El Salvador Perspectives

It's Holy Week - Semana Santa  -- in El Salvador.   A time of vacations throughout the country.   Enjoy this photo gallery  from La Prensa with pictures of Holy Thursday activities from the beach to religious observances.

As the issue of same sex marriage and LGBT rights dominates US media this week, I thought I would share this article from the Episcopal News Service titled  The making of an LGBT ministry in El Salvador .   It was November 2007. Not long after Torres arrived, a male couple found the church. And then came another gay man and another, and eventually the number grew to six. Bishop of El Salvador Martin Barahona suggested that the group help the diocese begin a ministry on sexual diversity, but the group declined, Torres said. “We said, ‘No, El Salvador isn’t ready.’”  Two years later, the group was meeting regularly on Saturday afternoons and had doubled in size.  “We were 12, and we started to talk about our experiences in the [other] churches, and we said maybe it was time to call and invite the people we know,” Torres said. “Half of the people who came wanted to change [their sexual orientation] but that wasn’t our vision or our mission.”...  The group’...

The anniversary of Romero's murder and new hopes that Pope Francis will canonize Oscar Romero were covered in today's Washington Post : Church leaders say they believe Francis’ accession to the papacy will help their effort to win beatification and eventual sainthood for Romero, who was killed after his increasingly strident defense of Central American nation’s poor and denunciations of government violence. His killing was one of the triggers that set off a civil war that left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing over the next 12 years.  “We are more hopeful that at last Romero will be beatified. He is a martyr. He is a saint,” said Lucia Escalante, a retired schoolteacher of 65 who attended the Mass at the hospital which treats patients with terminal cancer.  “They killed Romero for defending the weakest, the poorest, for saying the truth, for denouncing injustice, and he is a martyr of the church,” she said.  A large crowd then marched nearly four miles (seven ...

To commemorate the 33rd anniversary of the martyrdom of Oscar Romero, here is an excerpt from his sermon preached on Palm Sunday in 1978. Holy Week is a call to follow Christ’s austerities, the only legitimate violence, the violence that he does to himself and that he invites us to do to ourselves:   “Let those who would follow me deny themselves,” be violent to themselves, repress in themselves the outbursts of pride, kill in their hearts the outbursts of greed, of avarice, of conceit, of arrogance. Let them kill it in their hearts.   This is what must be killed, this is the violence that must be done, so that out of it a new person may arise, the only one who can build a new civilization: a civilization of love.    Palm Sunday, MARCH 19, 1978 Taken from The Violence of Love

The coffee harvesting season has come to an end in El Salvador.   El Faro recently ran a photo essay titled How much does your cup of coffee cost? .   The photo essay shows images of some of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran who work in the coffee industry during the four or five months of the harvest.   For those who actually pick the coffee, the going rate is $1.25 for each bag of coffee cherries, and a picker can pick about 4 bags per day.   For workers involved in carrying, hauling, drying, sorting the coffee, average wages are $70-75 every two weeks.

In the 2014 presidential elections, Salvadorans living outside of the country will have the chance to vote from abroad for the first time.   Given the size of the Salvadoran community living in the US, Canada and elsewhere, there could be a noticeable impact on next February's elections.   Already, Salvadoran politicians are campaigning among Salvadoran communities in the US. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs recently looked at these new voters in an article titled The 2014 Presidential Elections in El Salvador and the Transnational Electorate by Frederick B. Mills.  He comments: In the past, even without the right to vote abroad, expat Salvadorans played an influential role in the social, political, and economic life of El Salvador, especially since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992. The agreement transformed a decade long armed struggle into a political contest between the FMLN and the right wing Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) parties. After t...

The most recent monthly El Salvador Update from the Center for Democracy in the Americas has a description of where the US has stood with respect to the gang truce in El Salvador: The U.S. Embassy has remained aloof from any endorsement of the truce. But, according to one government official, it has not been an obstacle , despite the recent State Department-issued warning about the dangers of travel to El Salvador. Ambassador Mari Carmen Aponte reiterated on February 7th that the United States “is not collaborating in economic terms with the so-called security zones.” She added that the State Department Travel Warning issued in January does not affect the strong bilateral relationship between the United States and El Salvador. Just days later, USAID announced a donation of $20 million toward a $42 million program called “SolucionEs.”   Described as a public-private partnership between USAID and four non-governmental organizations, the program will focus on youth with ...