When I wrote my Travel as a Political Act book a couple of years ago, I included a chapter on El Salvador. Realizing that things here have changed substantially in just that short time, I needed to be sure my impressions were still valid. So I sat down with our guide, Cesar Acevedo, and Professor Knut Walter from the University of Central America. Cesar is a soft-spoken Salvadoran who fled the war with his family, grew up in Alberta, Canada, and came home 15 years ago when peace arrived. Professor Walter is a stony and sage Norwegian who’s spent most of his long adulthood here, and feels like a font of unemotional wisdom as he observes the scene. Below are a few updates I gleaned from the conversation (which will be of particular interest if you’ve read that chapter of my book).
El Salvador’s recent history is even more tumultuous than Nicaragua’s: It begins with a long tradition of right-wing military governments who brutally repressed campesinos. Through the 1980s, the leftist FMLN guerilla insurgency threatened to take power (opposed by the US government, which spent $1 million a day to keep the pro-business ARENA party in power). These two forces met in a bloody civil war. With the peace accords to end that war, the FMLN traded in their weapons for a place at the governmental table, and today they are the ruling party. Only by offering up a less political candidate for president ‘ Mauricio Funes, who is known more as a journalist and a writer than as a politician ‘ could the former guerillas win a slim majority to take the presidency in 2009. Today the FMLN seems to respect the democratic process and the country, exhausted by extremism, feels determined to be peacefully pluralistic.
In the last decade, extreme poverty in El Salvador has declined significantly. And yet, the FMLN seems to accept democracy, capitalism, and a globalized world. Professor Walter said, “Consider my breakfast: I eat oatmeal from Nicaragua, powdered milk from Australia, my fruit is from Guatemala…and the coffee is from El Salvador. Importing coffee to El Salvador would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.”
On the global scene, El Salvador has been dealt some miserable cards. There’s just no way it can compete. El Salvador is one of the few countries that consumes more than it produces ‘ possible only because of remittances: Twenty percent of its economy is money wired home from loved ones doing mostly menial labor in the USA. Salvadoran cell phone contracts allow calls to the USA cheaper than local calls. Soil, rain, and air ‘ plus people ‘ are the only natural resources this country has. Half of El Salvador’s university students aspire to leave the country. They see higher education as their ticket out.
I always thought land reform was a driving issue of economic justice in Central America. Walter explained that, until this generation, land struggles were, indeed, a critical issue. But no longer. The post-civil war government gave land to soldiers in trade for disarming. Landowning soldiers simply sold their land. These days, people don’t want to work the land. They want an education and to get big-city jobs ‘ or to emigrate to a land with more opportunity. Labor is decapitated. There are no real strikes today. You couldn’t rally labor to support another war.
The export of young men to the USA to fill low-end jobs there and to send home money is promoted by El Salvador’s government. In Central America, the two countries with the closest economic ties to the USA are Costa Rica and El Salvador. Both get their money from the USA ‘ Costa Rica welcomes tourists, while El Salvador exports its labor…and its problems. Passports are issued fast and easy. The government basically is saying, if you’re not happy here and want to leave, fine. Here’s a passport. Now go. And, while immigrants send home lots of money, the resulting broken families ‘ poor single mothers trying to raise children alone ‘ leaves a society ripe for the growth of street gangs.
Walter lamented how, because the government has allowed the rape of its land, there will never be a real tourist industry in El Salvador. The government here has long been business-friendly ‘ allowing corporations to operate with almost no regulations. Because of this unbridled capitalism, El Salvador has little real outdoors to enjoy or use as a basis for growing tourism. Its rivers are polluted. Just to the south, Costa Rica has a marketable environment because its government shielded it from corporate abuse. Because of its natural charms, tourism thrives in Costa Rica today.
Politically, it’s easy to be the guerilla opposition and just complain. But now that the FMLN is actually in power, they must actually grapple with big challenges. Its priorities ‘ which seem to be accepted by all but the wealthy ‘ are: improve education and health care; deal with violence; and reform the tax codes so favorable to the rich.
Taxation is a hot-button issue among El Salvador’s wealthy, just as it is among American conservatives. El Salvador’s current tax code is a remnant of its past right-wing governments. Its main tax is a sales tax. (Sales taxes are the most regressive, and therefore favor the wealthy.) The maximum income tax is 25 percent, with loopholes for the business class. There is no property tax and no inheritance tax. Revamping this regressive tax code ‘ part of the country’s ARENA party heritage ‘ is one of the primary challenges of the current FMLN government.
I love how travel to developing ‘ or unraveling ‘ countries lets me see the problems confronting my own country in high contrast. I travel to places like El Salvador not just to try to better understand our world, but also to see where my own country is heading if we don’t smartly tackle problems confronting us. For example, in this petri dish of unbridled capitalism, I see the power of corporate ads, environmental damage as the downside of fewer regulations, and the consequences of paying down debt by squeezing health and education.
Walter considered El Salvador’s bloody civil war the growing pains of democracy. After lots of tumult and bloodshed, there is now a basis for democracy like never before. There are new political institutions. This fits my belief that different societies (whether Iran, China, El Salvador, or the USA) are on parallel evolutionary tracks. Absent naive and impatient external forces, if left to their own, societies develop in a way that is good for their people. (As we capitalists believe in the invisible hand of the marketplace, I see this as the invisible hand of the political arena.) El Salvador, along with the rest of Central America, is evolving. Their fragile democracies are maturing. The successful revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua have morphed into pragmatic and moderately corrupt political parties. The brutality of earlier strongman governments is a thing of the past. There is a respect for the political process and hope for progress without more armed resistance.
