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Workers struggle in El Salvador
By JOHN LAVIN
Special to the National Catholic Reporter San Salvador,
El Salvador
Just 10 days before he was killed in El Salvador in 1989, Jesuit
Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría pleaded to an audience in Barcelona, Spain:
Because we work not only in theory but in the face-to-face cause of
people who are unjustly treated, I am asking you to bear personal witness to
the situation in Nicaragua and El Salvador and to help us.
Ellacurías outcry was for poor people to negotiate
their way out of poverty through labor unions. He explained, I must here
acknowledge the merciless killing of union leaders by a car bomb a few days ago
with the precise intent of shutting down the FMLNs [the rebel group
Farabundo Marti Liberación Nacional] negotiations with the
government.
His cry dissolved in the silence of his death. Ellacuría,
who was murdered along with five other Jesuits, their housekeeper and her
daughter, advocated not rebellion but an open dialogue for better living
standards in the fields and in the factories. That petition for sound,
dignified exchange met its counterpoint in heedless military power.
Leaders from the same unions whose silencing Ellacuría had
protested continue today to cry out for the right to bargain and continue to
face impasse and intimidation instead of good faith bargaining. We are in
a war between the rich and the poor, said Manuel Vasquez, general
secretary of El Salvadors Public Workers Union, in an interview in
January. President Francisco Flores has proceeded to privatize our
schools, our utilities including telephone, water, electricity and now medical
care since his coming to office in June 1999.
Vasquez added, Not only are the costs of schools,
electricity, telephone service and medical care escalating out of the average
familys reach, but there is a proposal to lower our minimum wage, which
fails, as it stands, to cover the cost of buying food alone. Housing, necessary
clothing and basic health care are out of most peoples reach.
Vasquez came to power as a union leader by replacing Alejandro
Jaco, who had been assassinated while serving as chief negotiator for the Santa
Ana Region. Vasquez himself has more recently been threatened and has suffered
an attack on his life during the current protest against both the loss of jobs
and the cuts to services resulting from the Flores governments
privatization policies. Manuel Vasquez carries with him a copy of the
Salvadoran Constitution, which he charges the present government with
violating, particularly concerning its guarantees to protect and advocate for
the well being of the people.
The crucial issue at the moment is the right of Salvadoran labor
unions to negotiate.
Vasquez along with Oscar Aguilar, head of the medical
doctors union, and Wilfredo Berrios, fired head of the telephone
workers union, are in the street with hospital workers in their third
month of a strike that has closed clinics, surgery facilities and eliminated
all medical care except for emergency services in most areas.
Mass layoffs
International Banks want the Salvadoran government to privatize
human services, eliminating conditions for a sanitary, healthy, literate and
functional life for the great majority of the people. That privatizing also
brings about mass layoffs in a country whose unemployment rate is already 60
percent. Salvadors labor unions are negotiating to keep both the services
and the jobs.
More than 10,000 hospital workers employed by El Salvadors
Social Security Institute have been on strike since Nov. 16, 1999, to oppose
the privatization of the medical care system, which serves the nations
poorest communities. In response to the strike, the administration fired 221 of
the most active union members, resulting in an impasse whereby the chief
administrator of Social Security, Vilma de Escobar, has refused to promise
reinstatement of fired workers.
In this stalemate, the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor has found the
government administrators in violation of the workers labor contract and
has issued an order for the workers to be reinstated. No such action will
occur, however, until the Supreme Court has heard the governments appeal.
President Flores has declared the strike over. The people remain in the
street.
In 1979, the year before he was gunned down while saying Mass,
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero commented from the pulpit that
the
workers movement in our country -- as recently demonstrated by a number
of striking unions -- has so very much to tell us, above all, the solidarity
among labor unions which this movement has awakened. Romero identified El
Salvadors hope as resting in the legal and economic reality of poor
people being empowered to organize into labor unions through which they might
voice their hope for a better life. Speaking of the strikes he had witnessed,
Romero reflected that active unions represented something new that has
been born among us. He then said, ... and a life that has been
born must never be cut off. It must be examined and guided, such a life must
never be suffocated. That suffocating silence has been a reality that
Romeros people have known in many forms.
There is no indigenous language spoken in El Salvador today
because of the matanza or massacre of 1932 in which virtually all the
Indians working on Salvadoran coffee plantations were killed during their
revolt against oppressive living and working conditions. Salvadorans know that
silence. Their Guatemalan, Mexican and Panamanian neighbors continue to speak
and hear Native American languages. In recalling their Nahuatl ancestors,
Salvadorans relive a brutal history. Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, the
head of state in El Salvador from 1931 to 1944, has been lauded as a national
hero for his use of military power in putting down Indian and farm worker
movements. The museum today devoted to his memory displays not only his arsenal
but also his patronizing philosophy: It is good that children go
barefoot. That way they can better receive the beneficial effluvia of the
planet, the vibrations of the earth -- an irrational theory to apologize
for the nakedness that accompanies poverty and disease.
Ultimate cost
The massacre of 1932 and its military leaders have shaped the more
recent history of Salvadoran death squads over the 12-year civil war, which
ended in 1992. Among the human rights atrocities was the massacre at El Mozote,
carried out on Dec. 10, 1981, early in that war. More than 1,000 villagers were
slaughtered, first the men, then the women and finally the children. Those
historic moments -- the price extracted from labor organizers and others who
attempted to challenge those in power -- color todays attempts to
unionize. Salvadorans know the silence and ultimate cost that can accompany
such efforts.
Romeros pro-worker homily of May 1, 1979, appears today as
if its words were painted in an elaborate urban graffiti against a mural of El
Salvadors muted and voiceless victims. To a congregation, which later
witnessed his assassination, he extended blessings on the workers both in
the fields and in the factories who worry, who search for solutions, who urge
that their rights be taken into account and who seek to meet their
responsibilities to their employers through dialogue that is sincere and honest
and always based upon facts. Romero persisted in wishing for a miracle to
accomplish the modest hope of respectful, accurate dialogue between the poor
and the rich.
Approximately 2 million Salvadorans today live in the United
States. That represents the largest proportion of any Latin American country to
have emigrated north. With El Salvadors present population at about 6
million, Salvadoran-Americans have become a significant minority both here and
there. Living and working in the United States, Salvadorans represent the
memories of oppressive silence. They mourn the loss of parents, siblings and
neighbors who were disappeared by death squads during the war and
its aftermath.
Salvadoran-Americans know the price of political silence. They
also know the words of Ellacuría, Romero and many others who have bid
for basic rights to negotiate. The struggle for rights to equal treatment
transcends borders as Salvadorans enter the American labor scene in which
strikers also can be replaced, unions can be broken by management law firms and
workers can expect to check their free speech and democratic spirit at the
door.
Americans of all creeds, races and backgrounds can attest to the
universality of Romeros meditative prayer for the rights to form
labor unions to be seen as a natural right and not perceived as a danger and a
threat. American consumers examining the labels on their clothing will
note the products of Kathy Lee Gifford and The Gap assembled in El
Salvadors maquilas or sweatshops. According to Salvadoran union
organizer, Giovanni Fuentes, the efforts of women and men who work in
sweatshops to organize have repeatedly failed. Workers are fired as soon
as they are identified to be union supporters. Fuentes, who attended
Harvard Universitys School of Labor Relations, noted that, Everyone
loses, American workers who have been laid off from their jobs as well as the
Salvadoran workers who are taking the work with terrible pay and living in
terrible conditions.
He noted with a degree of irony that Flores pronounced him a
bad Salvadoran for advocating that factory work without basic labor
rights such as the freedom to organize has been contributing not to economic
development but to deeper and more desperate impoverishment of his people.
The banana stand
Did you ever own a banana stand? asks Fabio Castillo,
whom some say could contend for the presidency in the 2004 elections. Fabio
Castillo describes El Salvador as the poor person who goes to the banana
stand and asks for a banana on the promise of paying with interest the next
week. This continues for 10 or 11 weeks until, finally, the poor person belongs
to the banana stand owner. Fabio Castillo is the general secretary of the
FMLN. An attorney and law professor, he asked, Do you see the
analogy? In this manner he continually refers to Farabundo Marti, the
campesino philosopher for whom the party is named. Castillo lives the ethic of
Marti, who was executed at the end of the 1932 massacre of coffee plantation
workers, crying out for the ideal of humble dignity -- an ideal that will take
a combination of genius and determination to accomplish. Today, the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank have witnessed, he explained, the
multiplying of El Salvadors debts by escalating margins. A visitor asked,
Is the problem that banks dont know anything about bananas?
He punctuated the air, Exactly! Nor do they know anything about eating
bananas or being truly hungry.
Privatization of services and utilities and building sweatshops
are just two of the measures that the Flores government has been implementing
in order to satisfy the banks to whom El Salvador is indebted, asserted Roger
Gutierrez, secretary general of El Salvadors federation of independent
labor unions. What we are losing in the process is not only standards of
living such as housing, food, medical care and education, but we are losing the
family as single parents become sentenced to shift work. These are the same
people who had, in earlier generations, the ability to produce food, make
clothing and teach their children to do the same. It was a very basic life, but
at least it was a life. Sweatshops have fractured that life.
The people living the fractured life in its poorest form are those
who reside in San Salvadors old trash dump at Nejapa. Their shacks are
made of wooden slats or corrugated iron taken from the garbage heaps. As trucks
deposit mountains of refuse, the people who live in this wasteland follow,
sorting through the filth for glass and/or metal that they heap together and
sell by the pound. The majority of the residents of the dump are single
mothers, their children, dogs and a species of huge vultures with hooked,
squawking beaks. Community organizer, William Hernandez, commented that
many of the teenage boys here look for glue to sniff -- anything to take
them out of this desperation. Quite aside from the toxicity of living on
a landfill made up of burned garbage, the vultures pose an additional threat to
the peoples health. They are, in essence, big rats with wings.
Hernandez noted that there is a new dump on the other side of
Nejapa. It employs over 60 men and women who -- in tandem with consultants from
a French Canadian firm -- have established a waste treatment method that
processes the waste back into the land gradually, safely. These two sides
of Nejapa are two sides of life in El Salvador, said Hernandez. So,
there is hope.
On March 12 Salvadorans will vote to elect the alcaldes --
mayors -- as well as legislators or deputados. If the process remains
free of election fraud, the workers and the people they serve may gain an
opportunity to end the chronic impasse of the health care strike. With new
legislators, the Salvadoran government might halt the privatizing and slashing
of human services, the laying off of workers, the intimidation of women and men
in the sweatshops.
Incumbents with heavy military and police support, however, can
deter movements for democracy in the factories, in the fields and in the
communities of a poor people.
Teaching and learning are greater forces than the most
debilitating famine, the most rampant illness or confining prison, said Rafael
Coto, secretary general of El Salvadors teachers union. Over
years of witnessing thousands of our members being disappeared, exiled and
incarcerated, our union has collectively articulated our vocation to teach in
oppressive times. It is why, he said, the teachers union is central
to reform in El Salvador.
Coto told of teachers leading hunger strikes, marching on the
capital and leaving their schoolhouses to assist the people of the farms and
the factories. We have achieved a precious recognition, he said.
Our peoples poverty and oppression inspire our work in the cause of
learning. As teachers we need to know the needs of the children. We must have
sympathy with students families. Before teaching, we must have learned
from the people whom we are there to serve. That is why we are activists for a
stronger awareness of the basic rights that the Flores government has placed
under attack.
And our childrens spirited minds will be our guiding
hope.
John Lavin, director of St. Josephs Universitys
Comey Institute of Industrial Relations, traveled to El Salvador this January.
Quotations from speeches by Jesuit Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría and Archbishop
Oscar Romero are Lavins translations. His e-mail address is
lavin@sju.edu
National Catholic Reporter, March 10,
2000
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