Caribbean & Central America - June 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

President Salvador Sánchez Cerén delivered his state-of-the-nation address to the legislative assembly on 1 June to mark the completion of his first year in power. He expressed his hope that El Salvador would be “guided to a brighter path”, infused with the spirit of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who was beatified on 23 May, just over 35 years after he was infamously assassinated while celebrating mass. Rarely has El Salvador needed Romero’s intercession more than now as the number of homicides in the country spirals to levels unprecedented in recent history.

While President Sánchez Cerén frontloaded his speech with references to achievements from the government’s social programmes and a steady fall in poverty, all the headlines are being grabbed by the surge in violence in El Salvador beyond anything seen since the civil war. Sánchez Cerén did broach the issue of public security in the second half of his speech but he did not mention the alarming increase in homicides.

Sánchez Cerén said the economy had grown by 2% in 2014, surpassing the levels of recent years. This is not really much to crow about, saying far more about how poorly the economy performed in previous years than how well it did last year. Sánchez Cerén said that the economy should grow by 2.5% this year, generating more jobs, but he did not mention a specific target number.

Sánchez Cerén said that the main objective of his government’s five-year development plan was a more educated country with more inclusive, universal and quality education. He focused on “un unprecedented programme” ‘Una Niña, Un Niño, Una Computadora’ providing one computer for every child, modelled on the successful programme ‘Plan Ceibal’ carried out by the ruling left-wing Frente Amplio (FA) administrations in Uruguay in recent years. Sánchez Cerén said 50,000 computers would be handed out this year.

Poverty, Sánchez Cerén maintained, had fallen from 24.9% in 2009 to 20% in 2014 and extreme poverty from 10.5% to 6.2% over the same period. He also went on to discuss his administration’s investments in health, agriculture, and promoting small businesses.

Public security challenge
Only after listing these achievements did Sánchez Cerén finally come around to the issue of public security. He appealed to the legislative assembly to provide support by “approving laws that strengthen the fight against organised crime”. He listed a series of legislative initiatives, such as an anti-extortion law, and laws stiffening penalties for those who conspire against the lives of public servants. He enumerated the multiple causes for the violence in his government’s view, focusing on the lack of opportunities for young people, to address which he said the government had produced a survey for the creation of a national policy for youth employment.

Sánchez Cerén said the powerful private business association (Anep) had turned to the former mayor of New York, Rudolf Giuliani, to table proposals for addressing the violence [RC-15-05]. He added that he had appointed Hato Hasbún as the presidential commissioner for security, to hold talks with all sectors affected by violence as the government implements ‘Plan El Salvador Seguro’, targeting resources to ten of the country’s 50 most violent municipalities. Sánchez Cerén also said the government had undertaken a profound restructuring of the prison system, moving 2,000 inmates to different prisons and transferring the most dangerous leaders of mara gangs back to the high-security prison of Zacatecoluca. Finally he maintained that his government’s rehabilitation and reinsertion plan had added 8,600 inmates to the programme ‘Yo Cambio’ (I change’).

Murder rate soars
None of this received much media attention. That was because outside on the streets of El Salvador there were 35 murders on the day of Sánchez Cerén’s address. And then the figure for homicides in May was released. According to the supreme court’s institute of legal medicine (IML) there were a record 641 murders in May, a daily average of 20.7. To put that figure into some kind of perspective, there have not been more murders for any single month since the end of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war in 1992. Indeed, during the civil war the average monthly number of murders was 521. The number of homicides so far this year is up to 2,180. March this year was previously the most violent month this century with 482 homicides.

The director of the national police (PNC), Mauricio Landaverde, told the media that the increase in the number of violent murders was “a deliberate ploy” by the country’s mara gangs to put pressure on the Sánchez Cerén administration to heed their demands. Landaverde said the gangs had decided to “purge their own ranks…of any young men who have failed them…in collecting money for illicit products…selling drugs or gathering extortion payments”.

Romero finally gains Vatican’s approval
Archbishop Romero, who was murdered in 1980 for daring to condemn state-sponsored violence, and order soldiers not to kill innocent civilians, was beatified on 23 May in a three-hour ceremony in San Salvador cathedral. Some 300,000 people gathered in the square outside the cathedral for the ceremony which was conducted by Cardinal Angelo Amato and attended by four heads of state: President Sánchez Cerén; Ecuador’s Rafael Correa; Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández; and Panama’s Juan Carlos Varela. Delegations from across the region also attended, and over 1,000 priests.

Pope Francis expedited the beatification of Romero, who had been denied the first step towards sainthood by the conservative hierarchy that controlled the Holy See for many years because he was a proponent of liberation theology which argues that the Church should act to bring about social change by allying itself with the poor and downtrodden.
Romero was declared a martyr to the faith, obviating the need for a miracle to be attributed to him as the Vatican attempts to place a far greater emphasis on its mission of social justice than heretofore. The martyr’s remains were wrapped in the blood-stained shirt in which he was killed.

The presidential spokesman, Eugenio Chicas, described the beatification of El Salvador’s most famous son as “the event of the century”. But the Roman Catholic Church was really late to the party. The Anglican Church had long before proclaimed Romero one of te Christian martyrs of the 20th century commemorated with statues at London’s Westminster Abbey.

The present Archbishop of San Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, invoked Romero “to intercede with God to grant hope to build a new society, with justice for all”, and read out a letter from the Pope, who said Romero could “see and hear the suffering of a people”. Some, however, still seem deaf to that suffering. Roberto d’Aubuisson, the intellectual author of Romero’s assassination and founder of the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena), recently had a street renamed after him in San Salvador by the outgoing mayor, Norman Quijano.

On 30 April El Salvador’s human rights ombudsman, David Morales, denounced this as “a provocation and a message of disrespect to victims of the armed conflict”, and a violation of the State’s commitment under the peace accords not to allow “the homage of those found responsible for the murder”. Morales also called for the mayoralty of Antiguo Cuscatlán to revoke a decision to rename a square after D’Aubuisson.

• Social outreach

President Sánchez Cerén also said that 1.3m students were benefiting from the government’s food and health programme guaranteeing healthy refreshment, and the ‘Glass of Milk’ programme. He also celebrated the fact that six new municipalities have been declared free of illiteracy and more than 21,000 adults have learnt to read and write over the last year.

• Cuba

President Sánchez Cerén carried out his first official visit to Cuba in late May. He said he had held “fruitful” talks with his Cuban peer Raúl Castro. Sánchez Cerén said that he had signed “strategic accords” in the areas of health, education, sport, the environment, agriculture and the economy. He also said that both countries had agreed to share knowledge for scientific, technical and cultural development, and that Cuba had undertaken to establish ‘Misión Milagro’, to provide free treatment for Salvadoreans suffering from eye diseases, permanently in El Salvador.