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El Salvador Just Says No to Same Sex Marriage and Gay Adoption

6:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · El Salvador| GLBT · 1 Comment

4 May 2009

elsalvador While the recent presidential election in El Salvador signaled a change in politics as usual, recently the legislature in the Central American country made a legislative move that feels like a move backwards for equal rights.

El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved an amendment to the constitution to ban marriage between same-sex couples and same-sex couples’ ability to adopt a child. This amendment was proposed in the final hours of the current Legislative Assembly session, which ends April 30th.

“Marriage is only for men and women, born that way. It remains consecrated in our country that this is not possible for same-sex couples,” (El Diario de Hoy, 30 April 2009) announced Rodolfo Parker, the major proponent of the amendment.

The amendment is being strongly pushed by the Catholic Church in el Salvador, which is leading activists to fight the amendment from the perspective of an issue of separation of church and state.

Activist and law student Andrea Ayala explained her presence at one of the many demonstrations the Alliance held in front of the Legislative Assembly, “Personally I am not asking them for marriage, because, well, I think we are light years away from this…I simply ask that they do not obstruct our rights to equality. Our right to equality is protected in the United Nations Human Rights Charter…For me, as a lesbian, it is humiliating that they are trying to continue obstruct the right that we have to freely exercise our sexuality.”

Via / Narcosphere

Sabado Morning Cafe Con Links

21 Mar 2009

The Bustelo machine is running and this is what Mala is reading:

Raven’s Eye is live: Women and trans folk of color ISSUES have been done to death, we want OUR LIVES.

Seriously, where is the Change? Another Workplace ICE Raid

From the City of Brotherly Love :Where is the love for free speech and for Mumia?

Tech and Human Rights Justice in Guatemala

Is Cuba Keeping It’s Citizens Prisoners?

Ay that wacky Hugo Chavez is at it again.

And El Salvador’s new President wants to help with U.S. immigration.

Now go outside! It’s a nice Spring day.

El Salvador Meet Your President Elect

7:29 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · El Salvador| Politics · 1 Comment

17 Mar 2009

mauriciofunes
Ending 20 years of rule by the right wing ARENA party, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) won the presidential election, held this past Sunday, in El Salvador.

“Today, the citizenship that believed in hope and defeated fear has
triumphed. In the wake of an aggressive campaign, he promised to “cast aside
confrontation and the spirit of vengeance. My government will be based on the spirit of national unity,” Funes said.

The official count has Fulnes winning 51.3 percent of the vote against 48.7 percent.

The ARENA candidate, Rodrigo Avila, ran with ads linking Fulnes and his party, which were the Marxist rebels during the long, bloody Salvadorian civil war, with Hugo Chavez and Cuba, trying to inspire a new level of red fear that the voting public didn’t fall for.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, interviewed our amigo Roberto Lovato, the son of Salvadorian immigrants and a journalist who is in El Salvador.

“Let the joy come and wash away the suffering.” It’s something on an order I’ve never seen in my life. As a child of Salvadoran immigrants and as someone who’s spent time here and as someone who saw the Obama experience, I really can’t tell you what this is like, when you’re talking about ending not just the ARENA party’s rule, but you’re talking about 130 years of oligarchy and military dictatorship, by and large, that’s just ended last night. You’re talking about $6 billion that the United States used to defeat the FMLN, as you mentioned earlier. You’re talking about one of the most formidable — a formerly political military, now political forces, in the hemisphere, showing the utter failure of not just the ARENA party but of somebody in particular, too, who has a special place in many of our hearts: Ronald Reagan. This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less.

Via / New York Times and Alternet

Sabado Afternoon Links: Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazilians, Washing, and Jon Stewart

14 Mar 2009

Mala is a little stressed out and seeking calm from the internet isn’t really helping.

I mean, mira, scary socialist Chavez is taking over everything, including highways, ports and airports.

It’s not like the U.S. to interfere in the elections of Latin American countries like El Salvador, right?

We could all just unwind in Mexico.

If we wanna a wax we’d have to skip Jersey.

We can’t even wash our kids anymore

Pero thankfully when all else fails, we have Jon Stewart.

El Salvador: Elections Come With a History

8:37 am By Blogs Media · El Salvador| Politics · Comments Off

12 Mar 2009

With the presidential elections in El Salvador just a few days away, many here in the U.S., especially those who are not Salvadorian, don’t understand or have a sense of the complicated politics in the Central American country. Most don’t even know anything about el Salvador save stories of gang murders.

A right-wing party has dominated Salvadorian politics for the last 20 or so years at the expense of “minority” populations like indigenous peoples. Roberto Lovato from Of America gives us some historical context:

To understand the current presidential elections in El Salvador, you have to understand the cities, towns and campo, El Salvador’s countryside, located outside the capital of San Salvador. What follows is my attempt to provide further context for the media’s description of the horse race between the FMLN and the ARENA parties. A good starting point is the fact that both parties trace all or some of their political roots to Izalco, a relatively small town in the western, coffee-growing part of the country. Izalco is also home to one of the largest concentrations of El Salvador’s small (less than 1% of the population) indigenous population….

And you can find the indigenous presence in the deep, dark soil of Izalco’s history. Almost all of the children from Izalco’s Mario Calvo school pictured above are descendants-great, great and great, great, great, grandchildren- of the 20,000-30,000 indigenous people who rebelled against deadly poverty and abuse and were then slaughtered in 1932 by General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, the dictator who perpetrated what is known as “La Matanza” (the Great Killing). Martinez and his troops did all this in less than a month, according to scholars like my friend Aldo Lauria-Santiago, whose book is pictured below with a cover of the Izalco volcano.

Read the entire article aqui.

El Salvador : Last Latin American Country in Iraq Leaving

1:57 pm By Maegan La Mala · El Salvador| Iraq War · Comments Off

24 Dec 2008

In exactly a week, the last Latin American country with troops in Iraq will withdraw.

According to remarks made yesterday by Salvadoran President Tony Saca, troops will withdraw from the country on December 31st. “Considering the lack of a United Nations resolution, the government of El Salvador decided to end our presence in Iraq,” Saca said.

Other Latin American nations that used to have troops in Iraq were Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

The Salvadorian contingent is made up of 200 soldiers. In the five years since the Salvadorian troops have been stationed, five soldiers have been killed.

Via / The Latin Americanist

U.S. Street Orgs Going South of the Border (And Then Come Back)

10:26 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · El Salvador| crime| mexico · Comments Off

26 Dec 2007

It’s not something you hear about often. How street organizations, aka gangs, move their industry to Latin America making them even bigger and transnational. What results is that neither the U.S. or Latin American nations are equipped to deal with the results. Personally, I know of a friend of mine who was recently killed by a gang member in El Salvador after being deported from the U.S.

Two gangs that originated on the streets here have grown so large in El Salvador that there are two prisons in that country devoted exclusively to their members, one for each gang, according to officials who traveled there recently to meet with the local authorities.

So what to do. No one wants crime, here or there and how to do it without resorting to racial profiling.

Sweep of Los Angeles Mara Salvatruchas

10:37 am By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · El Salvador| Justice| Los Angeles| crime · Comments Off

16 Nov 2007

A joint effort between the Los Angeles Police Department, Salvadorian authorities and the FBI led what is being called one of the biggest street gang crackdowns in Los Angeles.

Seized during the search for 60 suspects: guns, drugs and $40,000 in cash. But the biggest catch of all: “Oscar Chacon.” Though the name is likely an alias, the FBI identifies him as the shot-caller for the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, known as “MS-13.”
Chacon’s street name: “Little Man,” a Salvadoran national who had been deported at least once, but returned illegally. He was one of dozens taken into custody Thursday morning at five locations.Recent sweeps have targeted MS-13 members in North Hollywood, Rampart District, and Pico-Union.

While some in the Los Angeles area say they are sleeping safer tonight, the LAPD seeks other allged gang members. Previous crackdowns against suspected members of the MS-13 in other states often led to accusations of racial profiling against Latino youths.

Via / ABC 7 and Despierta America Univision

Ambassador caught with his pants down

2:00 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Chismes| El Salvador| Politics| World · Comments Off

12 Mar 2007

This piece of news kind of lives up to what I’ve always thought of Consuls and Ambassadors sent to places where their role isn’t of the utmost importance. I’ve seen the Consul of a certain European country here in San Francisco eternally drunk, and in Barcelona the Consul of another European country eternally drunk or eternally unavailable. The Israeli Ambassador to El Salvador seems to have similar problems, as he was recently found bound, naked and drunk in the streets of San Salvador:

Tzuriel Rafael has been made to return to Israel after being found drunk and naked after participating in a sadomasochistic party, says local media and sources from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mother and daughter reunited after 24 years

6:09 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · El Salvador| World · Comments Off

6 Mar 2007

El Salvador’s bloody civil war separated countless families, some of which have never been reunited. But at least one mother and one daughter have found each other again — 24 years later:

It was 1983 when Francisca Quinteros, who lived in the La Cruz section of the town of Jucuarán, some 150 km southeast of San Salvador, left her daughter in the care of other people, due to the danger she faced as a young woman in a war zone.

“The war was so dangerous that I couldn’t care for my daughter, that’s why I asked some people to take care of her for me. After a while, they thought I had died, so when I came back they told me they had given her up to a family for adoption,” says Quinteros, now 40.

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