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The
victims and the victimizers in the Salvadoran Neoliberal model
The Salvadoran soldier Natividad
Mendez Ramos was, at 19, the first Latin American victim in the senseless
war fought in Iraq. El Salvador sent troops to that Arabian country as part
of its dependency on the economy and the politics of the United States.
Inside those troops are many young Salvadorans in the same conditions of
Mendez. He was a victim, and it is necessary to say that he was not only a
victim of the war, but also a victim of the Neoliberal economic model of his
country.
According to the Spanish Royal Academy, the word “victim” means “the person
that is being sacrificed, someone in danger” and “a person that suffers
either because of someone else’s fault or because of a fortuitous cause”.
The word “victimizer” has a briefer definition: “killer”.
These definitions are useful to understand how is that the Salvadoran
economic model has had an overwhelming effect in the lives of the people.
This is not just because this model has the characteristics of Capitalism
itself, but that the same consequences are multiplied in a country such as
El Salvador, where adopting an extreme version of Capitalism –that is
Neoliberalism- becomes a crime. The victims are the majorities that do not
own the means of production, the “popular majorities”, as they were once
called by Ignacio Ellacuria.
Mendez was more than a soldier in this context, he was kind of a slave of
this model. He and his family were the victims of poverty, social exclusion,
unemployment, the lack of opportunities to guarantee decent life standards,
human beings living on the edge of the alleged paradise of welfare offered
by the economic elite. However, this model does not actually offer the
possibility to lead a decent life for most of the people.
The struggle to survive was the reason why a 15 year old young man from the
village of San Andres, in the jurisdiction of Guaymango, Ahuachapán, would
become part of the relative slavery of the Armed Forces. He was the third
child in a home of six brothers, and his decision lead him to change the
plow for the fusil, the grains of corn for bullets, his uncertainties for a
way to assure the welfare of his family. It all ended with his death.
He did not have to go to the United States to make a living, but he had to
put his own life for sale in order to get the benefits denied to him by the
economic model: to have a decent job, to lead a decent life. Using this same
logic in strict terms, the Spanish Royal Academy defines “slave” as “the
person that, for being under the command of someone else, has no freedom”,
and it defines “slavery” as “the subjection of one person to another, to a
job, or to an obligation”.
Mendez was, therefore, a victim and a slave. He was, in a particular manner,
during his brief presence in Iraq, part of that mass of thousands of
Salvadorans who support their families in El Salvador. It seems ironic that
the people who keep the economy afloat remain as anonymous characters for
the government, a government that prefers to call them “the far-away
brothers” and build monuments for them, when actually they should be called
“the life savers of the economy”.
Mendez died without ever knowing what high school was, or what it was like
to be part of this Salvadoran utopia called “university”. His childhood and
his adolescence only had to do with his work on the fields, especially with
the cultivation of corn. With his salary at the armed forces he fulfilled a
dream: to build a modest home and to be able to have electricity, after
living for almost his entire life without this basic service. The picture of
this young man appears in the newspapers, there he is among the weapons and
the wild settings: somebody who was invisible for the society until the day
when he died, unfairly, by chance.
The shadow of the Neoliberal model makes people like Mendez invisible. After
all, would he had enrolled himself in the armed forces if he had had the
chance to study, to get a better job, a higher income, and more
opportunities in the agricultural field? Who is to blame for this? During
the last fifteen years that ARENA has administrated the country, the main
concern of the government has not been the welfare of the population in
general, but the welfare of the business elite. Those who say that they live
better with the Neoliberal model are precisely the members of the economic
elite, the rest of the people do not have the chance to talk about the
oppression they suffer.
When extortion and fear are used as political weapons
After the presidential elections, the lack of hope of the population is
something that people have had to assimilate. It is necessary to see that
the fundamental reason for the political power resides inside the economic
power, and those who know how to use this fact to get what they want will
have all the freedom to precisely get it through the manipulation of the
society.
Since this lack of hope is the result of the economic situation, it is
necessary to see that many families are in the same situation that the
family of Mendez once was. They are poor people struggling to survive, and
forced by a model in which those who have all of the resources have the
freedom to do and undo using the same economic doctrine of the United States.
That is why the number of victims keeps growing.
For the United States, to become an accomplice of the victimizers means to
use the $30,000 million of annual remittances as a political weapon, those
family remittances sent by the Latin American population that works in that
part of North America. For those who hold the power, that is the Salvadoran
business elite, the remittances were a key piece of the electoral strategy
that the elected president of El Salvador, Elias Antonio Saca, used to win
the elections on March 21st. The population had only one alternative:
“Either they vote for the present model, or you will lose your remittances”.
The business elite would use the same strategy: “Either you vote for the
present model, or you are fired, because our company will close”.
This happened because the electoral campaign of the official party made it
clear that if the candidate of the left wing, Schafik Handal, won the
elections, the relations with the United States would go down the drain. As
a result of this, a considerable portion of the 2.3 million of Salvadorans
who live in the United States would run the risk of being deported, and the
flow of approximately $2,200 million of remittances that annually come to
the country would be interrupted. In El Salvador, 28% of the population live
with the help of the remittances. This means that El Salvador is the Central
American country with the highest percentage of population that receives
remittances. The worst aspect of all this is that, according to the
information issued by the Inter-American Bank of Development (BID, in
Spanish), 84% of the remittances that come to the country are used for
common expenses and to cover the basic needs. This means that most of the
remittances are used to guarantee the families’ subsistence, and that there
is not enough left to invest on the productive activities. In fact, only 12%
is invested on business, savings, education, and a 2% of that amount has to
do with expenses on luxury items.
According to the Analysis of the Economic Conjunction of the second semester
of 2003 published by the ECA, with the present poverty line (according to
the inflation rate of these days), out of 100 Salvadoran homes,
approximately 54 live in poverty. Mendez came from Ahuachapan, and there the
homes suffer of an even worse poverty level: 69 homes out of 100 live in
poverty. Only in Ahuachapan there are 9,792 homes that live in extreme
poverty.
The Neoliberal economic model bases its doctrine in the motto “let us pass,
let us do”, and the markets are the ultimate conception of freedom according
to this perspective. However, when there are so many differences among the
social levels and a high level of extreme poverty, what kind of freedom do
people really have? How many thousands of Mendez had the “freedom to chose”
their future and their welfare?
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