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Proceso 928
November 22, 2000
ISNN 0259-9864

INDEX

Editorial Diplomatic fiasco
Society More promises of development for El Salvador
Economy Building on a solid foundation
 
 
 

EDITORIAL

    El Salvador presented itself as well prepared and very optimistic at the Tenth Iberoamerican Summit Meeting in Panama. President Francisco Flores prepared a speech in which he presented El Salvador as a model country: a model of transition, a neo-liberal economic model and a model society. The opportunity was a propitious one to say, in the presence of Iberoamerican presidents and the press which accompanied them, that the peace accords were something special, that they were never violated, that the Salvadoran economy is one of the freest economies in the world, that its banking system is first rate, that privatizations are a resounding success although, it is clear that there are some few small problems with poverty and children, (the theme of the meeting)—child labor, street children and sexual exploitation. Moreover, President Flores brought a message from the government of Spain, with which he especially sympathized: that of proposing that the Iberoamerican governments ought to condemn the guerrilla group ETA. But all of those plans fell by the wayside given the spectacle acted out by Flores and Fidel Castro. Inexperience and frustration ruled the day in place of diplomacy.

    The diplomatic fiasco was a result of the arrest—by Panamanian authorities, alerted by Cuban security forces—of a well-known anti-Castro terrorist with Salvadoran documentation who, among other things, is responsible for having blown up an airplane with 73 persons aboard, in 1976. Cuban authorities turned over evidence to the administration of ex President Armando Calderón Sol that the terrorist in question was using Salvadoran national territory for his activities. But the Salvadoran president, for reasons unknown to us, ignored the denunciation and thereby prepared the stage setting for the fiasco in which Salvadoran diplomacy became immersed which, even while proposing the condemnation of Basque terrorist, Salvadoran diplomacy found itself suddenly confronted with an anti-Castro terrorist. It is not, therefore, true with any certain degree of truth that the terrorist had entered El Salvador to buy an identity document in order to obtain a Salvadoran passport, as Flores said in defending him.

    Fidel Castro, who spoke openly with no holds barred, confronted Flores on the question of such tolerance on the part of his administration and Flores, indignant and exposed before the international community, responded in the finest style of Salvadoran politics when he effectively accused Castro of having supported the Salvadoran guerrilla and held him responsible for the cruel and bloody death of many Salvadorans—forgetting the fact that the U.S. government had more responsibility in this past series of events. But the Salvadoran president was not prepared for the public admission by Castro who reminded Flores that the history of exploitation and oppression in El Salvador was not unknown to the presidents at the summit conference. Neither could Flores explain how the arrested terrorist came to be in possession of a Salvadoran passport, and how he was able to enter and leave El Salvador so freely and how it was that he was using Salvadoran national territory as a base for his terrorist activities. After a tense dialogue, President Flores launched the question of proposing a private dialogue with the Cuban president during the next presidential meeting, which is what he ought to have done in the first place, as well as promising an investigation.

    Meanwhile, in San Salvador, the same customary events were taking place in which the authorities found themselves with no other solution than to acknowledge that the Salvadoran passport was authentic and to acknowledge, as well, the multiple entries and exits of its owner, but could not provide any further explanation or the identify of those responsible for this situation. The National Civilian Police declared, laconically, that El Salvador is open to international criminals, as if stopping them were no concern of theirs. But neither could Salvadoran Immigration authorities, for their part, who are always so ready to prosecute ideological adversaries, explain the existence of two passports with two different names, but used by the same terrorist, who is not a Salvadoran national. It may be supposed that these new passports were used with numberless security measures, which make their carriers almost invulnerable. But it is clear that a Salvadoran passport can be gotten for ideological reasons or bought without much difficulty.

    The war and its atrocities have not been forgotten and those who have forgotten the least are those who, when it pleases them, demand that it be forgotten. But the ways in which it is remembered are very distinct. There are those who remember in a committed way the victims and, then again, there are those who remember it out of a sense of political convenience, who remember calling for justice and those who remember it with bitter rancor, who remember because they are moved by a desire that a state of law might prevail and those who remember when they are carried away by their emotions, those who remember because they consider the past deeds as part of an individual, social and historical reality and for whom, therefore, memory is not an instrument, but a fundamental faculty of human life and who use their memory as an arm to wave about, using it as the last recourse when they run out of rational arguments.

    This is what happened with President Flores at the Iberoamerican Summit Conference. Finding himself exposed and confronted with acts for which he had no response, he drew upon the past which ought to have been forgotten for some time now. Visibly shaken, the Salvadoran president repeated before the gathering of the summit meeting that Castro’s position was not going to be tolerated and threw in Castro’s face the patience he claimed to have had with him, but without it occurring to him that his position was also characterized by a very low level of diplomacy. The position of President Flores is untenable for two reasons: because he tolerates terrorism in El Salvador while it is right-wing terrorism—for which it would seem that he cannot succeed in gaining his objectives without this recourse—and because, if it is a valid position to hold Castro responsible for the past, he ought also to hold to account the functionaries of Cristiani’s administration and all the others who committed atrocities. President Flores’ international posture hardly contributes to calling for a national reconciliation among Salvadoran politicians who have lost no time in hurling accusations mutually concerning what happened during the war and for lining up behind their favorite leader.

    Obviously, Cuba is opposed to condemning Basque terrorism because it is an exclusive and limiting condemnation, given it leaves aside all other forms of terrorism and, in particular, the terrorism from which the island itself suffers. In this way, another element was added to the fiasco of inexperienced Salvadoran diplomacy which thought, with a great deal of naivete, to keep silent before the other kind simply because the first is against an administration with which the Salvadoran administration sympathizes and the other is opposed to another administration which is repugnant to his right-wing sensibilities. But neither can one go about proclaiming large-scale successes while at the same time protecting himself—or at least tolerates—terrorism of the right-wing brand. The other side of the coin of freedoms and the redefinition of the role of the state which the Salvadoran administration claims as such a great success is the loss of control over its own reality. El Salvador must begin to put its own house in order and learn something of the subtleties of diplomacy so that it does not fall into such embarrassing situations which make a public spectacle of his administration and leave it open to ridicule.

SOCIETY

    President Francisco Flores wishes to recover what he himself was at the point of condemning to be forgotten. Some months ago, when the National Commission for Development presented the results of its work of consulting the whole country, Flores responded with much rhetoric and little commitment to the question underlying the possibility that his administration might take up the implementation of these proposals. And not only that. The hope which the mobilization of resources led by the Commission awoke was sufficient to the point that, at the beginning of his mandate, the young statesman might have seen himself overwhelmed by the enormous commitments required to set the country on course towards true economic and social development. In fact, the electoral campaign which led him to the presidency was inspired by that process of calling together and gathering the thoughts and feelings of the many sectors of the country on the question of the state of the nation. But, in the case of Flores, his open door policy campaign never succeeded in systematizing neither the basic needs of the most vulnerable sectors of the population nor even the most integral solutions to their problems—glazed over as it was by the ideology which marked the future president of the republic.

    Now, more than a year since he was required to define the role which the state ought to adopt in the construction of a country “such as we all wish for”, the president springs a surprise on us: it turns out that during all this time he has been constructing plans as to how to deal with the systematized challenges presented by the Commission of the National Plan with the points contemplated within his administration’s “New Alliance”. And as a demonstration of that effort, he made public the generalities of a new Proposal for Territorial Actions, the objective of which is to encourage a national development scheme in which the whole country will reap benefits in accordance with its geographic potentialities. The message that the president wishes to transmit to the population is clear: following in the steps of his predecessor in the presidential office, he will revive the longing of the population to be able to count on a government which plans and integrates its policies and which renounces spontaneous and immediate improvisations. At the end of his term in office, Flores aims to turn over a country in which equality of opportunities prevail, which he has been offering since his party led him to five years of government administration.

    What is most noteworthy in this event is the excessive confidence with which the results in the proposal are projected. He speaks right out loud of decentralizing public investment by means of the concession of works and projects, of favoring the development of new metropolitan areas, of inaugurating a model not only of economic, but also human development and of accelerating the much longed for integration of the countries of Central America. And all of this will be ready—or at least on the way—by the year 2004. It is, evidently, a strange species of logic which moves the president and his team to include this kind of goal in his proposal, the reliability of which ought to be fully sustained before he gives them out as facts. The proposal, doubtless, represents an effort to plan the state resources in accordance with certain clear objectives, but these objectives cannot be reached by covering up the whole effort at development which he alleges they purport to deliver. And this above all because his priority is the empowerment and recuperation of the debilitated highway infrastructure of the country, by means of more highways and a peripheral circle around the capital which would serve as a basis for the new highways.

    Is it possible to speak with such certainty of a new stage of human development when one is only working for a “way of connecting up” the nation, that is to say, for improving the capacity for mobilizing transportation? The answer is no, unless one doesn’t mind taking the risk of appearing simpleminded. According to what has been made public, a little more than a third of the money which is to be invested in this first plan is earmarked to these and other highway megaprojects. On the other hand, only an eighth of the total budget plan (a little more than a thousand million colones) will be invested in the conservation of the environment and another fourth (2,400 million) is earmarked for the creation of an environmental agricultural corridor through the northern area of the country, one of the most depressed areas as a result of a lack of public and private investment. And this corridor will take shape in good measure because of the presence a coffee plantation area and with the articulation of more highways, which leaves the aside the sector which suffers most from “marginalization” which the Commission in its Bases for a National Plan: the peasantry which works in subsistence agriculture. Where is the human component, then, which he proposed to include, which ought to play a role in this new plan of national development?

    Even more, it remains to be seen in what way the work of all of the social actors called to participate in this proposal will be coordinated in order to procure, on the basis of concrete actions, that avalanche of bonanzas which the country will receive during these three years. The arduous task of making dynamic the sectors of the economy which, from the presidential optic, will reap the most benefits from this plan, which is to say, industry, agriculture and commerce, requires not only more and better highways which can be used for transportation; this goal implies, above all, a serious effort to offer better opportunities for the economic development of these sectors. And it is no secret that this necessity will begin to emerge if concrete steps are taken to control the zeal for accumulation exhibited by the financial sector which condemns many businessmen to bankruptcy, whether they are big or small, under the oppressive yoke of the finance and interest payments to the banks.

    And so, in general terms, the publicity strategy launched by Flores and his team to empower the image of his government does not seem to be other than a new reorganization of the small matters which its ministers, vice-ministers, directors and superintendents must implement as part of their term in office. Someone ought to remind the president that if he aims to continue the game of systematizing all of his good intentions on paper, he ought to begin by concerning himself with showing the practical viability of his proposals. This is the third time that the president offers an integrated policy for government action and up to this point in time nothing or very little has changed the configuration of the urgent problems calling for resolution such as the fiscal deficit, the creation of jobs, the qualitative transformation of the health system and the recovery of the agricultural system in its production of basic grains. At first time his ministers presented him with a strategic plan for making the “New Alliance” proposals operative. On a second occasion, the president revealed to each department the plans for economic and social development assigned to them in the country’s budget.

    What makes President Flores think that this time the situation could be different? How many high-sounding plans must be presented in order to strengthen the image of his government? What more does he need to convince himself that the population is not accepting his message in a facile manner? Flores probably goes to bed calmly every night thinking that he will pass into history as the president with the most plans, proposals and structured activities for El Salvador when he ends his term in office. But none of these plans will show much in the future concerning his capacity for responding with a minimum of efficiency to the demands of the population. And if he stubbornly continues with this short-term idea of what his work as a leader of this country implies—so complex and full of problems—in the end he will have shown his capacity for leaving behind him many and varied unfulfilled promises.

ECONOMY

    The President of the Republic closed his speech before the General Assembly of the Latin American Federation of Banks with these words: “And so it is that El Salvador is moving towards development on a solid foundation”. El Diario de Hoy for November 11 of this year adds a post datum to the effect that “this is a topic to think about”. And this is not the least of the matter because there are many things, which draw our attention in this presidential speech. It gives the impression that the amnesty law urging us to “forgive and forget” is added to the economic order of things, but with a new twist. The past is not to be forgotten. Before the Peace Accords of 1992, everything was plunged into stagnation because of governmental control while in recent years “the bases for economic recovery have been laid down and this has surprised the world thanks to the free economy, an adequate equilibrium and a low level of state intervention. If history is this way, forgiveness must be applied to the past administrations of the lost decade, for today there is no reason for anyone to have to ask or concede pardon. Economic freedom will make us all free.

    It continues to be worrisome (this topic must surely give us pause) that the president discovers and describes the economic situation of the country in this way if he were truly speaking for all Salvadorans and not only for the owners of the national banking system. The national economy will, apparently, walk side by side with the “free, modern and competitive Salvadoran bank”. But here lies a double error. In the first place it is not true that the Salvadoran bank might be a model for credit and financial mediation for the national productive sector when the delinquent bank accounts are double what the international norms of Basle require and when the “savagery of business” is much spoken of. With all due respect, it would be advisable for the president to read the objective research of Rafael Lemus, “the banking industry of the nineties” (FUSADES, August, 2000) so as to appreciate the strengths, weaknesses and threats of our banking system: “the volatile nature of the economy is a replica of consumer behavior and bank credit” (p. 51).

    His second error is that our economy has gradually lost its strengths and accumulated, instead, a menacing weakness. The economic analyses of the current juncture describe it as “decelerated and depressed”, without multiplying examples presented in the graphs and statistics because the best testimony comes from the market women. In these circumstances it is noteworthy, not to say incomprehensible, that the president cites as a wreathed crown the fact that “El Salvador has been placed among the countries with the highest indices of economic freedom after conscientiously evaluating our efforts in areas such as commercial policies, the flow of capital, levels of foreign investment, efficiency in our financial activity and the degrees of quality in our system of regulations”. What reading must we give to these declarations when this much-touted economic freedom has been translated into stagnation of economic freedom itself? Freedom to stagnate? Our commercial policies are not very clear when we repeat the syndrome of chronic balance of payments deficits with each and every one of the country blocks, business colleagues and when there are doubts and a lack of transparency on the question of the ratification of the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico. Capital flow, if we are referring to the growing family remittances, are the external life raft which alleviates the weaknesses of our domestic economy. If the flow of capital referred to is foreign investment, this too can be read as the process of privatizations which have “denationalized” some state or national service industries and not always for the greatest common good. The same efficiency in financial activity has been translated into “economically volatile” and not so much in harmonic development of the productive sectors. They continually say to us, as Claudio de Rosa just announced, that we will do better “next year”. That’s how one plays the lottery....

    What is true—but not very praiseworthy— is the “low level state intervention”. When, at the international summit conferences, from OMC in Seattle (December, 1999) to the century’s end conference of the United Nations in New York (September, 2000) “governing globalization” is spoken of, low level state intervention means to be out of orbit and concern for the orbits in which the countries of the Third World are moving. Low level state intervention means that “the state is absent” when social demands grow, even those of the private sector, for orienting and straightening out an economy at the edge. Going from question to question, the presidential vision causes surprise and wonder when he tells us? “For this reason we can now count on a stable economy which has, for the last four years, maintained an inflation rate of 2%”. How is it that our economy can be characterized as “stable” when we are all concerned that since 1996 growth and, above all, development move towards a height which already represents a crisis? Are the research institutes and think tanks malevolent because they describe reality in an accurate way? On the question of low inflation levels, even a negative level in 1999, our technological productivity (competitive advantage) means little or nothing but is simply and plainly the result of a depressed social demand throughout the length of the decade. The real explanation is that “inflation is low because the cost of living is high for two thirds of the population”. It would not be out of line to call for a little more economic science. If the era of globalization is to be remembered as “the era of inequalities”, the best government is the one which governs least. We need another kind of government.

    The presidential speech poses a slogan and an objective: “freedom and free economy”. The obvious question is what is intended by the term freedom? Some testimonials come to mind. The great Sunday preacher J.B. Lacordaire said in his Lenten services in Notre Dame de Paris: “among the poor and the rich, among the slave and the master; among the weak and the powerful, freedom oppresses and the law liberates”. Those were the days, during the nineteenth century, in which the right of the workers to organize trade unions was under discussion.

    Closer to us, those who inspired the Social Welfare State said that by freedom one should understand not only “positive freedom” which means self-determination and democracy, but the meaning of “real freedom”, which connects essentially with economic capacity “only by means of the removal of the obstacles of a social and economic nature in order to succeed in making individuals free. Freedom is identified as real freedom which leads the state to pursue not only of civil rights and autonomy but also social, economic, educational, housing and health rights”. As a consequence, there can be no real equality without real freedom.

    Closer to us is Amartya Sen, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economy, 1998, when he says: “if there is a general topic which can be identified as all encompassing social commitment, it is the importance of individual freedom in the broadest sense of the word as a condition of shared life. Individual liberty includes, on the one hand, those means and positive instruments which make it possible for us to act as viable and responsible individuals, including basic health care, basic education, being free from hunger and extreme poverty, etc. It also includes, on the other hand, our basic rights and liberties, freedom and opportunity to participate in the social and political processes which affect our lives”. Amartya Sen has said that the development of the nation ought not to be measured so much by the growth of the GNP as by the success of our progress towards this “real freedom”. It seems that the president is not speaking of this kind of freedom...

    We are not overmuch in agreement with the following conclusion offered by the president in his speech: “we do not deny that at his point in time an adverse situation of a momentary character exists, as a result of multiple external circumstances”. If we are to be frank, it is impossible to ignore a kind of intellectual fraud here: this is to deny a recognition of the weakness of our economy which lies essentially in the lack of harmony between our productive branches, in the traditional economic and social inequalities, in the absence of a real social and economic development plan and in so many other weaknesses which appear in the introduction to the report Bases for a National Plan. Why should we cover up the truth? The very fact of stating that we are going to recover if the regional and world economy is recovered, means that we are lacking a new internal dynamic. If even the very reports of the World Bank itself (from The Other Crisis (1998) up to and including the present report concerning Poverty (August, 2000) recognize that the market economy causes serious social economic problems and that globalization must be governed, why not read and learn from the signs of our times? This line of argument, then, is an intellectual fraud, which disqualifies these hollow declarations of realism.

    And to top it all off, the president does not even use the word “juncture in time” [lit., “coyuntura”, translator’s note]. He understands it as a passing situation from which we will soon emerge. Etymologically speaking the term “coyuntura” [lit., juncture in time] is in the future tense in Latin: “cum-juntura”, which is to say what is going to occur in the future as a consequence of present actions. This means that our “present time” is a “juncture in time, a juncture or result” of the actions, measures and adoptable economic policies in past decades in support of an “economic model”. This result is no passing fancy given that the actual juncture in time consists of serious social inequalities and economic dysfunctions. Our juncture in time [conjuncture actual] is the result of our structures. As El Diario de Hoy says, although we cannot understand his intention, the presidential speech really is a “topic to think about”.