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EL SALVADOR: President’s ‘Path to Peace’ Award Draws Outcry

Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, Jun 10 2008 (IPS) - The decision by a Catholic foundation with links to the Vatican to award its highest distinction to Salvadoran President Antonio Saca drew a wave of protests from local analysts and representatives of civil society in this Central American country.

The Path to Peace Foundation, which describes its mission as “spreading the Catholic Church’s message of peace,” is bestowing its annual Path to Peace Award in recognition of Saca’s work towards consolidating peace and strengthening democracy in El Salvador, government sources said.

The president of the Foundation, which was created in 1991, is Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations.

The award was presented to President Saca at a gala dinner in New York Tuesday.

Saca “introduced reforms aimed at reducing delinquency, and has traced out ‘the map of poverty’ that identities the areas of extreme poverty in order to work towards eradicating it,” the Path to Peace Foundation says in its citation.

Several Salvadoran Catholic organisations said they “regretted” the foundation’s decision, in a letter to the Apostolic Nunciature in El Salvador.

Saca, of the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), became president in 2004. Since then, “inequalities, exclusion and poverty” have worsened among Salvadorans, while “insecurity and impunity have become widespread,” the letter says.

The Christian Base Communities of El Salvador (CEBES) stated that the president “has not shown any openness to the poorest sectors,” and therefore awarding him a decoration “is not in keeping with the vision of the Gospel.”

“It is in recognition of his collaboration on the Peace Agreement Process that the Path to Peace Foundation honours President Saca,” says the Foundation’s statement.

Miguel Ángel Guzmán, a leading member of CEBES, told IPS he was “outraged, because rather than working for peace, Saca has focused on building a positive image of himself and the party he represents.”

Under the Saca administration, crimes against humanity like the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero have gone unpunished, in spite of a directive from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the Salvadoran state carry out “a thorough investigation of the crime, make reparations to the victims and adjust local legislation to the American Convention on Human Rights” by annulling the 1993 general amnesty law, Guzmán said.

Romero was murdered at the start of the 12-year civil war which left 75,000 people dead and 8,000 forcibly disappeared. Then-President Alfredo Cristiani and the leftwing guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), now the main opposition party, signed a peace agreement in January 1992.

In 1993, Cristiani decreed a general amnesty, blocking trials of those responsible for killings of civilians, the great majority of which were committed by military and paramilitary forces, according to the report handed down by the Truth Commission created as a result of the peace talks.

The report also found that Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, the late far-right founder of ARENA, which has governed the country since 1989, ordered the assassination of Romero, who was nominated for sainthood by the Salvadoran Catholic Church in 1994, a process that has apparently been stalled in the Vatican.

María Silvia Guillén, head of the Foundation for the Study of Applied Law (FESPAD), said that awarding Saca this distinction “shows a lack of respect for the Salvadoran people,” and indicates that “either the Foundation is misinformed, or they are going to decorate the president for non-existent achievements.”

Guillén also said that during the Saca administration “social protest has been criminalised, and crime rates have shot up, with murder rates at unprecedented levels.”

According to official figures, between 2003 and 2007 the murder rate rose from 36 to 52 per 100,000 population.

“One of his first actions as president was to appoint a commissioner for democratic governing, who, in turn, created a group that includes representatives of all the political parties to discuss and find solutions to issues of national interest,” says the Path to Peace Foundation statement.

“I can find no explanation for this award, especially coming from the Vatican, because Saca has been a factor of national division rather than unity,” political scientist Héctor Dada Hirezi told IPS.

Although at the start of his term of office “Saca appointed Gloria Salguero (the rightwing president of parliament) as his commissioner for governance, that didn’t mean that there was a genuine intention to enter into dialogue,” he added.

Dada Hirezi, who is the leader of the centre-left Cambio Democrático (Democratic Change) party, said “we participated in the inter-party discussions and ended up frustrated at the government’s total lack of political will. The clearest proof is that the dialogue process is dead.”

The inter-party talks were an initiative of Salguero’s which brought together all the parties represented in parliament. But after meeting for a few months, the FMLN withdrew, arguing that the government was blocking possibilities for reaching an agreement. Months later, the initiative fell apart.