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El Salvador After Hurricane Ida, How You Can Help

8:00 am By Maegan la Mamita Mala · El Salvador · No Comments

12 Nov 2009

The death toll in El Salvador due to Hurricane Ida has risen to nearly 200 now mainly due to flooding and landslides. Hundreds of homes have been destroyed. Thousands of homes have been damaged.

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Here are some ways that you can help:

CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with El Salvador is collecting donations to help with the relief effort.

The Comité Cívico Salvadoreño de New York is mainly seeking donations; they can be reached via e-mail at desastredeida@yahoo.com or telephone at 516-368-1912.

Salvadoran expats in Los Angeles helped create a bank account solely for the use of sending donations to their countrymen.

–El Salvador Relief Fund
Promerica Bank
Cuenta # 1100002375

Via / The Latin Americanist

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

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

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.

San Salvador gets an “alcaldesa” after much drama

6:06 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · Blogs| El Salvador| Politics| Women · 3 Comments

17 Mar 2006

History was made today in El Salvador as the capital city of San Salvador elected its first female mayor, Violeta Menjivar, who claimed victory by a margin of just 61 votes. Menjivar belongs to the FMLN party.

Tim’s El Salvador Blog offers coverage and interesting comments from people who were present on election day and witness to the violence that broke out before Menjivar’s victory was declared. It seems that the recount people were taking too long, and many began to suspect fraud.

According to another blogger in El Salvador (in Spanish) the newly elected mayor claimed that members of her party had marched on the hotel Radisson, where the recount was taking place, in a pacific manner. The blogger himself disagrees and describes what sounds like an angry mob situation. Elsalvador.com describes a similar scene.

La alcadesa herself says “get over it!”:

The FMLN organizers set up a march to the Hotel Radisson. Did you like the outcome of that march?

What I didn’t like was that the police hurt seven people. Because in all parts of the world there are marches when institutions don’t work. What’s wrong with a group of people being worried about dragging out the recognition of victory? I think the police went too far. Maybe the march wasn’t necessary, I don’t know, but I don’t think we need to make drama out of it.

A Latin American election without drama just wouldn’t be a Latin American election.

Via / Sources listed above

Keeping it real back in the motherland

2:16 pm By Jennifer Woodard Maderazo · El Salvador| Immigration| houston · Comments Off

7 Mar 2006

El%20Salvador%202.jpg The story is a common one: a person immigrates to the United States out of necessity, but vows to return for the rest of his or her family. The promise is kept and the family also leaves for the States. The new vow is to return home one day, when things get better. This doesn’t usually happen. Sucked up by the daily strife of just making it in a country as daunting as the U.S., that dream is easily erased for some.

Fortunately, that isn’t the case of a group of Salvadoreños from Houston. Not only are they helping their pueblo, Olomega, solve some very basic infrastructure issues such as the building of bridges and roads, they are taking it one step further: they plan to make their pueblo a destination, and hopes that tourists begin to see it for the beauty it as for them:

Standing on the shore of the serene Lake Olomega, Nora Pineda envisions passenger boats cruising its surface, amateur fishermen lining its edges and musicians serenading tourists along a boardwalk.

She said hundreds of tourists could visit Olomega on weekends if restaurants, hostels and fishing spots are built near the water.

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