Ellacuria and the liberating role of philosophy

Martin-Baro and the social violence in El Salvador

This November 16th the UCA commemorates the fourteenth anniversary of the massacre that took place in its campus. This Sunday, fourteen years ago, a battalion of the bloodthirsty Salvadoran army blinded the life of the six Jesuit priests –and two of their collaborators-. They were a group of intellectuals who were committed analysts of the national reality. With their death, a considerable part of the Salvadoran intellectual legacy disappeared. With the growing importance that the scientific knowledge is gaining nowadays, the readers can imagine the dimensions of that barbaric murder and what it meant for El Salvador.

Among the eight people who were killed that fatal night of November 16th of 1989, was Ignacio Martin-Baro. This son of Spain, who adopted the Salvadoran nationality, dealt with the many issues connected with the field of social psychology. His research, in the context of the Salvadoran civil war, intended to understand the essence of this country, the motivations, the culture or simply the way to live and the way to survive of its inhabitants. That is how Martin-Baro made an effort to understand the Salvadoran reality through scientific means. At the same time, he tried to have an influence on the conception that the people had about social psychology in the most important intellectual institutions of the world.

About this last aspect, Martin-Baro would usually say: “to reduce social psychology to what the social psychologists have studied and how they have studied means to accept that a science is defined by those who have organized the economic and the social power in order to determine the problems that have to be studied and the way to resolve them. In the present case, it is well known that the present problems that are being treated by the social psychology texts are fundamentally the problems that the circles of power of the North American society have presented to their academics, and the answers that the North American social psychologists have provided in order to gain a solid position inside the scientific world of the United States. These questions are clearly logical in the context of this social system and in this structure of knowledge. However, the dimensions and the sense of the questions are determined by the interests of the class that has the power to approach them. We do not have to look for the problem inside the internal logic of the answer, but inside the sense of the question; what is important is to know if the structure is historically acceptable, and not if the solution is valid inside the structure”.

Through this line of thought, Martin-Baro defended a liberating social psychology connected with liberation movement of the Latin American countries, and this was a very important issue during his time. Why does psychology has to be liberated? Luis de la Corte Ibañez responds: “We have to consider, first of all, the kind of freedom that we have, because only if the social scientists acknowledge the close relation that connects freedom with rights, they will count with the criterion to verify if the human rights are being respected or not in a specific society, in the precise moment”.

On the other hand, in reference to the rigorous conception of the Salvadoran reality, the analysis of violence was one of his favorite subjects. The irony of history took Martin-Baro to another life because of the irrationality of the State’s intimidating violence. The violence that he had analyzed with such a masterful depth and showing its terrible effects over those who commit violent acts, those who suffer them, and those who are the distant spectators. Those who use repression, through a denial mechanism that is a typical feature of a cognitive dissonance (the collision produced by the fact that a person is a bloodthirsty repressor who at the same time rises the flags of peace and the flags of the human rights), tend to devaluate their victims. Those who are either psychologically or physically repressed, react aggressively in the second case, absorbing many times the ideological and the ethical criteria of the authority. The observers, instead, learn and feel stimulated to resolve their own problems in a similar way.

Martin-Baro concluded that “the efficiency that the repressive violence has to neutralize certain actions is more intense to the repressed than to the spectator: mainly because of its destructive effects. However, politically speaking, it is more interesting to see the effects of the repression in the spectators, although it is simply because there are more spectators than there are repressed people. If the repressive violence does not inhibit the spectators, the effects can be counterproductive for the objectives of the repressor”.

Martin-Baro also analyzed the effects of violence on mental health. In a conception that he understood as a positive and a complete appreciation of the mental health, he refused to consider it as the problem of an isolated individual. “That would be a poor conception of the human being, it would be to reduce people to individual organisms, and understand its actions based on individual characteristics and features, and not as historical beings whose existence is constructed through the webs of the social relations”.

As long as a fair relation is established between the mental health and the social lives of the individuals, it is necessary to pay close attention to the specific relations and the environments in which people interact. “This perspective allows us to see the full impact that the events that substantially affect the human relations can have over the human mental health, such as the natural catastrophes, the social or the economic crisis, and wars. Among these events, it is a war what can cause the most profound effects because it is both a social and an economic crisis and a catastrophe, and also because it is irrational and it goes against the human rights”.

In addition, wars usually have a considerable number of consequences in the societies that have suffered such problems. “We have to think about those consequences that affect the mental health and that only reveal themselves in the long term. Many people know, for example, that the so called “syndrome of the refugee” has a first period of incubation, in which the person expresses an intense degree of disorders. However, it is during this period when a person begins to rebuild his or her life and begins to recover a certain level of normality when the violent experience actually sends the bill”. Nevertheless, the main concern of Martin-Baro was the children who were born during the war. He said that the adults had to worry and “not build their personality through violence, irrationality, and lies”.

The present of Martin-Baro
Looking back, eleven years after the Peace Accords were signed, the least that can be said is that violence still rules in El Salvador. In this post-war period, one of the main problems that the country faces is the vertiginous growth of social violence. El Salvador is considered as one of the most violent countries of Latin America, next to Colombia, which is in the middle of a civil war. There are enough elements that allow us to say that the adults were not able to take care of the mental health of the children who were born during the conflict. The high levels of social violence are there to remind us about this collective failure. What is even worse is that it can be said that violence is now present inside of all the social tissue. Violence has become the quintessential way to resolve the social conflicts (in some cases it is also used to resolve the political frustrations of the post-war), at the same time that it is affecting the people’s coexistence in an intolerable manner.

The proliferation of the gangs and the violence that they create are both only a small sample of how the society has failed to take care of the children who were born during the war, as Martin-Baro claimed. Some people think that approximately 30,000 people are members of gangs nationwide. These young individuals would be responsible (or victims) for a significant portion of the violent crimes that are committed every day in the country. Being young has become a dangerous subject in El Salvador. The probabilities of losing your life in a premature way, if compared with other segments of the population, grow significantly.

In addition, being young could be the reason for many social stigmas. Most of the population is not very fond of young people. Many Salvadorans easily connect youth with violence. Santacruz, in his book Barrio Adentro (Inside the neighborhood), says that “This tag has an influence on the social construction of what being young means, because it leads to unavoidably overlap youth and delinquency, this means that the social figure of youth is sometimes condemned”.

Nowadays, the social solidarity and the responsibility of the adults, that Martin-Baro spoke about, is turning into a rejection of the society’s violent sons. People have not only forgotten about their responsibility as adults in a violent context, but also several unscrupulous politicians have turned “gang hunting” into the most important feature of their electoral popularity. Recently, after an internal document of ARENA found its way into the press, it was published that “the ‘Iron Fist’ initiative and the support of 95% of the voters mean that there is an immediate opportunity to associate the party with a winning issue. The enormous support for this initiative will allow the party to occupy a better position among the preferences of the voters”.

The Salvadoran society has forgotten its responsibilities with its lost sons. Once again we can use the contribution of Martin-Baro to analyze this tendency to forget and the lie that characterizes this society and its effects over the victims of violence. The solution to the violence that troubles the Salvadoran society cannot overlook the humanity of the delinquents (especially if we are talking about young people who grew beneath the shadow of the social exclusion and the maelstrom of violence that surrounded them in the last decade). Because of the contribution made by Martin-Baro, it is necessary to examine the group of social actions –it would be ridiculous to forget the individual responsibilities- that create and promote violence as a personal interaction mechanism.

Humanism and economy: a tribute to Francisco Javier Ibisate

While the assassination of the Central American University’s martyrs is commemorated, the Central American University (UCA, in Spanish) takes the opportunity to pay tribute to the life and the work of those who, along with the martyrs, dedicated themselves (and still do) to the search for both the truth and justice. One of the figures that has made an important and a continuous effort in this field is Father Javier Ibisate, a Jesuit priest who, as a person, as a religious man, and as an Economics professor, is an example for those who have had the privilege to know him and learn from his teachings.

In the academic field, Father Ibisate has played a constant and a productive role. He starts to work in the Central American University in 1966, and during his 37 years of experience, he has lived and analyzed the problems of El Salvador for the last four decades. That experience has faced many challenges.

The analysis of the country’s reality has been a problematic and a dangerous mission. The reality of El Salvador has been shaped by political, economic, and social earthquakes that exploded with the brutality of a war, during the eighties. For the academic world in general, this context amputated the free reproduction of the intellectual thoughts, and El Salvador began to live in the dark ages, where telling the truth would be to put one’s life at risk. However, by examining the immensity of Father Ibisate’s economic thought, it becomes evident that not even this harsh reality diminished his constant and his systematic academic contribution, impregnated with a humanistic and a critical vision, a compromise with the reality of the poor.

The sensibility and the academic lucidity of Father Ibisate has been so outstanding that the UCA granted him with a Honoris Causa Doctorate in Economic and Social Sciences, on November 13th of 2001, for his 35 years of work in the Central American University. In this case, it is necessary to wonder what is the line of the economic thought that Father Ibisate has developed over the years.

With his permanent analysis of the economic reality, he has unmasked the actual objectives and the weak influence of the economic policies implemented by the different governments. In his own words, “the most important problem is that the governments have hidden the most important problem: the social and the economic differences of this country”. For Father Ibisate, ever since he started living and working in El Salvador, the economic problems of this country have not been resolved and they have caused a considerable number of economic diseases. This situation has increased the poverty level, and it has affected the structural disorientation of the economic policies.

The passive attitude of the population towards the economic and the social situation of the country has affected the agricultural sector. During the last decades, this sector has been seen only as “an income generator”. The agricultural sector has been a key factor of the country’s economy; however, no one took the time to examine if this sector created qualified workers, steady jobs, and decent salaries.

For Ibisate, to place the Salvadoran economy at the center of the agricultural sector made us spent decades with an economy not only based in the primary sector, but also in a precarious condition. That is why a considerable part of the Salvadoran population that worked in that sector never improved their life standards, the labor was not qualified, and it did not develop competitive skills; the poverty levels were not reduced, and the sector was not prepared to respond to the major challenges.

According to Ibisate’s approach, this is an example of the mistakes caused by the economic policies, which are the result of a lack of planning and the result of overlooking the sustainable human development of the population. Because of the country’s critical situation, this vision should be the axis of all of the economic policies. However, the absence of a Ministry of Planning, and to ignore the fundamental aspects of both the Nation’s Plan and the development projects designed by several non-governmental organizations are aspects that reveal the short-term perspectives and the lack of vision of the present governments, who do not seem to be concerned about the development of the country.

Therefore, the present economic policies tend to become sterile in the long term and they suffer from an economic myopia. Neoliberalism has negatively affected this situation of economic injustice, giving too much importance to commercial policies such as the free trade agreements, and has not analyzed its possible impact in the Salvadoran population from a long-term perspective. The stagnation and the abandonment of the agricultural sector does not seem to be important, and those in charge rather liberalize this sector without helping it to support the demands of competing with nations such as the United States.

For Ibisate, this difficult problem is the result of a culture that has traditionally excluded the poor from the society and from the economy. This situation has turned worse over the last 20 years. During the eighties, the civil war tore the society apart and destroyed the productive axis of the economy. During the nineties, the implementation of an economic model based on the statutes of the Consensus of Washington intensified the poverty and the marginality of the traditionally excluded sectors. Presently, it seems that the conjugation of the war’s legacy and the wrong economic policies have intensified the disintegration of the social tissue and the decreasing economic activity. In other words, the social problems, according to Father Ibisate, have to be analyzed through a couple of important dimensions: both the social and the political areas, and the economic field.

In this context, the solution to the most important problems of the society is connected with the reconstruction of the social tissue. This structure has been historically affected by the enormous differences of wealth and income. “Now –Ibisate says- the first challenge is the reorganization of the social tissue, in order to end with the general discontent, with the aggressive environment; with the insecurity, the apathy, and the lack of trust in the public institutions; with the despair, and the immigration phenomenon”. As the main element of the reconstruction of that social tissue, he considers that it is necessary to look for a national consensus about the direction that the country must follow. In other words, the nation has to look for a project that makes the society feel part of the community. In order to create a better society, we cannot continue living with the project of others. A project that a minority has built, and that it keeps building from several private institutions.

In addition to the reconstruction of the social tissue, it is necessary to actually reactivate the economy and the productive apparatus. It is crucial that the productive apparatus grows and that it develops itself in a sustainable manner. The economic sectors of the country have to be articulated in order that they can grow harmoniously. The economy is not actually growing if only the profitability rates of the financial sector are high, while other sectors (the manufacturing sector and the agricultural one, for example) are going through a severe crisis.

It is also necessary that the different actors of the society play an active role researching and formulating scientific projects in order to look for the truth. In this sense, according to Ibisate, there are many investigations about the economy and many proposals that have been made by the civil society and by international analysts. They have presented new studies and new projects to examine the future of the country. Unfortunately, the State does not seem to think that these contributions are important. According to Father Ibisate, it is necessary to look for a political consensus and an economic development based on all of the technical and the economic proposals that have been designed by the non-governmental organizations and that have been overlooked by the State.

From an economic perspective, in the debate between the role of the State and the market, another fundamental component of the social activity has been overlooked: the civil society. It is necessary that both elements play an important role inside the economic performance. According to Ibisate “The State and the market need each other and they complement each other for the good performance of the economy. Both institutions present problems and potentialities”. When the role of both the State and the market is redefined in the economic field, it is important to make the civilian society participate in an active manner. For Ibisate, we can no longer continue with a sterile debate about which one of these elements should be more important than the other. It is time to include the civil society into the decision making process about the key aspects of the national affairs, and try to look for the basic consensus of all of the social actors.

In order to do this, it is necessary to develop a new institutional style in El Salvador. An institutional structure able to articulate a new vision for the country. The performance of the State’s institutions and the civil society, in a coherent and an articulated fashion, will create better social and economic policies to benefit the Salvadorans in both the mid and the long-term.