A heavy storm caused flooding in areas of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, on August 16. These phenomena mostly occur during the rainy season, partly due to the environmental degradation of a water recharge area known as El Espino. Credit: Cruz Roja de El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 25 2025 (IPS)

Two construction projects pushed by the government of El Salvador, in a water recharge area adjacent to the country’s capital, on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano, threaten to make the area more vulnerable and increase the risk of flooding in the city’s poor neighborhoods downstream.

That is what environmentalists, and especially residents of communities who have lived for decades in this green area and witnessed the impact of urban expansion, told IPS.  Like a cancer, it is slowly eating away at the 800 hectares of what was, in the 19th century, one of the main coffee farms, El Espino, in what is now the western periphery of San Salvador.“I was born here, I am a native of this farm, and I have seen how everything has been deteriorating” –Héctor López.

“I was born here, I am a native of this farm, and I have seen how everything has been deteriorating,” 63-year-old Héctor López, a member of the El Espino Agricultural Production Cooperative, told IPS. The cooperative has 100 members who are mostly dedicated to coffee cultivation.

“It was all pure coffee plantations, owned by the Dueñas family, and over time El Espino has been affected by the constructions”, said López.

The two new government projects continue the pattern of deforestation that the property has been subjected to since the 1990s, a product of the unstoppable advance of the real estate sector.

These are the El Salvador National Stadium, which will hold 50,000 seats and whose construction began in September 2022 on an area of 55,000 square meters, and is expected to be ready in 2027.

Meanwhile, the new Center for Fairs and Conventions (Cifco) will begin construction in the coming months on an area of similar size. Both would cover about 10 hectares.

The cost of the stadium is around 100 million dollars, but the authorities have not revealed the figure for the Cifco.

Runoff coming down from the San Salvador volcano overflows a river, downstream, and floods areas populated by low-income families in the southern part of the city. The capacity to absorb rainwater will be affected by two large construction projects promoted by the Salvadoran government. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The forest turned to cement

With each new construction, the soil absorbs less rainwater, and each storm turns the runoff into a river that reaches the poor neighborhoods of San Salvador, a city of 2.4 million inhabitants, including its metropolitan area, within a total country population of six million.

“When everything is paved, the water flows downward and causes flooding in neighborhoods like Santa Lucía,” Ricardo Navarro of the Center for Appropriate Technology (Cesta) told IPS, referring to a residential area of low-income families located in eastern San Salvador.

“When rainwater soaks into the forests, there isn’t much runoff, but without the forest, flooding increases,” adds Navarro, who founded Cesta 45 years ago, the local branch of Friends of the Earth.

The coffee plantation that still survives in El Espino is a forest populated with a rich diversity of tree species and wildlife.

Both the stadium and the convention center are funded by non-reimbursable funds from China, which also donated a US$54 million library, inaugurated in November 2023, as a sort of reward because El Salvador ended the relations it had maintained for decades with Taiwan in 2018.

China considers Taiwan part of its territory and rewards nations that break ties with Taiwan, which is currently recognized as an independent nation by only 12 countries.

Additionally, as part of this package of donations, China built a US$24 million tourist pier in the port city of La Libertad, south of San Salvador on the Pacific coast, and is constructing a water purification plant at Lake Ilopango, east of the capital, among other projects.

Elsa Méndez, together with Ever Martínez, from the El Espino Agricultural Production Cooperative, laments that urban development in the area affects them every rainy season, to the west of San Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Navarro lamented the lack of environmental awareness among the authorities, and more specifically, of the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has governed with a markedly authoritarian style since taking office in June 2019. In 2024, he won a second consecutive term, something previously prohibited by the Republic’s Constitution.

Lawmakers from his party, New Ideas, who control the unicameral Legislative Assembly, amended the constitution on July 31 to allow Bukele the option to run for the presidency as many times as he wishes.

Because of this authoritarian style, it is known that in El Salvador, nothing is done without the consent of the ruler.

“President Bukele: Not long ago there was a storm, which caused serious flooding in the lower parts of the city. President, the climate is changing, I can guarantee you, with absolute certainty, that the climate situation is going to get much worse due to climate change,” Navarro urged.

The environmentalist suggested that, in any case, if the construction is not stopped, the convention center should be built adjacent to the stadium, so that common spaces, such as the parking area, could be shared.

The El Espino farm belonged to the Dueñas family, one of the wealthiest in the country, in the 19th century, then linked to coffee production. Land reform seized the property in 1980 and handed it over to dozens of families who worked there as colonists, peasants who labored on the farm in semi-slavery conditions and received a portion of land to build their house.

However, a court ruling decided in 1986 that a part of the farm, around 250 hectares, was urbanizable land and should be returned to the Dueñas family.

Since then, that segment of the farm has been turning into an area of permanent construction of shopping malls and luxury residences, developed by Urbánica, the real estate arm of the Dueñas family.

“If we analyze the companies that are building there and if we pull the thread, we end up at Urbanística,” economist José Luis Magaña explained to IPS.

“There should be clarity about what the infrastructure needs are,” said the expert on the two government projects. “Instead of financing a school repair project with a loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, the government could have asked the Asian power to rebuild those educational centers”, he adds.

In 2022, several families from the El Espino cooperative participated in the “San Salvador sponge city” project, to increase rainwater filtration levels through the construction of trenches and absorption wells, to prevent runoff from causing floods downstream. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The usual floods

On the night of August 15, a heavy storm caused flooding in several sectors of the Salvadoran capital, whose avenues seemed to turn into rivers and lagoons, with hundreds of cars stuck.

In some areas, trash clogged the city’s storm drains and the water rose and flooded into residential areas. Around 25 families were evacuated and sheltered in safe locations.

San Salvador was founded in 1545 at the foot of the San Salvador volcano, a massif rising 1893 meters above sea level, and this location has placed the city at risk of floods and landslides.

In September 1982, a mudflow came down from the volcano’s summit and buried part of a residential area called Montebello, killing about 500 people.

The southern zone of the capital is the most affected by flooding during the rainy season, from May to November. The rain and runoff coming down from the volcano feed small streams along the way, which in turn flow into the El Arenal stream and the populous Málaga neighborhood.

In July 2008, heavy rains caused that stream to overflow, and 32 people drowned when a bus was swept away by the current.

As a way to reduce the vulnerability of this southern zone, in 2020 the city was part of the “Sponge City” project, promoted by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Some 1,150 hectares of forests and coffee plantations were restored in the upper part of the San Salvador volcano, seeking to reactivate the capacity to absorb rainwater through the construction of catchment tanks and trenches amidst the coffee fields.

Urbánica is the real estate arm of the Dueñas family, which builds luxury residences in the capital of El Salvador, in the area of the former El Espino farm, like the one in the image, called Alcalá. Credit: Urbánica

Environmental hope remains

Members of the El Espino cooperative actively participated in that project, as the communities of former colonists of the Dueñas family continue to live on the segment of the farm the land reform granted them, which currently totals 314 hectares and are also hit by the constructions in the upper part, called El Boquerón, near the volcano’s crater.

Deforestation continues there to make way for more restaurants and luxury residences.

“We are worried that more and more construction keeps happening, and there are fewer trees, and more water runoff flowing downstream,” said cooperative member López, who took part in a meeting of the organization’s board members on August 19 when IPS visited the area.

Elsa Méndez, also a cooperative member, stated: “We try to infiltrate water with the trenches, but when the ground is already too saturated with water, we can’t do everything as a cooperative either. Everyone must raise awareness among all people, because the runoff from the volcano carries trash, bottles, plastic, etc.”

On Saturday, 16 families from the community went to reforest the upper area, and the task also served “to teach our children how to reforest,” said Méndez.

Social movement Todos Somos El Espino (We Are All El Espino) has called for a second rally to protest against the construction of the convention center on Saturday, August 23, as part of their plan to defend the increasingly threatened forest.

“At this march, we will be doing the first preliminary count of the signatures collected in physical form… so that Salvadorans can say, ‘I defend El Espino,'” Gabriela Capacho, who is part of that movement, told IPS.

Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, a subsidiary of the Salvadoran company El Granjero, where chicken manure from eight farms is converted into biogas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 5 2025 (IPS)

El Granjero, the second-largest egg producer in El Salvador, invested US$2.5 million in 2017 to build a biogas plant, proving that there is a solution to the thorny issue of environmental pollution caused by most poultry companies in the country.

It also showed that the investment can yield financial benefits, as the biogas generates electricity that is fed into the national power grid.

The biogas plant, located in Jayaque, a district in southwestern El Salvador, is managed by Renig, the subsidiary created by El Granjero to handle its biological waste.

In 2018, Renig began processing the 200,000 tons of chicken manure and other organic waste produced annually from the eight farms that El Granjero operates in the southwestern part of the country, housing around one million birds.

The plant’s biodigester, with a capacity of 5,300 cubic meters, is 92 meters long, 17 meters wide, and five meters deep.

“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because they solved the environmental problem immediately, but there was also at least a possibility of being profitable,” Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, told IPS during his visit to the plant.

The environmental pollution caused by the poultry sector has been a source of tension for rural communities living near the farms established in their territories.

According to data from the Salvadoran Poultry Association, the country’s poultry sector produces approximately 1.2 billion eggs and 155 million kilograms of chicken meat annually.

The production of biogas is complex. Bacteria are living organisms that, depending on the conditions inside the biodigester, can behave differently and affect gas production, Melissa Ruiz, in charge of the digester and secondary processes, explained to IPS.

“The digester works like our stomach, and the bacteria are very sensitive to the elements we provide them, just like us. If we suddenly eat a lot of meat or an unbalanced diet, our stomach reacts, and we feel sluggish or get sick. The same happens with the digester,” Ruiz elaborated.

The biodigester at the Renig plant began producing biogas in 2018 but only started generating electricity in 2021. That year, after winning a government tender for biogas production, it began generating and injecting 0.85 megawatts into the national grid through the power distributor Del Sur.

Waase said that, in environmental terms, the plant has achieved its primary goal—preventing pollution—which is already a reason for celebration and pride, as few large companies in the poultry sector have taken this step. Specifically, in the egg industry, El Granjero is the only one that decided to make this investment.

However, financially, expectations have not been fully met.

“From an environmental standpoint, it has been a total success, but financially speaking, it’s much more complicated. We haven’t lost money in any year, but we’re nowhere near the return we had envisioned,” he stated.

The biodigester at the Renig plant in Jayaque, southwestern El Salvador, processes 200,000 tons of chicken manure annually from the farms of the company El Granjero. This serves as the raw material for producing biogas, which is used to generate electricity injected into the national grid. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
JAYAQUE, El Salvador, Jul 25 2025 (IPS)

Still in its early stages and with few players, the poultry sector in El Salvador is taking small steps toward environmentally sustainable production by using its biological waste to generate biogas and, in turn, electricity –an equation that benefits the natural environment, communities, and the farms themselves.

El Granjero is the second-largest egg-producing company in the country, with over one million chickens distributed across its eight farms. After an investment of US$2.5 million, it created the subsidiary Renig to build a biogas plant in 2017.“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because you solved the environmental problem right away, and the possibility of being profitable” –Bernhard Waase.

A year later, it began processing 200 000 tons of chicken manure and other organic waste annually.

This waste serves as the raw material for producing biogas, the fuel used to generate electricity, which the company then injects into the national power grid.

“Back around 2010 or 2012, we discussed what to do with all the chicken manure because the way it was being handled—by poultry farmers in the country and, I’d say, around the world—was that it was dumped in the open air,” Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, told IPS. The facility is located in La Labor, within the district of Jayaque, in the southwestern department of La Libertad.

At least five of El Granjero’s eight farms, which are dedicated exclusively to egg production, are situated in this rural settlement.

Bernhard Waase, director of Renig, a subsidiary of the Salvadoran company El Granjero, where chicken manure from eight farms is converted into biogas. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

An Environmentally Friendly Solution 

The environmental pollution caused by the poultry sector has been a source of tension for rural communities living near the farms that were established in their territories or expanded around them over time, as was the case with El Granjero, founded in 1968.

“When the company was established, there wasn’t a single house nearby; it was completely uninhabited,” Waase noted before showing IPS around the plant facilities. But the issue of environmental pollution remained.

“I thought biodigesters were the most suitable because they solved the environmental problem immediately, but there was also at least a possibility of being profitable,” said Waase, referring to the potential for generating electricity.

The country’s poultry sector produces approximately 1.2 billion eggs and 342 million pounds of chicken meat annually, according to data from the Salvadoran Poultry Association.

However, despite being crucial in food production for the country, its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) is low, at just 0.79%, though within the agricultural GDP, it accounts for 16%.

Few companies in the poultry sector have chosen to invest in environmentally friendly solutions for biological waste.

One of them is Grupo Campestre, one of the largest chicken producers, which invested seven million dollars to set up its biogas plant and process the 40,000 tons of biological waste generated annually by its farms, processing plant, and fried chicken restaurants owned by the consortium nationwide.

Laying hens at the San Jorge farm, one of eight owned by the egg producer El Granjero. The manure from these farms in southwestern El Salvador is used for biogas production. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Biogas production in El Salvador is minimal compared to other renewable energy segments. In fact, its share is so small that it does not appear in the national energy matrix, which is dominated by hydropower (33.7%), geothermal (23%), and natural gas (16%).

Meanwhile, photovoltaics account for 8.5%, and wind power barely represents 2.1%.

In recent years, there has been notable interest in El Salvador, a country of six million people, in promoting clean, renewable energy production, which represents 70% of the country’s energy matrix, according to official figures.

The Renig executive stated that producing electricity from biogas is expensive and complex, as it not only requires investment in facilities and personnel but the process itself is extremely complicated.

“It’s costly because of the equipment and the operation of production. It’s not like solar—that’s child’s play: you have the land, you install the panels, you make the connections that any university student can do, and that’s it,” said Waase.

The complexity of biogas production also lies in dealing with bacteria, living organisms that can behave unpredictably and affect gas production, explained Melissa Ruiz, in charge of the digester and secondary processes.

Sometimes the bacteria get “sick,” she noted, and they must be carefully tended to.

“The digester works like our stomach, and the bacteria are very sensitive to the elements we provide them—just like us: if we suddenly eat too much meat or an unbalanced diet, our stomach reacts, and we feel sluggish or get sick. The same thing happens with the digester,” Ruiz told IPS.

The biogas produced by the Renig plant’s biodigester, using waste from a Salvadoran poultry company, powers two engines with a generation capacity of 425 kilowatts each. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

An Eco-Friendly Plant 

Once El Granjero decided to bet on biogas production through its subsidiary, it began working on the technical, operational, and financial details of what would become the Renig plant, where a biodigester measuring 92 meters long, 17 meters wide, and 5 meters deep—with a capacity of 5,300 cubic meters—would be built.

The biodigester is the centerpiece of any biogas plant. Inside, bacteria break down the biological waste from the farms—in El Granjero’s case, chicken manure.

This decomposition process generates gases, including methane, which become the fuel to power the plant’s two engines, each with a generation capacity of 425 kilowatts.

If not used for electricity production, these gases would rise into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a warming potential 80 times greater than carbon dioxide.

This gas is also the main contributor to ground-level ozone formation, a dangerous air pollutant whose exposure causes 1 million premature deaths worldwide each year.

The Renig plant’s biodigester began producing biogas in 2018, but it only started generating electricity in 2021, as that was the year it participated in a government tender for renewable energy production.

During the period when no electricity was generated, the biogas had to be “flared” to prevent the gases from escaping into the atmosphere, using a combustion torch the company had to purchase for US$40,000.

“This torch basically burned all the biogas, and I thought: I’m literally burning money. Since February 2021, this torch hasn’t been lit because I’ve been generating energy,” said Waase.

As part of its production processes, the Renig biogas plant also produces high-quality fertilizer, which it markets to the agricultural sector. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The Business Moves Slowly but Surely 

Two years earlier, in 2019, Renig won the contract to inject 0.85 megawatts into the national grid—a modest amount but significant as a starting point.

For reference, the Nejapa biogas plant, built in 2011 and operated by AES El Salvador at a cost of US$58 million, has an installed capacity of six megawatts.

Waase stated that, environmentally, the plant has achieved its primary goal of preventing pollution, which is already a cause for celebration and pride, as few large companies in the poultry sector have taken this step. Specifically, in the egg industry, El Granjero is the only one that made this investment.

However, financially, expectations have not been fully met.

“From an environmental standpoint, it’s been a total success, but financially speaking, it’s much more complicated. We haven’t lost money in any year, but we’re nowhere near the return we had projected,” he said.

More than 30 solar panels power the pumping plant in the village of El Mozote, in eastern El Salvador, providing water to around 360 families. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
EL MOZOTE, El Salvador , Jun 6 2025 (IPS)

The worst massacre of civilians in Latin America occurred in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote, where environmental projects are beginning to emerge, slowly fostering awareness about protecting the natural resources of this deeply symbolic site, embedded in the country’s historical memory.

Since early 2024, a small photovoltaic plant has been operating in El Mozote, in the district of Meanguera, eastern El Salvador, powering a municipal water system designed to supply around 360 families in the village and nearby areas.“We used to wash clothes in those communal wells, which were built after the war, in ’94.” — Otilia Chicas

“The project’s goal was to minimize environmental impacts in the area by seeking cleaner energy sources, and with that in mind, the solar panel system was implemented,” Rosendo Ramos, the Morazán representative of the Salvadoran Health Promotion Association (ASPS), the NGO behind the project, explained to IPS.

The Spanish organization Solidaridad Internacional Andalucía also participated in launching the initiative.

El Mozote is located in the department of Morazán, a mountainous region in eastern El Salvador. During the civil war (1980-1992), the area was the scene of brutal clashes between leftist guerrillas and the army.

In December 1981, over several days, military units massacred around 1,000 peasants in the village and neighboring communities—including pregnant women and children—accusing them of being a support base for the rebels.

The conflict is estimated to have left more than 75,000 dead and 8,000 disappeared.

The photovoltaic system installed in El Mozote, eastern El Salvador, operates alongside the national distribution grid, so on cloudy days with low solar generation, the conventional power grid is activated. Credit: Courtesy of ASPS

Sunlight to Distribute Water

The solar project consists of 32 panels capable of generating a total of 15 kilowatts—enough to power the equipment, primarily the 60-horsepower pump that pushes water up to the tank installed atop La Cruz mountain. From there, water flows down to households by gravity.

The photovoltaic system operates alongside the national power grid, so on cloudy days with low solar output, the conventional grid kicks in—though the goal is obviously to reduce reliance on it.

The project, costing US$28,000, was funded by the European Union as part of a larger environmental initiative that also included two nearby municipalities, Arambala and Jocoaitique, focusing on protecting the La Joya Pueblo micro-watershed.

Key aspects of the broader program include reducing the use of agrochemicals, plastic, and other disposable materials; and promoting rainwater harvesting.

The overall program reached 1,317 people (706 women and 611 men) across three municipalities and six communities, involving NGOs, schools, and local governments.

“The aim is to consume less energy from the national grid, thereby lowering pumping costs,” explained Ramos.

However, this cost reduction doesn’t necessarily translate into lower water bills for families in El Mozote and surrounding areas. That’s because the water system is municipally managed, and tariffs are set by local ordinances, making adjustments difficult—unlike community-run projects where residents and leaders can more easily agree on changes.

One benefit of the new system is that lower energy costs for the municipality free up funds to expand and improve other basic services—not just in Meanguera but also in places like El Mozote, Dennis Morel, the district director, told IPS.

The plaza of El Mozote, the iconic village in eastern El Salvador, was renovated, but local residents complain that the government-led construction work was not agreed upon with the community. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Water in the postwar era

Otilia Chicas, a native of El Mozote, recalled what life was like in the village when there was no piped water service—back in the days following the end of the civil war in 1992, when people began returning to the area.

“We used to wash clothes in those communal wells. They were built after the war, in ’94,” said Chicas, pointing toward one of those now-empty wells, about 20 meters away from where she stood, inside a kiosk selling handicrafts, books, and T-shirts in El Mozote’s central plaza.

Next to the plaza is the mural bearing the names of the hundreds of people killed by the army—specifically, by units of the Atlacatl Battalion, trained in counterinsurgency by the United States.

“We used to fetch water from there and bathe there, but since these wells weren’t enough, we’d go to a spring, to ‘El Zanjo,’ as we called it,” she recounted.

She added that the drinking water project arrived between 2005 and 2006, finally bringing the resource directly into people’s homes.

“The community had to pitch in, and the hours people worked were counted as payment, as their contribution,” she noted while weaving colorful thread bracelets.

There is uncertainty over whether the kiosk in the village plaza will be removed. Several women from the El Mozote Historical Committee sell handicrafts and work as tour guides there. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

 Almost No One Was Spared 

Chicas, 45, was born in 1980, a year before the massacre. Now, she helps run the kiosk and works as a tour guide alongside other local women from the El Mozote Historical Committee, explaining to visitors the horrific events that took place in December 1981.

The artisan shared that her family lost several relatives in the 1981 massacre, as did nearly everyone here. The victims’ mural is filled with dozens of people bearing the last names Chicas, Márquez, Claros, and Argueta, among many others.

“My grandmother lost four of her children and 17 grandchildren,” she recalled.

Chicas’ father, in an attempt to save their lives, moved his family out of El Mozote before the massacre and resettled in Lourdes Colón, in the western part of the country. But the military ended up killing him in 1983 after discovering he was originally from Morazán and linking him to rebel groups.

“The National Guard came for him and two uncles—they saw they were from Morazán, a guerrilla zone,” she emphasized. “Before killing them, they forced them to dig their own graves. They were left by the roadside, in a place called El Tigre,” she explained.

The military operation that culminated in the massacre was planned and executed by the Salvadoran Army’s High Command, with support from Honduran soldiers and covered up by United States government officials, revealed Stanford University scholar Terry Karl in April 2021.

Karl testified as an expert witness during a hearing on the case held that April in San Francisco Gotera, the capital of Morazán.

Dormant in El Salvador’s judicial system since 1993, the case was reopened in September 2016. Among the accused are 15 soldiers—seven of them high-ranking Salvadoran officers—,the only surviving defendants from the original list of 33 military personnel.

The trial is currently in the investigative phase, where evidence is being gathered and examined before the judge decides whether to proceed to a full public trial.

A mural on the side of El Mozote’s plaza displays the names of the hundreds of people killed by the Salvadoran army in December 1981, marking the largest massacre of civilians in Latin America. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Times of Uncertainty 

El Mozote’s central plaza has been renovated over the past three years as part of the government’s effort to give it a more orderly and modern appearance—a promise made by President Nayib Bukele when he visited the site in February 2021.

The town is also nearing completion of a Urban Center for Well-being and Opportunities (CUBO)—a government-sponsored community center designed to provide youth with access to reading materials, art, culture, and information and communication technologies.

However, some residents told IPS that these projects are being carried out without prior consultation or agreement with the community, in violation of the 2012 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which called for justice, truth, and reparations for the victims.

The reconstruction work demolished the bandstand, a space highly valued by the community as a gathering place for meetings and collective organizing.

Despite this, Chicas said she supports the plaza’s renovations, as they have made it more inviting for young people to spend time there. Still, she noted that the remodeling affected her personally.

The construction forced her to dismantle her small food stall, made of corrugated metal sheets, where she used to make and sell pupusas—El Salvador’s most iconic dish, made of corn and stuffed with beans, cheese, or pork.

Chicas also mentioned the ongoing uncertainty about whether the kiosk where she and other women craft and sell their handicrafts will be removed.

“We’re left in limbo—we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

Representatives of a dozen environmental organisations, united in the Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador, speak out against Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s goal to reopen this industry, banned by law since 2017. Credit: Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Dec 10 2024 (IPS)

Metal mining has a renewed momentum in Central America, encouraged by populist rulers who, in order to soften environmental damage, claim they can develop it in harmony with nature, which is hard to believe

Thus, they seek to win the approval of a majority that seems to follow them blindly, but not environmentalists or other social sectors, activists told IPS.

“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country,” Rodolfo Calles, an activist with the Association of Salvadoran Community Promoters, told IPS, referring to the interest shown by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in reactivating metal mining, which has been banned for seven years.“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country”: Rodolfo Calles.

Central America, an isthmus of six nations and 64 million inhabitants, is one of the most environmentally vulnerable regions, where activists and social defenders have been warning for decades about the negative impacts the metal mining industry has had on their ecosystems.

As a result of these struggles, a law banning all forms of metal mining was passed in El Salvador in March 2017, the first measure of its kind in the world and considered a historic milestone.

Costa Rica had done the same in 2010, but only for open-pit mining, and other countries have halted specific projects, such as in Guatemala and Honduras, and Panama last year.

Central America is a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources. It has abundant water and forests as well as mineral resources. With the exception of Belize, the only country without significant mineral deposits, significant quantities of metals such as gold, silver or zinc, as well as nickel, copper and other minerals can be found in all territories.

But several studies indicate that the mining industry’s economic contribution is minimal in the area, and in the case of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, it has not exceeded 1% of their gross domestic product (GDP). GDP per capita in the region is around US$6,000.

Guatemala is the Central American country with the greatest mineral wealth, metallic and non-metallic, while Panama and El Salvador have much lower concentrations of mineral elements of interest, according to a study.

Panama saw its largest protests in three decades, against the largest copper mine in Central America. As a result, in November 2023, a law established an indefinite moratorium on mining. Credit: Luis Mendoza / Mongabay

Going backwards

Now El Salvador and Costa Rica, ruled by leaders labelled as populist, are taking steps backwards.

“Bukele launches the issue because he relies on the credibility he claims to have as president and people’s misinformation,” Calles stressed.

Despite his authoritarian nature, the president continues to enjoy broad popular support, according to all opinion polls.

Meanwhile, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves announced on 27 November that he had submitted a bill to the unicameral National Assembly to reverse the ban on open-pit mining, setting off alarm bells in a country renowned for its efforts to preserve the environment.

The intention is to finally give the green light to a gold mine that had already won a concession but was cancelled when the 2010 ban came into force, based on the constitutional premise that citizens have the right to live in a healthy environment.

The mine is located in the town of Crucitas, in the province of Alajuela, in the north of the country. It is owned by the Canadian consortium Infinito Gold.

But President Chaves wants to reverse the ban.

“Right now we are just seeing how we are going to counteract what is coming,” Erlinda Quesada, a Costa Rican environmentalist with the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, an organisation that, among other things, seeks to protect water sources from intensive monoculture production, told IPS.

In a telephone conversation from the town of Guácimo, in the province of Limón, in the northwest of the country, Quesada added: “It is no secret to anyone that we have a populist government that… is ingratiating itself with these humble sectors, the poorest in the country, and holding them in its hands” when it wants to approve the proposal.

Meanwhile, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega intensified his relationship with China by granting, also on 27 November, the fifth concession to Xinjiang Xinxin Mining Industry.

The new 1,500-hectare mining project is located between the municipalities of Santo Domingo and La Libertad, in central Nicaragua. In all, the consortium’s operations cover 43,000 hectares.

These concessions granted by Ortega’s dictatorial regime would appear to be, in addition to the economic benefit, a move to tighten links with China and annoy the United States, which is seeking to curb the Asian power on the world geopolitical stage.

In September 2022, the people of Asunción Mita in eastern Guatemala voted against the Cerro Blanco mining project owned by Elevar Resources, a subsidiary of Canada’s Bluestone Resources. The ‘no’ won. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Bukele’s economic hope

Out of the blue, Bukele posted a message on the social network X on 27 November showing his interest in the country’s return to the extractive industry, arousing concern among social sectors that, after a long struggle, had succeeded in getting the Legislative Assembly to ban mining in March 2017.

“We are the only country in the world with a total ban on metallic mining, something that no other country applies. Absurd!” the president wrote.

He added that this wealth can be harnessed responsibly to bring “unprecedented” economic and social development to the Salvadoran people.

That development is what he has promised to deliver in his second five-year presidential term, beginning in June 2024, after winning the elections in February amid sharp criticism that the constitution did not allow him to participate in a second, consecutive election.

Then, on 1 December, in a public act, the president tried to justify his extractivist project stating that the country’s mining potential is enough for an accumulated wealth of three trillion dollars, equivalent to 8,800 % of the current Salvadoran GDP.

There are around 50 million ounces of gold in the subsoil, equivalent to 132 billion dollars at current value. But it’s not just gold and silver, he said.

“According to our initial studies, we have found metals of the fourth industrial revolution, such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which are used to make batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage,” he claimed.

Rare earth minerals, used for advanced electronics, wind turbines and electric vehicle motors, as well as platinum, palladium and iridium to produce hydrogen and catalytic converters, among others, have also been detected, he added.

Bukele said there will always be environmental impacts in any development project, but they can be minimised. As his New Ideas party controls the Legislative Assembly, it would be very easy for him to revive mining in El Salvador.

An anti-mining banner at a church in El Salvador. Social mobilisation against mining projects has been key in trying to stop the operations of these consortiums and prevent soil and water contamination in the communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Cheerful accounts

“The president is making happy accounts of the supposed economic benefits that would be obtained, but he is not accounting for the real damage that would be done to the ecosystems,” said Calles, a Salvadoran who has been fighting against the mines for years.

He added that when the ban on mining in the country was being discussed, Bukele was already involved in politics, and knew there were studies showing that the industry was unfeasable in El Salvador because of its negative impacts on water, soil and people’s health.

“I don’t know where he gets the idea that the impacts will be less. What we know is that mining extraction techniques have not changed significantly, and cyanide, for example, is still being used,” he said. This is a chemical compound that, if misused or unintentionally leached into bodies of water, can be lethal.

Central America’s experience with the extractive industry is negative and long-standing, as in other regions of the world.

At a forum organised in 2009 in San José, Costa Rica, by the Latin American Water Tribunal, the regional experiences of open-pit mining in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Peru were analysed and testimonies were heard about the adverse effects in these countries.

These included testimonies from representatives of the Honduran Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and the Environmental Committee of the Siria Valley, where the San Martín mining project, run by Minerales Entre Mares de Honduras, was operating at the time. It was shut down in 2008.

In 2022, the international organisation Oxfam stated that the mine left behind “a trail of complaints about human health (…), as well as reports of contamination and destruction of flora, fauna and local ecosystems; economic, social and cultural damage to the communities”.

Meanwhile, in late 2023, Panama ordered the closure of the largest copper mine in Central America, operated by Minera Panama, a subsidiary of Canada’s First Quantum Minerals. This came after the courts ruled that the concession contract was unconstitutional.

The closure was the result of massive social protests, due to allegations of serious environmental contamination, and led the government to promote a law establishing moratorium on mining activity in the country for an indefinite period of time.

In Guatemala, social mobilization led to court rulings that stopped the country’s main mining projects.

“The most emblematic projects have been suspended by the Constitutional Court, whose members, although corrupt, accepted that the companies never complied with two fundamental requirements: providing information to the community and holding citizen consultations,” Julio González, of the Madreselva Collective, told IPS from Guatemala City.

González added that these include the nickel mine owned by the Solway Investment Group, located in the municipality of El Estor, and El Escobal, owned by the Canadian company Pan American Silver, near San Rafael Las Flores, both in the east of the country.

The Progreso VII Derivada mine, known as La Puya, owned by Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala, in the central-south department of Guatemala, as well as Cerro Blanco, owned by Canadian Bluestone Resources, located in the vicinity of Asunción Mita, in the eastern department of Jutiapa, have also been added to the list.

González questioned the authenticity of the environmental impact studies carried out by the mining consortiums, as they are based on a specific, very restricted geographical area.

“The biggest lie are these environmental impact studies, carried out in the so-called areas of influence, which is the place where the mine is located and the three or four surrounding villages, but the water, which is going to be contaminated, goes far beyond this area of influence,” he said.

On El Salvador’s backtracking on the possible reactivation of mining, he added: “What I see is Bukele’s alignment with the hegemonic economy, which is not exercised by the US government but by US corporations”.

Marixela Ramos and Fausto Gámez in the village of El Rodeo, northern El Salvador, where a solar-powered drinking water system has been in operation since 2018. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
VICTORIA, El Salvador, Jul 17 2024 (IPS)

Setting up a community water project with a solar-powered pumping system was an unlikely idea for the peasant families of a Salvadoran village who, despite their doubts, turned it into reality and now have drinking water in their homes.

In El Rodeo, a hamlet in the municipality of Victoria, in the department of Cabañas, drinking water was an urgent need, as the government does not provide it to peasant villages like this one, in northern El Salvador. According to official figures, 34% of the rural population lacks piped water in their homes.

So the community had to organise itself to provide water from local springs. But when the board of directors of El Rodeo, in charge of the project, informed that the pumping system would be solar powered in order to reduce costs, there was some collective disappointment.

“When solar energy was mentioned, the people’s big dream of water… went up in smoke, they didn’t believe,” Marixela Ramos, an inhabitant of El Rodeo, who saw the project come to life when it was conceived as a “dream” between 2005 and 2008, told IPS."Before, we had to go to the wells and rivers to fetch water. Now it is easier, we get the water at once in the house": Ana Silvia Alemán.

But that was the most viable option at the time in the village dedicated to subsistence farming.

“Since there are only a few families, it would not be financially sustainable if we connected it to the national power grid,” added Ramos, 39, who is the secretary general of the El Rodeo board of directors.

Ramos is also involved in other community spaces, mostly linked to the promotion of women’s rights, as well as shows on Radio Victoria, a station that for decades has given voice to the demands of communities in the area.

Despite the disbelief of many villagers, work began in 2017 and the village’s water system was inaugurated in 2018, benefiting around 80 families, including those living in La Marañonera, another nearby town.

The El Rodeo project is the most innovative, having solar energy, but other villages in this area of the department of Cabañas are supplied with water from their own community initiatives, through the so-called Juntas de Agua, or Water Boards. The largest of these is Santa Marta, where some 800 families live.

Other rural communities do the same throughout the country, given the government’s inefficiency in providing the service to the country’s population of 6.7 million inhabitants.

There are an estimated 2,500 such Water Boards in El Salvador, providing service to 25% of the population, or 1.6 million people.

Ana Silvia Alemán, 45, washes a pitcher in El Rodeo, a subsistence farming village in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Water for all

The system in El Rodeo is supplied by a nearby spring known as Agua Caliente. Since it was located on private land, the water had to be purchased from the owner for US$5,000, with funds from international organisations.

From there the water is redirected to a catchment tank, with a capacity of 28 cubic metres. A five-horsepower pump then sends it to a distribution tank, located on top of a hill, from where it is gravity-fed through pipes to the users.

Families are entitled to about 10 cubic metres per month, equivalent to 10,000 litres, for which they pay five dollars.

As a roof, at a height of about five metres, 32 solar panels were mounted to provide the energy that drives the pumping system.

“Before, we had to go to the wells and rivers to fetch water. Now it is easier, we get the water at once in the house,” Ana Silvia Alemán, 45, told IPS as she washed some containers with the water from the tap at her home.

José Amílcar Hernández, 26, is in charge of the technical operation of the water system installed in his community, El Rodeo, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

The water service is available two days a week from 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., weather permitting. A distribution tank with more capacity than the current 54 cubic metres would be needed to extend those hours, Amílcar Hernández, who is responsible for the technical operation of the system, told IPS.

“That is one of the improvements pending. We estimate a tank of about 125 cubic metres is needed,” said Hernández, 26, who also works as a maize farmer, performs in a small community theatre group, and produces shows for Radio Victoria.

Several Salvadoran and international organisations participated in the construction of the water system in El Rodeo, including the Washington Ethical Society, the Spanish City Council of Bilbao, Ingeniería sin Fronteras and the Rotary Club.

The villagers contributed many hours of work in return.

Apart from water supply, the project included other related aspects, such as the construction of composting latrines, so as not to pollute the aquifers, as they produce organic fertiliser from the decomposition of excrement.

In each house, a mechanism was also designed to filter grey water by redirecting it to a small underground chamber with several layers of sand. The filtered water is used to irrigate small vegetable gardens or “bio-gardens”.

One of the tanks from which drinking water is distributed to families in Santa Marta, the largest village in the municipality of Victoria, department of Cabañas, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A place of struggle and hope

The history of El Rodeo is linked to the Salvadoran civil war, between 1980 and 1992. Clean drinking water was the main goal that families set for themselves when they returned from exile after that conflict.

El Rodeo is one of several villages in Cabañas and other Salvadoran departments whose families had to flee in the 1980s because of the war, and the place was the target of constant army attacks. Several massacres against civilians took place in this locality.

They fled mainly to Mesa Grande, a camp of more than 11,000 Salvadoran refugees established by the United Nations in San Marcos Ocotepeque, Honduras.

The civil war left an estimated 70,000 people dead and more than 8,000 missing. The conflict ended in February 1992, when a peace agreement was signed.

However, before the war ended, and amidst the bullets and bombings, groups of families began to return to their place of origin, and thus El Refugio began to repopulate, in four waves: in 1987, 1988, 1999, and the last one in March 1992.

“I was born here, in El Rodeo, but we had to move to Mesa Grande, like everyone else. We came back 32 years ago, to try to live in peace in our hamlet,” said Alemán, filling the pitchers she had just finished washing.

A characteristic of villages like El Rodeo is their high level of organisation, perhaps learned during the war years. Many peasants were part of the guerrillas, who had a strict way of organising themselves to carry out common tasks.

The environmental struggle against the mining industry installed in the country in the first decade of the 2000s emerged on the lands of the municipality of Victoria. Thanks to this pressure, El Salvador was the first country in the world to pass a law banning metal mining, in March 2017.

“This level of organisation has meant that we now have projects such as water, education, health and security programmes,” Fausto Gámez, 33, chairman of the community’s board of directors, told IPS.

In addition to his role in the water system, Gámez also does community journalism for Radio Victoria, and coordinates the sexual diversity collective in Santa Marta, the largest settlement in the area.

Radio Victoria is the community station that for decades has given voice to the struggles and demands of the communities and families of Cabañas, in northern El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Challenges to overcome

The water supply system of El Rodeo has room for improvement. As it is photovoltaic powered, it stops when the weather prevents sunlight from heating the panels, especially during the rainy season from May to November.

“Having a solar-powered water project has its pros, but also its cons: sometimes the weather doesn’t allow us to have water, we depend on the sun,” explained Gámez, adding that this is a recurring complaint.

Technically, the ideal system should be hybrid, meaning that it can be connected to the national power grid when needed.

But that would represent a costly investment for the community, which it cannot afford. Moreover, the families would have to absorb the cost and pay a higher monthly fee.

However, while the interruption of service due to bad weather is a nuisance, some families manage to endure these days of shortages by saving the water they have previously stored.

“We try to consume only what we need, and as there are only two of us in the family, we have enough water,” said Alemán.

Elena López (left), one of two teachers who teach Náhuat to children in Nahuizalco, in western El Salvador, leads one of the morning's learning practices, in which the children, walking in circles, sing songs in the language of their ancestors, the Pipil people. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
NAHUIZALCO, El Salvador , May 6 2024 (IPS)

A group of children participating in an immersion program in Náhuat, the language of the Pipil people and the only remaining pre-Hispanic language in El Salvador, are the last hope that the language will not die out.

“This effort aims to keep Náhuat alive and that is why we focus on the children, for them to continue and preserve this important part of our culture,” Elena López told IPS during a short snack break for the preschoolers she teaches."This effort aims to keep Náhuat alive and that is why we focus on the children, for them to continue and preserve this important part of our culture." -- Elena López

López is part of the Náhuat Cuna project, which since 2010 has sought to preserve and revive the endangered indigenous language through early immersion. She is one of two teachers who teach it to children between the ages of three and five at a preschool center in Nahuizalco, a municipality in the department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador.

At risk of disappearing

“When a language dies, the basis of indigenous cultures and territories becomes extinct with it,” says the report Revitalization of Indigenous Languages, according to which the 500 Amerindian languages still spoken in Latin America are all in a situation of greater or lesser threat or risk.

In Mesoamerica, which includes Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, 75 indigenous languages are spoken, says the study by the Fund for the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean (FILAC).

With the exception of Mexico, Guatemala is the most linguistically diverse in this group of countries, with 24 native languages. The most widely spoken is K’iche’, of Mayan origin, and the least is Xinca, of unknown origin.

Brazil is the most ethnically and linguistically diverse country in Latin America, with between 241 and 256 indigenous peoples and between 150 and 186 languages.

A picture of some of the children learning Náhuat in the town of Nahuizalco, in western El Salvador, through an early language immersion program, in an effort by Don Bosco University to keep the endangered language alive. Teacher Elsa Cortez sits next to them. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Around 25 percent of these languages are at risk of extinction unless something is urgently done, the report warns. It is estimated that Latin America is home to more than 50 million people who self-identify as indigenous.

“These languages are losing their usage value…families are increasingly interrupting the natural intergenerational transmission of the languages of their elders, and a slow but sure process of moving towards the hegemonic language is observed, with speakers making Spanish or Portuguese their predominant language of use,” the report states.

The causes of the danger of the disappearance of these Amerindian languages are varied, the report points out, such as the interruption of intergenerational transmission, when the language is no longer passed on from generation to generation.

And that is exactly what the Náhuat Cuna project aims to revert by focusing on young children, who can learn from Náhuat speakers who did receive the language from their parents and grandparents and speak it fluently.

Two boys pretend to purchase and sell fruits and vegetables speaking in Náhuat, as part of the teaching exercises at Náhuat Cuna in western El Salvador, a preschool for new generations of Salvadorans to learn the nearly extinct Amerindian language. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala /IPS

López is one of these people. She belongs to the last generation of speakers who acquired it naturally, as a mother tongue, speaking it from a very young age with her parents and grandparents, in her native Santo Domingo de Guzmán, also in the department of Sonsonate.

“That’s how I was born and grew up, speaking it at home. And we never stopped speaking it, among my sisters and brothers, but not with people outside the house, because they discriminated against us, they treated us as Indians but in a derogatory way, but we never stopped speaking it,” said Lopez, 65.

Indeed, for reasons of racism and classism, indigenous populations have been marked by rejection and contempt not only from the political and economic elites, but also by the rest of the mestizo or mixed-race population, which resulted from the mixture of indigenous people with the Spaniards who started arriving in Latin America in the sixteenth century.

“They have always looked down on us, they have discriminated against us,” Elsa Cortez, 43, the other teacher at the Nahuizalco Náhuat Cuna, told IPS.

And she added: “I feel satisfied and proud, at my age it is a luxury to teach our little ones.”

Both López and Cortez said they were grateful that the project hired them as teachers, since they had no prior teaching experience, and in a context in which discrimination and social rejection, in addition to ageism, make it more difficult to find formal employment.

Before joining the project, Cortez worked full time making comales, which are circular clay griddles that are placed over a wood fire to cook corn tortillas. She also sold baked goods, and continues to bake bread on weekends.

López also worked making comales and preparing local dishes, which she sold in her neighborhood. Now she prefers to rest on the weekends.

All is not lost

When IPS visited the Náhuat Cuna preschool in Nahuizalco, the three-year-olds were performing an exercise: they stood in front of the rest of the class of about ten children and introduced themselves by saying their first name, last name and other basic greetings in Náhuat.

Later they identified, in Náhuat, pictures of animals and elements of nature, such as “mistun” (cat), “qawit” (tree) and “xutxit” (flower). The students started their first year in the center in February, and will spend two years there.

The five-year-olds are the most advanced. Together, the two groups totaled about twenty children.

Jorge Lemus  (blue shirt), director of El Salvador’s Náhuat/Pipil Language Revitalization Program and the driving force behind the Náhuat Cuna project, which teaches the language to children between the ages of three and five, is photographed with indigenous women of the Pipil people in Nahuizalco in western El Salvador. CREDIT: Don Bosco University

At the end of their time at the Cuna, they will go to regular school in Spanish, with the risk that they will forget what they have learned. However, to keep them connected to the language, the project offers Saturday courses where they begin to learn grammar and how to write the language.

There is a group of 15 teenagers, mostly girls, who started at the beginning of the project and speak the language fluently, and some even teach it online.

The initiative is promoted by the Don Bosco University of El Salvador, and supported by the municipalities where they operate, in Nahuizalco and Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The Santa Catarina Masahuat branch will also be reopened soon.

Santo Domingo de Guzmán is home to 99 percent of the country’s few Náhuat speakers, who number around 60 people, Jorge Lemus, director of El Salvador’s Náhuat/Pipil Language Revitalization Program and main promoter of the Náhuat Cuna project, told IPS.

“In three decades I have seen how Náhuat has been in decline, and how the people who speak it have been dying out,” stressed Lemus, who is also a professor and researcher of linguistics at the School of Languages and Education at Don Bosco University, run by the Salesian Catholic order.

According to the academic, the last three indigenous languages in El Salvador in the 20th century were Lenca, Cacaopera and Náhuat, but the first two disappeared by the middle of that century, and only the last one survives.

“The only one that has survived is Náhuat, but barely, as there are perhaps just 60 speakers of the language. When I started working on this there were about 200 and the number continues to shrink,” said Lemus.

The only way to keep the language alive, he said, is for a new generation to pick it up. But it will not be adults, who could learn it as a second language but will continue speaking Spanish; it must be a group of children who can learn it as native speakers.

The expert clarified that, although they come from the same linguistic trunk, the Náhuat spoken in El Salvador is not the same as the Nahuatl spoken in Mexico, and in fact the spelling is different.

In Mexico, Nahuatl has more than one million speakers in the Central Valley, he said.

In El Salvador, in 1932, the Pipil people stopped speaking their language in public for fear of being killed by the government forces of General Maximiliano Hernández, who that year brutally cracked down on an indigenous and peasant uprising demanding better living conditions.

At that time, society was dominated by aristocratic families dedicated to coffee cultivation, whose production system plunged a large part of Salvadorans, especially peasants and indigenous people, into poverty.

Lemus argued that for a language to make a decisive comeback and become a vehicle for everyday communication would require a titanic effort by the State, similar to the revival of the Basque language in Spain, Maori in New Zealand or even Israel’s resuscitation of Hebrew, which was already a dead language.

But that is not going to happen in El Salvador, he said.

“The most realistic thing we want to achieve is to keep the language from disappearing, and for the new generation of Náhuat-speaking people to grow and multiply. If we have 60 speakers now, in a few years we will hopefully still have 50 or 60 speakers, from this new generation, and they will keep it alive in the communities and continue speaking it,” he said.

For her part, López wants to continue working towards this goal in order to leave the country her legacy.

Speaking in Náhuat, the preschool teacher said: “I really like teaching this language because I don’t want it to die, I want the children to learn and speak it when I am dead.”

Two huge biodigesters process around 40,000 tons of organic waste produced by Grupo Campestre's poultry farms and other companies in El Salvador each year. This material is used to generate biogas to produce electricity that is injected into the national grid. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN MIGUEL, El Salvador, Mar 1 2024 (IPS)

In a win-win relationship, a segment of El Salvador’s agribusiness industry is taking steps to ease the tension of the historic socio-environmental conflict caused by poultry and pig farms, whose waste has caused concern and anger in nearby communities.

Today, some companies in the sector are converting the waste into biogas to produce electricity for their own consumption and to inject the rest into the national grid.

“People no longer say that the chicken manure is contaminating our water or land. That is very important for the community, now we don’t have to deal with that pollution anymore,” small farmer Elizabeth Méndez, who welcomes the investments made by Grupo Campestre to process the waste and generate biogas, told IPS."Things used to be different, there was a bad stench. But now we are living in a more favorable environment." -- Elizabeth Méndez

Méndez, 44, lives in the San Carlos El Amate canton, in the municipality of San Miguel in eastern El Salvador. Near her community is located one of the four poultry farms of Grupo Campestre, which owns several companies in the agribusiness sector and fried chicken restaurant chains.

“Things used to be different, there was a bad stench. But now we are living in a more favorable environment,” stressed Méndez, after a hard day working as a farm laborer, during an IPS tour of rural localities in San Miguel near poultry farms.

El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, with 6.7 million inhabitants and a territory of 21,000 square kilometers, is the scene of disputes between poultry and pig farms and the rural families that live near them, as the industry has generally failed to manage its biowaste properly.

Elizabeth Méndez (left), who lives in the San Carlos El Amate canton, in the municipality of San Miguel in eastern El Salvador, says the biogas plant that processes waste has significantly reduced the pollution produced by a poultry farm installed in her community. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Circular economy: biogas from manure

Grupo Campestre took a key step about four years ago when it decided to invest around seven million dollars to tackle the thorny issue of biowaste head-on, and acquired state-of-the-art technology to produce biogas, to generate electricity for consumption and injection into the national grid.

The company’s biogas plant is located in the El Brazo canton, also in San Miguel, near the area where the farms are located, which produce eight million chickens per year, whose manure is the main component to produce biogas.

All biowaste from the company’s various business activities, such as chicken manure from the farms and liquid and solid waste from the poultry processing plant, as well as biodegradable material from the fried chicken restaurants, are processed here.

“As part of the sustainability of operations, the need arises to move towards a circular economy model, to reincorporate waste into its life cycle, through reuse, recycling, or producing energy,” Jimmy Gómez, environmental compliance manager for Grupo Campestre, told IPS at the facility.

The biogas plant, in operation since 2021, processes some 40,000 tons per year of biological waste with energy potential, which is fed into two huge biodigesters where bacteria decompose the waste to generate gases such as methane, the main fuel that drives a generator with 850 kilowatts of installed power.

The biodigesters generate around 10,000 cubic meters of biogas per day, producing 17 megawatt hours a day of electricity.

A photo of one of Grupo Campestre’s four poultry farms, which raise 200,000 chickens each. It is located on the outskirts of El Brazo, in the eastern Salvadoran municipality of San Miguel. Thanks to its biogas plant, the surrounding villages no longer have to put up with the foul odors emanating from the farms. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“Today chicken manure is the main waste product that is given new value at the biogas plant, generating about 80 percent of all the energy we produce and sell,” said Gómez, a chemical engineer.

Grupo Campestre has entered into an energy sales contract with Empresa de Electricidad de Oriente, one of the four electric power distribution companies in El Salvador, owned by AES El Salvador, a subsidiary of the U.S. transnational AES Corporation.

“We resolved a socio-environmental issue, which brought complaints from nearby communities about bad odors and flies, and we turned it into an opportunity, which has also helped us to provide support to the other companies in the group,” said Gómez.

When the plant began to operate, it was also necessary to address the noise pollution caused by the generator that produces the biogas. The solution was to enclose it in a metal container so that the sound now does not exceed 50 decibels and cannot be heard from 20 meters away.

Part of the energy generated, around 50 kilowatts, is used for the plant’s own consumption, production manager Rubén Membreño told IPS. In addition, hundreds of solar panels, placed on the roof of a large shed containing thousands of chickens, generate 5.5 megawatts per hour per day.

This energy efficiency provides the company with the capacity to even provide waste processing services to other companies in the agroindustrial sector that have not yet made the necessary investments to carry out the transition.

“We are taking advantage of all the waste from our own companies, and also from other companies. For them it is waste but for us it is our raw material” to generate electricity, Membreño pointed out.

The technology used in the plant was provided by European companies, mainly from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, he said.

Jimmy Gómez (left), environmental compliance manager, and Rubén Membreño, production manager of Grupo Campestre, inspect the 850 kilowatt generator that produces electricity from biogas generated by the company’s activities. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Relief for the climate

Methane, the main gas produced in the bacterial decomposition process in the biodigester, is one of the major pollutants and causes of the greenhouse effect. But using it in the production of electricity prevents it from being released into the atmosphere, thus alleviating the effects of climate change.

According to company estimates, methane makes up 60 percent of the plant’s biogas production process, thereby “capturing” around 24,000 tons of CO2 or carbon dioxide per year, which damages the atmosphere and impacts life on the planet through climate change that produces extreme rainfall and droughts.

If that methane were not “burned” at the plant, “it would remain on the ground, in the open and would go into the atmosphere,” said Gómez.

Another agroindustrial company that has included new technologies to process its waste and generate biogas is Avícola El Granjero, which produces eggs from farms with more than one million hens.

Its 5,000 cubic meter biodigester produces the biogas that drives two 360 kilowatt generators, and the resulting electricity is fed into the national grid.

Granja San José, in the poultry and swine industry, also has a biodigester that processes the manure from 13,000 hogs and 75,000 hens.

One of the first phases of biogas production at the Grupo Campestre plant in central El Salvador consists of depositing biological material in huge underground tanks to begin the decomposition process. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Pending disputes

But despite these strides, the poultry and swine farming sector has not completely reconverted and socio-environmental conflicts are still simmering in several parts of the country.

In May 2023, IPS reported on the struggle of rural villages near the municipality of Suchitoto, in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, to defend their community water system, built in 2002, which will be affected by Avícola Salvadoreña, a company that is building an agribusiness farm nearby.

“The work has continued, trucks with construction materials are passing by all the time,” Blanca Portillo, a resident of Nueva Consolación, one of the seven rural settlements affected by the project, told IPS in a conversation on Feb. 28.

Portillo said local residents have learned that a court, which is handling the conflict, has requested that the poultry company carry out a new environmental impact study and citizen input consultation, due to apparent violations committed previously.

Many of the nearby villages are not supplied by the national grid, and have worked hard to set up their own community water projects, which are now at risk of being contaminated with waste from the farm.

“The authorities have told us that they will not give water exploitation permits to the company if there is a risk of contamination. But we don’t know if they are just saying that to keep us quiet,” said Portillo, a member of the Haciendita Rural Water and Sanitation Association, which serves some 1,000 families in seven communities, including Nueva Consolación.

Luis Aviles, standing on a segment of the rock embankment that protects riverbank communities from the overflow of the Lempa River in southern El Salvador, points to the part of the river that makes a turn in its course and hits the levee hard, undermining it. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
TECOLUCA, El Salvador, Nov 30 2023 (IPS)

For decades, poor fishing and farming communities in southern El Salvador have paid the price for the electricity generated by one of the country’s five dams, as constant and sometimes extreme rains cause the reservoir to release water that ends up flooding the low-lying area where the families live.

"Certainly there is climate injustice: richer people or sectors of the country, who live in urban areas, benefit more from energy, while poor families, who live on the banks of the rivers, take the hit." -- Ricardo Navarro
Dozens of communities located in the Bajo Lempa area in southern El Salvador suffer year after year from flooding during the May to November rainy season, when the river overflows its banks and floods corn, beans, and other crops, as well as affecting fishing and other livelihoods.

The ecoregion is the lower stretch of the Lempa River basin, which runs through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until flowing into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country.

The Lempa River basin covers 18,240 square kilometers, shared with Honduras (30 percent) and Guatemala (14 percent). In El Salvador, it stretches across slightly more than half of the territory of just over 21,000 square kilometers.

An estimated 5,000 families live in the 900-square-kilometer Bajo Lempa area. They are dedicated to subsistence farming and fishing and non-intensive cattle ranching, although there are also some families from other regions of the country, with more money, who have acquired land to grow sugar cane.

Celina Menjívar (R), a resident of San Bartolo, one of the ten settlements located in the Bajo Lempa area near the mouth of the river on the Pacific Ocean, participates in a neighborhood meeting. She makes the case that the Salvadoran government ought to reimburse local families for the crops they lost as a result of flooding from an upstream dam. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“In the 32 years that I have lived here, I have been affected just like the rest by many floods,” Celina Menjívar told IPS. She is a farmer in San Bartolo, one of the settlements or communities of Bajo Lempa.

“I plant corn, sesame, and cushaw squash (Cucurbita argyrosperma) on a small family plot, but when the floods come, everything is lost, and in the end we are left with nothing,” said Menjívar, 41.

In addition to subsistence farming, a group of some 50 families set up a cooperative for the organic production of cashew nuts, which they were able to export to the United States, France, and the United Kingdom after achieving certification as organic producers.

An aerial view of the state-owned 15 de Septiembre Hydroelectric Power Plant, the largest in El Salvador. The reservoir discharges when rainfall exceeds its storage capacity, causing the Lempa River to overflow and flood dozens of farming and fishing communities in the Bajo Lempa area. Credit: CEL

But rising production costs and competition from cheaper prices, especially from India, have hampered exports in the last two years. The cooperative is therefore looking to promote new products, such as pistachios and peanuts.

“We have made an effort to ensure that the farmers can at least sell their cashew seeds” on the domestic market, the cooperative’s administrative coordinator, Brenda Cerén, told IPS.

Impact on the Most Vulnerable

Most of the residents of Bajo Lempa were part of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas, who settled on the riverbanks after receiving land in the region as part of the demobilization process at the end of the civil war in 1992.

El Salvador’s bloody civil war (1980–1992) left some 75,000 people dead and 8,000 missing in a country that currently has 7.6 million inhabitants.

“Most of the flooding is not due to the rains per se, but to the discharges from the reservoir,” said Menjívar, referring to the state-owned 15 de Septiembre hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, located upstream between the departments of San Vicente and Usulután, in central El Salvador.

Manuel Mejía is one of the former guerrilla fighters who received a hectare of land in Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to settle there as part of the demobilization process of the rebel forces at the end of the 12-year Salvadoran civil war in 1992. Now, when the area is flooded by the overflowing river, he says everything is lost, even household goods. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Another resident of San Bartolo, Manuel Mejía, added: “When there are floods here, everything is lost: crops, livestock, even household goods, everything.”

Mejía, a 77-year-old former guerrilla fighter, told IPS that this year’s rainy season did not produce flooding because the storms began late, and this meant that the drainage channels, located along the road leading to the area, did not fill up and were able to handle the rainfall at the end of the rainy season in November.

Increasingly unpredictable and extreme rainfall periods, due to climate change, generate intense storms in short periods of time, and, as a consequence, the reservoir’s capacity is easily exceeded and water releases are authorized.

Hence, the poor families of Bajo Lempa pay the cost of the dam’s ability to generate electricity for other parts of the country, including those that generate the most income, such as industrial groups and real estate consortiums, whose business activities are among those that have the greatest impact on the environment.

Part of the levee that has been undermined by the force of the waters of the Lempa River, near the Rancho Grande community in the Bajo Lempa, a coastal ecoregion located in the municipality of Tecoluca in southern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

This situation falls under the category of climate justice, or, actually, climate injustice: vulnerable groups are more heavily impacted by extreme weather events fomented by others, whether at the national or global level.

“Certainly there is climate injustice: richer people or sectors of the country, who live in urban areas, benefit more from energy, while poor families, who live on the banks of the rivers, take the hit,” environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, director of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, told IPS.

The Center is a local affiliate of the international NGO Friends of the Earth.

A light rain that falls for two or three days generates releases from the dam and the overflowing of the Lempa River, which floods the settlements. But of course, the most tragic floods have been caused by tropical storms or hurricanes, such as Hurricane Mitch in October 1998.

The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Mitch, a category 5 hurricane, the most lethal, caused such heavy rains that the hydroelectric dam filled in a matter of 36 hours and went from discharging 500 cubic meters per second to 11,500 cubic meters per second, according to a study on flooding in the Lower Lempa.

“During Mitch, I lost 40 heads of cattle; they drowned,” Luis Avilés, a farmer from the Taura community, told IPS.

“Where we live is like living with a chronic illness; year after year we have this anxiety: wondering whether it will flood a lot this year, if I’ll lose my crops, not knowing whether to plant or not,” said Avilés, 53.

The Lempa River flows through three Central American countries: it originates in Guatemala, crosses part of Honduras, and then enters El Salvador, where it meanders from the north until it flows into the Pacific Ocean in the south of the country. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Embankment on the Verge of Collapse

A crucial issue in the impact of the floods is the damage that has been suffered over the years to the levee built with Japanese aid funds years ago and which has not been repaired since then, residents of Bajo Lempa told IPS.

The elevation made of different materials on the river bank to contain the overflowing waters runs 18 kilometers along the right bank of the river, from the Cañada Arenera community, in the municipality of San Nicolás Lempa, to the community of La Pita, near the river’s mouth.

“We are in the most vulnerable area of the riverbank, the one that receives the strongest impact of the Lempa, because up there it makes a turn and then it flows down with force,” said Avilés, standing on the damaged infrastructure: a wall of rocks tied together with wire, about four meters higher than the level of the river.

Drainage ditches can be seen alongside the road leading to Bajo Lempa in southern El Salvador, to drain the water that accumulates with the rains and floods that occur almost every year in this coastal region of El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

This segment of the five-kilometer-long levee is indeed the most damaged; the flow of the river has been undermining the base of the wall more and more.

“This wall protects the communities of Santa Marta, San Bartolo, Rancho Grande, Taura, Puerto Nuevo, Naranjo, and La Pita, and if it were to collapse, it would be a great tragedy,” said Avilés, also a former guerrilla fighter.

The deterioration of the stone embankment is clearly visible along its five-kilometer length.

The production of cooking bananas is one of the most profitable in the coastal area known as Bajo Lempa, although floods frequently swamp crops and ruin the harvests on family farms. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The rest of the dike is not a stone wall but an earthen elevation about two meters high, and it is also damaged.

The repair and maintenance of the embankment is one of the main demands of the inhabitants of Bajo Lempa, but it has never been efficiently addressed by any of the past governments.

Brena Cerén, administration coordinator, shows part of the organic cashew nut production just out of the ovens of the cooperative set up in San Carlos Lempa, in the Salvadoran municipality of Tecoluca. Cashew nut production in the coastal area of the country has a growing market in the United States and European countries. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Compensation for Damage

Avilés said it is obvious that the country needs to generate electricity “because many sectors, factories, industry, and homes depend on it, but we should also consider the cost that we pay down here,” referring to the energy produced by the 15 de Septiembre power plant.

This dam and the other four in the country are managed by the state-owned Comisión Ejecutiva Hidroeléctrica del Río Lempa (CEL). For this reason, he and the other people interviewed argued that the government should take responsibility for the damage and losses caused to the families of Bajo Lempa and create an indemnity or compensation fund.

Avilés said that last year, when there was light flooding, he lost his crop of plantains or cooking bananas, which he had planted on a two-hectare plot. He went to claim compensation from CEL for the 15,000 dollars he had invested.

“They told me that they had nothing to do with it, that the dam was above us and the flooding was below,” he said.

Sugarcane monoculture, practiced by families that have invaded and grabbed land in the coastal area of Bajo Lempa, in southern El Salvador, has damaged the fragile ecosystem of the area as it encourages the intensive use of agrochemicals and the burning of sugarcane fields, which often reach the crops of riverbank communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Environmental activist Gabriel Labrador, of the NGO Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UES), told IPS that these families have every right to demand an economic compensation fund for losses and damage.

“It is an injustice—the discharges, the vulnerabilities to which people and territories are exposed—which is a systematic practice that is unjust and ends up burdening the most disadvantaged people with more damage and losses,” he said.

Meanwhile, the residents of Bajo Lempa, already accustomed to the floods, know that they have no choice but to continue fighting, despite the adversities.

“It would be fair for CEL to say, ‘We are going to help you, at least with 50 percent of what was lost’, but it doesn’t give anything. However, we have no choice but to keep working hard,” said Menjívar.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

A group of "curileros" ride in a boat in the bay of Jiquilisco, in the Pacific Ocean off the Salvadoran coast, during the daily task of searching for "curiles", a locally prized mollusk. Two municipalities bordering the bay, Jiquilisco and Puerto El Triunfo, are working to keep a treatment plant that processes wastewater from these towns active, in order to avoid contaminating this important wetland and protect the health of local families and visitors. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador , Oct 25 2023 (IPS)

Insufficient wastewater treatment systems in El Salvador have taken a toll on the environment and the health of the population for decades, but some municipalities are putting more attention on processing their liquid waste.

Various reports warned as early as 2014 that in El Salvador, a country of 6.7 million people, only 8.52 percent of wastewater receives some form of treatment, and the picture has not changed much since then."My job is to provide the proper maintenance so that the plant works well and we make sure that the environment is not polluted.” -- Eduardo Ortega

It is not surprising, then, that only 12 percent of the rivers have good quality water and that dozens of people die each year from diarrhea: this year, as of Sept. 30, 63 people had died from this cause, of a total of more than 164,000 reported cases.

Wastewater includes what is generated in domestic activities, such as the use of toilets, sinks, washbasins and laundry. Wastewater is also produced by industry, but due to its characteristics it requires more complex treatment.

With international assistance

Few municipalities and communities have their own wastewater treatment systems, in some cases created as collective efforts that included their own funds as well as financing from international institutions and from the central government.

“My job is to provide the proper maintenance so that the plant works well and we make sure that the environment is not polluted,” Eduardo Ortega, who runs one of the few treatment plants located in eastern El Salvador, told IPS.

Ortega works in maintenance in the plant located next to La Española, a rural settlement in the municipality of Chirilagua, which borders the Pacific Ocean, in the south of the department of San Miguel.

La Española, a village of 40 houses, was built with Spanish aid funds for 40 fishing families affected by Hurricane Mitch, which left a trail of death and destruction in Central America in October 1998.

The housing project, financed by the government of the southern Spanish region of Andalucía, included a basic sanitation system that is unusual in rural areas: a sewage network that transports wastewater, including human waste, to the treatment plant.

A nearby similar initiative of 278 houses built for 1,500 people, called Flores de Andalucía, in the vicinity of Chirilagua as well, was also financed by humanitarian aid from the regional government of Andalucia.

There are currently 196 “ordinary” treatment plants in the country, in other words, plants that treat wastewater from domestic activities.

Of these, 90 are private, 78 are public and 17 are community-run, among other categories, according to the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources.

Eduardo Ortega (L), in charge of the treatment plant located near Chirilagua, in the department of Usulután in eastern El Salvador, and Edwin Guzmán (R), head of the municipality’s Environmental Unit, are mainly responsible for ensuring that the liquid waste treatment plant is operating at 100 percent. The station was built with financial aid from Spain as part of a housing project to benefit victims of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated large areas in Central America in October 1998. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Bacteria and gravel filters

The process begins with a hydraulic structure that removes sand and other small particles which, before passing into a tank, are filtered through a screen, Edwin Guzmán, head of the environmental unit of the local government of Chirilagua, a municipality of 25,000 people, including the local capital and outlying villages, told IPS.

The liquid then runs into another tank containing bacteria that eliminate the organic matter that has been dissolved into particles before reaching the tank.

After this, the waste passes to the biofiltration areas: rectangular ponds two meters deep, filled with layers of volcanic rock and gravel.

Finally, everything goes to another pond with “percolator” filters, which contain more bacteria to eliminate any remaining organic matter.

“This treated water will not contaminate the San Román river, which is about three kilometers away,” Guzmán said.

He added: “If this treatment plant were not here, there would be terrible pollution of the river, which is one of the few in the area that always has a good flow of water.”

And if the river were polluted, it would also affect the waters of the Pacific, where it flows into from this small Central American country that only has coasts on that ocean.

A view of part of the infrastructure of the treatment plant set up next to Jardines de Andalucía, the second housing project built in 2003 mostly with Spanish aid near the Salvadoran municipality of Chirilagua, on the coastal strip of the eastern department of Usulután. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A cleaner sea

The larger Flores de Andalucía plant also receives sewage from El Cuco, a beach located about two kilometers to the south, visited by tourists drawn by its kilometers of gray sandy beaches and the gentle waves of the sea.

The inhabitants of El Cuco have always been dedicated to fishing, but there are also businesses, small hostels and restaurants, whose wastewater no longer goes directly into the sea.

The wastewater is collected in a tank and, fueled by a gasoline engine, is pumped uphill through a pipeline to the plant, its final destination.

“Before, all that water went straight to the sea,” José Henríquez, one of the plant’s operators, told IPS.

“It is important to treat the water, because otherwise we are contaminating ourselves,” said Henríquez, while cleaning the plant’s pipelines.

But despite this initiative, it is estimated that only 60 percent of the wastewater from El Cuco and surrounding areas is treated, as there are people and businesses that, for some reason, bypass the regulations and continue the old practice of dumping their wastewater on the beach.

Moreover, the municipalities near Chirilagua do not have treatment plants and, consequently, much of their waste is discharged into the rivers, which carry it to the sea.

Official figures show that 61.5 percent of Salvadoran households throw gray water, from washing clothes, hands, dishes, etc., into the street or outdoors, 33 percent dispose of it through sewage systems and 2.3 percent through septic tanks. The remaining 3.1 percent discharge their gray water into rivers or use other means.

El Cuco beach, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, is a community whose wastewater is pumped through a pipeline uphill to the treatment plant located in Jardines de Andalucía, near Chirilagua, to prevent contamination generated by the villlage’s shops, homes, restaurants and hostels from reaching the sea. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A bay without pollution

Further west on the Salvadoran coast is Jiquilisco Bay, the country’s main wetland, a place of exuberant natural beauty covering more than 600,000 hectares, home to numerous marine-coastal plant and animal species.

The municipality of Puerto El Triunfo, population 20,000, is located on the edge of the bay’s estuary in the south of the department of Usulután. A treatment plant that has been processing the municipality’s wastewater since the end of 2009 is located nearby.

The Puerto El Triunfo plant was also partially financed by aid from Spain, which contributed approximately 50 percent of the cost of the work, which totaled 660,000 dollars.

The rest of the investment came from the municipal and central governments.

“The water used to be dumped untreated into the mangrove swamp and into the bay; now it is discharged treated, cleaner,” Evelio Álvarez, in charge of the Environmental Unit of the Puerto El Triunfo municipal government, told IPS.

Álvarez said that in 2010, due to financial problems, the municipality could no longer afford to run the plant and ceded control to the government’s National Aqueduct and Sewer Administration, which has managed it ever since.

The facility also processes liquid waste from Jiquilisco, a municipality of some 50,000 inhabitants located about eight kilometers north of Puerto El Triunfo, from where the wastewater is pumped down to the station.

In the past, the waste from Jiquilisco went directly into the El Paso River, which flows into the bay.

Only 8.52 percent of the wastewater generated in El Salvador receives some type of treatment, and much of the waste is dumped untreated into rivers and streams, which end up depositing it in important wetlands in the country, contaminating ecosystems and affecting people’s health. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“Most of the families make their living from fishing, and all that pollution was going raw into the mangroves,” agro-ecologist Etelvina Pineda, head of the environmental unit of the Jiquilisco municipal government, told IPS.

From the mangrove swamp and its web of canals the pollution spread to the lowlands bordering the bay, and as a result the homemade wells that supplied the coastal communities in the area had high concentrations of Escherichia coli, a bacterium present in human feces.

In addition, in the mangroves, “we ended up contaminating the mollusks, crustaceans and all the marine fauna that live there, through feces and heavy materials,” said Pineda.

As a result, people got sick from eating improperly cooked seafood. The pollution also decimated the marine fauna, a source of income for local families.

However, as in Chirilagua, Pineda pointed out that the pollution has not been stopped 100 percent.

She stressed that this would require a broader and more comprehensive effort, including the other four municipalities with an impact on the bay: Usulután, San Dionisio, Concepción Batres and Jucuarán.

In addition to the lack of financial resources to carry out such a program, Pineda argued that there is an absence of political will on the part of local governments and the central government, which she said are not committed to solving the environmental problems of this area or the country as a whole.

Farmer Gustavo Panameño stands in the middle of what is left of his cornfield, hit hard by drought and windstorms, near Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador. Many Salvadoran small farmers are feeling the impact of El Niño, as are many others in Central America and the rest of the world. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador , Oct 10 2023 (IPS)

The effects of El Niño on agriculture in Central America are once again putting pressure on thousands of small farmer families who are feeling more vulnerable economically and in terms of food, as they lose their crops, due to climate change.

But that is not all. In addition to the obvious fact that poor harvests lead to higher food prices and food insecurity, they also generate a lack of employment in the countryside, further driving migration flows, said several experts interviewed by IPS."I lost practically all the corn, and the beans too, they couldn't be used, they started to grow but were stunted." -- Héctor Panameño

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather phenomenon had not been felt in the area since 2016. But now it has reappeared with stronger impacts. Meteorologists define ENSO as having three phases, and the one whose consequences are currently being felt on the ground is the third, the strongest.

Impact on the families

“The lack of water made us plant later, in June, when a drought hit us and ruined our corn and beans,” Gustavo Panameño, 46, told IPS as he looked disconsolately at the few plants still standing in his cornfield.

The plot Gustavo leases to farm, less than one hectare in size, is located in Lomas de Apancinte, a hill in the vicinity of Santa María Ostuma, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz.

“The beans were completely lost, I expected to harvest about 300 pounds,” he said.

The corn and bean harvest “was for the consumption of the family, close relatives, and from time to time to sell,” said Gustavo.

A large part of Héctor Panameño’s corn crop in central El Salvador was destroyed by strong winds during a period when rain was scarce as a result of the El Niño phenomenon. The small farmer also lost his bean crop, making it a challenge to feed his family of nine. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Nearby is the plot leased by Héctor Panameño, who almost completely lost his corn crop and the few beans he had planted.

Corn and beans form the basis of the diet of the Salvadoran population of 6.7 million people and of the rest of the Central American countries, which have a total combined population of just over 48 million.

This subtropical region has two seasons: the wet season, from November to April, and the dry season the rest of the year. Agriculture contributes seven percent of GDP and accounts for 20 percent of employment, according to data from the Central American Integration System (SICA).

“I lost practically all the corn, and the beans too, they couldn’t be used, they started to grow but were stunted,” said Héctor, 66, a distant relative of Gustavo.

At this stage, the stalks of the corn plants have already been “bent”, a small-farming practice that helps dry the cobs, the final stage of the process before harvesting.

And what should be a cornfield full of dried plants, lined up in furrows, now holds barely a handful here and there, sadly for Héctor.

Both farmers said that in addition to the droughts, the crops were also hit by several storms that brought with them violent gusts of wind, which ended up knocking down the corn plants.

“The plants were already big, 45 days old, about to flower, but a windstorm came and knocked them down,” recalled Héctor, sadly.

“After that, there were a few plants left standing, and when the cobs were beginning to fill up with kernels another strong wind came and finished knocking down the entire crop.”

A few weeks ago both Gustavo and Héctor replanted corn and beans, trying to recover some of their losses. Now their hopes are on the “postrera”, as the second planting cycle is called in Central America, which starts in late August and ends with the harvest in November.

The windstorms mentioned by both farmers are apparently part of the extreme climate variability brought by climate change and El Niño.

The photo shows a parched ear of corn in a small cornfield that was destroyed in central El Salvador. It is estimated that losses of the staple crops corn and beans in the country, as a result of the impacts of extreme weather events, such as El Niño and the historical shortage of rainfall, on local production, will lead to a grain deficit of about 6.8 million quintals (100-kg). CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

El Niño 2.0

“It’s part of the same process, the warming of the water surface generates those winds,” said Pablo Sigüenza, an environmentalist with the National Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty of Guatemala (REDSAG).

Guatemala is also experiencing what experts have noted in the rest of the region: because El Niño has arrived in the “strong phase”, in which climate variability is even more pronounced, there are periods of longer droughts as well as more intense rains.

That puts the “postrera” harvest in danger, said the experts interviewed.

This means that whereas El Niño would bring drought in the first few months of the agricultural cycle, now it is hitting harder during the second period, in August, when the postrera planting is in full swing.

“For the farmers it was clear since April that it was raining less, compared to other years,” Sigüenza told IPS from Guatemala City.

“Then, in August, we had the first warnings from the highlands and the southern coast that the plants were not growing well, that they were suffering from water stress,” he said.

The most affected region, he said, is the Dry Corridor, which in Guatemala includes the departments of Jalapa, Chiquimula, Zacapa, El Progreso, part of Chimaltenango and Alta Verapaz, in the central part of the country.

The Dry Corridor is a 1,600 kilometer-long strip of land that runs north-south through portions of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

It is an area highly vulnerable to extreme weather events, where long periods of drought are followed by heavy rains that have a major effect on the livelihoods and food security of local populations, as described by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Sigüenza said that food security due to lack of basic grains is expected to affect some 4.6 million people in Guatemala, a country of 17.4 million.

Even the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “predicted that August, September and October would be the months with the greatest presence of El Niño,” said Luis Treminio, president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers.

Treminio said that 75 percent of bean production is currently planted, and because it is less resistant to drought and rain than corn and sorghum, there is a greater possibility of losses.

“So the risk now is to the postrera, because if this scenario is fulfilled, we will have a very low postrera production,” he said.

Treminio’s estimate is that El Salvador will have a basic grains deficit of 6.8 million quintals, which the country will have to cover, as always, with imports.

This bean plant growing on a Salvadoran farm may or may not make it to harvest. The El Niño phenomenon has begun to hit hard the “postrera” or second harvest in Central America, in which farmers hope to recover some of the losses suffered in the first harvest, in May and June. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Nicaragua, hardest hit

Nicaragua, population 6.8 million, is the Central American country hardest hit by El Niño, Brazilian Adoniram Sanches, FAO’s subregional coordinator for Mesoamerica, told IPS.

As in other countries in the region, Nicaraguan farmers suffered losses in the first planting, in May, and again in the second, the postrera, “and all of this leads to a strong imbalance in the small farmer economy,” the FAO official said from Panama City.

Sanches said that El Niño will be felt in 93 percent of the region until March 2024 and, in addition, 71 percent is in the “strong phase”.

He added that in the Dry Corridor 64 percent of the farms are less than two hectares in size. In other words, there are many families involved in subsistence agriculture, and with fewer harvests, they would face unemployment and would look for escape valves, such as migration.

“All this would then trigger an explosion of migration,” said Sanches.

With regard to the impacts in Nicaragua, researcher Abdel Garcia, an expert in climate, environment and disasters, said that, in effect, the country is receiving “the negative backlash” of El Niño, that is, less rain in the months that should have more copious rainfall, such as September.

García said that the effects of the climate are not only being felt in agriculture, and therefore in the economy, but also in the environment.

“The ecosystem is already suffering: we see dried up rivers and surface water sources, and also the reservoirs, which are at their lowest levels right now,” García told IPS from Managua.

García said that some farmers in the department of Estelí, in northwestern Nicaragua, are already talking about a plan B, that is, to engage in other economic activities outside of agriculture, given the harsh situation in farming.

In late August, FAO announced the launch of a humanitarian aid plan aimed at mobilizing some 37 million dollars to assist vulnerable communities in Latin America in the face of the impact of the El Niño phenomenon.

Specifically, the objective was to support 1.1 million people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

Even more ambitious is an initiative in which FAO will participate as a liaison between the governments of 30 countries around the world and investors, multilateral development banks, the private sector and international donors, so that these nations can access and allocate resources to agriculture.

At the meeting, which will take place Oct. 7-20 in Rome, FAO’s world headquarters, governments will present projects totaling 268 million dollars to investors.

Among the nations submitting proposals are 10 from Latin America and the Caribbean, including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Meanwhile, despite the gloomy forecasts for farming families, who are taking a direct hit from El Niño, both Gustavo and Héctor remain hopeful that it is worth a second try now that the postrera harvest is underway.

“We have no choice but to keep working, we can’t just sit back and do nothing,” said Héctor, with a smile that was more encouraging than resigned.

Rural women in El Salvador participate in a literacy class in the Santa Rosa canton of the municipality of Sensuntepeque, in the northern department of Cabañas. Education authorities in this Central American country have done very little to continue with programs that teach adults to read and write, especially in rural areas. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SENSUNTEPEQUE, El Salvador , Sep 4 2023 (IPS)

El Salvador’s efforts to improve the educational level in the country seem to be falling short, with rundown schools, especially in rural areas, and little progress in overcoming illiteracy.

In almost a decade, this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants has moved just two percentage points in its fight against illiteracy, going from 11.8 percent in 2013 to 9.7 percent in 2021, the last year with available official data.

Illiteracy is higher in rural areas: 15.2 percent. And among people over 60 years of age the rate is 45.7 percent"Sometimes I would go to the offices in the town of Ilobasco, and I felt bad when I saw signs with messages written on them and I couldn't understand the words." -- Carmen Molina

Literacy efforts in the freezer

Even more worrisome is the suspension in the last three years of the government’s adult literacy program in rural areas, people involved in this effort told IPS.

“It is worrying, the literacy program ceased to exist,” Verónica Majano, executive director of the non-governmental Association of Popular Education (CIAZO), told IPS.

Her organization has been working on literacy programs since 1989, during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war.

And now CIAZO is perhaps the only organization that still runs adult literacy programs in rural areas of the country.

Other institutions that carried out similar projects have given up because they say the education authorities have abandoned the national effort.

“It is not only stagnation, it is a setback; the COVID-19 pandemic affected initial, basic, middle and higher education, but right or wrong it has continued. But in literacy nothing is happening,” Majano stressed.

The cancellation or suspension of the government’s Literacy Program has become evident, she said, since Nayib Bukele became president in June 2019.

She added that the effort to teach reading and writing to those who did not have the opportunity to go to school, or who had to drop out for one reason or another, had previously continued regardless of which government was in power, left or right.

She was referring to the administrations of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, which governed for four terms between 1989 and 2009, and those of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was in power for two terms between 2009 and 2019.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has pointed out that acquiring and improving literacy skills throughout life is an intrinsic part of the right to education and brings enormous empowerment and many benefits.

“Literacy drives sustainable development, enables greater participation in the labor market, improves child and family health and nutrition, reduces poverty and expands life opportunities,” the UN agency states.

According to UNESCO, a country can be declared free of illiteracy if less than 3.9 percent of the total population over 15 years of age is illiterate.

It has also stated that illiteracy is another form of modern slavery.

However, it notes that despite the progress made worldwide, 763 million adults still do not know how to read and write.

The hands of an elderly woman fill in a primer with which she is learning to read and write. Most of the women who participate in the literacy circle in Santa Rosa canton, in northern El Salvador, are over 60 years old. But that has not discouraged them from continuing to learn, despite the fact that some have vision problems and getting their eyes examined and buying glasses involves a cost that many cannot afford. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Academic Óscar Picardo told IPS that part of the problem in El Salvador is that, historically, the arrival of each new government has meant a change of strategy and vision on how to promote education in general and literacy programs in particular.

This has generated discontinuity with some of the achievements or progress made by the previous authorities, he said.

“The country and the Ministry of Education have had a recurring problem that is still present, which is the absence of state policies,” said Picardo, director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation, of the private Francisco Gavidia University.

He added; “The education system works with government policies, and every five years the whole system is rebooted, the minister changes and plans change, priorities change, but the major problems remain intact.”

The expert pointed out that if progress is to be made in education, and in particular in reducing illiteracy, the problem of school dropouts, caused by poverty and the insecurity generated by gangs, must be tackled.

According to official figures, 1.3 million people aged four to 29 (47.4 percent) reported not attending school in 2022.

The poverty rate stands at 26.6 percent of the population, but in the countryside the figure rises to 29.6 percent.

Picardo stressed that the so-called “war against gangs” waged since the end of March 2021 by the Bukele administration, which has succeeded in largely dismantling the operations of these criminal groups, is likely to lower the dropout rates and this is already reflected in the figures for the next school year.

“Of course, if the dropout rates decrease due to improved security that would be very positive; hopefully we will see statistics in that regard,” Picardo said.

The “mano dura” or iron fist strategy against the gangs, known here as “maras”, although it has largely dismantled the criminal activity of these groups, has also generated a dynamic of human rights violations and abuses by police and military authority that have been denounced by local and international human rights organizations.

With an average schooling of only 7.2 grades, it will be difficult for the Salvadoran populace to pull out of poverty and for the country to find foreign investment that offers better paying jobs, said the expert.

In El Salvador there are three grades of initial education, up to seven years of age on average. These are followed by nine grades of basic education, up to the age of 15, and three more of middle school, up to the age of 18. Schooling is considered compulsory until the completion of basic education.

Most other Central American countries face a similar problem to El Salvador, Picardo added, although Costa Rica has always shown better development in the educational and social areas, in general, and is the only country in the sub-region declared free of illiteracy.

The Salvadoran government has made a commitment to reducing the technological gap, with the distribution of thousands of laptops to elementary and high school students, which is an important achievement.

But the Bukele administration has also been criticized for the low level of investment in improving the conditions of most of the more than 5,000 schools in the country, especially in rural areas, and in remedying the deficiencies in teaching.

Blanca Velazco, a schoolteacher, shared with IPS the difficulties she faces every day in teaching essential knowledge to her kindergarten and first grade students, who share the same classroom at the Santa Rosa canton school in the municipality of Sensuntepeque, in the northern Salvadoran department of Cabañas.

“My first graders should be reading better by now, but I’ve had a hard time teaching them, because they are together with the kindergarteners, and that shouldn’t be the case,” said Velazco, 47.

She added that at 10:30 AM the kindergarteners leave and she only has 45 minutes to teach the first graders Language Arts and Math.

“”Forty-five minutes are not enough,” she stressed. In the afternoon, she also teaches fourth grade.

Livestock and small-scale and subsistence agriculture are the main economic activities in the canton of Santa Rosa, in the jurisdiction of Sensuntepeque, in northern El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Winning the battle against illiteracy

In this canton, where some 50 families live, the Association of Popular Education, CIAZO, is organizing five literacy circles aimed at adults, mostly women, who want to win the fight against illiteracy.

Official figures reveal that of those who cannot read or write in El Salvador, 14.4 percent are women and 7.7 percent are men.

One of the literacy circles is made up of a dozen peasant women over the age of 60. Half of them were present when IPS visited the area on Aug. 28, and several of them are visually impaired due to their age, but they are not giving up.

“Sometimes I would go to the offices in the town of Ilobasco, and I felt bad when I saw signs with messages written on them and I couldn’t understand the words,” said Carmen Molina, 66, as she worked on a primer, writing words and solving simple addition and subtraction equations.

She said that as a child she attended school but only got as far as the second grade, and what little she learned was forgotten over the years.

“I didn’t want to go anymore,” she explained, because she had to take breakfast to her father and siblings to the milpa – the traditional agricultural system that intermingles corn with beans and vegetables. “And then coming all the way back to school was very hard,” she said.

She got up the courage to go to the literacy circle because some of her younger children would ask her what to write on their assignments.

“Some have a harder time learning than others, but in general they have advanced quite a bit, little by little,” said Flor Echeverría, 30, who has been teaching in the circle since the beginning of 2023.

Echeverría commented that she herself only studied up to the eighth grade and did not want to finish ninth grade, the last grade offered at the school she attended.

“At that time the facilities to go to school didn’t exist, everything was even more complicated,” she said.

“It’s nice to dedicate time to share knowledge with people who did not learn to read or write,” she said.

Although some men participate in the literary circle, such as Julio, Carmen’s son, the vast majority are women who have come to understand that learning to read and write is in itself an act of rebellion and also of liberation.

Medardo Pérez, 60, sprays paraquat, a potent herbicide, to kill the weeds growing in his corn crop in the San Isidro canton of the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador. Most small farmers in Central America use this and other agrochemicals on their crops, just as agribusiness does on monocultures such as bananas, pineapples, coffee and sugar cane. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador , Aug 21 2023 (IPS)

In his green cornfield, Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez set about filling the hand-held spray pump that hangs on his back, with the right mixture of water and paraquat, a potent herbicide, and began spraying the weeds.

Paraquat, the active ingredient in brands such as Gramaxone, from the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer, is sold without any restrictions in El Salvador and in other nations in Central America and around the world, despite its toxicity and the fact that the label clearly states “controlled product”."We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don't even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores." -- Medardo Pérez

“We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don’t even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores,” the farmer from San Isidro, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz, told IPS.

Pérez, 60, said he was aware of the risks to his health, but added that using the agrochemical made it easier and faster for him to get rid of the weeds growing in his cornfield on his two-hectare farm.

“Paraquat is restricted here in Guatemala, but it is commonly used in agriculture; any peasant farmer can buy it; it is sold freely,” David Paredes, an activist with the National Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, told IPS.

In 2016 the New York Times reported that scientific reports linked paraquat to Parkinson’s disease, and explained that the product could not be sold in Europe but could be marketed in the United States and the rest of the world.

Agrochemicals everywhere and no controls

Central America is a region where these and other agrochemicals are imported and marketed with virtually no controls, and where governments appear to have given in to the interests of the powerful transnational corporations that produce and sell them.

Some 51 million people live in the region and 20 percent of jobs are in the agricultural sector, which accounts for a total of seven percent of the GDP of the seven countries of Central America.

In addition to small farmers, agroindustry in the region uses agrochemicals intensively to produce monocultures for export, such as bananas, pineapples, African palm, coffee and sugarcane.

Sugarcane is the raw material for the sugar that the region exports to the United States, Europe and even China, through trade agreements.

The sugar agribusiness uses glyphosate, patented in 1974 by the U.S.-based Monsanto, to accelerate sugarcane ripening, but there are reports around the world about the damage caused to the environment and to health, including possible cancer risks, as warned by environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

And yet it continues to be widely used in the region and in other parts of the world. Glyphosate is known by commercial names such as Roundup, also owned now by Germany’s Bayer.

“There is indiscriminate use of agrochemicals by agribusiness,” Paredes said from his country’s capital, Guatemala City.

Paredes shared with IPS the preliminary results of a study, still underway, that has detected the presence of 49 chemicals in the water due to the use of pesticides, half of them banned in more than 120 countries, he said.

The research has been carried out along the southern coast of the country, where monocultures such as sugar cane, banana, African palm and pineapple are predominant, he said.

Juan Mejía, a small farmer, takes a break from his daily chores on his two-hectare plot in the El Carrizal canton, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, El Salvador. Mejía still continues to use herbicides such as paraquat, but has reduced their use by 90 percent, and is now shifting to agroecological production. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala

The fight against agrochemicals

“Glyphosate is applied through aerial spraying, it is very common in that area, and when the wind spreads it to the crops of poor communities, their harvests are destroyed,” he said.

The same is true in El Salvador, where environmental organizations have been carrying out the Bitter Sugar campaign for several years, against the indiscriminate use of glyphosate, in particular, and agrochemicals in general.

“In this campaign we have protested the fact that spraying by light aircraft continues, and that it is punishable, as an environmental crime,” Alejandro Labrador, of the Ecological Unit of El Salvador (UNES), told IPS.

In September 2013, El Salvador’s single-chamber legislature approved a ban on 50 agrochemicals, including paraquat and glyphosate. But the decree was rejected by then President Mauricio Funes and the bill has been bogged down ever since.

However, except for a list of 11 products – including paraquat and glyphosate – the agrochemicals that the legislature wanted to ban were already regulated by other national and international regulations, although in practice there is little or no state control over their use in the fields.

“The corporate lobby twisted their arm,” Labrador said, alluding to the failed attempt to ban them via legislative decree.

He also hinted at the influence exercised over presidents and government officials by transnational biotechnology corporations such as Bayer and Monsanto, whose interests are usually defended by the agricultural chambers of the Central American region.

He added that El Salvador is the Central American country that imports the most agrochemicals per year, “at a very high cost to ecosystems and people’s health.”

In this regard, in the last decade, the use of glyphosate during the sugar cane harvest has been linked to a high rate of kidney failure in El Salvador.

This nation has the highest rate of deaths from chronic kidney disease in Central America: 47 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, according to a UNES report published in 2021, which states that 80,000 tons of fertilizers, 3,000 tons of herbicides and 1,200 tons of fungicides are imported annually into El Salvador.

The bittersweet taste of pineapple

In Costa Rica, the use of pesticides is also intensive in monoculture export crops like bananas and, above all, pineapples, activist Erlinda Quesada, of the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, told IPS.

Quesada pointed out that the product known generically as bromacil has been linked to cases of cancer, while nemagon has been linked to cases of infertility in men and women.

“It happened to us with the nemagon in banana production, which sterilized a lot of men in Costa Rica,” said Quesada, from Guásimo, a municipality in the province of Limón, on the country’s Atlantic coast.

Complaints from environmental organizations led the government to ban bromacil in 2017, due to the impact on underground water sources.

“However, I doubt that they have stopped using it,” Quesada said.

A report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) revealed in May 2022 that Costa Rica uses up to eight times more pesticides per hectare than other Latin American countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“The average apparent use of pesticides in agriculture between 2012 and 2020 was 34.45 kilos per hectare, a figure higher than previous estimates” in the Central American country, the report cited, more than in OECD members Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

One of the one-liter cans of paraquat that Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez used during a day’s work to eliminate weeds in his cornfield. Paraquat is one of the most widely used agrochemicals in Central America and the world, despite health risks and environmental contamination. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A blow to food sovereignty

The focus on intensively produced monocultures among national and international economic leaders has ended up damaging the capacity to produce food for the local population, Wendy Cruz, of the local affiliate of the international farmers’ rights movement Via Campesina, told IPS from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

“Now it is the consortiums and elites that occupy large tracts of land to produce for global markets, and agrotoxins increasingly weaken the capacity of the land to produce food for our people,” Cruz said.

“We need to push for a change of model, with governments adopting an agroecological vision that sustains life,” she said.

Seeds of passion fertilize Brazil’s semiarid Northeast

This vision of producing agricultural products without damaging the environment with agrochemicals is shared by another Salvadoran, Juan Mejía, a 67-year-old small farmer who grows some of his products using ecological fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

Paraquat is still used, he said, to “burn the weeds,” but on a smaller scale, and he is trying to use it less and less. He also uses – but “very little” – Monarca, another Bayer pesticide, whose active ingredient is thiacloprid.

“We have learned to work organically, maybe not 100 percent, but as much as possible,” said Mejía, during a break in the work on his two-hectare plot, located in the canton of El Carrizal, also in Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador.

Mejía produces organic fertilizer known as gallinacea and a pesticide based on chili, onion, garlic and a little soap, with which he combats whiteflies, a pest that damages growing vegetables.

“It’s effective, but it doesn’t work automatically, right away, it takes a little more time,” he said.

He added: “We farmers have always mistakenly wanted to see immediate results, like we get with chemicals. But organic agriculture is a process, it is slower, but more beneficial to our health and the environment.”

In addition to milpa, a traditional ancestral pre-Hispanic system of planting corn, beans, chili peppers and pipián, a type of zucchini, Mejía grows citrus fruits, plantains (cooking bananas) and cacao.

“We have diversified and included other crops, such as green leafy vegetables, so that we are not buying contaminated products and are harvesting our own, healthier food,” he said.

Two pregnant girls walk through the center of the capital of El Salvador, a country with one of the highest rates of pregnancies among girls aged 10 to 14, and where, as in the rest of Central America, what prevails are conservative views opposed to the teaching of sex education in schools, which is essential to reducing the phenomenon. CREDIT: Francisco Campos / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR , Aug 3 2023 (IPS)

Pregnancies among girls and adolescents continue unabated in Central America, where legislation to prevent them, when it exists, is a dead letter, and governments are influenced by conservative sectors opposed to sex education in schools.

The most recent incident reflecting this situation was the Jul. 29 veto by Honduran President Xiomara Castro of an Integral Law for the Prevention of Adolescent Pregnancy, approved by the single-chamber Congress on Mar. 8 and criticized by conservative groups and the country’s political right wing."When I became pregnant I didn't even know what a condom was, I'm not ashamed to say it." -- Zuleyma Beltrán

“We don’t know the arguments behind the veto, but we could surmise that the law is still being held up by pressure from these anti-rights groups,” lawyer Erika García, of the Women’s Rights Center, told IPS from Tegucigalpa.

The influence of lobbying groups

Conservative sectors, united in “Por nuestros hijos” (“for our children”), a Honduran version of the regional movement “Con mis Hijos no te Metas” (roughly “don’t mess with my children”), have opposed the law because in their view it pushes “gender ideology”, as international conservative populist groups call the current movement for the dissemination of women’s and LGBTI rights.

In June, the United Nations expressed concern about “disinformation campaigns” surrounding the Honduran law.

The last of the marches in favor of “family and children” took place in Tegucigalpa, the country’s capital, on Jul. 22.

These groups “appeal to people’s ignorance, to fear, to religion, with arguments that have nothing to do with reality,” said García. “They say, for example, that people will put skirts on boys and pants on girls.”

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), one in four births is to a girl under 19 years of age in Honduras, giving the country the second-highest teenage pregnancy rate in Latin America.

According to the Honduran Penal Code having sexual relations with minors under 14 years of age is statutory rape, whether or not the girl consented.

In 2022, 1039 girls under 14 gave birth.

“The problem is quite serious, and it is aggravated by the lack of public policies to prevent pregnancies among girls and adolescents,” García said.

In the countries of Central America, which have a combined total of some 50 million inhabitants, ultra-conservative views prevail when it comes to sexual and reproductive health and education.

In El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – as well as the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean – abortion is banned under all circumstances, including rape, incest or a threat to the mother’s life.

In the rest of Central America, abortion is only permitted in certain circumstances.

The Honduran president vetoed the law under the formula “return to Congress”, so that it can be studied again and eventually ratified if two thirds of the 128 lawmakers approve it.

Zuleyma Beltrán, 41, talked about becoming pregnant at the age of 15 because there is no proper sex education in El Salvador. A second pregnancy led to a miscarriage that landed her in jail in 1999, where many Salvadoran women who miscarry or have abortions end up due to a draconian anti-abortion law. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“I didn’t even know what a condom was”

However, having laws of this nature does not ensure that the phenomenon will be reduced, since legislation is not always enforced.

Since 2017 El Salvador has had a National Intersectoral Strategy for the Prevention of Pregnancy in Girls and Adolescents, and although the numbers have declined in recent years, they are still high.

An UNFPA report noted that in this country the pregnancy rate among girls and adolescents dropped by more than 50 percent between 2015 and 2022.

However, “it is worrisome to see that El Salvador is one of the 50 countries in the world with the highest fertility rates in girls aged 10-14 years,” the UN agency said in its latest report, released in July.

Among girls aged 10-14, the study noted, the pregnancy rate dropped by 59.6 percent, from 4.7 girls registered for prenatal care per 1000 girls in 2015 to 1.9 in 2022.

The map of pregnancies in girls and adolescents in El Salvador added that the country “needs to further accelerate the pace of reduction, adopting policies and strategies adapted to the different realities of girls aged 10-14 years and adolescents aged 15-19 years.”

Such actions must be “evidence-based,” the report stressed.

The reference appears to be an allusion to the prevalence of conservative attitudes of groups that, in Honduras for example, reject sexual and reproductive education in schools.

This lack of basic knowledge about sexuality, in a context of structural poverty, led Zuleyma Beltrán to fall pregnant at the age of 15.

“When I became pregnant I didn’t even know what a condom was, I’m not ashamed to say it,” Beltrán, now 41, told IPS.

She added: “I suffered a lot because I didn’t know many things, because I lived in ignorance.”

Two years later, Beltrán became pregnant again but she miscarried, which landed her in jail in August 1999, accused of having an abortion – a plight faced by hundreds of women in El Salvador.

El Salvador not only bans abortion under any circumstances, even in cases of rape. It also imposes penalties of up to 30 years in prison for women who have undergone abortions, and women who end up in the hospital after suffering a miscarriage are often prosecuted under the law as well.

“The State should be ashamed of forcing these girls to give birth and not giving them options,” said Anabel Recinos, of the Citizens’ Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion.

“The State does not provide girls with sex education or sexual and reproductive health, and when pregnancies or obstetric emergencies occur as a result, it is too cruel to them, it only offers them jail,” she added.

Recinos said that, due to pressure from conservative groups, the State has backed down on the strategy of providing sexual and reproductive information in schools.

“Now they are more rigorous in not allowing organizations working in that area to go and give talks on comprehensive sex education in schools,” she noted.

Not even baby formula

In Guatemala, initiatives by civil society organizations that since 2017 have proposed, among other things, that the State should offer reparations to pregnant girls and adolescents, to alleviate their heavy burden, have made no progress either.

These proposals included the creation of scholarships, making it possible for girls to continue going to school while their babies were cared for and received formula.

“But unfortunately we have not been able to take the next step, to get these measures in place,” said Paula Barrios, general coordinator of Women Transforming the World, in a telephone conversation with IPS from the capital, Guatemala City.

Barrios said that most of the users of the services offered by this organization, such as legal and psychological support, “are girls and adolescents who are pregnant because of sexual violence and are forced to have their babies.”

She said that in the last five years some 500,000 girls under 14 years of age have become pregnant, and the number is much higher when teenagers up to 19 years of age are included.

“Today we have half a million girls who we don’t know what they and the children who are the products of rape are eating,” Barrios stressed, adding that as in El Salvador and Honduras, in Guatemala, having sex with a girl under 14 years of age is considered statutory rape.

“Society sees it as normal that women are born to be mothers, and so it doesn’t matter if a girl gets pregnant at the age of 10 or 12 years, they just think she has done it a little bit earlier,” she said.

Patriarchy and capitalism

The experts from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador consulted by IPS said the root of the phenomenon is multi-causal, with facets of patriarchy, especially gender stereotypes and sexual violence.

“The patriarchy has an interest in stopping women from going out into the public sphere,” said Barrios.

She said the life of a 10-year-old girl is cut short when she becomes pregnant. She will no longer go to school and will remain in the domestic sphere, “to raise children and stay at home.”

For her part, Garcia, the lawyer from Honduras, pointed out that there is also an underlying “system of oppression” that is intertwined with patriarchy and colonialism, which is the influence of a hegemonic country or region.

“We have girls giving birth to cheap labor to feed the (capitalist) system, and there is a greater feminization of poverty, girls giving birth to girls whose future prospects are ruined,” she said.

In the meantime, to avoid a repeat of her ordeal, Beltrán said she talks to and teaches her nine-year-old daughter about sexuality.

“In order to keep her from repeating my story, I talk to her about condoms, how a woman has to take care of herself and how she can get pregnant,” she said.

“I don’t want her to go through what I did,” she said.

Marisol and Misael Menjívar pose next to the biodigester installed in March in the backyard of their home in El Corozal, a rural settlement located near Suchitoto in central El Salvador. With a biotoilet and stove, the couple produces biogas for cooking from feces, which saves them money. The biotoilet can be seen in the background. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador , Jul 25 2023 (IPS)

A new technology that has arrived in rural villages in El Salvador makes it possible for small farming families to generate biogas with their feces and use it for cooking – something that at first sounded to them like science fiction and also a bit smelly.

In the countryside, composting latrines, which separate urine from feces to produce organic fertilizer, are very popular. But can they really produce gas for cooking?

“It seemed incredible to me,” Marisol Menjívar told IPS as she explained how her biodigester, which is part of a system that includes a toilet and a stove, was installed in the backyard of her house in the village of El Corozal, near Suchitoto, a municipality in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán."When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too." -- Marisol Menjívar

“When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too,” added Marisol, 48. Hers was installed in March.

El Corozal, population 200, is one of eight rural settlements that make up the Laura López Rural Water and Sanitation Association (Arall), a community organization responsible for providing water to 465 local families.

The families in the small villages, who are dedicated to the cultivation of corn and beans, had to flee the region during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war, due to the fighting.

After the armed conflict, they returned to rebuild their lives and work collectively to provide basic services, especially drinking water, as have many other community organizations, in the absence of government coverage.

In this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, 78.4 percent of rural households have access to piped water, while 10.8 percent are supplied by wells and 10.7 percent by other means.

With small stoves like this one, a score of families in El Corozal in central El Salvador cook their food with biogas they produce themselves, thanks to a government program that has brought clean energy technology to these remote rural villages. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Simple green technology

The biodigester program in rural areas is being promoted by the Salvadoran Water Authority (Asa).

Since November 2022, the government agency has installed around 500 of these systems free of charge in several villages around the country.

The aim is to enable small farmers to produce sustainable energy, biogas at no cost, which boosts their income and living standards, while at the same time improving the environment.

The program provides each family with a kit that includes a biodigester, a biotoilet, and a small one-burner stove.

In El Corozal, five of these kits were installed by Asa in November 2022, to see if people would accept them or not. To date, 21 have been delivered, and there is a waiting list for more.

In El Corozal, a rural settlement in the municipality of Suchitoto in central El Salvador, the technology of family biodigesters arrived at the end of last year, and some families are now producing biogas to light up their stoves and cook their food at no cost. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“With the first ones were set up, the idea was for people to see how they worked, because there was a lot of ignorance and even fear,” Arall’s president, Enrique Menjívar, told IPS.

In El Corozal there are many families with the surname Menjívar, because of the tradition of close relatives putting down roots in the same place.

“Here we’re almost all related,” Enrique added.

The biodigester is a hermetically sealed polyethylene bag, 2.10 meters long, 1.15 meters wide and 1.30 meters high, inside which bacteria decompose feces or other organic materials.

This process generates biogas, clean energy that is used to fuel the stoves.

The toilets are mounted on a one-meter-high cement slab in latrines in the backyard. They are made of porcelain and have a handle on one side that opens and closes the stool inlet hole.

One of the main advantages that family biodigesters have brought to the inhabitants of El Corozal, a small village in the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, is that the whole process begins with clean, hygienic toilets, like this one set up in Marleni Menjívar’s backyard, as opposed to the older dry composting latrines, which drew flies and cockroaches. To the left of the toilet is the small handle used to pump water to flush the feces into the biodigester. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

They also have a small hand pump, similar to the ones used to inflate bicycle tires, and when the handle is pushed, water is pumped from a bucket to flush the waste down the pipe.

The underground pipe carries the biomass by gravity to the biodigester, located about five meters away.

The system can also be fed with organic waste, by means of a tube with a hole at one end, which must be opened and closed.

Once it has been produced, the biogas is piped through a metal tube to the small stove mounted inside the house.

“I don’t even use matches, I just turn the knob and it lights up,” said Marisol, a homemaker and caregiver. Her husband Manuel Menjívar is a subsistence farmer, and they have a young daughter.

In El Corozal, biodigesters have been installed for families of four or five members, and the equipment generates 300 liters of biogas during the night, enough to use for two hours a day, according to the technical specifications of Coenergy, the company that imports and markets the devices.

But there are also kits that are used by two related families who live next to each other and share the equipment, which includes, in addition to the toilet, a larger biodigester and a two-burner stove.

With more sophisticated equipment, electricity could be generated from biogas produced from landfill waste or farm manure, although this is not yet being done in El Salvador.

Marleni Menjivar gets ready to heat water on her ecological stove, watched closely by her four-year-old daughter, in El Corozal in central El Salvador, where an innovative government program to produce biogas has arrived. With this technology, people save money by buying less liquefied gas while benefiting the environment. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Saving money while caring for the environment

The families of El Corozal who have the new latrines and stoves are happy with the results.

What they value the most is saving money by cooking with gas produced by themselves, at no cost.

They used to cook on wood-burning stoves, in the case of food that took longer to make, or on liquefied gas stoves, at a cost of 13 dollars per gas cylinder.

Marleni Menjívar, for example, used two cylinders a month, mainly because of the high level of consumption demanded by the family business of making artisanal cheeses, including a very popular local kind of cottage cheese.

Every day she has to cook 23 liters of whey, the liquid left after milk has been curdled. This consumes the biogas produced overnight.

For meals during the day Marleni still uses the liquefied gas stove, but now she only buys one cylinder a month instead of two, a savings of about 13 dollars per month.

“These savings are important for families here in the countryside,” said Marleni, 28, the mother of a four-year-old girl. The rest of her family is made up of her brother and grandfather.

“We also save water,” she added.

The biotoilet requires only 1.2 liters of water per flush, less than conventional toilets.

In addition, the soils are protected from contamination by septic tank latrines, which are widely used in rural areas, but are leaky and unhygienic.

The new technology avoids these problems.

The liquids resulting from the decomposition process flow through an underground pipe into a pit that functions as a filter, with several layers of gravel and sand. This prevents pollution of the soil and aquifers.

Also, as a by-product of the decomposition process, organic liquid fertilizer is produced for use on crops.

Most families in the rural community of El Corozal have benefited from one-burner stoves that run on biogas produced in family biodigesters. Larger two-burner stoves are also shared by two related families, where they cook on a griddle one of the favorite dishes of Salvadorans: pupusas, corn flour tortillas filled with beans, cheese and pork, among other ingredients. CREDIT: Coenergy El Salvador

Checking on site: zero stench

Due to a lack of information, people were initially concerned that if the biogas used in the stoves came from the decomposition of the family’s feces, it would probably stink.

And, worst of all, perhaps the food would also smell.

But little by little these doubts and fears faded away as families saw how the first devices worked.

“That was the first thing they asked, if the gas smelled bad, or if what we were cooking smelled bad,” said Marleni, remembering how the neighbors came to her house to check for themselves when she got the latrine and stove installed in December 2022.

“That was because of the little information that was available, but then we found that this was not the case, our doubts were cleared up and we saw there were no odors,” she added.

She said that, like almost everyone in the village, her family used to have a dry composting toilet, but it stank and generated cockroaches and flies.

“All that has been eliminated, the bathrooms are completely hygienic and clean, and we even had them tiled to make them look nicer,” Marleni said.

She remarked that hygiene is important to her, as her little girl can now go to the bathroom by herself, without worrying about cockroaches and flies.

Cecilia Menjivar, a tortilla maker in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, takes a break from cooking corn in a pot that is one meter high and 50 centimeters in diameter, heated by a wood stove. Many women in urban and rural areas run these small businesses, aware of the damage to their health caused by the smoke, but the economic situation forces them to use firewood, which is much cheaper than liquefied gas. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador , Jul 4 2023 (IPS)

Using a few dry sticks as fuel, Margarita Ramos of El Salvador lit the fire in her wood stove and set about frying two fish, occasionally fanning the flame, aware that the smoke she inhaled could affect her health.

“I know that the smoke can damage my lungs, because that’s what I’ve heard on the news, but what can I do?” Ramos told IPS, standing next to her stove in the courtyard of her home in El Zapote, a village of 51 families in the coastal municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Paz.

Firewood, the fuel of the poor

“I cook with firewood out of necessity, because I don’t always have a job or money to buy gas,” added Ramos, 44, referring to liquefied gas, a petroleum derivative used for cooking in 90.6 percent of Salvadoran homes, according to official data."I know that the smoke can damage my lungs, because that's what I've heard on the news, but what can I do?" -- Margarita Ramos

This is the situation faced by many women in El Salvador and other parts of the world, especially in the countryside, where dire economic conditions as well as ingrained habits and traditions lead families to cook with firewood, with negative repercussions on their health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2019 approximately 18 percent of global deaths were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 23 percent to acute respiratory infections.

Ambient pollution, including wood smoke, plays a decisive role in respiratory diseases, especially among rural women, who do the cooking in line with the roles of patriarchal culture.

Back in 2004 the WHO warned that about 1.6 million people were dying annually from charcoal and wood smoke used in cooking stoves in many developing countries.

In El Salvador, 29,365 cases of acute respiratory infections per 100,000 inhabitants were reported in 2022, well above the 19,000 reported in 2021. Pneumonia reached 365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the same period, and the case fatality rate stood at 13.6 percent, up from 11.4 percent the previous year.

Ana Margarita Ramos fries two fish for dinner on a wood stove in El Zapote, a coastal village located in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the Salvadoran department of La Paz. Due to economic difficulties she frequently has to cook with firewood, and she fears that she might get asthma from exposure to the smoke. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Ramos showed IPS the gas stove she has inside her house, with a cylinder that lasts approximately 40 days.

But when the gas runs out and she can’t afford to refill the cylinder, she has to cook with her wood stove. In her courtyard she has a table in a makeshift shed, where she keeps the wood and a metal structure that holds her pots and pans.

Official figures indicate that 5.9 percent of households in this Central American country use firewood for cooking.

However, in rural areas the proportion rises to 12.9 percent, while 84.4 percent cook with gas and the rest use electricity and other systems.

Ramos, 44, has no steady job and as a single mother, scrambles to provide for the needs of her two children.

Twice a week she cleans upscale apartments at a resort near her home, in Los Blancos, a well-known beach on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, also in La Paz. When she does well she cleans two a day, earning 24 dollars.

Sometimes she also washes other families’ clothes.

“Right now I have run out of gas, I have to use firewood,” she said. A cylinder of liquefied gas costs between 12 and 14 dollars.

She generally collects firewood on the banks of the estuary, from the branches of mangrove trees, since hers and other poor families live in a shantytown located between the Pacific Ocean and the Jaltepeque estuary, one of the country’s main wetlands.

Poverty affects 26.6 percent of the population at the national level in this small Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, according to official figures. But in rural areas the proportion rises to 29.6 percent, and of these, 10.8 percent live in extreme poverty.

At her house in the coastal village of El Zapote, Ana Margarita Ramos luckily has a yard where she has set up her wood stove, thus reducing her exposure to smoke, in a country like El Salvador where many women suffer from respiratory diseases due to the effects of cooking with firewood. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Cutting costs with firewood

Meanwhile in San Salvador, the country’s capital, Cecilia Menjívar runs her small tortilla-making business partly by using firewood, which she collects from tree branches around the Los Héroes community where she lives.

She also uses wood left over from construction sites and sometimes buys it as well, at a cost of one dollar for about three “rajas” or axe-cut tree branches.

Tortillas are round flat bread made from corn dough, which are baked on metal plates generally heated with the flame from liquefied gas.

But Menjívar does not use gas to cook the 68 kg of corn she uses daily to run her business, as she can’t afford it.

“That’s why we prefer firewood. We don’t like it, first of all because of the damage to our health, and also because our clothes are impregnated with the smell of smoke and the walls of the house too, they look dirty,” Menjívar, 58, told IPS.

“We do it to save on the cost, which would be very high, and we wouldn’t make any profit,” she added, while behind her the 68 kg of corn for the day rattled in a boiling pot, black from the wood smoke.

Tortillas are part of the staple diet of the Salvadoran population. Most households cook their food on gas stoves, but they don’t make their own tortillas, because it is a complex and time-consuming process.

That is why so many women, like Menjívar, go into the tortilla business to meet the high level of demand, cooking the corn on wood stoves, usually located in the open air in their courtyards.

But during the May to November rainy season, they cook the corn inside the house, in a back room.

Because of the amount of corn and the size of the pot, the improvised wood stove made of wood and a metal structure has to be set on the floor.

The tortilla business has shrunk, she added, due to the increase in the cost of corn, which climbed from 15 dollars per quintal (45 kg) to 32 dollars.

“With this business we earn enough to buy our food and other basic things, but not for other expenses,” she said.

One of Ana Margarita Ramos’ two sons, in El Zapote, a coastal settlement in southern El Salvador, stands near the firewood that is always on hand in case they can’t afford to buy liquefied gas. About 13 percent of rural Salvadoran households cook with firewood, which poses serious health risks. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Chronic bronchitis and pneumonia

Menjívar said that she fell ill with pneumonia in 2022, and she did not rule out that the cause could have been precisely the smoke she has been inhaling for decades, although she pointed out that the doctors who treated her did not inquire about it.

“Since I was a little girl I have been exposed to smoke, because my mother also used to make tortillas using firewood,” she said. “When she couldn’t find dry branches, my mom would burn anything: old shoes, old clothes or paper.”

When she got pneumonia, she had to stop working for three months, and she had to leave the business in the hands of her teenage daughter.

Burning firewood releases toxic gases and polluting particles that end up causing ailments that in medical terminology are grouped together as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonologist Carmen Elena Choto told IPS. These gases include carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.

“We also see other harmful particles, there may even be hydrocarbons, because they not only burn wood, but also dry cow dung, corncobs, paper, anything to make the fire,” said the expert.

Damage to the bronchi, or chronic bronchitis, and to the alveoli in the lungs, or pulmonary emphysema, are some of the diseases associated with exposure to smoke, including tobacco smoke, she added.

“Due to the burning of biomass (firewood and other products), the most frequent disease is chronic bronchitis,” said Choto, and older women are the main victims.

People with bronchitis have a constant cough “or wheezing or shortness of breath because there is obstruction due to mucus plugs in the airway,” she said.

Patients, she added, feel tired and suffer from dyspnea or shortness of breath from low oxygen levels, which in severe cases requires hospital care.

Menjívar began to feel these symptoms after spending years making tortillas.

“I felt very tired, I suffered from hot flashes, I was short of breath, I felt like I was having a hard time breathing,” she said.

After she was diagnosed with pneumonia, Menjívar stopped working for three months.

“That’s why I try to stay farther away from the smoke now,” she said. “But the smoke spreads through the house.”

For her part, Ramos, in her coastal village, has put her stove in the yard outdoors, to reduce exposure to smoke. She worries that she could suffer from asthma, like her sister.

A resident of the coastal hamlet of El Salamar, in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura in southern El Salvador, cooks pasta for lasagna on an ecological stove called a “rocket”, which is much more efficient in producing heat and emits less smoke. This kind of stove has been used for decades in rural communities in the country, with good results in alleviating the health risks posed by wood stoves. But they have not become widespread, due to a lack of government investment and campaigns to encourage their use. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Eco-stoves, an alternative

One possible answer to reduce exposure to smoke, especially in rural areas, is the spread of eco-stoves, which due to their combustion mechanism are more efficient in producing energy and release less smoke.

These stoves have been around for decades in developing countries, including El Salvador, but they have not yet become widespread enough to make a difference, at least in this country.

There are socio-cultural aspects that hinder the expansion of the stoves and lead to the continued use of wood-burning stoves, environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, a local affiliate of the international organization Friends of the Earth, told IPS.

For example, he mentioned the practice by small farmers of placing corn or beans on bamboo or wooden platforms on top of wood stoves, so that the smoke prevents insects from eating the food.

“The problem is that sometimes we approach the issue as an energy or health problem, without considering these socio-cultural aspects,” Navarro said.

O'Brian Robinson (R) sits with two friends at the beach. He is a trans man, coordinator of Negritudes Trans HN, a group that fights for the rights of the trans community in Honduras, including those of the black Garífuna population living mainly on the Atlantic coast, in the north of the country. CREDIT: Courtesy of Negritudes Trans HN

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jun 20 2023 (IPS)

There is still a long way to go before the LGBTI population in Central America stops being discriminated against and begins to make progress in gaining recognition of their full rights, including the possibility of changing their name to match their gender identity, in the case of trans people.

“The issue of the rights of LGBTI people is extremely precarious. There is no recognition of our rights, obviously including the identity of trans people in our country,” O’Brian Robinson, general coordinator of Negritudes Trans Honduras, told IPS from Tegucigalpa."The non-recognition of our identity also affects us in all social spheres, in the areas of ​​employability, healthcare and schooling; people are forced to live on the fringes of society.” -- O’Brian Robinson

In the heavily conservative Central American countries, public policies with a strong moralistic bias predominate on issues such as the right to abortion or the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex (LGBTI) population.

That is the reason for the strong institutional resistance to the passage of a gender identity law recognizing the rights of this community, without discrimination. In none of the six countries in the region – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – has such legislation been enacted.

The vast majority of the LGBTI population experiences marginalization and social rejection that in many cases leads to physical violence and even murder – phenomena that are not exclusive to this region.

A June 2022 Amnesty International report stated that El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Honduras are among the countries in the Americas with “high levels of hate crimes, hate speech, and marginalization, as well as murders and persecution of LGBTI activists.”

As in other regions of the world, the LGBTI community in Central America has been marginalized and is the victim of frequent human rights violations, including murders and other hate crimes. One of the chief demands is the approval of laws that allow transgender people to legally change their name so it matches their gender identity and expression. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The right name

Regarding the fight for a name that matches an individual’s gender identity and expression, Robinson pointed out that daily aspects such as carrying out bank transactions, undergoing a medical consultation or enrolling in an academic course are difficult for a trans person in Honduras.

And this is especially true if the legal name on their document is the one they no longer use, which is generally the case due to the obstacles they face in obtaining an ID that reflects their transgender identity.

“The non-recognition of our identity also affects us in all social spheres, in the areas of ​​employability, healthcare and schooling; people are forced to live on the fringes of society,” added the 29-year-old activist.

These daily tasks can be carried out, but often after facing ridicule, contempt, and arguments with civil servants who do not understand that State institutions are there to serve everyone, without distinction.

In Honduras, it is forbidden to change your name, according to article 61 of the National Registry of Persons Law, with only three exceptions: that it is unpronounceable, that it is the name of some object, or that it violates decency and good customs.

This third category makes it impossible for a trans person to change their name.

According to the Amnesty International report, the concept of transgender encompasses people who identify as such and also includes transsexuals, transvestites, gender queer or “any other gender identity that does not meet social and cultural expectations regarding it.”

Robinson added that LGBTI, and specifically trans, organizations have been pushing for changes in the legal regulations since 2010 in order to pass a law that brings visibility to and protects people with anything other than a heterosexual gender expression and sexual identity.

In 2021 they also promoted a reform of the registration law, which would open the door to a legal name-change process for trans people.

More than 4,000 signatures were collected in support of the proposed bill. But it was rejected by the authorities, who alleged that only 200 of the signatures were real and the rest were false, which Robinson said was untrue and a “ridiculous” argument.

In Guatemala and El Salvador, trans people can change their names, but that is because the legal regulations allow anyone to do so if they wish and can afford to.

“The Civil Code in Guatemala has always allowed everyone to change their name, but from a heterosexual perspective,” Galilea Monroy, director of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala, told IPS.

Monroy, a trans woman, said that through this mechanism around 500 people from that community have been able to change their names, with financial support from international organizations.

But a name change costs around 600 dollars in Guatemala and about 4,000 dollars in El Salvador.

Monroy also pointed out that the name change does not include modifying the “sex” in the personal identity document, and in her case, her ID continues to say she is a “man”. The same is true in El Salvador.

Galilea Monroy is the executive director of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala, which pushes for respect for the rights of trans people in a nation where, like the rest of Central America, it is difficult to work for changes on behalf of LGBTI people, and where hate crimes against this community are frequent. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Multicultural Network of Trans Women of Guatemala

A region of hatred and death

In El Salvador, transgender activist Karla Avelar, with the support of several Salvadoran human rights organizations, filed a lawsuit against the government on Jan. 31 for not providing a legal mechanism allowing her name to match her gender identity on her ID.

The case came to light on May 17, during a conference in San Salvador in which the organizations and Avelar participated by means of videoconference.

In February 2022, the Constitutional Chamber, a five-judge court that is part of the Salvadoran Supreme Court, ruled that the legislature had one year to pass a law that would allow trans people to change not only their names but the gender on their ID.

But parliament, which since 2021 has been controlled by Nuevas Ideas, the party of President Nayib Bukele, failed to meet the deadline.

Avelar also held the government responsible in her lawsuit for failing to investigate or prosecute those responsible for the violence against her and her mother, which forced them to seek asylum in a European country in 2017.

In addition, the lawsuit mentions the forced displacement that she and her mother suffered because they had to flee the violence, including gang violence.

“El Salvador has a history of violence and discrimination against the LGBTI community that mainly affects transgender people,” Avelar said in an online call from the conference held in San Salvador by the organizations backing her case.

The violence suffered by Avelar, 45, included an attempt on her life in 1992.

In a March 2021 ruling on the case of Vicky Hernández, a Honduran trans activist murdered in June 2009, allegedly by agents of the State, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered a series of reparations for the LGBTI community to be fulfilled by Honduras in the area of human rights.

Among the provisions to be complied with, the Inter-American Court included the “right to recognition of legal personality, to personal liberty, to private life, to freedom of expression, to their name and to equality and non-discrimination,” as included in several articles of the American Convention on Human Rights, known as the San José Pact.

This international treaty, in force since 1978, makes Inter-American Court rulings final and binding on the States parties, which currently number 23 as some countries have pulled out. But Honduras has not complied with the requirements in the ruling.

Trans women, the most prone to violence

Transgender women are the most prone to suffering attacks, whether verbal or physical, the Amnesty International report says, because due to the lack of job opportunities they tend to engage in sex work on the streets, unlike trans men.

This was corroborated by the Guatemalan activist, Monroy, who pointed out that around 90 percent of trans women engage in sex work and are thus victims of all kinds of abuse and attacks.

“Most of us trans women have to do sex work because we don’t have social coverage or basic rights such as access to education, work, decent justice, not to mention a pension,” Monroy stressed.

She added that around 90 percent of transgender women engage in sex work on the streets of Guatemala, and the rest work in trades such as hairdressing, or are in the informal sector.

To this must be added the transphobic attitudes that prevail among the population of Central American countries.

“Discrimination is latent in social spaces, in parks, in restaurants, in nightclubs, and in many cases they reserve the right of admission when they identify you as being part of the LGBTI community, and much more so if you are trans,” Monroy said.

She added: “It’s horrible when they tell you: ‘there is no service here’, or there is, but they tell you ‘sit there in the corner where nobody will look at you’.”

She said that far from promoting laws in favor of gender identity, in Guatemala 20 lawmakers “who are totally religious are pushing for approval of Law 5940, which does not recognize gender identity and in which they want to implement the famous conversion therapies.”

A rainwater harvesting system was installed in the home of Marlene Carballo, in the town of Jocote Dulce in eastern El Salvador, in the Central American Dry Corridor, in November 2022. The system, with pipes and gutters running from the roof to a polyethylene bag, will start operating in May of this year, at the beginning of Central America’s rainy season. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
CHINAMECA, El Salvador, May 2 2023 (IPS)

“This is a very difficult place to live, because of the lack of water,” said Salvadoran farmer Marlene Carballo, as she cooked corn tortillas for lunch for her family, on a scorching day.

Carballo, 23, lives in the Jocote Dulce canton, a remote rural settlement in the municipality of Chinameca, in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel, a region located in what is known as the Central American Dry Corridor."The husbands go to work in the fields, and as women we stay at home, trying to manage the water supply; only we know if there is enough for bathing or cooking.” -- Santa Gumersinda Crespo

Acute water crisis

This municipality is one of the 144 in the country that is located in the Dry Corridor, which covers 35 percent of Central America and is home to more than 10.5 million people and where over 73 percent of the rural population lives in poverty and 7.1 million people suffer from severe food insecurity, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Food security is particularly threatened because the rains are not always constant, which creates major difficulties for agriculture.

“My grandfather has a water tank, and when he has enough, he gives us water, but when he doesn’t, we’re in trouble,” said the young woman.

When that happens, they have to buy water, which is not only the case in these remote rural Salvadoran areas, but in the rest of the Central American region where water is scarce, as is almost always the case in the Dry Corridor, which stretches north to south across parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

When IPS visited several villages in the Jocote Dulce canton in late April, the acute water shortage was evident, since all homes had one or more plastic tanks to store water and many were empty.

A rainwater harvesting system was installed in the home of Marlene Carballo, in the town of Jocote Dulce in eastern El Salvador, in the Central American Dry Corridor, in November 2022. The system, with pipes and gutters running from the roof to a polyethylene bag, will start operating in May of this year, at the beginning of Central America’s rainy season. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Women in the forefront of the struggle for water

The persistent water shortage has led rural women in Central America to organize in recent years in community associations to promote projects that help alleviate the scarcity.

In the villages of Jocote Dulce, rainwater harvesting projects, reforestation and the creation of small poultry farms have the support of local and international organizations and financing from European countries.

In some cases, depending on the project and the country, rainwater harvesting is designed only for domestic tasks at home, while in others it includes irrigation of family gardens or providing water for livestock such as cows and chickens.

In other parts of the country and the rest of Central America, institutions such as FAO have developed water collection systems that in some cases have a filtering mechanism, which makes it potable.

In El Salvador, FAO has been behind the installation of 1,373 of these systems.

Carballo said she and her family are looking forward to the start of the May to November rainy season, to see their new rainwater harvesting system work for the first time.

Through gutters and pipes, the rainwater will run from the roof to a huge polyethylene bag in the yard, which serves as a catchment tank.

Gumersinda Crespo (R) and her daughter Marcela stand next to the kitchen of their house in the Jocote Dulce canton in eastern El Salvador, an area with a chronic water crisis because it is located in the Central American Dry Corridor, where the shortage of rainfall makes life complicated. Almost every household in this remote location has various plastic containers and tanks to capture rain. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“When the bag fills up, we’ll be so happy because we’ll have plenty of water,” she said, as she cooked corn tortillas in her “comal”, a clay or metal cylinder used to cook this staple of the Central American diet.

Women suffer the brunt

The harsh burden of water scarcity falls disproportionately on rural women, as national and international reports have shown.

In this sexist society, women are expected to stay at home, in charge of the domestic chores, which include securing water for the family.

“The husbands go to work in the fields, and as women we stay at home, trying to manage the water supply; only we know if there is enough for bathing or cooking,” Santa Gumersinda Crespo told IPS.

Crespo, 48, was feeding her cow and goat in her backyard when IPS visited her. In the yard there was a black plastic-covered tank where the family collects water during the rainy season.

“Without water we are nothing,” Crespo said. “In the past, we used to go to the water hole. It was really hard, sometimes we left at 7:00 at night and came back at 1:00 in the morning,” she said.

Marta Moreira is one of the community leaders who has worked the hardest to ensure that in Jocote Dulce, a remote rural settlement in eastern El Salvador, programs are helping supply water and strengthen food security. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In Guatemala, Gloria Díaz also says it is women who bear the brunt of water scarcity in rural families.

“We are the ones who used to go out to look for water and who faced mistreatment and violence when we tried to fill our jugs in the rivers or springs,” Díaz told IPS by telephone from the Sector Plan del Jocote in the Maraxcó Community, in the southeastern Guatemalan municipality and department of Chiquimula.

In that area of ​​the Dry Corridor, water is the most precious asset.

“It’s been difficult, because drinking water is brought to us from 28 kilometers away and we can only fill our containers for two hours a month,” she said.

Almost all of the homes in the villages located around Chinameca, in the Salvadoran department of San Miguel, have several water storage tanks, given the scarcity of water in that area, which forms part of the Central American Dry Corridor. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Projects that bring relief and hope

Climate forecasts are not at all hopeful for the remainder of 2023.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon is likely to occur, which would bring droughts and loss of crops, as it has before.

“When the weather is good, we sow and harvest, and when it is not, we plant less, to see how winter (the rainy season) will shape up; we don’t plant everything or we would lose it all,” Salvadoran farmer Marta Moreira, also from Jocote Dulce, told IPS.

Most people in these rural regions depend on subsistence farming, especially corn and beans.

Moreira added that last year her family, made up of herself, her husband and their son, lost most of the corn and bean harvest due to the weather.

In Central America climate change has led to longer than usual periods of drought and to excessive rainfall.

A farmer gets ready to fill a jug at one of the water taps located in the Jocote Dulce canton, in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel, where water is always scarce. The community taps are padlocked, so that only people with permission can use them. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In October 2022, Tropical Storm Julia destroyed 8,000 hectares of corn and bean crops in El Salvador, causing losses of around 17 million dollars.

Given this history of climatic effects, rural families and groups, led mostly by women, have received the support of national and international organizations to carry out projects to alleviate these impacts.

For example, around 100 families from the Jocote Dulce canton benefited in 2010 from a water project financially supported by Luxembourg, to install a dozen community water taps.

Programs for the construction of catchment tanks have also been carried out there, such as the one that supplies water to Crespo’s family.

In addition to using the water for household chores, the family gives it to their cow, which provides them with milk every day, and Crespo also makes cheese.

The water collected in the pond “lasts us for almost five months, but if we use it more, only about three or four months,” she said, as she brought more fodder to the family cow.

If she has any milk left over, she sells a couple of liters, she said, bringing in income that is hard to come by in this remote area reached by steep dirt tracks that are dusty in summer and muddy in the rainy season.

Other families benefited from home poultry farm and fruit tree planting programs.

Drinking water is provided by the community taps, but the water crisis makes it difficult to supply everyone in this rural settlement.

Yamilet Henríquez, 35, shows the reservoir set up outside her home in eastern El Salvador. Water is increasingly scarce in this area of ​​the ecoregion known as the Central American Dry Corridor, and things could become more complicated if the forecasts are right about the looming arrival of the El Niño climate phenomenon, which will bring droughts and damage to crops. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Only 80 percent of rural households in El Salvador have access to piped water, according to official figures.

“The water runs for only three days, then for two days the pipes dry up, and that’s how things go, over and over,” said Moreira, who also has a small tank, whose water is not drinkable.

When the rains fail and the reserves run out, families have to buy water from people who bring it in barrels in their pick-up trucks, from Chinameca, about 30 minutes away by car. Each barrel, which costs them about three dollars, contains some 100 liters of water.

The same is true in the Sector Plan del Jocote in Chiquimula, Guatemala, where Díaz lives, and in neighboring communities. “People who can afford it buy it and those who can’t, don’t,” she said.

Díaz added that families in the area are happy with the rainwater harvesting programs, which make it possible for them to irrigate the collectively farmed gardens, and produce vegetables that are important to their diet.

They also sell their produce to nearby schools.

“We grow vegetables and sell them to the school, that has helped us a lot,” she said.

There are 19 water harvesting systems, each with a capacity of 17,000 liters of water, which is enough to irrigate the gardens for two months. They also have a community tank.

These programs, which have been promoted by FAO and other organizations, with the support of the Guatemalan government, have benefited 5,416 families in 80 settlements in two Guatemalan departments.

However, access to potable drinking water remains a serious problem for the more than eight rural settlements in the Sector Plan del Jocote and the 28,714 families that live there.

Martín Pineda (R) is in charge of a four-hectare community farm on the outskirts of San José Villanueva, in southern El Salvador. He says no government has focused on food sovereignty in the past 30 years. He and other farmers, like his co-worker Miguel Ángel García (L), complain that they lack technical support to produce food efficiently. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN JOSÉ VILLANUEVA, El Salvador, Apr 18 2023 (IPS)

Sitting under the shade of a tree, Salvadoran farmer Martín Pineda looked desperate, and perhaps angry, as he said that governments of different stripes have come and gone in El Salvador while agriculture remains in the dumps.

“I think this shows contempt for farmers,” Pineda told IPS, frowning.

Pineda is in charge of a four-hectare community farm worked by 12 families near San José Villanueva, in the department of La Libertad in the south of El Salvador.

Pineda’s hopelessness turned into concern when he commented on the risks that the agricultural sector faces from climatic phenomena that hit crops almost every year.“It is sad that we have to import beans, when we have the capacity to produce them, if we just had government support.” -- Martín Pineda

This risk increases when considering reports that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso) climate phenomenon is expected to appear in 2023, which would mean new droughts and loss of crops.

“Last year we lost a good part of the bean crop,” said Pineda, 70. He explained that of the four hectares they plant they lost 2.7 hectares, and the same thing happened with the corn.

In October 2022, Tropical Storm Julia devastated 8,000 hectares of corn and bean crops in the country, leading to losses of around 17 million dollars.

The backdrop is the rise in the cost of inputs for production, due to international factors, such as Russia’s war with Ukraine. In addition, in El Salvador there have been unjustified price increases because just three companies monopolize the import market for the inputs required by farmers, adding to their difficulties.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned in a report published in 2023 that in 2020, factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climatic phenomena, and structural aspects like poverty and violence, exposed the Salvadoran population to even greater risks.

The FAO report said that since 36 percent of vulnerable Salvadorans depend on agriculture for a living, “it is essential to provide affected households with the necessary means to rehabilitate their productive assets and resume production activities.”

However, this course is not being followed in the agricultural sector.

According to official figures, in this small Central American country of 6.7 million people, 22.8 percent of households are living in poverty, a proportion that rises to 24.8 percent in rural areas, of which 5.2 percent are in extreme poverty and 19.6 percent in relative poverty.

Given the difficulties in growing crops under the current conditions, the 12 families who collectively work a farm in the surroundings of San José Villanueva, in southern El Salvador, have turned to the production of chickens and eggs. They presently have 1,400 laying hens. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Agriculture is not recovering

El Salvador has failed to jumpstart its agricultural sector for at least three decades. It is one of the most deficient nations in several categories of food, such as vegetables.

It is estimated that the production of vegetables in El Salvador barely covers 10 percent of domestic demand, while the remaining 90 percent are imported from neighboring countries, such as Guatemala.

But what is most worrying is that the country is also deficient in Central American staples such as corn and beans, although the shortfall occurs especially when climatic events hit hard, whether excess or lack of rain.

When that happens, El Salvador must import beans from neighboring countries, such as Nicaragua, although if those nations face drops in production, this country must look for them elsewhere and at higher prices.

For example, in 2015 El Salvador had to import around 1.5 million kg of beans from Ethiopia.

“It is sad that we have to import beans, when we have the capacity to produce them, if we just had government support,” Pineda complained.

He said that over the last 30 years, neither left-wing nor right-wing governments have had the political will to provide agriculture with decisive support, and that it appears that the focus is on promoting imports.

“There is no well-defined government policy,” said Pineda. “For example, we have the land, but we do not have the inputs, or ongoing technical advice.”

He was talking about the lack of a clear policy in the last 30 years, including the four governments, between 1989 and 2009, of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the two administrations of the ex-guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), from 2009 to 2019, and the almost four years of the administration of Nayib Bukele, in office since June 2019.

“This government has followed the same pattern, of not showing strong support,” he argued.

To illustrate, the farmer pointed to the need for an irrigation system on the San José Villanueva farm, which would not be difficult to achieve, since there is a river nearby with sufficient flow.

But when the farm has requested technical support for an irrigation system, it has consistently received the same negative response from governments.

“We have no machinery here, no irrigation system, although we have a river nearby,” said Pineda. “We have two wells, but at this time of year they dry up, and we have to buy water.”

“How can we produce food efficiently in these conditions?” he asked.

A group of young people who created the Micelio Suburbano organization are promoting agroecological gardens in residential areas of San Salvador, like this one in the Zacamil neighborhood on the north side of the Salvadoran capital. The aim is to encourage families in the area to grow some of the food they need in their daily diet. CREDIT: Micelio Suburbano

Bukele follows the same blueprint

Academics agree that the collapse of the agricultural sector was influenced by the 1980-1992 civil war, which left some 75,000 dead and 8,000 disappeared.

But that doesn’t explain everything.

Neighboring countries, such as Guatemala and Nicaragua, also suffered civil wars, and are more self-sufficient in food production.

When the ARENA neoliberal party took power in El Salvador in 1989, the agriculture sector was abandoned by policy-makers.

This was accentuated in the second ARENA administration (1994-1999), when the growth of the textile maquilas or export assembly plants was bolstered as a source of employment, and the government focused even less on development in the countryside.

Decades later, the country still hasn’t found a clear direction for getting agriculture on track, Luis Treminio, president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers, told IPS.
.
The chamber is made up of 15 agricultural organizations and in total brings together some 15,000 farmers. An estimated 400,000 people in the country are dedicated to agriculture.

Treminio said that a plan promoted by the Bukele government to reactivate the agricultural sector, announced with great fanfare in June 2021, did not come to fruition because the 1.2 billion dollars in funding needed was not found in the international financial market.

This was due to a lack of confidence on the part of the multilateral lenders, he added.

Treminio said the government lacks vision and priorities, since national income is allocated to unfeasible projects, such as the millions of dollars spent to buy bitcoins, which have been legal tender in El Salvador since September 2021.

“The problem is that the government does not prioritize food sovereignty,” he said, but instead focuses on food security – that is, providing food regardless of whether the country produces it or not, and much of which is actually imported.

One illustration of the government’s chaotic agricultural policy is the fact
that there have already been four ministers of agriculture, in less than four years of government.

Treminio said El Salvador’s farmers are not opposed to imports, but argued that they must complement what the country does not produce.

“We are not against imports, but they have to be regulated,” he added.

He said that what often happens is that, under the justification of shortages of grains or other products, more is imported than what is actually needed to cover national demand, driving prices way down for local farmers.

“For example, in dairy there is a 40 percent deficit in consumption, and 120 percent imports are authorized,” he said.

Yellow plum tomatoes are part of the harvest of the Micelio Suburbano collective, which takes advantage of green spaces in urban areas in the north of San Salvador to plant gardens and encourage families to start growing some of their food. CREDIT: Micelio Suburbano

Growing food in the city

Given the scarcity and high costs of food, small initiatives have begun to emerge to promote gardens, even in urban areas, taking advantage of all available spaces.

One of these efforts, which are new in the country, is fostered by Micelio Suburbano, a group made up of a dozen young people and adolescents who are trying to show that part of the food consumption can be met by growing vegetables and fruit in open spaces in urban areas.

“It’s kind of a utopia to think that in our homes we can grow our own crops of aromatic herbs, tomatoes, etc.,” Nuria Mejía, an architect by profession with a passion for spreading the idea of urban agriculture, told IPS.

The group set up its first garden in 2022 in a working-class area of apartment buildings known as Zacamil, on the north side of San Salvador.

In small spaces that were once green areas in the apartment complex, they have planted three gardens, where they grow on a small scale tomatoes, radishes, eggplant and various kinds of aromatic herbs.

The aim is for people to see what can be achieved and to get involved.

“People see the radishes we are growing and ask us for seeds,” Mejía said.

Alleged gang members are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison built by the government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to house 40,000 detainees accused of belonging to organized crime. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Apr 17 2023 (IPS)

Violence involving organized crime has made Latin America the most dangerous region in the world and has helped paved the way for a repressive kind of populism with a dangerous future, whose most visible symbol is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

According to United Nations reports, Latin America, home to eight percent of the global population, accounts for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. (These statistics do not include deaths in wars, accidents and suicides.)

Observers talk about a generalized security crisis, and the Salvadoran president boasted of a 56.8 percent decline in the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, while Ecuador, at the other end of the spectrum, showed an increase of 82 percent.

But comparisons in percentages from one year to the next are misleading if the absolute numbers are not taken into account. For example, the homicide rate in Chile increased 32.2 percent in 2022, although in actual numbers that meant 4.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In El Salvador, the figure for the same year was 7.8 per 100,000.

Statistics in percentages, magnified by the media and by the rise in the degree of violence in the crimes committed, spread a sensation of insecurity and fear among the public.

The terrain of politics

Politics have seized onto the insecurity crisis, which serves in some cases for the opposition to question the government, or in others for those in power to seek to neutralize their opponents. Both sides come up with shortsighted measures that do not attack the roots of the problem and can actually aggravate it in the medium to long term.

The most common reaction is to beef up the police force while providing it with greater means and authority to crack down on criminals. Police officers are given a greater margin of discretion to size up the danger and shoot – in other words, to become “trigger-happy”.

The expression is not new in the region. It became widespread in various countries between the 1960s and 1980s, under military dictatorships, when the law enforcement and armed forces murdered opponents in staged shootouts or brutally cracked down on social mobilizations.

The revival of these practices in the 21st century has required legitimization through laws, such as the so-called “law of privileged legitimate defense”, passed in Chile on Apr. 10, or broader norms that involve the police, the military and the powers of the State, as Bukele has pushed through in El Salvador.

Bukele, the leader of El Salvador’s Nuevas Ideas party, used his majority in the legislature to allow him to be re-elected as president. And on Mar. 22, 2022, he declared a state of emergency, accompanied by various legislative reforms that in practice gave him a free hand in his fight against crime, namely gangs known in Central America as maras.

More than a year after the state of emergency was declared, Amnesty International denounced widespread violations of human rights in the small Central American country:

“This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime,” the human rights watchdog said in a statement released on Apr. 3.

“Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency,” it added.

A member of the carabineros, Chile’s militarized police, is photographed while opening fire on a street in Santiago. CREDIT: Courtesy of El Desconcierto

Repressive populism

Bukele replaced prisons with virtual concentration camps. A total of 1.5 percent of Salvadorans are currently deprived of liberty, which means the Central American country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

However, opinion polls show that eight out of 10 Salvadorans are satisfied with the current president and want him to be reelected, while some dissident voices warn that the State is replacing the gangs as an agent of intimidation and concentration of power.

The temptation to imitate Bukele with repressive populism that feeds on showy measures is present throughout Latin America. While the “privileged legitimate defense law” was being debated in Chile, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in Santiago, demolished houses registered as belonging to drug traffickers, in front of the television cameras.

In Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso, threatened by impeachment, announced in early April that he was authorizing the “possession and carrying of weapons for civilian use for personal defense” as an urgent measure against the “common enemies: delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Delinquency, drug trafficking and criminal organizations are recurring terms when talking about insecurity, but a dangerous drift is often observed where ‘trigger-happy’ laws and measures give way to repression against social protests or empower political persecution under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Criminalizing the poor

Javier Macaya, president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a far-right Chilean party that vindicates the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), accused the United Nations of supporting “political violence” when its High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned of the dangers posed by the “law of privileged self-defense”.

The authoritarian scope of “trigger-happy” laws also includes the criminalization of immigrants and poor neighborhoods, classified as gang territories that shelter drug trafficking rings, although large drug traffickers and drug users from high-income sectors are rarely prosecuted in the cities of Latin America.

Political persecution is often disguised as security, as in Nicaragua in February when 222 dissidents were expelled and stripped of their nationality. The government of Daniel Ortega accused them of “treason”, described them as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” and justified the measure in the name of national peace.

Security has been instated as Latin America’s most pressing issue. The latest Amnesty International report documents arbitrary acts in Venezuela that include forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Haiti, mired in ungovernability, is another country where human rights are a victim of insecurity.

The complexities of the fight against crime involve strengthening the police and also growing vigilante justice on the part of citizens. In Brazil, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) authorized the police to kill criminals and loosened restrictions on gun ownership for civilians. His successor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, suspended the measures after taking office on Jan. 1.

Latin America has become a kind of arsenal, with more powerful weapons for the police, and also with the illegal trade that feeds organized crime. A third of the firearms seized in 2017 in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama came from the United States.

On Mar. 22, 2023, dozens of people watched a live broadcast from San José, Costa Rica, on a large screen at the University of El Salvador, in San Salvador, of the open hearing of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, listening to the testimony of witnesses in the Beatriz v. El Salvador case. The screenshot shows Beatriz's mother giving her testimony. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR , Mar 24 2023 (IPS)

An open hearing in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Beatriz v. El Salvador case is raising hopes that this country and other Latin American nations might overturn or at least mitigate the severe laws that criminalize abortion.

That will happen if the Inter-American Court rules that El Salvador violated the right to health of Beatriz, as the plaintiff is known. In 2013 she sought to have her pregnancy terminated because it was high risk and her life was in danger."I hope that in the end my daughter's name will be vindicated, and that what happened to her will not happen again to any other woman.” -- Beatriz´s mother

But she was not given an abortion, only a tardy cesarean section, which affected her already deteriorated health and, according to the plaintiffs, eventually led to her death in October 2017.

The hearing on the emblematic case was held Mar. 22-23 at the Inter-American Court in San José, Costa Rica. Beatriz’s case builds on similar ones: the cases of Manuela, also from El Salvador, Esperanza from the Dominican Republic, and Amelia from Nicaragua.

The seven judges heard the arguments of the plaintiffs, the representatives of the Salvadoran State and the witnesses on both sides.

After the hearing, the parties have 30 days to deliver their written arguments and the magistrates will then take several months to debate and reach a resolution.

The open hearing held by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the Beatriz v. El Salvador case is the first time that the complete ban on abortion has been tried, and the verdict will have implications for Latin America, a region that is especially restrictive in terms of women’s sexual and reproductive rights. CREDIT: Inter-American Court of Human Rights

A historic case

“I hope that in the end my daughter’s name will be vindicated, and that what happened to her will not happen again to any other woman,” Beatriz’s mother said when testifying on the stand. Her name was not revealed in court.

The hearing has drawn international attention because it is considered historic for the sexual and reproductive rights of women in a region that is especially restrictive with regard to the practice of abortion.

“This will be the first case where the Court will rule on the absolute prohibition of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, particularly regarding the risk to health and when the fetus is nonviable,” Julissa Mantilla Falcón, from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), told the Inter-American Court.

Beatriz turned to the IACHR when the Constitutional Court of El Salvador denied, on Apr. 11, 2013, her request for an abortion.

On Apr. 19, the IACHR issued a precautionary measure in favor of Beatriz, and on May 27, 2013, it asked the Inter-American Court to adopt provisional measures which would be binding on the State.

In its November 2020 Merits Report, the IACHR established that the Salvadoran State was responsible for the disproportionate impact on various rights of Beatriz, by failing to provide her with timely medical treatment due to the laws that criminalize abortion.

The IACHR identified the disproportionate impact of this legislation on Salvadoran women and girls, especially the poor.

The Commission stated that it did not expect full compliance by the State with the recommendations of the report, and therefore referred the case to the Inter-American Court, which now, ten years later, is a few months away from handing down a resolution.

Anabel Recinos, from the Citizen Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion, one of the Salvadoran organizations that are co-plaintiffs in the Beatriz v. El Salvador case, hopes that the Inter-American Court sentence will set a legal precedent and pave the way for the modification of the 1998 law criminalizing abortion under any circumstances in El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

For her part, Anabel Recinos, from the Citizen Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion, one of the Salvadoran organizations that are co-plaintiffs in the case, told IPS that she hopes that the Inter-American Court ruling will set a new precedent.

She said her hope is that the court will rule that laws in El Salvador and the region banning abortion under all circumstances must be modified.

In addition to El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic are the countries in the region where abortion is completely prohibited in their penal codes. It is only legal in five countries in Latin America, while it is allowed only in strict circumstances in the rest.

“Or at least it should be allowed for specific reasons or exceptions, such as safeguarding health and life, or the incompatibility of the fetus’s life outside the womb,” Recinos said.

Twenty Latin American and Caribbean countries recognize the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court: Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname and Uruguay.

The IACHR and the Court make up the inter-American human rights system. They are independent bodies and in the case of the Court the sentences are final and binding, although they are not always enforced.

Recinos spoke to IPS at the University of El Salvador, in the country’s capital, where dozens of people gathered to watch the hearing, broadcast live from San José, on a large screen.

The activist added that it is likely that the Court will rule against the Salvadoran State, backing the IACHR’s conclusions.

The Court is made up of judges Ricardo Pérez Manrique (Uruguay), Humberto Sierra Porto (Colombia), Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor (Mexico), Rodrigo Mudrovitsch (Brazil), Nancy Hernández López (Colombia) and Verónica Gómez (Argentina).

In March 2003, Beatriz requested an abortion during her second pregnancy, because she suffered from lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy organs, and preeclampsia, a dangerous increase in blood pressure during pregnancy, as well as other health problems.

In other words, her life was at risk. In addition, the fetus had malformations and would not live long at birth.

However, the medical personnel, although they were aware that an abortion was indicated to save Beatriz’s life, did not carry it out due to the fear of prosecution.

Beatriz was forced to continue with a pregnancy that continued to harm her health as the days went by.

But after the Inter-American Court granted provisional measures, Beatriz underwent a cesarean section on Jun. 3, 2013, almost three months after requesting an abortion.

The child, who was born with anencephaly, missing parts of the brain and skull, died just five hours later.

Activists for the sexual and reproductive rights of women in El Salvador demonstrate on Mar. 22 outside the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica, during the hearing for the emblematic case of Beatriz v. El Salvador. Many carried green balloons, whose color is a symbol of the fight for the right to abortion in Latin America. CREDIT: Collaborating Organizations

Misogyny on the part of the State

Since 1998 El Salvador, this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, has been the most drastic in the region in the persecution of abortion, punishing women who terminate their pregnancies with sentences of up to 30 years, in all cases, even when the life and health of the pregnant woman is at risk or in cases of rape.

The legislation mainly affects poor women in rural areas. According to data from women’s rights organizations, 181 such cases have been prosecuted since 2019.

Guillermo Ortiz, a gynecologist and obstetrician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, testified before the Inter-American Court: “Yes, I saw many women die because they did not have access to a safe abortion, despite my having requested it.”

In her testimony, Beatriz’s mother said that the many doctors who treated her daughter had recommended that the pregnancy be terminated, but did not dare to perform an abortion or c-section to remove the fetus, for fear of going to prison.

“They told my daughter that they couldn’t, because in El Salvador it’s a crime, and if they did, they could go to jail,” said the mother.

“The State failed Beatriz twice,” said the mother, before breaking down in tears.

She was referring to the failure to carry out an abortion promptly, despite her daughter’s serious health conditions. She also was talking about a motorcycle accident that the 22-year-old suffered later.

“She had an accident that shouldn’t have been fatal, she was in stable condition” when she was admitted to the hospital in Jiquilisco, a municipality in the eastern department of Usulután.

But a storm caused a flood in some parts of the hospital, so they transferred her to the hospital in Usulután, the capital of the department.

“The doctor who treated her there didn’t even know what lupus was,” she said. In the hospital, Beatriz caught pneumonia.

The mother’s testimony and that of the other witnesses at the hearing has been closely followed in El Salvador and other nations by feminist and human rights organizations that have been monitoring and criticizing the country’s strict anti-abortion law.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele (C) tours the facilities of the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) in January, when through a video he showed for the first time the interior of the new mega-prison, built to hold 40,000 gang members. Some 65,000 people accused of belonging to the gangs or maras have been arrested since the state of emergency was declared in March 2022. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 13 2023 (IPS)

Despite serious allegations by the US justice system that two officials of the government of Nayib Bukele reached a secret agreement with the MS-13 gang to keep the homicide rate low, the Salvadoran president seems to have escaped unscathed for now, without political costs.

The MS-13 gang members reached the agreement, according to investigations, in exchange for benefits offered by the Bukele administration after the president took office in February 2019.

One of the benefits was apparently not to extradite to the United States leaders of the gangs who are in prison in El Salvador, according to the criminal indictment filed by the Attorney General’s Office of the Eastern District of New York.

The legal action was filed in September 2022, but it was made public on Feb. 23, and it targets 13 leaders of the fearsome MS-13 gang, who are held responsible for murders and other crimes committed in the United States, Mexico and El Salvador.“I do not believe the legal action in New York will damage Bukele’s reelection prospects.” -- Jorge Villacorta

“The accusation (in New York) merely confirms something we already knew,” analyst Jorge Villacorta told IPS.

Villacorta was referring to investigative journalistic reports by the newspaper El Faro, which since 2021 revealed the secret negotiations that the Bukele administration held with the gangs, which the president has consistently denied.

But it is one thing for a newspaper to report this and quite another for it to come from an accusation from the United States Attorney’s Office, in an investigation in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) participated.

“Because in this case we are talking about legal action” by the U.S. justice system, which could affect the two officials implicated, Mario Vega, an evangelical pastor who studies the phenomenon of gang violence in El Salvador, told IPS.

Since 2012, the United States has considered MS-13 a transnational criminal organization.

A grand jury has reportedly already heard the evidence presented by the prosecution and has endorsed a trial, at an unspecified date.

Three gang members and others who could be captured later could at some point in the trial testify against the two Bukele officials, “and we are going to find out about all the secrecy that has surrounded the negotiations,” Vega added.

The two officials are the director of the General Directorate of Penitentiaries, Osiris Luna, and the head of the Directorate for the Reconstruction of the Social Fabric, Carlos Marroquín.

Neither of them are mentioned by name in the legal action, but they are clearly identifiable by their government positions.

Nor is it mentioned that they reportedly reached an agreement with gang members under the auspices of the Salvadoran president, but that is obvious because given the president’s authoritarian style, no one moves a finger without his consent.

Bukele, a millennial neo-populist who governs with increasing authoritarianism, has been waging a frontal war against gangs since Mar. 27, 2022, which has led him to imprison more than 65,000 members, with the help of a state of emergency in place since then.

However, the war apparently broke out once the pact with the gangs broke down. In the course of the trial in New York it may be verified that the secret negotiations took place since 2019 and were suspended in March 2022.

So far, the crackdown on the gangs, known here as maras, has drawn the applause of the majority of the population in this Central American country of 6.7 million people, according to the opinion polls.

But the president has also come under fire for abuses by soldiers and police, who have arrested people with no ties to the maras.

Around 2,000 suspected gang members were transferred in late February to the mega-prison that the government built to hold a large part of the gang members arrested under the state of emergency, which has suspended some constitutional guarantees since March 2022 in El Salvador, allowing abuses and arbitrary arrests by soldiers and police. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

Immune ahead of the elections

And what could spell a major blow to their credibility for any president and would perhaps shake the foundations of a government would not make a big dent in Bukele’s popularity, said analysts interviewed by IPS.

With regard to the news about the case in New York, “people see it as suppositions or simply do not believe it; I do not see it as generating significant political costs for Bukele,” added Villacorta, a former leftist member of Congress.

It will apparently not affect the president even as he is getting ready to seek reelection in the Feb. 4, 2024 elections. He has already announced that he will run again, but his candidacy has not yet been made official.

Although his campaign has not been launched, Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas party are already mobilizing their publicity machine, in the face of an opposition that is keeping its head down.

Most lawyers agree that the Salvadoran constitution prohibits immediate reelection.

In May 2021, a new Legislative Assembly, controlled by Nuevas Ideas, dismissed the five judges of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court without the proper procedures and appointed five of their allies, who endorsed the right to reelection.

“I do not believe the legal action in New York will damage Bukele’s reelection prospects,” said Villacorta, a critic of the president.

This is due to the high levels of popularity that the president has among the public and the widespread acceptance of the state of emergency, which suspends some constitutional guarantees and has made it possible to capture 65,000 gang members.

Some 2,000 imprisoned gang members were transferred at the end of February to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison that the government built on the outskirts of the municipality of Tecoluca in central El Salvador to hold some 40,000 prisoners.

Villacorta added: “What is perceived in the country and abroad is that Bukele, like some kind of superhero, in a few months has squashed the gangs.”

However, despite abundant evidence of abuses and arbitrary arrests, ordinary Salvadorans are overlooking this because their main problem, gang violence, has been successfully reduced.

“People will tend to forgive his past deeds, due to the fact that now they (gang members) are all imprisoned. This narrative is the one that moves people, and these are the emotions that count when it comes to voting,” commented Pastor Vega, also an opponent of Bukele.

Of the 65,000 incarcerated gang members, 58,000 have had an initial hearing before a judge, Justice and Public Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said on Mar. 8 in a television interview.

The case brought in New York does not affect Bukele; “on the contrary, it makes Salvadorans mad, because they say ‘do they want us to keep suffering (from the gangs)?’. They are not going to say, ‘Ok they’re right, (the government) has brainwashed us’,” criminologist Misael Rivas told IPS.

Negotiations today and always

But Bukele’s war against the “maras” is now more in doubt than ever, with the investigation and accusation initiated by the US justice system against the 13 leaders of the MS-13.

In the criminal indictment, the US Attorney’s Office states that since 2012 the gangs, including Barrio 18, the other major mara, engaged in secret negotiations with the government and political parties.

In that year, the country was governed by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the guerrilla group that became a political party in 1992, after the end of the 12-year Salvadoran civil war.

The pact or “truce” fell apart in 2015.

Negotiations with the gangs continued in 2019 “in connection with the 2019 elections,” the document continues. That year, in February, Nayib Bukele won the presidency with a large majority of votes.

It adds that several leaders of the MS-13 secretly met “numerous times” with the two officials – Luna and Marroquín, although it does not mention their names, only their posts.

These meetings took place in the Zacatecoluca and Izalco prisons, in the center and west of the country, it adds, which had already been reported by El Faro.

Batman in trouble?

Even when the alleged pact with the Bukele administration fell apart in March 2022, in one of the voice recordings published two months later by the newspaper, Marroquín is heard saying that “Batman” (a pseudonym for the president) was fully aware of the situation.

The MS-13 also agreed to support Nuevas Ideas in the 2021 parliamentary elections, which that party won by a large majority

Of the 13 indicted MS-13 leaders, three were arrested on Feb. 22 in Mexico “by the authorities of that country and extradited to the United States,” the Attorney General’s Office for the Eastern District of New York said a day later, in an official statement.

Those captured are: Vladimir Antonio Arévalo Chávez (nicknamed “Vampiro de Monserrat Criminales”), Walter Yovani Hernández Rivera (“Baxter from Park View”) and Marlon Antonio Menjívar Portillo (“Red from Park View”).

Criminologist Rivas said the outcome of the trial, once it begins, is far from certain.

If prosecutors press for the details of the negotiations with the Bukele government, defense attorneys would have to work hard to undermine the gang members’ credibility when it came to implicating the two Salvadoran officials, he said.

“Thinking as a defense attorney, suppose they gave me the case, I would insist on why they are bringing the case up now, when there is a frontal attack against the gangs and the Salvadoran people are finally happy?” said Rivas, who is also a lawyer and who supports the state of emergency.

Aerial view of the Terrorism Confinement Center, the mega-prison that the Salvadoran government has built to house some 40,000 gang members, and about which very little is known because the information was classified as confidential by the Nayib Bukele administration. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 13 2023 (IPS)

The construction of a mega-prison, in which the government of El Salvador intends to imprison some 40,000 gang members, is in line with President Nayib Bukele’s tendency to hide public information on public projects, classifying them as “reserved.”

The Bukele administration thus continues to bypass accountability and transparency procedures, building a huge prison about which no one knows important details, as in the case of other government projects.

Construction work on the prison began last year, under a blanket of total secrecy.

The only information available was that the prison was being built on a 165-hectare rural piece of land, in the El Perical hamlet in Tecoluca municipality, in the central department of San Vicente. It was finished in seven months.“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret.” -- Wilson Sandoval

It was Bukele himself, in a televised program on Jan. 31, who formalized the start of prison operations during a tour of the facilities, accompanied by four officials.

The jail was still empty of inmates, and it was not announced when they would begin to be transferred there.

Cloak of secrecy

Despite the magnitude of the mega-project, the public does not know how much was spent on it and, above all, what criteria were taken into consideration to award the project, or which company built it, among other aspects.

Critics question Bukele about this veil of secrecy, the same one that has previously surrounded issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, or the construction of other public works.

“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret,” Wilson Sandoval, head of the Anticorruption Legal Advice Center of the National Foundation for Development, told IPS.

Although Salvadoran legislation allows some aspects of government programs to be classified as reserved, out of national security concerns for example, the Bukele administration keeps almost everything shrouded in secrecy.

In the case of the new prison, Sandoval said they were not demanding that sensitive or confidential information be revealed, such as the penitentiary’s internal security protocols.

He said the issue was basic aspects that should be available to the public, such as the cost of the prison and the bidding processes, since it was built with public funds.

The official secrecy surrounding the prison was announced in December 2022 and will be in force until 2024, according to the local newspaper La Prensa Gráfica.

But it is very likely that before the deadline expires, the classification will be extended, as has happened in other cases, added the expert.

The abuse of government secrecy can lead to embezzlement of funds, he said.

“I would say that more than a doubt, it is rather almost a certainty (that there may be mismanagement) because there is a basic formula in public management: discretion plus opacity will normally result in corruption,” Sandoval argued.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele listens to an explanation from an official about how the X-ray scanners operate, located at the entrance of the mega-prison that has been built in the center of the country. Bukele made the opening of the facility official on Jan. 31, during a tour of the facilities. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

The largest prison in the Americas

The government has boasted of building the prison, which it has described as the largest in the Americas, as if it were inaugurating a public university or a state-of-the-art hospital.

“It is logical to think that the government needs prisons, because otherwise it would have nowhere to put criminals in jail,” an Uber motorcycle driver, who was driving along one of the avenues in San Salvador and said his name was Carlos, told IPS.

The mega-prison, called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot), will hold a good part of the almost 63,000 people held under the state of emergency that the government declared in late March 2022.

The state of emergency suspended several constitutional guarantees, such as extending the term from three to 15 days for filing charges before a judge.

The war on gangs led at first to massive arrests of people suspected of belonging to the gangs or “maras”, in many cases without due process.

The maras took root in El Salvador in the early 1990s, when young Salvadorans who became part of gangs in the United States were deported to this impoverished Central American nation and brought their gang affiliation with them.

The mega-prison has several security rings, the main one being a concrete perimeter wall, 11 meters high and reinforced at the top with a 15,000-volt electrified fence. It also has 19 watchtowers.

Another security ring has been set up on the outskirts of the compound, made up of 600 soldiers and 250 police officers.

Modern X-ray equipment will fully scrutinize the body of whoever enters, to keep out prohibited objects.

Standing in front of one of the X-ray screens, Bukele told one of his officials: “You can see everything here, even the lungs, the bones.”

On Feb. 3 Amnesty International tweeted against the prison saying it would mean “continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed during the massive raids, documented by local and international organizations.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tours one of the cell blocks of the prison built in the center of El Salvador. International human rights organizations have criticized the project, with Amnesty International saying it would mean “the continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed under the state of emergency. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

Machiavellian style: does the end justify the means?

The new prison is the most recent move by the Bukele government, in its fight against gangs.

That fight, at least until the state of emergency, had been thrown into doubt when an investigation by the online newspaper El Faro revealed in 2020 that the Bukele administration had negotiated with the gangs to reduce the number of homicides in the country.

Bukele began his five-year term in June 2019, at the age of 38, with an air of modernity that led him to be described as the millennial president.

But after he gained a majority in Congress two years later, he took control of the Judiciary and the Attorney General’s Office, taking steady steps towards authoritarianism.

Since the government announced the state of emergency in March 2022, human rights organizations have denounced more than 4,000 cases of arbitrary detentions and abuses by soldiers and police officers emboldened by Bukele’s hard line against the gangs.

In fact, the government itself has reported that around 3,000 detainees have already been released, as their participation in the maras was not proven.

That has been read by opponents as evidence that innocent people have indeed been arrested.

But the government gives it a positive spin, saying it shows that the cases are being investigated, and that if there is no conclusive evidence, people are released.

Carlos, the Uber driver, pointed out that since the state of emergency began, the neighborhoods of San Salvador are safer, and he himself has seen this because he can now enter areas that were previously too dangerous to visit, as they were controlled by the maras.

Like him, the majority of the population of 6.7 million inhabitants of this small Central American country approve of Bukele’s measures to dismantle the gangs, as can be seen when people are asked on the streets of towns and cities, and as all opinion polls confirm.

“Only he has put on his pants against the gang members,” Carlos said.

But the impression is that the public backs the crackdown on gangs even when human rights violations are involved.

The problem of murders and insecurity in El Salvador was so severe that most people back the measures, as long as their own family members are not arbitrarily detained and subjected to police brutality.

When the murder rate peaked in 2015, El Salvador had a rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, making it the most violent country in the world

At the end of 2022, three and a half years into the Bukele administration, the homicide rate had plunged to 7.8 murders per 100,000 population.

But not everyone agrees with the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means and that gangs should be fought at any cost.

Despite agreeing, in general, with Bukele´s fight against gangs, Álvaro, who draws portraits in downtown San Salvador, told IPS that it does not seem right for abuses to be committed in the persecution of gangs.

“It is obvious, what is being done (against the gangs) is a good thing, but we must remember that there are cases, perhaps not a large percentage, of people who are innocent,” he added, sitting outside the National Theater waiting for customers.

“They are people who have been victims of an unfounded complaint. This has happened and from what I see it will continue to happen,” he said.

“The key is how to make legal and police work more efficient, without detaining everyone who is reported,” he argued.

Oscar Sosa cooks roast chicken and pork on an artisanal grill set up outside his small restaurant, Comedor Espresso, in the eastern Salvadoran city of San Francisco Gotera. Like many of the returnees, especially from the United States, he set up his own business, given the unemployment he found on his return to El Salvador. More than 10,000 people were deported to this Central American country between January and August 2022. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN FRANCISCO GOTERA, El Salvador, Jan 10 2023 (IPS)

While grilling several portions of chicken and pork, Salvadoran cook Oscar Sosa said he was proud that through his own efforts he had managed to set up a small food business after he was deported back to El Salvador from the United States.

This has allowed him to generate an income in a country where unemployment affects 6.3 percent of the economically active population.

“Little by little we grew and now we also have catering services for events,” Sosa told IPS, as he turned the chicken and pork over with tongs on a small circular grill.

The grill is located outside the premises, so that the smoke won’t bother the customers eating inside.

It’s not easy, he said, to return home and to not be able to find a job. That is why he decided to start his own business, Comedor Espresso, in the center of San Francisco Gotera, a city in the department of Morazán in eastern El Salvador.“You come back wanting to work and there aren’t any opportunities. The first thing they see in you is your age; when you’re over 35, they don’t hire you.” -- Patricia López

In this Central American country of 6.7 million people, “comedores” are small, generally precarious, neighborhood restaurants where inexpensive, homemade meals are prepared.

Sosa’s, although very small, was clean and tidy, and even had air conditioning, when IPS visited it on Dec. 19.

Skills and capacity abound, but opportunities are scarce

Sosa, 35, is one of thousands of people deported from the United States every year.

He left in 2005 and was sent back in 2014. He worked for eight years as a cook at a Mexican restaurant in the city of Pensacola, in the southeastern state of Florida.

A total of 10,399 people were deported to this country between January and August 2022, which represents an increase of 221 percent compared to the same period in 2021, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration.

The flow of undocumented Salvadoran migrants, especially to the United States, intensified in the 1980s, due to the 1980-1992 civil war in El Salvador that left some 75,000 dead and around 8,000 forcibly disappeared.

At the end of the war, people continued to leave, for economic reasons and also because of the high levels of violent crime in the country.

An estimated 3.1 million Salvadorans live outside the country, 88 percent of them in the United States. And 50 percent of the Salvadorans in the U.S. are undocumented.

Despite the problem of unemployment, Sosa was not discouraged when he returned to his country.

“I feel that we are already growing, we have five employees, the business is registered in the Ministry of Finance, in the Ministry of Health, and I’m paying taxes,” he said.

Obviously, not all deportees have the support, especially financial, needed to set up their own business.

The stigma of deportation weighs heavily on them: there is a widespread perception that if they were deported it is because they were involved in some type of crime in the United States.

A government survey, conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, found that 50 percent of the deportees manage to open a business, 18 percent live off their savings, their partner’s income or support from their family, and 16 percent have part-time or full-time jobs.

In addition, seven percent live on remittances sent home to them, two percent receive income from property rentals, dividends or bank interests, and seven percent checked “other” or did not answer.

Apart from some government initiatives and non-governmental organizations that provide training and funds for start-ups, returnees have faced the specter of unemployment for decades.

Many return empty-handed and owe debts to the people smugglers who they hired to get into the United States as undocumented migrants.

In the case of Sosa, his brothers supported him to set up Comedor Espresso.

He also received a small grant of 700 dollars to purchase kitchen equipment.

The money came from a program financed with 87,000 dollars by the Salvadoran community abroad, through the Salvadoran Foreign Ministry.

The initiative, launched in 2019, aims to generate opportunities for returnees in four municipalities in eastern El Salvador, including San Francisco Gotera.

This region was chosen because most of the deportees reside here, according to Carlos Díaz, coordinator of the program on behalf of the San Francisco Gotera mayor’s office.

But the demand for support and resources exceeds supply.

“There was a database of approximately 350 returnees in Gotera, but there was only money for 55,” Díaz told IPS.

More than 200 people benefited in the four municipalities.

David Aguilar and Patricia López (right) set up their own business, El Tuco King Carwash, after they decided to return to El Salvador. Their business is located in the eastern part of the country, a region where more than 50 percent of returnees live. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Hope despite a tough situation

Out of necessity, David Aguilar and Patricia López, 52 and 42, respectively, also set up their own business, in their case a car wash, after deciding to return to El Salvador. It’s called Tuco King Carwash.

Like Sosa, they are from San Francisco Gotera. Aguilar left the country in November 2005 and López three months later, in February 2006.

They made the risky journey to try to give their young daughter – six months old at the time, and today 17 years old – a better future.

One leg of the trip was by sea, on the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico.

“I spent 12 hours at sea, in a boat carrying about 20 people, who were all undocumented like me,” Aguilar said.

He added: “The only thing they gave us as lifesavers were a few plastic containers, in case the boat capsized.”

It was in Houston, in the state of Texas, that Aguilar found work in a car paint shop. The experience has been useful to him back in El Salvador, because in addition to washing cars, he offers paint jobs and other related services.

Aguilar and López were not deported; they decided to return because her father died in 2011. They came back in 2012, without having seen many of their dreams come true.

“You come back wanting to work and there aren’t any opportunities. The first thing they see in you is your age; when you’re over 35, they don’t hire you,” López said.

Before embarking on the trip to the United States, she had finished her degree as a primary school teacher, in 2005. But she never worked as a teacher because she left the following year.

“When I returned I applied to various teaching positions, but no one ever hired me,” she said.

Today, their carwash business, set up in 2014, is doing well, albeit with difficulties, because the couple have found that there is too much competition.

But they do not lose hope that they will succeed.

Former Salvadoran guerrilla David Henríquez, deported from the United States in 2019, shows the quality of the disinfectant he has just produced in his small artisanal workshop in San Salvador. With no chance of finding formal employment after deportation, he worked hard to set up his disinfectant business to generate an income. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

An ex-guerrilla chemist

David Henríquez, a 62-year-old former guerrilla fighter, was deported in 2019.

During the civil war, Henríquez was a combatant of the then insurgent Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), but when peace came he decided to emigrate to the United States in 2003 as an undocumented immigrant.

With no hope of finding a formal sector job here, he began to make cleaning products, a skill he learned in the United States.

In the 12 years that he lived there, he worked for two years at the Sherwin Williams plant, a global manufacturer of paints and other chemicals.

“It was there that I began to discover the world of chemical compositions and aromas,” Henríquez told IPS during a visit to his small workshop in the Belén neighborhood of San Salvador, the capital.

Henríquez was producing a 14-gallon (53-liter) batch of blue disinfectant with the scent of baby powder. He also makes disinfectant smelling like cinnamon and lavender, among others. His business is called El Dave de los aromas.

His production process is still artisanal, although he would know how to produce disinfectant with high-tech machinery, if he had it, he said, “as I did at Sherwin Williams.”

He used a baby bottle to measure out the 3.5 ounces (104 milliliters) of nonylphenol, the main chemical component, used to produce 14 gallons.

Henríquez dissolved other chemicals in powder, to get the color and the aroma, and the product was ready.

He produces about 400 gallons a month, 1,514 liters, at a price of 3.50 dollars each.

“The important thing is to have discipline, work hard, to shine with your own effort,” he said.

A couple participate in the gay pride parade in San Salvador, held before the state of emergency was declared on Mar. 27, under which the government is carrying out massive raids in search of suspected gang members. Members of the LGBTI community are among those arbitrarily detained, victims of police homophobia and transphobia. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Nov 21 2022 (IPS)

Police raids against gang members in El Salvador, under a state of emergency in which some civil rights have been suspended, have also affected members of the LGBTI community, and everything points to arrests motivated by hatred of their sexual identity.

Personal accounts gathered by IPS revealed that some of the arrests were characterized by an attitude of hatred towards gays and especially transsexuals on the part of police officers."Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’.” -- Cultura Trans

“Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’,” an activist with Cultura Trans, a San Salvador-based organization of the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) community, told IPS.

Hatred of homosexuals and transgender people

The activist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that another member of his organization, a gay man known as Carlos, has been detained since Jul. 13, after he complained about the arrest two months earlier of his sister Alessandra, a trans teenager.

The authorities have accused them of “illicit association,” the charge used to arrest alleged gang members or collaborators, under the state of emergency.

“The case against Carlos was staged, it was invented,” said the source. “He is a human rights activist in the trans community, we have documents that show that he participates in our workshops, in our activities.”

A police officer stops a young man in San Salvador and checks his back and other parts of his body for gang-related tattoos, one of the elements used by authorities to track down gang members in El Salvador. Since the state of emergency was declared, 58,000 people have been detained, in many cases arbitrarily, among them members of the LGBTI community. CREDIT: National Civil Police

The state of exception, under which some civil rights are suspended, has been in force in El Salvador since Mar. 27, when the government of Nayib Bukele launched a crusade against criminal gangs, with the backing of the legislature, which is controlled by the ruling New Ideas party.

Gangs have been responsible for the majority of crimes committed in this Central American country for decades.

According to the constitution, a state of exception can be in place for 30 days, and can be extended for another 30. But a legal loophole has allowed the government and Congress to renew the measure every month, under the argument that this was already done during the 1980-1992 civil war.

This interpretation could only be modified by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice. But Bukele, with the backing of the legislature, named five hand-picked magistrates to that chamber in May 2021, in what his critics say marked the beginning of a shift towards authoritarianism, two years into his term.

Since Mar. 27, the police and military have imprisoned some 58,000 people.

In most cases no arrest warrants were issued by a judge, and the arrests are generally based on gang members’ police files.

In addition, anonymous tips by the public to a hotline set up by the government have gradually expanded the number of people arrested.

“The state of emergency exposes you to an inefficient prosecutor, incapable of investigating and linking people to crimes,” William Hernández, director of Entre Amigos, an LGBTI organization founded in 1994, told IPS.

He added: “If a police officer decides to detain someone and make a report of the arrest, they go out to look for them, but there’s no record of who reported that individual, where the information came from, and no one knows who investigated them.”

Among the 58,000 detainees are some 40 people from the LGBTI community, according to a report made public in October by Cristosal and other human rights organizations that monitor abuses committed by the Salvadoran authorities under the state of exception.

These organizations have collected some 4,000 complaints of arbitrary detentions and other abuses, including torture, committed against detainees. Some 80 people have died in police custody and in prison.

Carlos is a gay man who spoke out against the arrest of his younger sister Alessandra, a trans woman seized in May by Salvadoran police, accused of belonging to a gang. In July he was also arrested and so far little is known about their situation, under the state of emergency in El Salvador, which has led to the imprisonment of 58,000 people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Cultura Trans

Police homophobia

In the case of Carlos, 32, and his sister Alessandra, 18, the information available is that she was arrested in May in one of the police sweeps, in a poor neighborhood in the north of San Salvador.

She was arrested for not having a personal identity card. She had recently turned 18, the age of majority, and she should have obtained the document, which is needed for any kind of official procedure.

The police officers who arrested Alessandra told her mother that she was only being taken for 72 hours, while the situation was clarified.

However, something that could have been easily investigated and resolved turned into an ordeal for her and her family, especially her mother, who was facing several health ailments, said the Cultura Trans activist.

“She was in the ‘bartolinas’ (dungeons) of the Zacamil (a police station in that poor neighborhood),” the source said. “We went to leave food for her, then they sent her to the Mariona prison. We realized that she had been beaten and sexually abused, because she was being held in a men’s facility.”

He added: “When they took Alessandra, her mother told us that the police told the girl ‘culero, we are going to take you to be raped, to be f**ked,’ which is what actually did happen. ‘We’re going to take you so that you learn not to dress like a woman’.”

Culero is a pejorative term used in El Salvador against gays.

Meanwhile, her brother Carlos spoke out against Alessandra’s arrest, during activities carried out by the LGBTI community.

In May, in a march against “homo-lesbo-transphobia” – hatred of gays, lesbians and trans people – he carried several handmade signs calling for his sister’s release from prison.

The authorities visited Carlos’ house, and threatened to arrest him as well, which they did on Jul. 13.

According to the source, the police and prosecutors put together a case and accused him of illicit association. They are asking for a 20-year prison sentence.

“It’s not because of illicit association, we know that very well. It’s because he’s a human rights activist in the LGBTI community, and because he has been demanding the release of his sister,” said the Cultura Trans activist.

“We want him back with us, and his sister too,” he said.

William Hernández, director of the association Entre Amigos, said that the police and the Attorney General’s Office stage raids against alleged gang members without carrying out proper investigations to substantiate the arrests or to release detainees if they are innocent. The Salvadoran government has been on a crusade against gangs since March, but in the process there have been numerous abuses and illegal detentions, according to human rights organizations. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Underreporting hides the real number of cases

According to reports by the NGOs, while the 40 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained represent a small proportion of the total number of people arrested, there could be an underreporting of undocumented cases, especially in rural areas.

“In this country, although it’s small, there may be cases in remote places involving people who have never contacted an NGO. These are cases that remain invisible,” Catalina Ayala, a trans woman activist with Diké, an LGBTI organization whose name refers to justice in Greek mythology, told IPS.

Ayala said that, although she has not personally experienced transphobia from the authorities on the streets of San Salvador, and her organization has not received concrete reports of cases like Alessandra’s, she did not rule out that they could be happening.

“I think it’s a positive thing that the authorities are arresting gang members, but not people who have nothing to do with crime, or just because they are LGBTI,” she said.

The organization’s lawyer, Jenifer Fernández, said Diké has provided legal assistance to 12 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained, mainly because they were not carrying their identity documents.

In one of the cases, the police said things that could be construed as transphobic, although there was also a basic suspicion, since she was a trans woman without an identity document.

“She was a 25-year-old woman who had never had a DUI, an identity document, because she suffered from gender dysphoria and was afraid to go to register, afraid of being asked to cut her hair or to remove her make-up,” said Fernández.

Gender dysphoria is a sense of unease caused by a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity and has repercussions on their ability to function socially.

“The arrest report said that she was a gang member disguised as a woman, that they did not know who she was, that she gave a name but that it could not be proven without a DUI,” the lawyer explained.

But Fernández added that, in general, with or without a state of exception, trans women suffer the most from harassment, mockery and aggression.

Of the 12 cases, 11 of the individuals were released, and only one remains in custody because, according to the police, there is evidence that the person may have had ties to a gang, although the details of that evidence are unknown.

Call to stop abuses

On Nov. 11, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed concern over “the persistence of massive and allegedly arbitrary arrests” by Salvadoran authorities under the state of emergency.

It also reported non-compliance with judicial guarantees, and called on the government “to implement citizen security actions that guarantee the rights and freedoms established in the American Convention on Human Rights and in line with Inter-American standards.”

Among the constitutional rights suspended since the beginning of the state of emergency on Mar. 27 are the rights of association and assembly, although the government says this only applies to criminal groups meeting to plan crimes.

It also restricts the right to a defense and extends the period in which a person can be detained and presented in court, which Salvadoran law sets at a maximum of three days.

On Nov. 16, Congress, which is controlled by the governing party, approved a new extension of the state of emergency, which it has done at the end of each month.

New Ideas lawmakers have said that the restriction of civil rights will be extended as long as necessary, “until the last gang member is arrested.”

In this country of 6.7 million people, there are an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 gang members.

Bukele’s party holds 56 seats in the 84-member legislature, and thanks to three allied parties they have a total of 60 votes, which gives them a large absolute majority.

Aerial view of the community water system located in the canton of El Zapote, in the municipality of Suchitoto in central El Salvador. Mounted on the roof are the 96 solar panels that generate the electricity needed to power the entire electrical and hydraulic mechanism that brings water to more than 2,500 families in this rural area of the country, which in the 1980s was the scene of heavy fighting during the Salvadoran civil war. CREDIT: Alex Leiva/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador , Nov 3 2022 (IPS)

The need for potable water led several rural settlements in El Salvador, at the end of the 12-year civil war in 1992, to rebuild what was destroyed and to innovate with technologies that at the time seemed unattainable, but which now benefit hundreds of families.

Several communities located in areas that were once the scene of armed conflict are now supplied with water through community systems powered by clean energy, such as solar power."The advantage is that the systems are powered by clean, renewable energies that do not pollute the environment.” -- Karilyn Vides

“The advantage is that the systems are powered by clean, renewable energies that do not pollute the environment,” Karilyn Vides, director of operations in El Salvador for the U.S.-based organization Companion Community Development Alternatives (CoCoDA), told IPS.

Hope where there was once war

The organization, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, has supported the development of 10 community water systems in El Salvador since 1992, five of them powered by solar energy.

These initiatives have benefited some 10,000 people whose water systems were destroyed during the conflict. Local residents had to start from scratch after returning years later.

A local resident of the Sitio el Zapotal community in El Zapote canton, El Salvador, turns on the tap to fill his sink to collect the water he will need for the day. A total of 10,000 people have benefited from the five solar-powered community water projects in El Salvador since 2010. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

This small Central American country experienced a bloody civil war between 1980 and 1992, which left some 75,000 people dead and more than 8,000 missing.

“Before leaving their communities, some families had water systems, but when they returned they had been completely destroyed, and they had to be rebuilt,” Vides said, during a tour by IPS to the Junta Administradora de Agua Potable or water board in the canton of El Zapote, Suchitoto municipality, in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán.

In El Salvador, the term Junta Administradora de Agua Potable refers to community associations that, on their own initiative, manage to drill a well, build a tank and the entire distribution structure to provide service where the government has not had the capacity to do so.

There are an estimated 2,500 such water boards in the country, which provide service to 25 percent of the population, or some 1.6 million people, according to local environmental organizations.

But most of the water boards operate with hydroelectric power provided by the national grid, while the villages around Suchitoto have managed, with the support of CoCoDA and local organizations, to run on solar energy.

The community water project in the Salvadoran community of Sitio El Zapotal was driven by the efforts of local residents and international donors. At the foot of the catchment tank stand Karilyn Vides of CoCoDA, consultant and former guerrilla fighter René Luarca (front) – a member of the project’s water board – and former guerrilla Luis Antonio Landaverde (left), together with two technicians. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

This area is located on the slopes of the Guazapa mountain north of San Salvador, which during the civil war was a key stronghold of the then guerrilla Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), now a political party that governed the country between 2009 and 2019.

Some of the people behind the creation of the water board in the canton of El Zapote were part of the guerrilla units entrenched on Guazapa mountain.

“This area was heavily bombed and shelled, day and night,” Luis Antonio Landaverde, 56, a former guerrilla fighter who had to leave the front lines when a bomb explosion fractured his leg in July 1985, told IPS.

“A bomb dropped by an A37 plane fell nearby and broke my right leg, and I could no longer fight,” said Landaverde, who sits on the El Zapote water board.

The Junta de Agua del Cantón El Zapote, in central El Salvador, is the largest solar-powered community water project in the country, although it uses electricity from the national grid, from hydroelectric sources, as backup. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Peasant farmers in the technological vanguard

At the end of the war in 1992, communities in the foothills of Guazapa began to organize themselves to set up their community water systems, at first using the national power grid, generated by hydroelectric sources.

Then they realized that the cost of the electricity and bringing the grid to remote villages was too high, and necessity and creativity drove them to look for other options.

“I was already very involved in alternative energy, and we thought that bringing in electricity would be as expensive as installing a solar energy system,” René Luarca, one of the architects of the use of sunlight in the community systems, told IPS.

The first solar-powered water system was built in 2010 in the Zacamil II community, in the Suchitoto area, benefiting some 40 families.

And because it worked so well, four similar projects followed in 2017.

Two were carried out around that municipality, and another in the rural area of the department of Cabañas, in the north of the country.

Given the project’s success, an effort was even made to develop a similar system in the community of Zacataloza, in the municipality of Ciudad Antigua, in the department of Nueva Segovia in northwestern Nicaragua.

The total investment exceeded 200,000 dollars, financed by CoCoDA’s U.S. partner organizations.

However, these were smallscale initiatives, benefiting an average of 100 families per project.

“There were eight panels, they were tiny, like little toys,” said Luarca, 80, known in the area as “Jerry,” his pseudonym during the war when he was a guerrilla in the National Resistance, one of the five organizations that made up the FMLN.

Then came the big challenge: to set up the project in the canton of El Zapote, which would require more panels and would provide water to a much larger number of families.

“This has been the biggest challenge, because there are no longer four panels – there are 96,” said Luarca.

A valve connected to the pump of the community water system in central El Salvador measures the pressure at which the liquid is being pumped to a catchment tank, located on a hill five kilometers away. The water flows down by gravity to the beneficiary families, who pay a monthly fee of six dollars for 12 cubic meters of water. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The water system in El Zapote is a hybrid setup. This allows it to use solar energy as the main source, but it is backed up by the national grid, fueled by hydropower, when there is no sunshine or there are other types of failures.

“Since it is a fairly large system, it is not 100 percent solar, but is hybrid, so that it has both options,” explained Eliseo Zamora, 42, who is in charge of monitoring the operation of the equipment.

Using the pump, driven by a 30-horsepower motor, water is piped from the well to a tank perched on top of a hill, about five kilometers away as the crow flies.

From there, water flows by gravity down to the villages through a 25-kilometer network of pipes that zigzag under the subsoil, until reaching the families’ taps.

The project started when the armed conflict ended, but it took several years to buy the land, with resources from the six communities involved, and to acquire the machinery for the hydraulic system. It began operating in 2004 with electricity from the national grid, before CoCoDA switched to supporting the solar infrastructure.

For the installation of the panels and the adaptation of the system, the water board contributed 14,000 dollars, part of it from the hours worked by the villagers.

The new solar power system was inaugurated in June 2022 and benefits some 10 communities in the area – more than 2,500 families.

The service fee is six dollars per month for 12 cubic meters of water. For each additional cubic meter, the users are charged 0.55 cents.

“Our water is excellent, it is good for all kinds of human consumption,” the president of the water board, Ángela Pineda, told IPS.

María del Carmen Aguirre, 52, stands outside her home and pizza business in El Zonte, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. Her daughters send her remittances from the United States, but they use traditional systems and not the bitcoin electronic wallet, after this country became the first to make bitcoins legal tender on Sept. 7, 2021. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Sep 7 2022 (IPS)

A year after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele decided to make El Salvador the first country where bitcoin is legal tender, the experiment has so far failed, as few of the original plan’s objectives have been achieved.

This result was foreseeable since Sept. 7, 2021, when Bukele’s government decided, out of the blue and without any precedent, to make bitcoin legal tender through a law approved by the legislature, controlled by members of the ruling party, Nuevas Ideas.

The aims of that decision were never explained in detail in an official plan, but were basically set out by Bukele, in power since 2019, through his tweets, as well as by officials who merely repeated what the president, given to governing with an authoritarian style, in which he is the only authorized voice for almost everything, has said."In the end, the majority of the population is not using either the government e-wallet or bitcoins in general.” -- Tatiana Marroquín

“Unfortunately there is no formal document or official information from the government in which the specific objectives of the measure have been laid out,” economist Tatiana Marroquín told IPS.

But judging by the president’s announcements, and by communications between the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which requested in January 2022 that the measure be annulled, several aims can be highlighted, such as boosting financial inclusion and tourism and improving the country’s “brand”, said Marroquín.

Disenchantment with the Chivo Wallet

The government claimed that bitcoin as legal tender would reduce the gap of unbanked people, which is around 70 percent of the population.

That segment would begin to carry out digital financial transactions with several clicks from their cell phones, according to the government.

However, because much of the information on bitcoin transactions has been classified by the authorities, it is unknown, for example, what percentage of the population is still actively using the Chivo Wallet, the digital wallet created by the government, and in what amounts.

Chivo is basically slang for “cool” in El Salvador.

It is known that at the beginning of the cryptocurrency’s implementation, around four million people downloaded the application, but basically they did so in order to collect a 30 dollar bonus granted by the government to promote the use of bitcoins.

But by this point it is clear that very few people are still using the application, judging by what you hear and see in the towns and cities of this Central American country of 6.7 million people.

“In the end, the majority of the population is not using either the government e-wallet or bitcoins in general,” Marroquin said.

Some businesses use them to receive payments, but there are very few transactions, analyst Ricardo Chavarría, director of Renta Asset Management, a company that manages investment funds in the international market, told IPS.

Nor has the government managed to convince Salvadorans living abroad to use the app to send family remittances to El Salvador, one of its main aims when it dove headfirst into bitcoins.

Each year, the country receives around seven billion dollars in remittances, representing 26 percent of GDP.

In August 2021, a month before the approval of the so-called Bitcoin Law, Bukele said in a tweet that Salvadorans pay around 400 million dollars in commissions to send money to their families in El Salvador.

That amount of money would be saved by sending it through the Chivo Wallet.

One of the Chivo ATMs scattered throughout El Salvador, in an attempt by the government to make it easier for the public to make transactions in bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that is legal tender in El Salvador, but which very few are using a year after its implementation. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Not even the diaspora trusts the cryptocurrency

However, according to official figures, only 1.5 percent of remittances were sent through e-wallets in the first quarter of 2022, a percentage far below what the government expected.

This was probably influenced by the high volatility of cryptoassets such as bitcoin, which is currently going through a crisis in its value, dubbed as a crypto winter.

Bitcoin’s price plunged to 19,813 dollars at the close on Sept. 5, well below last year’s peak, when it surpassed the 60,000 dollar mark.

And the Salvadoran population abroad, especially in the United States, where more than three million live, is reluctant to bet on something so volatile and, therefore, risky.

“People are extremely careful, despite the political capital of the president (Bukele), the same people over there (Salvadorans in the United States) do not risk their money,” said Chavarría.

That is the case of María del Carmen Aguirre, a 52-year-old entrepreneur who runs a small pizza business in El Zonte, a coastal community on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, some 50 kilometers southeast of San Salvador, part of the municipality of Chiltiupán, in the central department of La Libertad.

Aguirre told IPS that she regularly receives remittances from her two daughters who live in the United States, in San Francisco, California, but neither of them send the money through Chivo Wallet or any other similar platform.

“They send it only through the bank. It seems that they are quite afraid. ‘What happens if we send 200 dollars and at that moment the price of bitcoin goes down?’ they say to me,” said Aguirre, in her pizzeria.

El Zonte is a beach area known for its surfing and because an unusual community effort to use the cryptocurrency was launched there, about two years before the government decided to try bitcoins.

This initiative was promoted thanks to a donor, who remains anonymous, who gave money to carry out works in the town, but on the condition that those who worked on them would be paid in bitcoins and not in dollars, the legal tender in El Salvador since 2001.

That still raises suspicions: why would anyone be interested in promoting the crypto-asset in a poor coastal town, with dirt roads and modest shacks, although there are also some luxury hotels, hostels and restaurants.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, families in El Zonte received, on several occasions, 30-dollar vouchers from the mystery donor to use for bitcoin transactions.

“They gave us the bonus three or four times so we could go to the stores that already handled bitcoin,” Aguirre said.

Chavarría said the cryptocurrency is probably at the end of the so-called crypto winter, and he expects it to rise again in the future.

“For me, in a medium to long term horizon it is going to recover and it is going to win out,” he argued.

A street corner in the town of El Zonte, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, which became the place where a project to promote the use of bitcoins in the country started, before the government of Nayib Bukele gave the cryptocurrency legal status in September 2021. Most businesses in this town accept them as a form of payment, but in the rest of the country the use of bitcoins is marginal. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Not just gangs

One thing that Marroquín the economist and financial analyst Chavarría agreed on is that, with the passage of the Bitcoin Law, El Salvador made the global headlines about something other than the recurring issue of gang violence, which used to be the only issue of interest to the international press.

In this sense, it could be argued that the country’s image improved somewhat on the world news agenda.

“The fact that El Salvador is on the news map and that it appears in Bloomberg, in The New York Times, in Spain’s El País, when the only topic before was the gangs, is good news for me as a Salvadoran,” said Chavarría.

Marroquín concurred that “El Salvador is undoubtedly no longer known as it used to be solely for violence.”

She added that the adoption of the bitcoin has also bolstered tourism in the country by attracting a segment of visitors interested in the cryptocurrency, although it remains to be seen whether this improvement will have an impact on poor communities near tourist spots.

The bitcoin symbol can be seen everywhere in El Zonte, a coastal community in southern El Salvador, such as on this 1970s Volkswagen van or ‘furgoneta’, called the Bitcoineta. The implementation of the cryptocurrency in this country has not gone well and so far has been a setback for President Nayib Bukele, although the outlook could change if the price of the cryptoasset rallies. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

A cloak of secrecy

The government has been harshly criticized for the secrecy with which it has handled not only the adoption of the bitcoin but also other important issues about which the public has demanded information, since they have involved the use of public funds for which the Bukele administration has not been held accountable.

When it has been made available, Information has arrived in dribs and drabs.

It is known that the government has purchased 2,381 bitcoins, on which it has spent 106.04 million dollars. But when related investments are factored in, such as the ATMs placed at various points around the country, the total investment exceeds 300 million dollars.

“There is a big black cloak surrounding the government’s use of public funds,” Marroquín said.

Reporters and photojournalists cover an Aug. 11 press conference at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in San Salvador. Independent media outlets in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua suffer constant persecution and harassment by state entities and government officials in an attempt to silence them and discredit investigations into corruption and mismanagement of public funds. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 15 2022 (IPS)

Practicing journalism in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador is becoming increasingly difficult in the face of the persecution of independent media outlets by neo-populist rulers of different stripes, intolerant of criticism.

The most recent high-profile case was the Jul. 29 arrest of José Rubén Zamora, founder and director of elPeriódico, one of the Guatemalan media outlets that has been most critical of the government of right-wing President Alejandro Giammattei, who has been in office since January 2020.

The union of Guatemalan journalists and the reporter’s family say the arrest is a clear example of political persecution as a result of the investigations into corruption and mismanagement in the Giammattei administration published by the newspaper, which was founded in 1996."The last bastions of the independent press (in Nicaragua) are under siege and the vast majority of independent journalists, threatened by abusive legal actions, have had to flee the country" -- Reporters Without Borders

“I definitely believe it is a case of political persecution and harassment, and of violence against free expression and the expression of thought,” Ramón Zamora, son of the editor of elPeriódico who has been imprisoned since his arrest, told IPS from Guatemala City.

A case out of the blue

The 66-year-old journalist is one of the most recognized in Guatemala and in the Central American region, and has been awarded several times for elPeriódico’s investigative reporting.

Zamora is being charged with money laundering, influence peddling and racketeering, although the evidence shown at the initial hearing by prosecutors “are poor quality voice messages that show nothing,” according to Ramón.

The preliminary hearing ended on Aug. 9 with the judge’s decision to continue with the case and keep Zamora in pre-trial detention. Prosecutors now have three months to present more robust evidence before taking him to trial, while the defense will seek to gather evidence in order to secure his release.

“We are going to clearly demonstrate as many times as necessary that this case was staged, that the evidence, or rather the evidence they have, cannot be stretched as far as they are stretching it,” said Ramón, 32, an anthropologist by profession.

He added that from the beginning President Giammattei showed signs of intolerance towards criticism of his administration.

“We knew he was an angry person, authoritarian in the way he acted, but we never thought he would go this far,” he said.

Since the arrest, Ramón said that his father is in good spirits, upbeat, although he has had problems sleeping, while the newspaper continues to be published in the midst of serious difficulties due to the temporary seizure of its bank accounts and liquidity problems to pay the staff and other costs.

On Friday Aug. 12, elPeriódico gave key coverage to a decree approved by the Guatemalan legislature that gives life to a Cybercrime Law, which could become another governmental tool to silence critics.

The newspaper quoted the organization Acción Ciudadana, according to which article 9 of this law “contravenes free access to sources of information – a right stipulated in the constitution; furthermore, it violates the Law of Broadcasting of Thought, restricting freedom of information.”

Zamora Jr. regretted that in Central America journalistic work is restricted and persecuted by governments and other de facto powers, as is happening in Guatemala with Giammattei, in El Salvador with the government of Nayib Bukele, and in Nicaragua, with that of Daniel Ortega.

“Ortega, in Nicaragua, is a mirror that we all have in front of us in the region, it is worrisome,” he said.

Journalist José Rubén Zamora, editor of elPériódico, one of the newspapers most critical of the government of Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, leaves the courtroom on Aug. 9 after a judge ordered pretrial detention, on accusations of money laundering. But his family, the journalists’ union and civil society organizations maintain that the case is part of political persecution promoted by the government. CREDIT: Courtesy of elPériódico

Press freedom in free fall

In these three countries there is an openly hostile policy against the independent media, whose journalists suffer harassment, persecution, blackmail, intimidation and restrictions of all kinds in the line of duty.

Central America, a region of 38 million people, faces serious economic and social challenges after leaving behind decades of political strife and civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Further progress towards democracy is undermined by attacks on or harassment of media outlets that criticize corrupt governments, according to reports by national and international organizations.

In this regard, the World Press Freedom Index 2022 report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) points out the decline suffered by Nicaragua, which dropped 39 positions in the ranking to 160th place out of 180, and El Salvador, which lost 30 positions, dropping to 112th place.

“For the second year in a row El Salvador had one of the steepest falls in Latin America,” the report states.

And it adds that since he took office in 2019, Bukele, described as a “millennial” leader with a vague ideology and an “authoritarian tendency…is exerting particularly strong pressure on journalists and is using the extremely dangerous tactic of portraying the media as the enemy of the people.”

According to the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (Apes), from January to July 2022, 51 incidents have been reported against the press, related to digital attacks and obstruction of journalistic work by state institutions, officials and even supporters of the ruling party.

Bukele himself, in press conferences, often accuses the media and even specific journalists, who he names, of being part of an opposition plan to discredit the work of the government.

A number of reporters have left the country to avoid problems.

Of those who have left the country, at least three have done so almost obligatorily because government agencies or officials have pressured them to reveal their sources of information, Apes Freedom of Expression Rapporteur Serafín Valencia told IPS.

“Bukele decided to undertake a wave of attacks against the press, although not against the entire press, but against those media outlets and journalists who have a critical editorial line and try to do their work in an independent fashion,” said Valencia.

With regard to Ortega in Nicaragua, the RSF report states: “Nicaragua (160th) recorded the biggest drop in rankings (- 39 places) and entered the Index’s red zone.”

It adds: ” A farcical election in November 2021 that carried Daniel Ortega into a fourth consecutive term as president was accompanied by a ferocious crackdown on dissenting voices.

“The last bastions of the independent press came under fire, and the vast majority of independent journalists, threatened with abusive prosecution, were forced to leave the country,” says the report.

“You can’t kill the truth by killing journalists” reads a banner set out by press workers following the death of a colleague in Nicaragua, where the government of Daniel Ortega has shut down critical media outlets and forced many independent reporters into exile. CREDIT: Jader Flores/IPS

Guerrilla leader accused of being a dictator

One of the reporters who had to leave Nicaragua was Sergio Marín, who for more than 12 years hosted a radio program called La Mesa Redonda.

“There were very strong indications that my arrest was imminent,” Marín told IPS from San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the country he fled to on Jun. 21, 2021.

Marín said that the situation in Nicaragua was, and continues to be, untenable for independent media outlets and reporters since Ortega returned to power in January 2007, after a first stint as president between 1985 and 1990.

Ortega was a leader of the leftist guerrilla Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that in July 1979 overthrew the Somoza dynasty’s dictatorship, which directly or through puppet rulers had been in power since the 1930s.

But the FSLN’s progressive ideas of justice and freedom were soon buried by Ortega’s new power dynamics: he forged obscure pacts with the country’s political and economic elites to set himself up as Nicaragua’s strongman, with actions typical of a dictator.

“With Ortega’s return to power in 2007, he began a process of isolation of journalists who ask questions that question power,” said Marín, 60.

Then, according to Marín, the government threw up a “financial wall”: denying state advertising to media outlets that were critical, or even advertising from private businesses allied with the Ortega administration.

That is when the first media closures began to be seen, he said.

The situation worsened with the popular uprising against the government in April 2018, massive protests that were stopped with bullets by the police, military and pro-Ortega paramilitary forces.

Around 300 people died in the repression unleashed by Ortega, said Marín.

These events were a turning point for journalism because, in the face of the crackdown, the media in general, except for pro-government outlets, came together in a united front.

“So the regime identified us as a key enemy, which must be silenced,” Marin added.

Since then, the Ortega government has maneuvered to close down independent media outlets and critical news spaces, such as those directed by veteran journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, who is now also in exile in Costa Rica.

“Now, the newspaper El Nuevo Diario is closed, and La Prensa was taken over by the government and the entire editorial staff is in exile, and in total there are more than 70 journalists who have left the country,” he added.

In the first week of August Ortega stepped up harassment against dissenting voices, and began targeting Catholic priests. Since Aug. 4 police forces have been holding Bishop Rolando Alvarez, of the Diocese of Matagalpa, in the north of the country, in the Episcopal Palace.

A group of alleged gang members is presented to the media by police authorities in El Salvador on Jul. 20 as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the war against gangs waged in this Central American country under a state of emergency. But families of detainees and human rights organizations warn that in many cases they have no links to criminal organizations. CREDIT: National Civil Police

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

The body of Walter Sandoval shows a number of dark bruises on his arms and knees, as well as lacerations on his left eye and on his head – signs that he suffered some kind of violence before dying in a Salvadoran prison, accused of being a gang member.

The evidence of the beating is clear in photographs that Walter’s father, Saúl Sandoval, showed to IPS.

Walter, 32, was one of those who died in Salvadoran prisons after being detained by the authorities in the massive raids that the government of Nayib Bukele launched at the end of March, under the protection of the decreed state of emergency and the administration’s fight against organized crime and gangs.

The young man, a farmer, died on Apr. 3, in the parking lot of the hospital in Sonsonate, a city in the west of the country where he was transferred, already dying according to the family, from the police station in Ahuachapán, a city in the department of the same name in western El Salvador.

He had been transferred to the police station after his Mar. 30 arrest in the Jardines neighborhood of the municipality of El Refugio, also in the department of Ahuachapán.

“They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station,” his father told IPS.

He added that his son had been hanging out with friends, getting drunk. A few minutes later, a police patrol picked him up on charges of being a gang member, which the family vehemently told IPS was not true.

“He never received medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot,” the father added."They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station. He didn't receive medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot." -- Saúl Sandoval

He says the only explanation he has for why the police detained Walter is because “they wanted to get the day’s quota.” What he meant is that police officers are apparently supposed to arrest a specific number of gang members in exchange for benefits in their assigned workload.

Deaths like Walter’s, if the participation of police is confirmed, are the most violent and arbitrary expression of the human rights violations committed since the government began its plan of massive raids, in what it describes as an all-out war on gangs.

Since late March, the Salvadoran government has maintained a state of emergency that suspended several constitutional guarantees, in response to a sharp rise in homicides committed by gang members between Mar. 25 and 27.

In those three days, at least 87 people were killed by gang members, in a kind of revenge against the government for allegedly breaking an obscure under-the-table agreement with the gangs to keep homicide rates low.

The state of emergency has been in place since Mar. 27, extended each month by the legislature, which is largely dominated by the ruling New Ideas party. Since then, violent deaths have dropped to an average of three a day.

Among the constitutional rights suspended are the rights of association and assembly, although the government said it only applies to criminal groups that are meeting to organize crimes. It also restricts the right to defense and extends the period in which a person may be detained and brought before the courts, which is currently three days.

The government can also wiretap the communications of “terrorist groups”, meaning gangs, although it could already do so under ordinary laws.

After the state of emergency was declared, homicides dropped again to around two or three a day, and there are even days when none are reported.

But some 48,000 people have been arrested and remanded in custody, accused by the authorities of belonging to criminal gangs. And the number is growing day by day.

However, the families of detainees and human rights organizations complain that among those captured are people who had no links to the gangs, known as “maras” in El Salvador, which make up an army of a combined total of around 70,000 members.

On Jun. 2, rights watchdog Amnesty International stated in an official communiqué that “Under the current state of emergency, the Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment, and at least 18 people have died in state custody.”

But President Bukele, far from being receptive to criticism, dismisses and stigmatizes the work of human rights groups, referring to their representatives as “criminals” and “freeloaders” who are more interested in defending the rights of gang members than those of their victims.

Walter Sandoval is one of the young men who have died with signs of torture in El Salvador’s prisons under the state of emergency in force in the country since the end of March. The police captured him without any evidence linking him to gangs, said the young man’s family – part of a pattern that has been documented by human rights organizations. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Sandoval family

Silent deaths and torture

The local human rights organization Cristosal has documented nearly 2,500 cases of arrests which, according to the families, have been arbitrary, with no basis for their loved ones to have been detained under the state of emergency.

The organization has also monitored press reports and social networks and has carried out its own research to establish that, as of Jul. 28, some 65 people had died while detained in the country’s prisons or in police cells as part of the massive police raids.

Some of the deceased showed obvious signs of beatings and physical violence, as was the case with Walter and other cases that have been widely reported in the media.

The official reports of these deaths received by family members are vague and confusing, such as that of Julio César Mendoza Ramírez, 25, who died in a hospital in San Salvador, the country’s capital, on Jul. 15.

The official report stated that he had died of pulmonary edema, i.e., his lungs filled with fluid, but also stated that the case was “being studied.”

Suspicions that the deceased were victims of beatings and torture during their imprisonment are not ruled out by their relatives or by human rights organizations.

“The cause of death given to the relatives in the hospital sometimes differs from the legal medical examination, and that leads one to think that something is going on,” lawyer Zaira Navas, of Cristosal, told IPS.

She added: “There are also families who say they were told it was cardiac arrest, but the victims have bruises on their bodies, which is not compatible (with the official version).”

And in the face of doubts and accusations that beatings and torture are taking place under the watchful eye of the State, the authorities simply remain silent and do not carry out autopsies, for example, which would reveal what really happened.

Navas remarked that, even within the state of emergency, “the detentions are arbitrary” because the procedure followed is not legally justified and many people are detained simply because of telephone complaints from neighbors – with which other human rights defenders coincide.

Another problem is that among these 2,500 complaints by families, about 30 percent involve detainees who have chronic diseases or disabilities or were receiving medical or surgical treatment, according to Cristosal’s reports.

The prison staff do not allow family members of the sick detainees to bring their medication, although in a few rare cases they have authorized it.

“We have seen deaths because it is presumed that they have been tortured, beaten, etc., but there have also been deaths of people who have not been given the medication they need to take,” Henri Fino, executive director of the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Law (FESPAD), told IPS.

Regarding the dubious role played by the government’s Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), in charge of conducting the forensic examinations to inform families about the cause of deaths, Fino said that in his opinion it has no credibility.

Especially, he added, now that members of the so-called Military Health Battalion have been stationed since Jul. 4 at several IML offices, presumably to assist in various tasks, including forensic exams, given the shortage of staff.

“What collaboration can they (the military) provide, if they are not experts, and the only reason they are in the IML is to exercise oversight?” Fino said.

Media war

Some of the people who have died in jails or prisons, who were arrested under the state of emergency, were described by the local media as victims of arbitrary, illegal detentions, in contrast with Bukele’s propaganda war claiming that all the detainees are, in fact, gang members.

The press has highlighted the case of Elvin Josué Sánchez, 21, who died on Apr. 18 at the Izalco Prison located near the town of the same name in the department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador.

The media have referred to him as the “young musician”, because he had been learning to play the saxophone, and they have described him as a decent person who was a member of an evangelical church in the area.

But according to neighbors, Sánchez was well-known as an active gang member in his native El Carrizal, in the municipality of Santa Maria Ostuma, in the central department of La Paz.

“They saw him well-armed on farms in the area, along with other gang members, and he told the owners not to show up there anymore, or they would kill them,” a resident of that municipality, who asked not to be identified, told IPS.

Contradictions like this have strengthened local support for Bukele’s insinuations that the independent media are in favor of gang members and against the government’s actions to eradicate violence in the country.

In fact, opinion polls show that a majority of the population of 6.7 million support the president’s measures to crack down on the maras.

But even though Sánchez was recognized by neighbors as a gang member, his arrest should have been carried out following proper procedures and protocols, based on reliable information proving his affiliation to a criminal organization.

This is something the police do not usually do in these massive raids where it is impossible for them to have the evidence needed on each of the nearly 48,000 detainees.

Nor did the fact that he had been a gang member merit him being beaten to death, since his human rights should have been respected, said those interviewed by IPS.

Farmer Luis Edgardo Pérez kneels next to a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) seedling which he just planted using one of the climate-resilient techniques he has learned to retain rainwater and prevent it from being wasted as runoff on his steep terrain in the Hacienda Vieja canton in central El Salvador. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN PEDRO NONUALCO, El Salvador , Aug 1 2022 (IPS)

With the satisfaction of knowing he was doing something good for himself and the planet, Salvadoran farmer Luis Edgardo Pérez set out to plant a fruit tree on the steepest part of his plot, applying climate change adaptation techniques to retain water.

This is vital for Pérez because of the steep slope of his land, where rainwater used to be wasted as runoff, as it ran downhill and his crops did not thrive.

Before planting the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) tree, Pérez had previously cut part of the slope to create a small flat circular space to plant it.

This technique is called “individual terraces” and seeks to retain rainwater at the foot of the tree. He has done the same thing with the new citrus trees planted on his small farm.

He learned this technique since he joined a national effort, promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to make farmers resilient to the impacts of climate change.

“In three years this loquat tree will be giving me fruit,” the 50-year-old farmer from the Hacienda Vieja canton in the municipality of San Pedro Nonualco, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz, told IPS, smiling and perspiring as he stood next to the newly planted tree.

San Pedro Nonualco is one of 114 Salvadoran municipalities located in the so-called Central American Dry Corridor, a strip of land that covers 35 percent of Central America and is home to more than 10.5 million people, whose food security is threatened by inconsistent rainfall cycles that make farming difficult.

The Reclima Project is the name of the program implemented by FAO and financed with 35.8 million dollars from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which supports climate change mitigation and adaptation in the developing South. The Salvadoran government has also contributed 91.8 million dollars in kind.

The program was launched in August 2019 and in its first phase led to the installation of 639 Field Schools to promote agroecology practices in which 22,732 families are participating in 46 municipalities in the Salvadoran Dry Corridor.

In addition, 352 drip irrigation systems will be installed, and 320 home rainwater harvesting systems have begun to be set up in 12 municipalities in El Salvador.

By the end of the program, it will have reached all 114 municipalities in the Dry Corridor, benefiting some 50,000 families.

Patricia Argueta, 40, plants a green bell pepper (Capsicum annuum) seedling in the community garden of Hoja de Sal, in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco in central El Salvador. She is one of the farmers learning new agroecological techniques as part of a project aimed at helping them combat the impacts of climate change. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Learning and teaching

Pérez is one of the 639 farmers who, because of their enthusiasm and dedication, have become community promoters of these climate-resilient agricultural practices learned from technicians of the governmental National Center for Agricultural and Forestry Technology.

He meets with them periodically to learn new techniques, and he is responsible for teaching what he learns to a group of 31 other farmers in the Hacienda Vieja canton.

“You’re always learning in this process, you never stop learning. And you have to put it into practice, with other people,” he said.

On his 5.3-hectare plot, he was losing a good part of his citrus crop because the rainwater ran right off the sloping terrain.

“I was losing a lot of my crop, up to 15,000 oranges in one harvest; because of the lack of water, the oranges were falling off the trees,” he said.

On his property he has also followed other methods of rainwater and moisture retention, including living barriers and the conservation of stubble, i.e. leaves, branches and other organic material that cover the soil and help it retain moisture.

Pérez’s citrus production is around 50,000 oranges per harvest, plus some 5,000 lemons. He also grows corn and beans, using a technique that combines these crops with timber and fruit trees. That is why he planted loquat trees.

“I love what I do, I identify with my crops. I like doing it, I’m passionate about it,” he said.

Ruperto Hernández, 72, finishes preparing the organic fertilizer known as bokashi, which he and other families benefiting from a program promoted by FAO in El Salvador use to fertilize their crops in the San Sebastián Arriba canton of the municipality of Santiago Nonualco in central El Salvador. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Collectively is better

About five kilometers further south down the road, you reach the San Sebastián Arriba canton, in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco, also in the department of La Paz.

Under the harsh midday sun, a group of men and women were planting cucumbers and fertilizing with bokashi, the organic fertilizer that the farmers have learned to produce for use on their crops as part of the FAO program.

“We are tilling the soil really well, we put in a little bit of organic fertilizer, mix it with the soil we tilled and then we put in the cucumber seed,” 72-year-old farmer Ruperto Hernández told IPS.

To make the fertilizer, Hernández explained that they used products such as rice hulls, molasses, charcoal, soil, and chicken and cattle manure.

“The more ingredients the better,” he said.

Hernández also showed the water conservation techniques used on the farm. These included shallow irrigation ditches dug along the hillsides at a specific angle.

The seven-hectare plot is a kind of agroecological school, where they put into practice the knowledge they have learned and then the farmers apply the techniques on their own plots.

Among the women in the group was Leticia Valles, who has been working with a towel over her head to protect herself from the sun.

Valles said this was the first time she was going to try using bokashi to fertilize her milpa – a term that refers to a traditional farming technique that combines staple crops like corn and beans with others, like squash.

“We have always used commercial fertilizer, but now we’re going to try bokashi, and I’m pretty excited, I expect a good harvest,” she said during a break.

They and the other participants in the program have also been taught to produce ecological herbicides and fungicides, which not only benefit the land but also their pocketbooks, as they are cheaper than commercial ones.

Imelda Platero, 54, and Paula Torres, 69, stand in a cornfield in the canton of Hoja de Sal in central El Salvador. They are two of the most active women involved in promoting actions to adapt agriculture to climate change in their village in the Dry Corridor. CREDIT: Gabriela Carranza/IPS

Changing sexist habits

Further south, near the Pacific Ocean, is the village of Hoja de Sal, also in the municipality of Santiago Nonualco, which is taking part in the Reclima Project as well.

The effort in this village is led by Imelda Platero, who coordinates a group of 37 people to whom she teaches climate-resilient practices on the plots of the Hoja de Sal cooperative, created in 1980 as part of the agrarian reform program implemented in El Salvador.

A total of 159 cooperative members collectively farm more than 700 hectares of land, most of which are dedicated to sugarcane production. And the members are entitled to just under one hectare of land to grow grains and vegetables individually.

But she not only teaches them how to plant using agroecological methods to combat the impacts of climate change.

She also teaches the 27 women in the group to become aware of the role they play and to empower them, as part of the program’s focus on gender questions.

“I was outraged when I heard stories about one member putting a padlock on the granary so his wife couldn’t sell corn if he wasn’t there; that is called economic violence,” said Platero, 54.

And she added: “We have been working on this issue, it is a challenge. It is still hard, but the women are more empowered, now they grow their corn and they sell it how they want to.”

Another important aspect is to respect the cosmovision and ancestral knowledge of peasant farmers in the area.

For example, Paula doesn’t plant if she can’t see what phase the moon is in,” said Platero, referring to Paula Torres, a 69-year-old farmer who is one of the most enthusiastic participants in the initiative.

Torres and her husband Felipe de Jesús Mejía, with whom she has raised 15 sons and daughters, are two weeks away from harvesting the first ears of corn from a bright green cornfield that is glowing with life. She is sure that this is due to the organic fertilizer they used.

“I’ve seen the difference, look what a beautiful milpa,” said Torres.

She added that now that she has seen how well the techniques work, she will use them “till I die.” Last year she and her husband produced about 1,133 kilos of corn, and this year they expect to grow more, by the looks of it.

“It’s never too late to learn,” she said, as she bent down and cut zucchini (Cucurbita pepo), which she sells in the community, in addition to cooking them at home.

A hundred Central American migrants were rescued from an overcrowded trailer truck in the Mexican state of Tabasco. It has been impossible to stop people from making the hazardous journey of thousands of kilometers to the United States due to the lack of opportunities in their countries of origin. CREDIT: Mesoamerican Migrant Movement

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 19 2022 (IPS)

The immigration agreement reached in Los Angeles, California at the end of the Summit of the Americas, hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden, raises more questions than answers and the likelihood that once again there will be more noise than actual benefits for migrants, especially Central Americans.

And immigration was once again the main issue discussed at the Jul. 12 bilateral meeting between Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Biden at the White House.

At the meeting, López Obrador asked Biden to facilitate the entry of “more skilled” Mexican and Central American workers into the U.S. “to support” the economy and help curb irregular migration.

Central American analysts told IPS that it is generally positive that immigration was addressed at the June summit and that concrete commitments were reached. But they also agreed that much remains to be done to tackle the question of undocumented migration.

That is especially true considering that the leaders of the three Central American nations generating a massive flow of poor people who risk their lives to reach the United States, largely without papers, were absent from the meeting.

Just as the Ninth Summit of the Americas was getting underway on Jun. 6 in Los Angeles, an undocumented 15-year-old Salvadoran migrant began her journey alone to the United States, with New York as her final destination.

She left her native San Juan Opico, in the department of La Libertad in central El Salvador.

“We communicate every day, she tells me that she is in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and that everything is going well according to plan. They give them food and they are not mistreating her, but they don’t let her leave the safe houses,” Omar Martinez, the Salvadoran uncle of the migrant girl, whose name he preferred not to mention, told IPS.

She was able to make the journey because her mother, who is waiting for her in New York, managed to save the 15,000-dollar cost of the trip, led as always by a guide or “coyote”, as they are known in Central America, who in turn form part of networks in Guatemala and Mexico that smuggle people across the border between Mexico and the United States.

The meeting of presidents in Los Angeles “was marked by the issue of temporary jobs, and the presidents of key Central American countries were absent, so there was a vacuum in that regard,” researcher Silvia Raquec Cum, of Guatemala’s Pop No’j Association, told IPS.

In fact, neither the presidents of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, or El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, attended the conclave due to political friction with the United States, in a political snub that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago.

Other Latin American presidents boycotted the Summit of the Americas as an act of protest, such as Mexico’s López Obrador, precisely because Washington did not invite the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which it considers dictatorships.

From rural communities like this one, the village of Huisisilapa in the municipality of San Pablo Tacachico in central El Salvador, where there are few possibilities of finding work, many people set out for the United States, often without documents, in search of the “American dream”. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

More temporary jobs

Promoting more temporary jobs is one of the commitments of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection adopted at the Summit of the Americas and signed by some twenty heads of state on Jun. 10 in that U.S. city.

“Temporary jobs are an important issue, but let’s remember that economic questions are not the only way to address migration. Not all migration is driven by economic reasons, there are also situations of insecurity and other causes,” Raquec Cum emphasized.

Moreover, these temporary jobs do not allow the beneficiaries to stay and settle in the country; they have to return to their places of origin, where their lives could be at risk.

“It is good that they (the temporary jobs) are being created and are expanding, but we must be aware that the beneficiaries are only workers, they are not allowed to settle down, and there are people who for various reasons no longer want to return to their countries,” researcher Danilo Rivera, of the Central American Institute of Social and Development Studies, told IPS from the Guatemalan capital.

The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection states that it “seeks to mobilize the entire region around bold actions that will transform our approach to managing migration in the Americas.”

The Declaration is based on four pillars: stability and assistance for communities; expansion of legal pathways; humane migration management; and coordinated emergency response.

The focus on expanding legal pathways includes Canada, which plans to receive more than 50,000 agricultural workers from Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean in 2022.

While Mexico will expand the Border Worker Card program to include 10,000 to 20,000 more beneficiaries, it is also offering another plan to create job opportunities in Mexico for 15,000 to 20,000 workers from Guatemala each year.

The United States, for its part, is committed to a 65 million dollar pilot program to help U.S. farmers hire temporary agricultural workers, who receive H-2A visas.

“It is necessary to rethink governments’ capacity to promote regular migration based on temporary work programs when it is clear that there is not enough labor power to cover the great needs in terms of employment demands,” said Rivera from Guatemala.

He added that despite the effort put forth by the presidents at the summit, there is no mention at all of the comprehensive reform that has been offered for several years to legalize some 11 million immigrants who arrived in the United States without documents.

A reform bill to that effect is currently stalled in the U.S. Congress.

Many of the 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States come from Central America, especially Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as Mexico.

While the idea of immigration reform is not moving forward in Congress, more than 60 percent of the undocumented migrants have lived in the country for over a decade and have more than four million U.S.-born children, the New York Times reported in January 2021.

This population group represents five percent of the workforce in the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors, the report added.

Despite the risks involved in undertaking the irregular, undocumented journey to the United States, many Salvadorans continue to make the trip, and many are deported, such as the people seen in this photo taken at a registration center after they were sent back to San Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

More political asylum

The Declaration also includes another important component of the migration agreement: a commitment to strengthen political asylum programs.

For example, among other agreements in this area, Canada will increase the resettlement of refugees from the Americas and aims to receive up to 4,000 people by 2028, the Declaration states.

For its part, the United States will commit to resettle 20,000 refugees from the Americas during fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

“What I took away from the summit is the question of creating a pathway to address the issue of refugees in the countries of origin,” Karen Valladares, of the National Forum for Migration in Honduras, told IPS from Tegucigalpa.

She added: “In the case of Honduras, we are having a lot of extra-regional and extra-continental population traffic.”

Valladares said that while it is important “to enable refugee processes for people passing through our country, we must remember that Honduras is not seen as a destination, but as a transit country.”

Raquec Cum, of the Pop No’j Association in Guatemala, said “They were also talking about the extension of visas for refugees, but the bottom line is how they are going to carry out this process; there are specific points that were signed and to which they committed themselves, but the how is what needs to be developed.”

Meanwhile, the Salvadoran teenager en route to New York has told her uncle that she expects to get there in about a month.

“She left because she wants to better herself, to improve her situation, because in El Salvador it is expensive to live,” said Omar, the girl’s uncle.

“I have even thought about leaving the country, but I suffer from respiratory problems and could not run a lot or swim, for example, and sometimes you have to run away from the migra (border patrol),” he said.

Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala, 63, walks to his boat at the San Luis La Herradura pier, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, to begin a 24-hour fishing stint offshore. He said that due to the lack of a breakwater at the mouth, where the sea meets the estuary, boats have capsized and some of his colleagues have drowned, leaving their families unprotected because they have no kind of insurance. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador , Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

At the pier, Salvadoran fisherman Nicolás Ayala checked the pocket of his pants to make sure he was carrying the hypertension pills he must take when he is at sea on a 24-hour shift. He smiled because he hadn’t forgotten them.

At the age of 63, “we are just aches and pains now,” he told IPS, while showing other pills he carried with him to relieve a toothache and other ailments.

Ayala lives in San Luis La Herradura, a small town located on the coastal strip of the department of La Paz, in south-central El Salvador, on the banks of the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, which leads to the Pacific Ocean.

Waves of vulnerability

“I am worried that I will suffer a health mishap and I won’t be able to continue working and I will be left on the street, ruined,” he added, noting that, as an artisanal fisherman, he does not have any type of coverage for illness or work-related accidents.

This should not be the case, and they should be covered, as it is one of the highest risk jobs in the world, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But that is the reality of the thousands of people dedicated to small-scale fishing in El Salvador and the rest of Central America on the two coasts of the isthmus, an activity that is vital for the food security of a large part of the 43 million inhabitants of this region, many of whom suffer serious social deprivation.

Like other sectors of the population, artisanal fishers work in almost absolute vulnerability, without any social measures to protect them or provide adequate coverage from the accidents or illnesses they face on a daily basis, and with only precarious health systems to rely on.

Ayala said that since there is no breakwater at the mouth, the point where the estuary lined by mangroves meets the sea, the waves become dangerous and sometimes overturn small motorboats.

And even if the fishermen know how to swim, they can drown anyway, because their boats fall on them or they get entangled in the nets. Two or three people a year die this way, he added.

“We have nothing, no accident insurance or anything, here only God can bless us, if we drown. If they find our bodies, that’s good, if not, well, the crabs can eat us,” he said, only half jokingly.

According to a FAO report from January 2021, in El Salvador in 2018 the fishing sector employed about 30,730 people, with a total fleet of 13,764 boats, 55 of which were used by the industrial sector and the rest by artisanal fishers, 50 percent of whose boats were motorized.

Fishers weigh part of the day’s catch, after fishing near the Estero de Jaltepeque estuary, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. Most small-scale fishers in Central America do not earn enough and have to work harder and harder to support their families. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Social security for all

FAO urged the countries of Central America to begin efforts to incorporate artisanal fisheries into national social security policies, during the Mesoamerican Forum on Social Protection in Artisanal Fisheries and Small-scale Aquaculture, held in May in Panama City.

The UN agency pointed out that worldwide, small-scale fishers account for half of the world’s fisheries production and employ 90 percent of the sector’s workforce, half of whom are women.

More than 50 million families in the world depend on small-scale fishing, according to FAO data.

In the case of Central America, the regional director of the Organization of the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector of the Central American Isthmus (OSPESCA), José Infante, commented that all of the countries have been developing social protection systems for their populations, but that not all sectors have the same access to them, which increases inequality and vulnerability for those who are excluded.

“The artisanal fishing sector is the perfect example of this,” said the OSPESCA director.

These workers, like so many others without coverage, worry about reaching old age and no longer having the energy to go to sea on a daily basis, or suffering a work-related accident that leaves them unable to work.

A Salvadoran fisherman shows some of the shrimp and other kinds of seafood he caught off the Pacific coast of El Salvador. FAO urges governments in Central America to promote social protection for small-scale fishing workers, given their vulnerability and the important role they play in food security in the region. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The uncertain future

“It will be a very difficult situation; If we don’t have a pension tomorrow we’re going to have a tough time,” Nicaraguan fisherwoman Arelis Flores, 23, mother of one, told IPS.

She is president of the Abraham Moreno cooperative in the Venecia Community, a village of fishers and farmers where 400 families live, located in the municipality of El Viejo, on the Pacific coast of the department of Chinandega in western Nicaragua.

“Around here only teachers retire (with pensions),” Flores said in a telephone interview, adding that her community is made up of poor families with very low levels of schooling.

Fishing in their village consists mainly of breeding red snapper (Lutjanus guttatus) in aquatic cages made with nets in the mangroves.

For his part, Salvadoran fisherman José Santos Martínez, also a resident of San Luis La Herradura, told IPS that artisanal fishers are about to finalize a proposal to present to the country’s authorities, demanding social coverage, in order to reduce their vulnerability.

Martínez is the president of the Salvadoran Confederation of Small-Scale Fishing, Aquaculture and Small-Scale Livestock Farming, the first of its kind in the country, which brings together three federations with a total membership of 3,500 men and women.

“If we are sick we can go to a national hospital, like every citizen, but we have no injury or sick leave coverage for the days we have to stay at home recovering,” said Martínez, 57.

By contrast, those who have a formal sector job, working for a private or state-owned company, are covered by the Salvadoran Social Security Institute (ISSS).

The ISSS, although it has many needs, is considered to provide better service than the national public hospital network, which covers everyone in this country of 6.7 million inhabitants.

Martínez said that achieving something similar for the artisanal sector would be a great step forward, given the accidents and illnesses suffered by fishers in their line of work.

Salvadoran fishers can join the ISSS as self-employed workers, but those interviewed told IPS that they could not afford the 40 dollars a month that the coverage costs.

Martínez said that, in his case, he suffers from intense back pain because of the impact from the constant bouncing of the boat over the waves.

“Because of that, I hardly go out fishing anymore,” he said.

He added: “Illnesses become more complicated, and in the end we die, we have no pension, no decent insurance, our families are completely unprotected.”

Martínez said the government should create a mechanism that offers coverage, but the problem is how to pay for it.

However, different proposals can be analyzed, he said. As an example, he pointed out that for decades artisanal fishers have paid a road tax charged to motorists of 0.20 cents of a dollar per gallon of fuel purchased, even though they are clearly not using the fuel to drive on the country’s roads.

“We have paid millions of dollars to the State, without receiving anything in return. Well, part of that money could be returned to us in the medical coverage we need,” he argued.

This charge of 0.20 cents per gallon of gasoline was recently eliminated, since it made no sense to charge small-scale fishers for using the roads.

Gregorio Torres, president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers from this department in central El Salvador, complained that small-scale fishers are unprotected against illnesses and accidents at work, and need government support to obtain this type of coverage. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Decent work

His colleague, Gregorio Torres, said that the artisanal fishing sector is key, as it provides fresh products to the country’s markets and helps boost food security, but workers have been unprotected, without pensions or accident insurance.

“We don’t have any of that, and it would be a good idea to push that FAO idea forward,” he commented, referring to the proposal to include them in the social security system.

Torres is president of the La Paz Federation of Fishing Production and Services Cooperatives, which brings together 900 fishers.

Public policy expert Nayda Acevedo told IPS that social security strategies are government tools to minimize the impact of inequalities on vulnerable populations.

In the case of Salvadoran artisanal fishers, the government should focus on promoting “decent work” in that sector, so that the seasonality and irregularity of their incomes can be overcome, she said.

And within the range of social security policies, the State could focus on the most urgent ones, such as medical coverage, she added.

In the meantime, fisherman Nicolás Ayala, at the San Luis La Herradura pier, climbed into his boat, revved up his 60-horsepower engine and headed out to sea, through the estuary.

“As long as I don’t die today, that’s good enough,” he said with his characteristic dark humor and a wry smile, as he motored off in his boat.

Alex Leiva, holding his baby girl, uses the water he managed to collect in barrels at 4:00 a.m., the only time the service is provided in Lotificación Praderas, in the canton of Cabañas, on the outskirts of the municipality of Apopa, north of the Salvadoran capital. The families of this region are fighting in defense of water, against an urban development project for wealthy families that threatens the water resources in the area. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
APOPA, El Salvador , Jun 6 2022 (IPS)

Alex Leiva woke up at 4:00 a.m. to perform a key task for his family’s survival in the Salvadoran village where he lives: filling several barrels with the water that falls from the tap only at that early hour every other day.

If he does not collect water between 4:00 and 5:00 AM, he will not have another opportunity to fill the barrels for another two days.

“That’s what I have to do. Sometimes I manage to fill three barrels. The service is provided every other day,” Leiva, 32, a video producer, told IPS.

“It’s difficult to be in a situation like this, where the water supply is so inefficient,” he added.

The water is not provided by the government’s National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewers (Anda) but by the Water Administration Board (Acasap).

In El Salvador there are at least 3,000 of these boards, community associations that play an essential role in the supply and management of water resources in rural areas and the peripheries of cities, in the face of the State’s failure to provide these areas with water.

Leiva lives in Lotificación Praderas, in the Cabañas canton, on the outskirts of the municipality of Apopa, north of the country’s capital, San Salvador.

This northern area covering several municipalities has been in conflict in recent years since residents of these communities began to fight against an urban development project by one of the country’s most powerful families, the Dueñas.

The Dueñas clan’s power dates back to the days of the so-called coffee oligarchy, which emerged in the mid-19th century.

Ciudad Valle El Angel is the name of the residential development to be built in this area on 350 hectares, and which will require some 20 million liters of water per day to supply the families that decide to buy one of the 8,000 homes.

The first feasibility permits granted by Anda to the consortium date back to 2015.

The homes are designed for upper middle-class families who decide to leave behind the chaos of San Salvador and to live with all the comforts of modern life, with water 24 hours a day, in the midst of poor communities that lack a steady water supply.

“There are people in my community who manage to fill only one barrel because there isn’t enough water pressure,” said Leiva, the father of a five-year-old boy and a nine-month-old baby girl.

Valle El Angel is an extensive region located on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano, in territories shared by municipalities north of the capital, including Apopa, Nejapa and Opico.

A general view of Parcelación El Ángel, in the Joya Galana canton, in the municipality of Apopa, near San Salvador. The community is fighting to defend the few natural resources that survive in the area, including a stream that originates in the micro-basin of the Chacalapa River. Water in the area is scarce, while Salvadoran authorities endorse an upscale real estate project that will use millions of liters per day. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Unfair justice

Sociedad Dueñas Limitada, the consortium managing the urban development project, received the definitive green light to begin construction: a thumbs-up from the Constitutional court, which on Apr. 29, 2022 rejected an unconstitutionality lawsuit filed in October 2019 by environmental organizations and communities in northern San Salvador.

The lawsuit was against a dubious agreement signed in 2016 between that company and Anda, which manages water in the country. The deal granted the project 240 liters of water per second – that is, about 20 million liters a day.

The consortium intends to dig eight wells in the area. Water will be extracted from the San Juan Opico aquifer, as well as from shallower groundwater from Apopa and Quezaltepeque.

“These agreements open the door to this type of illegal concessions handed over to private companies…it is a situation that is not being addressed from a comprehensive perspective that meets the needs of the people, but rather from a mercantilist perspective,” lawyer Ariela González told IPS.

She is part of the Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law (Fespad), a member of the Water Forum, which brings together some twenty civil organizations that have been fighting for fair and equitable distribution of water in the country.

González added: “It is our public institutions that legalize this dispossession of environmental assets, through these mechanisms that allow the companies to whitewash the environmental impact studies.”

The organizations and local communities argue that water is a human right, for the benefit of the community, and also insisted in the lawsuit that the aquifers are part of the subsoil, property of the State.

Therefore, if any company was to be granted any benefit from that subsoil, the concession could have to be endorsed by the legislature, which did not happen.

Sara García and Martina Vides are members of an ecofeminist collective that has been fighting for five years to prevent the construction of a large residential project in the area, Ciudad Valle El Ángel, owned by one of the most powerful families in El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The resolution handed down by the Constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court comes at a time when people have lost trust in the Constitutional court in this Central American country of 6.7 million people.

The five Constitutional court magistrates were appointed without following the regular procedure on May 1, 2021, when the new legislature was installed, controlled by lawmakers from President Nayib Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, which holds 56 out of 84 seats.

“This government continues to benefit big capital and destroy local territories,” Sara García, of the ecofeminist group Kawoc Women’s Collective and the Let’s Save the Valle El Ángel movement, which forms part of the Water Forum, told IPS.

García´s fellow activist Martina Vides added: “We want protection for the aquifers and to prevent the felling of trees.”

Both women spoke to IPS on a rainy gray afternoon on the last day of May, in the Parcelación El Ángel, where they live, in the Joya Galana canton, also in the municipality of Apopa, which is in the middle of the impact zone.

A short distance away is the river that provides water to this and other communities, which originates in the micro-watershed of the Chacalapa River. Water is supplied under a community management scheme organized by the local water board.

Vides pays six dollars a month for the water service, although she only receives running water three or four days a week.

According to official figures, in this country 96.3 percent of urban households have access to piped water, but the proportion drops to 78.4 percent in the countryside, where 10.8 percent are supplied by well water and 10.7 percent by other means.

Since the Ciudad Valle El Angel project began to be planned, environmentalists and community representatives have been protesting against it with street demonstrations and activities because it will negatively impact the area’s environment, especially the aquifers.

The struggle for water in El Salvador has been going on for a long time, with activists demanding that it be recognized as a human right, with access for the entire population, because the country is one of the hardest hit by the climate crisis, especially the so-called Dry Corridor.

For more than 10 years, environmental and social collectives have been pushing for a water law, reaching preliminary agreements with past governments. But since the populist Bukele came to power, the progress made in this direction has been undone.

In December 2021, the legislature approved a General Water Resources Law, which excluded the already pre-agreed social proposals, although it recognizes the human right to water and establishes that the water supply will not be privatized. However, this is not enforced in practice, as demonstrated by the Dueñas’ urban development project.

A vendor of a traditional ice cream in El Salvador, made with shaved ice bathed in fruit syrup, waits for customers on one of the streets of Parcelación El Ángel, in the municipality of Apopa, north of the capital. The locality is one of the epicenters where poor families have been organizing to block a residential development project, which will affect the local water supply and worsen the water shortage in the area. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Not the only one

The residential development project is neither the first nor the only one in the area.

Residential complexes of this type have already been built in that area for the upper middle class, thanks to investments made by other wealthy families in the country, such as the Poma family.

And the same type of agreements have been reached with these other companies, in which the consortiums receive an endorsement to obtain water for their projects, said González.

The same thing has happened in the surroundings of the Cordillera del Bálsamo, south of the capital, where residential projects have been developed around municipalities such as Zaragoza, close to the beaches of the Pacific Ocean.

In Valle El Ángel there is also at least one company whose main raw material is water. This is Industrias La Constancia, which owns the Coca Cola brand in the country and other brands of juices and energy drinks, located in the municipality of Nejapa.

González, the Fespad lawyer, said that there should be a moratorium in the country in order to stop, for a time, this type of investment that threatens the country’s environmental assets, especially water.

But until that happens, if it ever does, and until the water supply improves, Alex Leiva will continue to get up at 4 a.m. every other day to fill his three barrels.

“What can we do? We have no choice,” he said.

Francisca Piecho stands with her daughter-in-law Johana Cruz and her grandson outside her home that now has electricity from solar energy, in the village of Cacho de Oro, Teotepeque municipality, in the southern department of La Libertad. Hers and other rural Salvadoran families have seen their lives improve with the arrival not only of electricity but also of a reforestation program in the area. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
TEOTEPEQUE, El Salvador , May 5 2022 (IPS)

After working on the family farm, Carlos Salama comes home and plugs his cell phone into a socket via a solar-powered electrical system, a rarity in this rural village in southern El Salvador.

“Just being able to charge the phone with our own electricity, which comes from the sun, is a great thing for us,” the 29-year-old farmer who lives in Cacho de Oro, a rural settlement nestled in hills on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Teotepeque municipality in the southern department of La Libertad, told IPS.

Salama’s mother, Rosa Aquino, was also enthusiastic about the electrical system installed in her home and 15 other houses in the village in late April.

“It feels good, we never had electricity… at night it makes you happy. When I was a child we used kerosene lanterns. And then battery lamps, and now we save what we used to spend on batteries,” Aquino, 45, told IPS.

Salvadoran farmer Carlos Salama recharges his cell phone by means of a solar energy system installed on the roof of the house where he lives in the village of Cacho de Oro, in the municipality of Teotepeque. Although the system does not support appliances that consume more than 500 watts, the families now have lightbulbs to use at night, can charge their cell phones and can use small appliances. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Poverty in plain sight

Some 50 families live in Cacho de Oro, dedicated to subsistence agriculture. And although the village has had electricity from the national grid for some years now, nearly twenty families, the poorest, have not been able to afford the connection to the grid.

That was the case of the family of Francisca Piecho, a 43-year-old farmer who lives with her son and his wife and their little boy in a dirt-floor dwelling.

Piecho’s husband works in another area of the country cutting sugar cane, as he could not find work in Cacho de Oro.

The family could not afford to pay the 500 dollars it cost to connect to the national power line that had finally reached the village.

“Some families have relatives in other countries who send them remittances, but we don’t have any, and we couldn’t afford it,” Piecho told IPS, while stirring a stew on a wood stove.

Her son was not at home when IPS visited the village. But Piecho said he works in agriculture, mainly during the May to November rainy season, because in the dry season there is almost no work available.

The village of Cacho de Oro is perched on top of a hill along the Pacific Ocean in southern El Salvador, a remote impoverished area where unemployment is particularly acute during the November to May dry season, when no agricultural work is available. The privatized electricity system has not connected these villages to the national grid because it is not profitable. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In El Salvador, electricity distribution has been privatized since 1998, and many rural villages do not have electric power because they are very small and the companies do not see investing there as good business.

According to official figures, 95.2 percent of households in rural areas have access to electricity, while 2.0 percent use candles, 0.8 percent use solar panels, 0.5 percent use kerosene, and 1.4 percent use other means.

Official data also shows that the average monthly household income in urban areas is 728 dollars compared to 435 dollars in rural areas.

But now the poorest families in Cacho de Oro also have electricity, and from a clean energy source, thanks to the solar power project brought to the village by the governmental Environmental Fund of El Salvador (Fonaes), at a cost of 16,000 dollars.

Staff from the municipal government in Jicalapa, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Libertad, explain to a group of residents from the village of Izcacuyo about the solar electrification project that began in December 2021, as well as the community reforestation effort. CREDIT: Municipality of Jicalapa

Solar energy to the rescue

Solar panels were installed on the rooftops of the houses of nearly twenty families. The panel provides just enough electric power to connect a couple of light bulbs, charge a cell phone and plug in small appliances that consume less than 500 watts.

“If the appliances consume more than that, it’s not enough to turn them on,” Arturo Solano, a technician with Tecnosolar, the company that supplied the panels, told IPS.

He added that there are approximately 100 community solar energy projects in rural El Salvador, a country of 6.7 million inhabitants. About 7,500 homes have been electrified with this clean energy source.

“You have to adapt to the system and buy appliances that are compatible with the power it supplies,” he said, adding that the amount of energy provided depends on the investment made, because if you want more power, you have to install more panels.

Even so, with this very basic electricity service, the residents of Cacho de Oro are happy to at least have electric light and an outlet to charge their cell phones and stay in communication.

Before the arrival of the solar energy project, some of the families were able to connect to the national grid indirectly through neighbors who were connected. But this meant that they had to pay part of the monthly bill.

“Now we no longer pay part of the bill, which cost us five dollars. We use that money to buy some food, eggs or oil,” Francisco de la Cruz Tulen, a 30-year-old farmer who lives with his wife Milagro Menjívar, 21, and their two small children, told IPS, pleased to have electricity at no monthly cost.

In the rainy season, Tulen, like the rest, rents a small plot of land to plant the staple crops of Central America – corn and beans – to feed the family. He also works on other farms as a day laborer, to earn a little money.

But in the dry season, he leaves the village to look for work in the sugar cane fields. This work, one of the most physically demanding in agriculture, pays between six and 24 dollars a day.

In addition to the solar electrification project in the village of Cacho de Oro in southern El Salvador, reservoirs have been built to capture rainwater and irrigate fruit and timber trees planted to reforest the area and provide food, such as avocados, and keep the aquifers healthy. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Reservoirs for life

There is no potable water in Cacho de Oro. The families get their water from a spring that sometimes dries up in the dry season and at times they have to buy water in barrels brought in by truck. Each barrel costs 2.5 dollars.

“There are possibilities of getting piped water. A Japanese development cooperation project has dug a well, but we are still waiting to see,” German de la Cruz Tesorero, a resident of the village and the president of the local Communal Development Association (Adescos), an organizational system for small settlements in this Central American country, told IPS.

To maintain water sources and to provide food, the solar electrification project is also accompanied by a reforestation effort in the area. In addition, small reservoirs have been built to irrigate the trees and home gardens.

This has occurred not only in Cacho de Oro, but also in another village located downstream, called Izcacuyo, in the municipality of Jicalapa, also in the department of La Libertad.

Some families have planted vegetable gardens next to their homes in the southern Salvadoran village of Cacho de Oro, growing vegetables such as “pipián”, a highly prized local squash, to boost food production in this impoverished part of the country. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The families of Izcacuyo have their own solar electrification project, inaugurated in December 2021, with the difference that they had never received energy from the national grid.

To charge a cell phone, villagers had to go to the canton of La Perla, a 30-minute bus ride away.

The total cost of the local electrification and reforestation project was 38,000 dollars, including 30,000 provided by Fonaes, 4,000 by the municipal government and the other 4,000 from work contributed by the community, which was counted as hours of labor.

Some 5,450 fruit trees have been planted in family plots, including avocado, lemon and mango trees, as well as timber species such as madrecacao (Gliricidia sepium), which offers advantages to the habitat and soils by fixing nitrogen.

The project also provided fertilizer to ensure that the trees grew well.

The municipal government’s idea is that in three or four years, families will be harvesting avocados, mangos and lemons, and part of the production can be marketed along the coastal strip of the department of La Libertad, catering to tourists and hotels and restaurants in the area.

“They will see the benefits in a couple of years,” said William Beltrán, a technician in the Jicalapa municipal government, during a meeting with IPS in San Salvador.