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El Salvador & Teosinte Today |
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Click the following links for a four-part series of profiles of villagers published in the Arlington Advocate in August, 2008. On February 14, 1992, the Salvadoran Peace Accords were signed in Chapultepec, Mexico. However, true peace and security have not come to El Salvador. Salvadorans continue to struggle with a poverty rate of over 50%, political corruption, urban violence, an exodus of youth to the United States for employment, and the legacy of wartime violence that has profoundly touched every family. El Salvador remains a divided country with half of the population living below the poverty line, and an extreme concentration of wealth, media ownership and political power in a small percentage of the population. Due to the lack of job opportunities, more than a quarter of the Salvadoran population has emigrated to the United States, many without documentation. Money sent back to El Salvador by Salvadoran workers in the United States, called “remesas,” constitutes 17% of El Salvador’s gross net product – the single largest source of revenue. This is why it is said that El Salvador’s chief export is people. El Salvador’s ruling party, since its formation at the time of the civil war, has been the ARENA party. The FMLN has become an official political party, and has won mayoral elections in several parts of the country. Many believe that the FMLN presidential candidate’s chances were undermined prior to the last election when the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador intimated that an FMLN victory would cause the U.S. to look more carefully at illegal immigration to the U.S. from El Salvador. Salvadoran youth who were imprisoned in Los Angeles for working illegally in the U.S. or petty crimes became involved in international gangs funneling drugs from Colombia. Upon deportation, these young people brought the gangs back to their country, where they found ready access to weapons and relentless unemployment and poverty. El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador now has one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere, due to gang warfare and other street violence. The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) The Central America Free Trade Agreement, renamed DR-CAFTA after the Dominican Republic joined it, was approved by the U.S. government in August, 2005. El Salvador was the first Central American country to ratify it. Because it was strongly opposed by poor Salvadorans, it was passed via what Salvadorans call a “middle-of-the-night decision,” at 3:00 AM on the last day of the legislative session. The president of the Salvadoran congress stated to reporters that neither he nor any other member of congress had actually read the legislation. According to Dr. Raul Moreno, Professor of Economics at the University of El Salvador, DR-CAFTA has negatively affected most of the Salvadoran population. For example, DR-CAFTA obligates El Salvador to give U.S. agricultural producers the same treatment as its domestic producers. However, the U.S. government subsidizes its producers. Thus, in its first year of implementation, U.S. rice imports (heavily subsidized by the U.S.) bankrupted Salvadoran rice production. Teosinte Today Today Teosinte is a village of approximately 280 people located in the mountainous region of northern El Salvador, in the province of Chalatenango. Like those who live in other repopulated villages, the people of Teosinte are mostly subsistence farmers. Teosinte is remote, with little infrastructure and few employment opportunities. However, its remoteness also protects it from the urban violence found in the capital San Salvador. The village is run by democratically-elected town council, the directiva. There is a health clinic, which was donated by a visiting Belgian physician and which boasts Teosinte’s only flush toilet. The lay midwife, María Elena Alas, has birthed all the babies in the village and surrounding area since the repopulation, achieving zero infant and maternal mortality. The town school has two dedicated teachers, both of whom became self-taught teachers during the war, but now have completed teaching degrees. Like many of their peers in other repopulated villages, they were schoolchildren of 14, 15, or 16 years old when they began teaching, and attended classes themselves in the morning and teaching younger children in the afternoon. As Teosinte does not have a high school, students who wish to graduate high school must continue their studies in one of the neighbor communities of Tejutla or San Francisco Morazán. These students must find the means to pay for tuition, uniforms, school supplies, and transportation. The Arlington-Teosinte Sister City Project is currently raising funds to provide Teosinte students with scholarships so that they can attend high school and university. Teosinte is very proud that two of its young people have recently graduated from the university, one as a lawyer and the other a nurse. |
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Second grade school children in Teocsinte |