This is the first in a series of three articles to be written about El Salvador. Human rights, the country’s development, history and foreign policy will be discussed.
The media, to a large extent, dictates what people talk about, but does it really cover what’s important?
Sometimes, the media is so focused on churning out fresh, breaking, brand-new stories that it fails to follow up and inform the public of what is happening (and changing) in other countries. Sometimes, it seems the media is no longer interested in informing people as much as it is concerned in engaging them with a compelling story, regardless of the story’s significance.
‘It’s like we’re gerbils in a cage; we have to be constantly entertained,’ Noah Bullock of the El Salvador Project, a study of poverty and development in El Salvador, said.
El Salvador is no longer newsworthy as far as the media is concerned. Instead, our reporters are focused on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, but geographically, Houston is closer to El Salvador than Seattle.
‘But what you see every day,’ said Bullock, ‘is that it’s foreign.’
We know little about the country even though it is so closely tied to America. The media’s failure to acknowledge it doesn’t negate the importance of El Salvador’s story.
The El Salvador Project is involved in prolonging relationships with Salvadoran people. Rather than having a straightforward mission trip, the project spends a considerable amount of time with the people.
‘We don’t want to be in and out,’ Bullock said. ‘We want to stay.’
Salvadorans are a people with a history of struggles. In March, the country saw its first legitimate change of power. The people elected an opposition party member president for the first time in the country’s history. The elections, while peaceful, took two attempts to reach success.
There may not be any documentation of corruption, but the pictures of last week’s mudslide, which killed close to 200 people, show that the pipes and drains were ineffective. El Salvador is the second most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere; what doesn’t absorb simply runs.
But Salvadorans have the mindset that they are in charge of their own realities and can change their destinies. So, with no place to live, no homes and no money, they organize, protest and eventually get things done. The mindset of El Salvadorians is why they take land, build and produce on it and make it their own, Bullock said.
Statistically, El Salvador is a middle-income country, but how is the average Joe living?The El Salvador Project intends to find out.
‘We’re beyond statistical analysis,’ Bullock said.
Regardless of the statistics, this is not how people live. El Salvador’s economy is on the U.S. dollar, with about 25 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product based on remittances from U.S. immigrants sent back to their families. The Salvadoran government isn’t alleviating poverty; Salvadorans mopping floors and cutting grass in U.S. are doing that.
Still, why are so many Salvadorans in the U.S.? Why do they keep coming here when we keep cracking down on illegal immigration?
What people don’t seem to understand about Central America and Latin America is that the refugee camps for the people of those countries are places such as Houston, Miami, Los Angeles and San Diego. This is why immigrants keep coming to our borders. We can debate foreign policy and scream all day about illegal immigrants, but until we address the reasons why they come to our door, nothing will change.
‘In El Salvador, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you’re subject to social, political and economic marginalization,’ Bullock said. ‘What we do concerning foreign policy is the least democratic aspect of our country. It’s like we say, ‘Here’s the death count. We’re out.”
Though the Salvadoran Constitution no longer permits the death penalty, gangs run many local territories and dictate the law, regardless of the police and politicians. So, to what degree has life truly been secured?
When things go bad, people either take advantage of the situation or play along to keep themselves and their families safe. If someone threatens your parents, you can either join a gang for protection or attempt to emigrate, neither of which is a safe option.
Bullock is writing a book, That a More Humane World Might Be, about how the above scenarios affect people’s lives.
So what can we do?
‘Make yourself responsible for your reality,’ Bullock said. ‘We draw a line that we’re first world and they’re third world, but the systems that exist in El Salvador are our own. We can’t say first world and third world because there is only one world.’
There is an oxymoronic separation between what happens here and what happens elsewhere in the world, but all of it affects us, especially in a case such as El Salvador, which is tied to the U.S. in many ways.
There are signs of a duality in El Salvador progressing (new highways, energy plants and more schools) while being intolerable (high infant mortality rates, poverty and the sheer number of gangs).
The Salvadoran government claims that the country is developing, but what of the mudslides? On top of the degree of family fragmentation, there is a social vacuity, a hole in society that is indicative of how the majority of the world lives: in violence and poverty.
The El Salvador Project is a multimedia project, the end result of which will be That a More Humane World Might Be, which will be published around September of 2010.
‘El Salvador is awesome,’ Bullock said. These realities are the norm. ‘They may sound like horror to us, but it’s all they know. And in a lot of ways, they are happy.’
I asked Bullock if there was any way that Houston – specifically students and young people – could help the cause, and he told me to just spread the word. Without knowing, we can have no efficacy. And now you know.
Matthew Keever is a communication junior and may be reached at [email protected]
