When I recently returned to the United States–after spending six months in El Salvador–I discovered that one thing hadn’t changed during my absence. Presidential candidates from both major parties are still calling for “securing our borders” by deploying more guards and building a bigger wall between the U.S. and Mexico. To drive immigrants back home, most White House hopefuls also favor a legal crackdown—which the Bush Administration has already begun—on the 12 million undocumented workers trying to make a living here.

 

Teoria din spatele acestei abordări bipartizane este că barierele fizice, interdicția și hărțuirea poliției, raidurile la locul de muncă și sancțiunile angajatorilor vor opri fluxul uman vast către los Estados. Pe partea republicană, chiar și John McCain – care a atras mânia colegilor conservatori anul trecut când a sponsorizat o legislație pe care o considerau prea „blană” față de imigranți – a trecut acum la ceea ce The Wall Street Journal numește „o formulare care pune pe primul loc securitatea la frontieră. ” Dintre democrați, doar guvernatorul New Mexico, Bill Richardson, a pus la îndoială eficacitatea gardurilor mai înalte – dar chiar și el și John Edwards, acum plecat de la cursă, au cerut în schimb consolidarea patrulei la graniță.

 

Tocmai am petrecut timp la sud de graniță, într-o țară săracă, al cărei export principal sunt oamenii, am văzut direct ce motivează această „imigrație ilegală” – și de ce soluțiile politice convenționale nu îi vor descuraja pe salvadorenii disperați să vină în SUA lipsește în mare măsură din campania din acest an orice reevaluare serioasă a politicilor noastre externe, militare și comerciale care au forțat milioane de latino-americani să se dezrădăcineze și să caute oportunități pentru o viață mai bună departe de casă. De fapt, așa cum subliniază jurnalistul David Bacon în viitoarea sa carte, „Illegal–How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants”, întregul proces care înlocuiește acești oameni și îi împinge spre nord este „în afara parametrilor dezbaterii politice”.

 

On the presidential campaign trail, even free trade critics provide little public education about the link between corporate globalization, trade deregulation, and the resulting forced relocation of people, in both hemispheres. For example, while courting blue-collar workers in farm states and the rust belt (often one and the same these days), Edwards frequently denounced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—and its new Central American counter-part, CAFTA—as “trade laws that send American jobs overseas.” In Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio, free trade has fallen into disfavor because it threatens local manufacturing in rural communities already so economically depressed that some are becoming depopulated. As Lorri Brouer, a middle-aged Iowa Falls gift shop owner, asked a Boston Globe reporter in January: “Who’s going to turn off the lights when we grow old and die, because all the young people are going away?” But, as The Globe reported, rural voters are just as apt to blame foreigners for their economic woes, as job-killing free trade deals. “We’ve got illegal immigrants working in our chicken and hog factories!” fumed Janice Bahr, a 63-year old Iowa Falls Dairy Queen employee. What Democrats—including Edwards—have failed to explain is why these newcomers are here and what they share in common with native-born casualties of neo-liberalism.

 

In my recent travels in the Salvadoran countryside, I heard Lorri Brouer’s fearful refrain echoed in many small villages (where the absence of people between the age of 25 and 55 is often quite noticeable). In one remote farming community in Usulutan, the remaining campesinos were struggling to survive by grazing cattle and growing beans and corn amid cycles of flooding and drought. Most had settled in the region after being made refugees by El Salvador’s 12-year  civil war. Some had served as combatants against the government forces which received $4 billion in U.S. counter-insurgency aid during the 1980s. Because most residents still support the left, the conservative Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) government of Antonio Elias Saca has failed to provide needed agricultural assistance and social services (which are made available to friendlier constituencies instead).

 

The mother and father in the large family I stayed with proudly showed me middle-school graduation photos of their two oldest children. But their pride was mixed with sadness and regret.  Their son and daughter had both emigrated illegally to Houston after completing 9th grade (joining the 100,000 of their countrymen who flee every year).  With few employment opportunities locally–and not many in the capital city of San Salvador either—the youth of the town “turn fourteen, and then they all leave,” the woman explained. She pointed to the picture of her daughter smiling in her cap and gown. “When we talk on the phone she says she misses us. She cries and says she doesn’t like it there and wants to come home.”

 

This forced displacement of people—a human tragedy on a massive scale—is what Bacon calls “the real, dirty secret of trade agreements.”  Enacted fifteen years ago, NAFTA established a now familiar regional pattern. It has allowed U.S. grain companies “to dump cheap corn on the Mexican market, while at the same time Mexico was forced to cut its agricultural subsidies.”  Poor farmers in Oaxaca and Chiapas can no longer able to sell their crops at prices covering their production costs.  So they’ve joined the stream of six million Mexicans seeking work here. As Bacon notes, “they didn’t abandon their homes, families, farms, and jobs willingly. They had no other option for survival.”

 

Salvadoran economist Alfonso Goitia sees the same phenomenon occurring in El Salvador, where 40% of the workforce is still employed in agriculture. Out of a total population of six million, 750,000 Salvadorans became political or economic exiles prior to the 1992 peace accords ending the civil war. Today, two million live in the U.S. because–under a series of ARENA governments over the last fifteen years–El Salvador has embraced free trade, adopted the dollar as its currency, privatized public services, ratified CAFTA, and consigned a large percentage of the population to continued poverty and exploitation.

 

În mediul rural, fermierii mici nu își pot întreține propriile terenuri fără sprijinul guvernului sau să supraviețuiască cu salariile plătite pentru munca zilnică la fermele mai mari. Nici pentru cei obligați să caute de lucru în mediul urban, alegerile nu sunt bune. În sectorul de producție, locurile de muncă sunt concentrate în fabrici din zonele de export de înaltă securitate, cu salarii mici, condiții de muncă în ateliere și angajatori multinaționali care distrug sindicatele. Un efort din vara trecută a SUTTELL, sindicatul lucrătorilor din telefonie, de a organiza femei asamblatoare la ABX Industries, un producător de componente electronice din San Bartolo, a dus la concedierea a 30 dintre ele și apoi plasarea pe lista neagră, cu complicitatea Ministerului Muncii. Așa cum se întâmplă adesea, victimele acestei campanii – când i-am întâlnit în noiembrie – fuseseră forțate să intre în economia informală, alăturându-se marii armate de salvadoreni care comercializau deja fructe, adidași, jucării, gustări ambalate și produse alimentare de casă. la standurile șoale șoale și în piețele centrale aglomerate din toată țara.

 

One of the street vendors’ biggest product lines—pirated CDs and DVDs—is now making them a special target of local police, trained by the U.S.-financed International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in San Salvador. Where the U.S. once aided and abetted “death squads,” it spends millions of aid dollars today orchestrating a crack-down on any would-be infringers on CAFTA-protected “intellectual property rights.” As Wes Enzinna reported in The Nation Dec. 31, a police raid on street vendor stalls in San Salvador last May triggered popular protests that were quelled only after the arrival of 150 riot cops, firing rubber bullets and tear gas.

 

Not surprisingly—given such a problematic urban and rural “job market”—I would regularly see large crowds of people at the American Embassy in San Salvador, waiting for hours with their documents in hand, to apply for some form of legal entry into the US. (A recent study by the University of Central America reported that 42% of all Salvadorans still living in their own country would leave for the U.S. if given the chance.) Whether you’re approved or not, the nonrefundable fee for the personal interview required to get a U.S. visa is $65–a hefty sum in a country where the monthly minimum wage is $157.  The lines of hopeful people who snake around the high outside walls of the castle-like embassy complex are now enclosed in their own adjacent structure, a kind of immigration bus depot (with a very limited number of tickets available).

 

When legal entry into the U.S. is thwarted, Salvadorans who can afford to sell any land they own or take out personal loans hire a coyote who charges $4,000 to $6,000 for unofficial immigration assistance. With or without such a “professional” guide, migrants are vulnerable to assault, theft and rape along the long overland route through Guatemala and Mexico. In 2006, the Central American Resource Center documented  hundreds of deaths and injuries among Salvadorans attempting to cross into the US on foot. While US newspapers report on local fears about Spanish-speaking invaders, the Salvadoran media regularly runs stories on children who disappear in the Arizona or Texas desert or young women who drown when their leaky boats capsize off the coast of Mexico. Meanwhile back home, family disintegration is a major Salvadoran social problem. Departing mothers and fathers leave their children in the hands of grandparents and other relatives; some kids grow up loosely supervised, feeling abandoned, and end up contributing to the country’s world-renowned “gang problem.” Everyone’s favorite local scapegoat,

strada salvadoreană

bandele sunt într-adevăr violente și un sistem alimentator pentru un sistem penitenciar național umplut de două ori capacitatea sa. Iar preocuparea populară legitimă cu privire la criminalitatea stradală – care îi este frică pe mulți locuitori din orașe să iasă afară după întuneric – este ușor manipulată de către dreapta, pentru a-și promova propriul program de măsuri de securitate internă (încălcând libertățile civile) inspirat de Bush.

 

Where President Bush and his ARENA allies are actually quite at odds is never publicly acknowledged. In Bush’s rosy world view, loyal members of the “coalition of the willing” not only send troops to Iraq (as President Saca did) to bring the benefits of free markets to the Middle East; they also keep folks down on the farm at home—instead of coming to the U.S.—by exposing them to benefits of unfettered domestic capitalism. In reality, El Salvador is heavily dependent on remittances– the earnings of hundreds of thousands of its citizens working abroad. In 2006, Salvadorans sent home $3.3 billion—which equals about 18% of the nation’s GDP. These remittances keep the economy afloat and, by cushioning the impact of  austerity policies imposed from abroad,  operate as a huge social safety valve.

 

With hard-earned dollars from the U.S. flowing to so many lower-income families and communities, there’s far less pressure on the government to tax the rich or corporations to pay their fair share of the cost of schools, roads, solid waste disposal, health care, and other public services.  In another town in Usulutan that I visited, a group of farmers proudly showed me the recently improved road connecting their fields to the closest markets; tired of waiting for public works assistance from the government, they had taken matters into their own hands and, with their own labor and funds–from children, siblings and others working in the U.S.—had done the necessary construction themselves.

 

Despite stepped up repression (in the form of new laws making various forms of political protest a potential “terrorist” act), Salvadoran social movements are also stirring. Their goal—and, hopefully, campaign platform, when the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) challenges ARENA in next year’s presidential election—is to reclaim the idea of national economic development, fueled by much-needed public investment. Last Fall, thousands of banner-waving Salvadorans marched in the capital to “Defend the Right to Water”—in a major anti-privatization protest aimed at averting a threatened corporate take-over of the country’s ailing public water system. On their heads, demonstrators balanced the colorful plastic containers that women and children  use to carry water on their long walks to and from wells, springs, and pumps in rural areas. Local speakers were joined by several North American visitors, including former U.S. Ambassador Robert White and Maryland legislator Ana Sol Gutierrez, who joined the call for expanded access to potable water. Unfortunately, only a handful of gringos currently share their understanding that publicly-funded job-creation, agricultural assistance, workers rights, decent roads and schools, and other basic services are exactly what’s needed to keep far more Salvadorans in El Salvador, where most would much prefer to be.

 

 

Alexandra Early este proaspăt absolventă a Universității Wesleyan în Studii Latino-Americane, care a lucrat în El Salvador pentru CRISPAZ, un grup transfrontalier de solidaritate și justiție socială. Ea poate fi contactată earlyave@gmail.com. Pentru mai multe informații despre CRISPAZ, vezi www.crispaz.org

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