Archive for August, 2010

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On Wednesday, August 11^th, Alicia Garcia, one of the founding members of the Committee of Mothers Monseñor Romero, passed away after over thirty years of unending struggle in defense of human rights and for justice in El Salvador

After witnessing the student massacre of June 30, 1975 from the Maternity Hospital where she worked at the time, sheltering students running from the National Guard and watching bodies thrown into military trucks, never to be seen again, coupled with the disappearance of her own son, Alicia accompanied women searching for their loved ones in prisons, morgues, and mass graves. When he was named archbishop, Monseñor Romero encouraged the Comadres to form a committee to search for their loved ones, support each other, and denounce violence together. At every Sunday mass, Monseñor Romero would read a list of disappeared, tortured and killed people that the Comadres compiled as they received information and testimonies from victims and families of victims.
Because of their extensive library of documents and photographs of the death squad and military violence during the 1970s and 1980s, the Comadres offices were bombed many times. In meeting with delegations, Alicia would often share her own heart-wrenching testimony of the disappearance, torture and death of her children and her unending search for their whereabouts and sometimes, her own stories of torture at the hands of the military. Read More »

The following is a sample Letter to the Editor to raise awareness about the struggle against metallic mining in El Salvador. Please help us educate others about the threat of mining and of US corporations by sending this letter to the Editor of your local or state newspaper, posting it on your blog or facebook page, and sending it to friends and family. Feel free to edit in your own experiences in El Salvador, your own reflections, and please, when you get published, send us the link!

Dear Editor,

We are writing to express our concern about a series of violent events in El Salvador linked to US foreign and trade policy, directly involving multi-national corporations with bases in the United States. Underground, cyanide-leach gold mining operations in this tiny Central American country threaten to do severe damage by polluting streams, rendering livestock ill or sterile, and compromising the health of children and adults. Communities that would be devastated by these effects have organized in resistance to mining and the multinational corporations, and have faced the consequences.

Ongoing violence and threats towards community leaders and activists—including a local radio station and priest—culminated in three assassinations in 2009. In June, activist Marcelo Rivera was kidnapped and tortured, his body found at the bottom of a well bearing marks of a death squad assassination. A spate of killings in the days before and after Christmas left community leader Ramiro Rivera and eight-month pregnant Dora “Alicia” Sorto dead. Read More »

The vegetable garden project in El Pino, Las Mercedes is an incredible testament to the effectiveness of organizing in women’s empowerment. Before this project, there was not a women’s committee in El Pino. According to the women themselves, the communal vegetable garden has motivated and encouraged women’s organization greatly. Women in this community are working together in synch, old and young, side by side, and are seeing the fruits of their labor. There are twenty-three people in total working this plot of land, including five young men. The work is done as collectively as possible, and there is certainly no shortage.

Their seeds are sown on the side of a steep hill, that ends, hundreds of meters below, on the banks of the Suchitlan reservoir. Aside from agriculture, which puts the beans and tortillas on many families’ plates, many in El Pino scrape by with fishing.

Because it is not possible for all of the members of the committee put in the same amount of work, when the crops are harvested, people will receive an amount relative to the time they contributed. Because of the size of the group, and with larger families in this community, the women believe that the harvest will go towards mostly towards family consumption.

Here’s a snipet of our conversation:

Read More »