El Salvador's Patriot Act

In These Times

On July 2, Salvadoran police arrested 14 rural activists who were protesting water privatization in Suchitoto, a colonial town in the middle of the country. The government plans to try them on Feb. 8 under the country’s new anti-terrorism laws, which could make them the first political prisoners in the nation’s post-war era.

In recent years, the Salvadoran government has faced increasing community resistance to the privatization of healthcare and water. Citizens have also protested against Pacific Rim, a multinational corporation that plans to develop the El Dorado mine in Cabañas province and pollute the local water supply.

In response, in October 2006 the government adopted a “Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism,” which gives police and judges leeway to clear the streets of demonstrators and imposes mandatory sentences of 60 years for what was once considered a freedom of expression. Intentionally vague, the law defines terrorism as crimes that “by their form of execution, or means and methods employed, evidence the intention to provoke a state of alarm, fear or terror in the population, by putting in imminent danger or affecting peoples’ life or physical or mental integrity, or their valuable material goods, or the democratic system or security of the State, or international peace.” According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the Salvadoran government modeled the new anti-terrorism law after the U.S. Patriot Act.

A small international outcry by those organizations followed the July arrests, and the government released the activists after nearly a month of imprisonment (though they still face trial in February). But instead of loosening their grip, in August, President Antonio Saca and his ultra-right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) Party pushed through penal code reforms by a one-vote margin that changed disorderly conduct from a misdemeanor to a felony. Three weeks later, the government arrested eight leaders of a nurses trade union for striking against the privatization of healthcare services and lack of medicine. If convicted, the union leaders could face eight years in prison under El Salvador’s new “Patriot Act.”

“The objective of these anti-terrorist laws isn’t to fight terrorism, because there haven’t been acts of terrorism here in many years,” says Pedro Juan Hernandez, a professor of economics at the University of El Salvador and an activist. He recently traveled to the United States with members of U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities to bring attention to the Salvadoran social movement. “What happened in New York and in Madrid were acts of terrorism,” says Hernandez. “But it’s not an act of terrorism to peacefully mobilize or concentrate a group of people demanding their rights, including what’s written in the constitution.” He says the new law’s objective is to “criminalize the social movement and imprison community leaders.”

In July, 60 U.S.-based organizations signed an open letter to Saca that appeared in the Salvadoran press. “While the Salvadoran government has the task of ensuring public security, charging demonstrators under an ‘anti-terrorism law’ … does not appear to be the measured response of a government seeking to maintain order while observing basic civil rights, such as the right to freedom of association and the right to protest,” the letter stated. A month later, 41 members of the U.S. Congress also signed and sent Saca a letter that expressed concern about the arrests of the 14 activists under the new anti-terrorism laws. Predictably, the White House and the U.S. Embassy in the capital city o have remained silent.

That silence might stem from El Salvador being a member of the “coalition of the willing” that has supported the United States in its invasion of Iraq. Saca has contributed as many as 380 soldiers at any given time to the war effort.

Meanwhile, $461 million goes to El Salvador through the Millennium Challenge Account, an aid program that President Bush announced at the Inter-American Development Bank in 2002. This money goes to the Central American nation despite the challenge account’s criteria that countries adhere to the “rule of law,” “political rights,” “civil liberties” and “voice and accountability.”

Sixteen years ago, the government of El Salvador signed the Peace Accords with anti-government FMLN guerrillas, ending 12 years of a brutal civil war that killed approximately 80,000 people. The accords were established “to create the necessary conditions to improve the quality of life of the population, especially of those living in extreme poverty.”

But more than a decade-and-a-half later, the country’s poor remain choked by desperation. Almost 50 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line and 61 percent have no access to water in their homes, according to USAID. The average Salvadoran child attends only 3.4 years of school. Remittances from the 2 million Salvadorans working in the United States account for approximately 17 percent of El Salvador’s economy, according to the U.S. State Department. This is greater than the money generated by any other export.

“The signing of the Peace Accords created the opportunity for reconciliation and to change the causes that led to the armed conflict,” says Hernandez. “But we’ve missed out on that opportunity. In the last 16 years, the government has implemented neoliberal economics, privatized services and signed free trade agreements that haven’t solved the economic problems but have made them more profound.”

The Salvadoran social activists fighting for water access, healthcare and education, and now the right to protest, have seen enough war, says Hernandez. “But the origins of the violence are in the politics, the unemployment and the government’s policies against the population,” he explains. “We are back to the level we were when the armed conflict began.”

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3411/el_salvadors_patriot_act/

Wrapping the Fall Classic

Glen Arbor Sun

How fitting that on the very night in October the Boston Red Sox captured their second World Series championship in four years Alex Rodriguez, the most talked-about and highest paid athlete in America, shunned the New York Yankees and opted for free agency. The old guard is in disarray, and the epicenter of baseball in this new century has officially moved two states north, to Beantown: goodbye Joe DiMaggio, hello Manny Ramirez; eject Paul Simon, and welcome back James Taylor.

Entire libraries have been written about the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees: the Bostonians selling their rising star Babe Ruth to the New Yorkers in 1918 for cash, and the subsequent 86-year drought wrought on the banks of the Charles River as Ruth went on to invent the homerun and the Bronx Bombers tallied 26 championships; the countless near misses and late-season heartbreaks in New England, and parade of superstars turned goats, Bill Buckner, Bob Stanley, Grady Little.

But the curse of the Bambino is a twentieth century museum relic now. The Yankees have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for three years running, and the deckhands and captain, former skipper Joe Torre, have been jumping ship since the season ended early this autumn. Meanwhile, a ragtag, blue-collar bunch who often neglect to shave, wash their batting helmets, or button up their jerseys are America’s new team.

They are unorthodox, to be sure: dreadlocked slugger Manny Ramirez stumbling around left field as if he had smoked a joint before the game; menacing closer Jonathan Papelbon dancing an Irish jig in his Speedos for the media; designated hitter David Ortiz, who looks something like an armchair sofa and rarely plays in the field, though he packs a Ruthian swing; Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka who wiggles his hips back and forth before throwing toward home plate.

The Red Sox walloped the Colorado Rockies in four games during the 2007 World Series and looked like a teacher towering over their student. The Rockies, whose franchise is only 15 years old, landed in the Fall Classic after winning an unprecedented 14 of 15 games to close the regular season and then swept the Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks — each surprises in their own right this season — for a date on the ultimate stage. But a week off after disposing of the rattlers hurt Colorado, and just like the Detroit Tigers last year, the Rockies looked rusty, or intimidated, in the World Series. Their young phenoms collectively stopped hitting, or maybe they woke up one morning during the extended in-season vacation and realized that their late-season run was so unlikely, that it was nothing more than a mile-high dream. The Rockies never really showed up to the World Series, and their quick defeat cost me a bottle of scotch to my father. I had made the grave mistake of betting on numbers (the Rockies’ winning streak) and not on baseball wisdom (the Red Sox were clearly the better, and more experienced team).

We haven’t seen a close Fall Classic, now, since 2003, when the Florida Marlins knocked off the Yankees in six games. In fact, the last couple contests have been grossly under-played by the losing team and, at times, tedious. Four of the seven postseason series (eight teams qualify, meaning three rounds of games) this year ended in sweeps, and only one match-up required the maximum number of games: Boston’s comeback victory over the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series. I ought to be writing about that contest instead.

So once again the recently departed baseball season will be remembered less for its climax and more for its buildup. This season — to no one’s surprise and to everyone’s relief because we’d finally stop hearing about it — the smug San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds eclipsed Hank Aaron’s all-time homerun record on Aug. 7 amidst allegations of steroid use that threw sports fans and non-sports fans alike into a moral frenzy. The fan who caught record-setting blast number 756 was a 22-year-old stockbroker visiting the Bay Area from New York who eventually sold the ball online to fashion designer Mark Ecko for $752,467. We live in the age of netroots democracy, and Ecko let baseball fans decide via an Internet poll to brand the cowhide with a demeaning asterisk (for Bonds’ alleged performance-enhancing drug use) before donating it to the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

But perhaps this baseball season’s greatest moment came on April 15, which Major League Baseball named Jackie Robinson Day in honor of the African-American who broke baseball’s color barrier as a Brooklyn Dodger 60 years earlier. Cincinnati star outfielder Ken Griffey, Jr. asked Jackie’s widow Rachel for permission to wear his retired number 42 for the day, and baseball commissioner Bud Selig later invited all players to do so. Three clubs elected to have their entire team wear number 42 to honor Jackie Robinson: blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians alike.

For baseball is a universal game now, played by athletes from around the globe, even though its top league is confined to North America. From the colonial streets of Havana, to the jungles of Nicaragua, to the fish markets of Japan, kids play stickball and emulate their heroes in the big leagues, only now those heroes are more likely clad in Boston Red than in Yankee pinstripes. Indeed, “where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”

Banana Republic to Baby Republic: Guatemala could shut down its massive adoption industry

In These Times

On any given day in Antigua, a touristy colonial town in Guatemala, as many as a dozen American couples can be seen lounging with their soon-to-be-adopted Mayan children in the Parque Central or dining nearby in posh restaurants.

The couples enjoy the leisurely Latin American lifestyle—constant spring-like temperatures, drooping bougainvillea plumage and stunning views of Volcán de Agua to the south. But lately, fear has set in among the Guatemalan adoption industry. The Guatemalan government is threatening to wrestle control of adoption away from the private sector and either slow it to a crawl or shut it down completely.

Last year, at fancy Antigua hotels or in the lobby of the Marriott in Guatemala City’s upscale Zona 9, Guatemalan foster mothers or adoption attorneys passed many of the 4,135 babies adopted from this country into the eager arms of teary-eyed couples from El Norte. In other words, one percent of all babies born in Guatemala in 2006 ended up in American cribs.

Guatemala is the only Latin American country that doesn’t exercise stringent state control over international adoptions. Adoptions there fall under the notary system, which means they are essentially privatized and run by attorneys who, critics claim, traffic in impoverished, malnourished and sometimes stolen babies.

Adoptive parents can spend approximately $25,000 to $30,000 to adopt from Guatemala, and most of them leave days or weeks later with their little ones cradled in their arms, and with no questions asked as to how the attorneys acquired their babies.

But this trade in babies could soon be shut down. Led by outgoing First Lady Wendy Berger, an American-educated aristocrat, many in the Guatemalan government view the current adoption system as a baby-selling industry, in which unscrupulous lawyers recruit, coerce and bribe desperate women into giving up their infants. These lawyers often make tens of thousands of dollars “selling” them to American couples.

Berger’s concern is shared by UNICEF, which believes that abandoned or orphaned children should remain in their villages with extended family members or be adopted by other Guatemalans. UNICEF views international adoption as an unfavorable last choice.

“Our focus is on the best interests of the child,” says Dora Giusti, a UNICEF assistant program specialist previously based in Guatemala. “Only as a last resort do we look to international adoption if there’s no other alternative. We think international adoption is a good option … if it’s well regulated.”

As the most open and vocal critic of international adoption from Guatemala, UNICEF has taken heat from adoption-advocacy groups, social workers, attorneys and adoptive parents, both in Guatemala and the United States. Shutting down the lifeline between impoverished Guatemala and families in the United States who are unable to have children, they claim, will deprive these kids of their inalienable right to a home, loving parents, food and nurture, as well as the support they need to thrive in life.

These children aren’t the property of Guatemala, says Hannah Wallace, executive director of Adoptions International. If the state can’t provide for them and guarantee that they won’t die as infants or end up as prostitutes, in gangs or sniffing glue in the streets to quash their hunger, then the state should welcome outside help.

As much as 60 percent of Guatemala’s population is considered poor by international standards, and 20 percent of Guatemalans are extremely poor, living on less than $1 a day.

In the indigenous western highlands, this means that many Guatemalans pray to the gods that the next corn harvest will be a good one; it means many nourish their babies with watered-down coffee in lieu of breast milk; it means some travel to faraway regions to find work, usually on the finca plantation of some wealthy landowner. It also means high infant mortality rates (around 30 per every 1,000 live births) and little chance of education for those children who do survive.

The Catholic and Evangelical churches that rule here all but forbid birth control. The average Guatemalan woman has more than six children in her lifetime—and some more than 10—giving adoption lawyers a nearly unlimited supply to choose from.

Those adoptive parents who are already in the process, or in some cases have already met and fallen in love with their would-be adopted children, are hoping their paperwork will run its course through the Procuradoría General de la Nación, the Guatemalan Solicitor General’s Office, and that the U.S. Embassy will grant their child a visa to the United States before the laws change.

Currently, more than 3,000 applications for adoption from Guatemala are being processed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or the Guatemala government, according to the U.S. State Department.

On GuatAdopt.com, a popular adoption advocacy and networking website for adoptive parents, posts like this one capture the mood of many parents: “I am already attached to the children that have been assigned to us. I have certainly written my letters, called my senators and called the [State Department]. I also sent an email to UNICEF. I would be prepared to march in Washington.”

In September, the U.S. State Department issued a press release, discouraging Americans against adopting from Guatemala: “Fundamental changes in Guatemalan and U.S. adoption law will take effect over the next six months,” the release stated, referring to changes to the Hague Convention, which governs international adoption.

“The Government of Guatemala has informed us that they will not process adoption cases that do not meet Hague standards after Dec. 31, 2007. We understand this to mean that Guatemala will stop processing adoptions to the United States beginning Jan. 1, 2008, until U.S. accession to the Hague Convention takes effect.” The Guatemalan Congress ratified the convention this year, but the United States has yet to do so.

Throughout Guatemala, international adoption has become a contentious issue. Earlier this year, in several villages in the western highlands, townsfolk attempted to lynch local women whom they accused of stealing babies.

On Aug. 11, the paranoia reached a fever pitch when Guatemalan authorities raided the Casa Quivira adoption foster home outside of Antigua under suspicions of “irregularities” in the adoption process. The government seized 42 kids waiting to be adopted and placed them in homes that don’t focus on adoption, according to industry sources who wish to remain anonymous.

Casa Quivira was run by Clifford Phillips, an American who now lives in Florida, and his wife Sandra Gonzalez, a Guatemalan adoption attorney. They were among the first to capitalize when Guatemalan adoption became a booming business in the ’90s.

The raid sent shockwaves through the adoption community, both in Guatemala and the United States. Hundreds of opinions poured onto GuatAdopt.com. Parents who had adopted through Casa Quivira posted mostly favorable opinions of Phillips. Others described the foster home as clean and efficient.

But Casa Quivira has allegedly employed people in the past whose unscrupulous practices have gotten them blacklisted from the payrolls of U.S. international adoption agencies. One such employee was arrested in July for smuggling a Guatemalan child into the United States without a visa.

In 2006, I helped reunite a teenage adoptee named Ellie with her biological mother in Guatemala—seven years after her relinquishment. During the emotional reunion, Ellie’s adoptive mother, Judy, learned from the biological mother, Antonia, that Casa Quivira’s Gonzalez had offered to pay for Ellie, then refused to pay once the girl was in the home’s custody. Antonia had a change of heart and returned to Antigua three months later to try and reclaim Ellie but was ridiculed and refused access to her daughter. In the adoption dossier, Sandra Gonzalez wrote, “Mother of child presents a troublesome and conflicted personality that makes her interpersonal relationships difficult.”

Ellie was already seven years old at the time, and the fifth of 10 siblings who Antonia had given up for adoption.

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In Tiquisate, a dismal, one-street industrial town near Guatemala’s southern coast where Ellie was born, and where the United Fruit Company once ran its southern port of operations, the public record keeper, Geronimo Méndez, offered a bleak assessment of why thousands of Guatemalan children were sent into adoption, even though they weren’t orphans.

“They [recruiters] are all around us,” says Méndez. “The lawyers from the capital have come to me and offered to pay me if I’ll supply them with a list of illiterate and poor women here in Tiquisate who have more children than they can handle.”

First Lady Wendy Berger, whose husband, Oscar Berger, will leave office next year, cast an incredulous glance when asked about the thousands of children who could likely end up institutionalized if the window closes on Guatemalan adoption—like they have elsewhere in Latin America, namely Nicaragua and El Salvador.

“What thousands of kids? Show them to me,” she says, adding that if American families didn’t buy them, lawyers wouldn’t be paying women for their children.

Since her husband became president in 2004, many American adoptive families who have children from Guatemala have sent Wendy Berger photo albums of their children, now happy in America. They do this to lobby Berger to keep the process open.

But Berger takes offense at the gesture. “I don’t come to your country and tell you how to do things, so please don’t come here and try to change our laws,” she says. “Adoption works very well in the United States. The problem is here in Guatemala.”

Toughening regulation on the Guatemalan adoption industry could help prevent the private sector from viewing children as a commodity, and it could keep these kids in their country and their culture.

But is shutting down the system the practical solution? After all, if these babies weren’t removed from their nests in their early days, they would never enjoy the fruits of the American middle class: food on the table, healthcare and education—not to mention iPods and prom nights.

An anecdotal story of a baby theft and recovery from Quetzaltenango, in the western highlands, provides few answers.

In 2005, foreign volunteers helped a birth mother find and legally reclaim the baby who was stolen from her at the maternity ward, placed in a foster home and on the verge of being adopted abroad. The happy reunion was shortlived, however. Within months of the return the unsupervised baby was killed by an abusive older brother—a tragedy that likely would have been prevented had the child been adopted into a healthy home in El Norte.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/continued/3380/banana_republic_to_baby_republic/