More from El Salvador

Sorry it's taken so long to update the blog. Coming back from El Salvador has been a lot to process and I needed time to collect my thoughts. Thanks Amber for posting about the Election. The following are excerpts from my journal about the first two days following the election.

March 17
After taking a day to recover from all the post-election festivities, we headed off to meet with one of the FMLN diputados (Congressman), Hugo Martinez. He spoke a lot about immigration reform and wanting to work closely with the U.S. on this matter. Twenty percent of El Salvador’s economy is based on remittances sent by Salvadorians in the U.S. to family still in El Salvador, so immigration is a big issue. The new administration wants to tackle the factors pushing people to migrate, but they know this will not happen over night, so they are asking the U.S. stability for people with TPS and maybe some kind of Visa that allows Salvadorians in the U.S. with TPS to freely travel between the two countries to visit family which will strengthen families ties that are severed due to immigration.

FMLN also wants to tackle the gang issues, which are plaguing the country. ARENA wasn’t very motivated to combat the gangs because they profited from the violence. Many ARENA members own private security companies (vigilantes) and weapon companies. So they profit from the violence because more people need to hire vigilantes and carry guns for protection.

Hugo Martinez stressed that El Salvador’s new government doesn’t want to be compared to other leftist countries. They are not Communist, they just want equality and to end oppression. The new government will look at leftist countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador and note what has worked and what hasn’t worked, but ultimately will make their own decisions. The new government wants friendly relations with the U.S., but they do not want to be submissive or a puppet of the U.S. El Salvador wants to be a strong country on its own.

March 18
Today we visited the UCA. It was so good to be back on familiar grounds. Not too much had changed since I was a student there. After walking around the campus for a while, we made our way over to the UCA Chapel and Romero Center. We stop in the Chapel to say some prayers and then walked through the Romero Center looking at the pictures and revisiting the Rose Garden (a memorial to the 6 Jesuit martyrs and they’re housekeeper and her daughter). While walking through the Romero Center, we had the privilege of bumping into Dean Brackley, SJ and Jon Sobrino, SJ. Dean is very involved with the Casa program and came to El Salvador right after the 6 Jesuits were killed to help continue their mission at the UCA. Jon Sobrino was one of the UCA Jesuits during the war and would have been killed with the other 6 had he not been out of the country for a lecture. Dean welcomed us back to El Salvador and then spoke to us for a while about the elections. He then made a comment that traveling to El Salvador is like a spiritual pilgrimage. I fell like that is a beautiful way of putting what this trip to El Salvador meant to me. The country has such a strong faith based in liberation theology and so many spiritual icons like Romero, Rutilio Grande, the 4 church women, and the 6 Jesuit martyrs. Returning to El Salvador was like returning to my spiritual roots. I felt invigorated and refreshed, ready to return to the U.S. and continue working for social change and living in solidarity with the people of El Salvador.

Paz,
Stephanie