Florentino Menjívar (left), his wife María Dolores Gómez, and Víctor Manuel Escalante at the foot of a mural showing prominent figures from El Salvador’s civil war, in Dimas Rodríguez, a settlement of former insurgents in the town of El Paisnal, which is tapping into “guerrilla tourism”. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
EL PAISNAL, El Salvador , Feb 10 2015 (IPS)

The memory of a priest killed shortly before civil war broke out in El Salvador is so alive in this small town that it is now the main attraction in a community tourist initiative aimed at providing employment and injecting money into the local economy.

The Historical Memory Tourist Route is the name of the project in Paisnal, 36 km north of San Salvador. The initiative revolves around Rutilio Grande, a locally born Jesuit priest who was killed by government forces in March 1977, before the start of the 1980-1992 civil war.

“Father Rutilio taught people about liberation and commitment to the needy, and that’s why they killed him,” said 62-year-old María Dolores Gómez who, before she joined the guerrillas in 1980, was a catechist and met the priest. Now she forms part of the El Paisnal Municipal Tourism Committee.

The tourism project, whose first stage begins in March, is part of a growing trend in this formerly war-torn Central American country to draw visitors interested in the political and historical context of the armed conflict and the prewar period. And in the case of this town in particular, in the life of the famous Jesuit priest.

Rutilio Grande was the first priest killed in El Salvador in the context of the 12-year civil war, which left over 70,000 people – mainly civilians – dead and 8,000 disappeared before the 1992 peace agreement put an end to it.

After decades of electoral fraud by the military and the local elites, opponents of the system took up arms and formed insurgent groups to push the military regimes out of power and usher in socialism.

Grande, accompanied by Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16, was driving near the town of El Paisnal on Mar. 12, 1977 when the three of them came under machine gun fire and were killed. They are buried in the village churchyard, which is already a pilgrimage spot for visitors from within and outside the country and will be an obligatory stop on the new tourist route.

Historians and theologians say that after Grande’s murder, the conservative views of the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, radically changed in favour of the poor.

Romero himself was assassinated three years later, in March 1980, while saying mass in a small chapel in San Salvador.

The Truth Commission set up by the United Nations after the end of the conflict to investigate the human rights violations blamed army Major Roberto D’Aubuisson for planning the assassination.

D’Aubuisson was the founder of the far-right Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA), which governed El Salvador from 1989 to 2009, when the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) came to power. The former guerrilla group won the national elections a second time in March 2014.

Before and during the war, a segment of the Catholic Church in El Salvador espoused liberation theology, which promoted the fight against poverty and broke with the church’s traditional alliance with those in power.

The new tourist route starts at a place known as Las Tres Cruces (the three crosses), halfway between El Paisnal and the neighbouring village of Aguilares, where a small monument marks the spot where the priest and the other two men were killed.

“We have delegations of foreign and local visitors who come to commemorate the murder of Father Grande, and the tourist project aims to create the infrastructure needed to give them a better reception,” town councilor Alexander Torres told IPS.

He explained that the El Paisnal local government is going to invest 350,000 dollars in establishing basic infrastructure catering to tourists, such as rural hostels and small restaurants, which will be run by local residents and people from nearby villages.

“The good thing is that the community is actively participating,” 62-year-old former insurgent Florentino Menjívar, María Dolores Gómez’s husband, told IPS.

“This was conceived of to generate possibilities of growth for our local communities,” he added.

The couple lives in Comunidad Dimas Rodríguez, a settlement of former guerrillas founded in December 1992 near El Paisnal after the demobilisation of the armed groups.

The community, which forms part of the tourist route, was named Dimas Rodríguez in honour of one of the commanders who led the guerrillas in this area, members of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), one of the five armed groups that made up the FMLN.

Every Dec. 15, the date of the founding of the community, the local residents hold a guerrilla military parade to remember their commander, who was killed in combat in 1989, and to keep alive the history of the settlement. The event is attended by local and foreign tourists.

In the last few years, government officials who used to live in the settlement of former guerrillas have also attended the parade.

“The country’s current vice president led the forces here, when we were demobilising,” said Víctor Escalante, referring to Vice President Oscar Ortiz.

Since June 2014 the president of El Salvador is another former guerrilla, Salvador Sánchez Cerén.

There are plans to open a museum, where visitors will be able to see the original weapons used by the insurgents, which were surrendered and rendered useless after the peace deal was reached. And a rebel camp will be recreated in a forested area near the town.

“I still have my backpack, and other people have radios and other artifacts from the war, and all of us together can set up the museum,” said Escalante, 45.

The local residents are organising to provide services to tourists, and there are groups working in the areas of food, crafts and other activities tied to the new initiative.

Employment is hard to come by in El Paisnal, a town of 4,500, where most of the locals are dedicated to agriculture and up to now there have been few opportunities for work in other areas.

The route also includes an ecotourism component, with visits to the El Chino hill, seven km from El Paisnal, and to Conacastera, a beach on the Lempa river.

The tour will also take the visitors to the San Carlos Cooperative, which is getting ready to host tourists who want an up-close look at the cooperative’s agricultural production processes.

Similar initiatives have been developed in other parts of the country over the last few years.

The town of Perquín in the eastern department or province of Morazán is the best-known for its war-tourism projects. In the local museum, visitors can learn about the civil war and see war memorabilia like guns, artillery pieces and even helicopters shot down by the guerrillas.

And in some rural areas, tourists can visit mountain caves and other bunkers used by the guerrillas as hideouts or even field hospitals.

In this country of 6.7 million people, Central America’s smallest, the Tourism Ministry reported that the tourism industry brought in 650 million dollars in the first half of 2014 – a 33 percent increase with respect to the same period in 2013.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in the prison of Ciudad Barrios, in the Salvadoran department of San Miguel, in 2012. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jan 15 2015 (IPS)

The upcoming municipal and legislative elections in March and the hiring of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a kind of anti-crime tzar are not the best equation for bringing down El Salvador’s high murder rate, analysts say.

Hopes that a national council set up by the government to tackle the problem of soaring crime will bring short-term results are waning because the focus on reducing the homicide rate has been overshadowed by the interest in gaining votes, said experts consulted by IPS.

“I am afraid that they are acting more as a result of the pressure generated by the need to win elections than in response to the country’s real need to find a solution to its crime problem,” said Raúl Mijango, one of the two mediators of the truce between gangs in place since March 2012.

On Mar. 1, Salvadorans will go to the polls to elect the 84 members of the country’s single-chamber legislature, as well as the mayors of its 262 municipalities.

In September, the government of left-wing President Salvador Sánchez Cerén created a National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence, as an innovative response to the soaring crime rates, which have mainly been driven up by the gangs.“What Giuliani did in New York is a kind of gringo-style ‘manudurismo' [iron fist-ism], and in El Salvador we shouldn’t be reviving failed initiatives; we need new experiences.” -- Jeannette Aguilar

The main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio 18, have an estimated 60,000 young members in El Salvador’s cities.

A total of 3,912 homicides were committed in 2014 in this impoverished Central American country of 6.2 million people – a 57 percent increase from the previous year, after a significant drop in 2012 and 2013 brought about by the truce between gangs.

The surge in the murder rate meant El Salvador returned to its earlier status as one of the world’s most violent countries, with 63 homicides per 100,000 population, compared to a global average homicide rate of 6.2 per 100,000 population in 2012, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In March 2012, the main gangs agreed a truce which significantly reduced the number of murders for 15 months. In 2012 the homicide rate fell to 41 per 100,000 inhabitants. But the measure ran up against resistance from a society deeply wounded by the gangs, known here as “maras”.

The truce, which in practice has fallen apart, had the backing of the government of former president Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), which saw it as a mechanism to bring down the homicide rate, but never publicly expressed its actual involvement or support. It preferred instead to say it merely helped “facilitate” the agreement, by allowing imprisoned gang leaders to communicate with their deputies outside of prison.

The need for frank analyses of El Salvador’s problems and decisions to address them have been undermined by near continuous election campaigns, in a country which goes to the polls to vote every three years or less.

Presidential elections, which are held every five years, took place in 2014, and legislative and municipal elections are held every three years.

On Jan. 5, Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander during the 1980-1992 civil war, foreclosed any possibility of the gangs participating in any way in the debates in the new National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence.

Members of the National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence during a meeting in the presidential house in El Salvador. President Salvador Sánchez Cerén is sitting in the middle. Credit: Government of El Salvador

Mijango told IPS that the position taken by the president and his party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) – a former guerrilla group – to reject any participation by the gangs in the Council is purely motivated by electoral concerns, as the majority of the population is furiously opposed to the gangs, according to opinion polls.

To demonstrate that the new position responds to electoral interests, Mijango pointed out that Sánchez Cerén was vice president under Funes and that the FMLN is the party that “facilitated” the truce.

The National Council is made up of a wide range of academic, religious, citizen, business and international cooperation institutions.

The hope is that with input from the different actors, a consensus will be reached around proposals for tackling the country’s violent crime problem.

“In general, the Council is an important platform and will give a boost to national and local programmes and policies,” said Jeannette Aguilar, director of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University Public Opinion Institute.

But Aguilar also insinuated in her dialogue with IPS that she had doubts that the National Council would work, given the failure of similar previous attempts to reach a consensus in other areas, such as the economy.

She cited the case of the Economic and Social Council, made up of trade unionists, members of the business community, political parties and civil society organisations, which failed in its aim to hammer out agreements between labour and business.

It is widely recognised that a large part of the country’s homicides are the result of turf wars between gangs.

The National Council’s Technical Secretariat includes representatives of the United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation of American States and the European Union.

On Jan. 16, the 23rd anniversary of the peace agreement that put an end to 12 years of armed conflict in 1992, the government will announce the first measures arising from the proposals set forth in the National Council.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will be visiting the country at the time to support the government’s anti-crime efforts.

The possibility of reaching agreements in this area has also been undermined by the irritation among some segments of society over the presence of former NY mayor Giuliani, who was hired by the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP), a powerful business group that also forms part of the National Council.

Giuliani is credited for the major drop in crime in New York City while he was mayor from 1994 to 2001. His team is set to arrive in the Salvadoran capital in the next two weeks.

ANEP is close to the right-wing National Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed the country from 1989 to 2009, when the FMLN first won the presidency.

The decision to hire Giuliani to make recommendations to the government in the context of the National Council has triggered controversy.

“What Giuliani did in New York is a kind of gringo-style ‘manudurismo’ [iron fist-ism], and in El Salvador we shouldn’t be reviving failed initiatives; we need new experiences,” Aguilar said.

“Mano dura” is the description of the “zero tolerance” policies against crime adopted by the ARENA governments during their two decades in office, based exclusively on repression. The policies were not successful.

Luis Cardenal, who belongs to one of ANEP’s member organisations, told the local media on Jan. 6 that if the government did not accept the proposals set forth by Giuliani and his team, it would be an indication that “it’s hiding something,” with its National Council initiative.

“ANEP’s stance is blackmail, pure and simple,” Aguilar said.

For his part, Mijango said the business community plans to use Giuliani to boycott the work of the National Council. With the large media outlets on its side, ANEP will try to ensure that media coverage is only given to the former mayor, in order to delegitimise the work of the National Council and the government, with the aim of hurting the FMLN’s performance in the elections.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Representatives of the Network for the Right to Communication gathered at the Constitution Monument in El Salvador’s capital city to demand a complete end to auctions of television and radio frequencies. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jun 26 2014 (IPS)

Pressure from social organisations has temporarily halted concessions of television broadcasting frequencies in El Salvador, a country where the struggle for spectrum ownership has political and ideological overtones, as well as economic ones.

“We have stopped the auctions, but it is only a partial victory because no definitive resolution has been taken,” Oscar Beltrán, the head of Radio Victoria, a community radio station in the small town of Victoria, in the central province of Cabañas, told IPS.

Beltrán was referring to the May 16 Supreme Court ruling that temporarily suspended the auction process begun by the Superintendencia General de Electricidad y Telecomunicationes (SIGET), the state electricity and telecoms regulator.

On May 5, SIGET invited companies and individuals to bid for six national open television channels, numbers 7, 13, 14, 16, 18 and 20. The date when the Supreme Court will issue its final ruling is unknown.

The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court partially accepted an appeal on the grounds of unconstitutionality brought by several organisations that had previously challenged six articles of the Telecommunications Law in August 2012.

These articles establish auctions as the sole mechanism for granting radio or television frequencies.

This part of the 1997 Telecommunications Law was contested by several community radio organisations, lawyers’ and journalists’ groups, which later formed the Network for the Right to Communication (ReDCo).

The ReDCo network is pressing the Supreme Court to issue a definitive finding that the six articles in the law are unconstitutional.

The network argues that auctions do not allow sectors like community radios to compete on equal terms for frequencies, as concessions are won by bids from powerful economic groups.

Blocking access for other sectors to the frequency spectrum by means other than auctions violates the constitutional principles of equality under the law and freedom of expression, among others, the network’s representatives say.

“The channels and frequencies that SIGET intends to grant to the highest bidder should be used to promote more public and community media,” activist Leonel Herrera, the head of the Association of Participatory Radios and Programmes of El Salvador (ARPAS), one of ReDCo’s founding organisations, told IPS.

Since 2013 the network has been lobbying for two bills, one on community media and the other on public media, which seek to democratise the country’s communications, a goal that entails reforming the mechanism for granting radio and television concessions.

According to SIGET, in this small Central American country of only 20,000 square kilometres and 6.2 million people, there are 51 free and subscription television channels. Four of the main ones are in the hands of the private Telecorporación Salvadoreña (TCS).

There are also 210 commercial radio stations, as well as 18 community radios that all share a single frequency modulation, 92.1 FM, which they have to divide between them to broadcast simultaneously.

SIGET planned the auction of the six television channels in response to a request by Autoconsa, an electronics company. Expressions of interest were subsequently received from the companies Tecnovisión and Movi, and from the individuals José Saúl Galdámez Ábrego, Luis Alonso Avela and Henri Milton Morales.

It is common in El Salvador for frequencies, especially for radio stations, to be bought by front men, who lend their names to the concessions on behalf of powerful media groups that want to make use of them or fend off competition.

The ruse is used by large communications consortia to avoid being accused of excessive concentration of media ownership.

The auction process was suspect from the outset, because it followed immediately on the Mar. 31 departure of former SIGET head Luis Méndez. It was never clarified whether he resigned or was fired.

Then Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, whose term of office ended on Jun. 1, appointed Ástor Escalante, a lawyer, to the top post at SIGET for the last two months of his term.

The new head of SIGET immediately opened the auction process, alleging that he was obliged to do so by law if a request was made. IPS tried without success to interview executives at Autoconsa, the requesting company.

Escalante did not say why he disregarded his predecessor’s resolution of September 2012, suspending new concessions of frequencies until the country’s frequency spectrum is digitised in 2018.

At the request of the social organisations, attorney general Luis Martínez opened an investigation into Escalante’s action.

“I don’t know what there is for the attorney general to investigate, since no irregularity has been committed,” Escalante told IPS.

The attorney general might also wish to investigate what the former superintendent has done with Channel 37, which used to belong to Francisco Gavidia University and according to the Salvadoran digital newspaper Diario 1 has been sold to Mexican communications magnate Ángel González.

González owns a multi-million dollar empire of 30 television broadcasters and 80 radio stations in Latin America. He has television channels and radio stations in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay as well as Mexico, according to several sources.

Escalante also changed the UHF channel 37 to VHF channel 11, improving its quality and range. IPS could not confirm whether the channel is already being operated by González’s group, as claimed.

The irruption of González, nicknamed “the Phantom” because of the secrecy of his operations, on to the Salvadoran market would worry the country’s traditional media groups, because the Mexican entrepreneur is expected to have allies among the ruling leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which has been in power since 2009.

According to Diario 1, the FMLN is keen to use the Mexican group to break the stranglehold of the right on the country’s media. The rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed the country from 1989 to 2009, has the backing of the mass media.

Spokespersons for the FMLN and the government of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who took office Jun. 1, declined to comment on the issue to IPS.

Activists have also asked the attorney general to investigate instances of frequencies being granted in the past which they claim did not follow legal procedures.

For example, in March 2009, at the end of the last ARENA government, Luis Francisco Pinto, a lawyer, obtained eight television frequencies under shady circumstances, paying over 300,000 dollars for them. They are still not in use, in spite of the fact that according to law, all concessions that remain unused after one year are revoked.

“It is worrying that SIGET’s actions have not been entirely transparent,” José Luis Benítez, the president of the El Salvador Journalists’ Association, told IPS.