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Proceso is published weekly in Spanish by the Center for Information, Documentation and Research Support (CIDAI) of the Central American University (UCA) of El Salvador. Portions are sent in English to the *reg.elsalvador* conference of PeaceNet in the USA and may be forwarded or copied to other networks and electronic mailing lists. Please make sure to mention Proceso when quoting from this publication.
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Proceso 942
March 7, 2001
ISSN 0259-9864
 
 
 

INDEX

Editorial: Complications following the earthquakes
Politics: The authoritarian trap
Economy: Rescuing the coffe production
 
 
 
 

EDITORIAL

     The meeting of the Advisory Group, which takes place in Madrid, has attracted our attention because of two reasons: the representation of the Salvadoran government and the millions that could be obtained to finance the country’s recovery. There was a debate on the failed attempt to include just government representatives in the Salvadoran mission. There was also a discussion about how many millions would be needed to pay for the post-earthquakes period. Both debates made us underestimate the importance of a third question (perhaps the most important): the ARENA’s concept of “recovery”, defined in the document entitled “United for El Salvador”. This question will clarify how the obtained money will be invested and what kind of country will be built in this new phase.

     Two things call our attention. First, the idea the government has about the country’s historical process and, second, its vision of the country that will be built. According to the ARENA’s government, the earthquakes, mere natural phenomena have complicated enormously the process of development, which was advancing without difficulties. Despite the complications, the government emphasizes that, “the people of El Salvador” (a term that makes government and people equal) remains firm with its purpose: “to develop a society integrated with itself and with the world”. In other words, the earthquakes did not change the reality, nor did it show new aspects of such reality.

    Therefore, there are no reasons for changing the governmental plans. The earthquakes would actually be an irrelevant “complication”. This peculiar way of thinking is understandable when one realizes that the government believes that El Salvador progresses automatically and inevitably. Thus, tragedies such as the earthquakes are just little inconveniencies.

     The second key idea is the governmental vision of the country, which guided the document proposed in Madrid. The country that the ARENA’s government is planning to build, according to the document, will have a modern infrastructure, a diverse and competitive production, and a universal net of public services. In this way, the living standards will improve permanently and the ecological balance will be guaranteed. The key points are the technological development and the productivity. The million and a half victims of the earthquakes do not seem to be important. The direct beneficiary of these plans, therefore, is the private sector, while the victims would have to wait for the indirect benefits, which are supposed to come from the private activity, as well as from the services guaranteed by the state.

    Even though the governmental document talks about the construction of a country “less vulnerable, socially speaking, and more equitable, just, participative and united”, it also establishes that “the conditions that have generated the economic stability must remain, since they are key to get external resources, to promote development, and to guarantee the population’s well-being”.

     Therefore, the economic policy will not be modified after the earthquake and its social consequences. It is questionable that such policy can contribute to get external assistance, because that has not happened yet, in terms of the needed and expected quantity. It has not guaranteed the population’s well-being, either. And it will not do it in the future. The reason is simple: its goals are different: to create riches for accumulation.

     The statistics speak by themselves. The Salvadoran economy suffers serious structural problems, which make us doubt its logic for the production and the distribution. There has been progress in the reduction of poverty, the expansion of education, illiteracy has diminished, and life expectancy is now higher than before. Despite all this, more than 40 percent of the population lived in poverty before the earthquakes, and some of those people, more than one million, lived in extreme poverty. This means that they were living with less than 9.52 colones per day (a little more than one dollar) in the city, and with less than 5.82 colones in the countryside. With this income, it is impossible to find opportunities to access public services and to break the poverty circle.

     This majority sector was more negatively affected by the earthquakes. This majority is not able to satisfy its needs, a problem that explains why the intern demand is insufficient and why the economy remains stagnant. In addition, any progress will be restrained by the Gross National Product, which is now below the level reached twenty-two years ago. Last year’s economic growth rate was the lowest since 1992. The unemployment increased, as well as inflation, while the minimal salary decreased. The fiscal and commercial deficit increased. The current revenue showed negative results for the first time after many years.

    The commercial interchange terms suffered deterioration, showing the country’s lack of competitiveness in the international market. The basic food basket was taxed and the electricity’s subsidy was eliminated. President Flores recognized all these problems a few months ago, when, at the end of November, justified the economic integration law arguing the stagnation of the national economy. El Salvador may have the best risk qualification in the region and be the country with the highest level of economic freedom in Latin America, as the governmental document here referred to reads, but it is next to the last place in terms of the economic growth among the Central American countries. Thus, there must be a powerful reason for the government to maintain the same economy policy in front of such bad results.

     The only reason we can think of is that the government is trying “to turn the tragedy into an opportunity” for the private sector. Apparently, the ARENA’s administration will invest the funds obtained after the earthquakes in the private sector. The poor and the victims of the natural disasters will not get any benefit. The foreign investment that never came despite the country’s good qualifications will be substituted for the international aid. The main goal is not the victims, but the stagnant economy. In this way, the government would be accomplishing its proposal, established in the document presented in Madrid.

     According to this proposal, the private sector would direct the economic growth of the country, while the government would make such job easier for the businessmen groups. It is impossible to see how the country will be united with itself and how such union will make the differences between the poor and the rich smaller. It is also difficult to imagine how El Salvador will join the international market given its low competitiveness. The frequent demands for national unity are only requests for support for the private sector and its government.

     Almost everybody knows the official vision of the methods to fight against the social violence affecting the Salvadoran society. Ever since the Calderón-Sol’s administration, when the problem was considered evil without remedy, the authorities made use of coercion to fight delinquency. It was also common the arbitrary hunt for those people seen as criminals, as well as the growing toughness of the penalties. Even the death penalty was discussed some times as an efficient way to pacify the society. For this reason, it is not surprising that the Executive branch and the private sector had supported the Penal and Procedural Penal Codes’ reform, describing it as the panacea for some problems such as kidnapping and violence.

     However, it worries us that, despite the fact that the reforms were issued many days ago, independent lawyers and civilian organizations have not said a word about them. Such reforms seem to be authoritarian and might represent a backward step in terms of human rights, since the police may abuse its power. Citizenry representatives have been absent in the debate on the convenience (or inconvenience) of the reforms. However, the organized social groups should not prevent themselves from pointing some potential threats out.

     The national authorities have justified the reforms made to the Penal and Procedural Codes underlining the increase of both the organized crime and the social violence. They are blaming the weaknesses of the laws for the uncontrollable rise of the delinquency happening in the post-war period. The government has also pointed the fact that the laws applied before the reforms had been copied from developed countries, whose situation was different from the Salvadoran one. Therefore, as a remedy for our problems, it would be enough with some authoritarian regulations, larger periods to consider a crime as flagrant, more control over the so called illegal associations, more discretion for the policemen to perform their duties, and the increase of the penalties.

     However, there has been no debate on the principles behind the changes to the laws. In addition, the practical consequences of the reforms have not been given the importance they deserve. As one public official said while he was lobbying for those reforms in the Congress, everything is allowed when we are talking about fighting the crime wave. Even though the social violence should be considered as a warning, to combat the problem should not force us to adopt just any kind of solution. Violating the constitutional guarantees that protect rapists as well as kidnappers will not solve the crime problem. The constitutional guarantees’ suppression is not the road we should be following. However, it is the rout taken by those that enacted and supported the codes’ reforms.

    In the first place, there is the home search issue.  The recently reformed Penal and Procedural Code of Law considers that " when there is enough reason to assume that in a public or private space are objects related to the commission of the prosecutable cause that is investigated, or that the arrest of the suspect can be effected, the District Attorney or the police, must ask the judge to issue a search warrant; the judge has to answer to the request in a period no longer than two hours. The lack of a judicial resolution in the indicated term will make the judge incur into a penal responsibility, and the Attorney General’s Office will inform the Judicial Investigation Section of the Supreme Court".

     Even when the two hour term granted to the judge to issue his resolution is aimed to prompt the judicial resolutions for a matter of police records, in practice it is a manipulative reform that seems to constrict the judge to approve any proceeding of the sort. It can be asserted in this case that the judge is not obliged to approve just any demand of the police or that of the Attorney General’s Office. However, the short term available for the judge to give his opinion reinforces the idea that he is obliged, in most of the cases, to approve the requested search warrants. Two hours are not enough for the analysis and the required justification for a search warrant. What the legislator foresaw, as a way to control the justice over the police, dilutes itself in a mere formality. The judge turns into a helper of the police, when it should be the other way around.

     On the other hand, the reform agreed  in the numeral 2, article 177, leaves no room for doubt about a certain will to limit the judicial control over the police, at least about the motives of arrests and captures of the "antisocial". An example of these cases is the house breaking without a judicial order. The last code gave free course to the home searches without a judicial order; in the spirit of numeral 2, only if there were heard voices, in a house, which mentioned to have committed a crime, or whenever people asked for help. The current reform, however, adds some details over which are convenient to reflect.

     In the new approach, interpretation of the Penal and Procedural Code of Law, a home search can be done without a previous judicial order "when there is known that inside of a house crimes are being committed, or when from its interior are heard voices that would announce that crimes are being committed, or when somebody asks for help in the case of great danger for human lives" (reforms to the numeral 2, article 177). The slight change, as it seems harmless, might mean, in practice, an evasion of the judicial order.

    The question that must be asked in this case must refer to the limit of "when there is known". What is the difference between this last phrase and the latter "when there is found reason enough to presume that in a public or private space" of the article 171 that, however, emphasized the need of a search warrant issued by the judge, before any search. The thin boundary between both phrases will allow the police to enter in action in any search without the need of a judicial order or, in the best of the cases, without a serious analysis of the authorities.

     The society is exposed to arbitrary house searches by the police. It is also exposed to the danger of a procedural fraud. This possibility is not based on groundless fears or on ill expectations aiming to discredit the work of the Civilian National Police. Instead, it is based on a strict analysis of national reality, which reflects on the dangers that might follow if an excessive power is granted to the police.
 The danger of procedural frauds is not exclusive of the Salvadoran Police. As a fact, in more developed countries there have been cases of this kind of fraud, in which police elements have had to place fake proofs to unjustly incriminate the suspects. These traps obey many times to the police desire of getting satisfactory results in the fight against crime, in order to get the approval of their superiors. Sometimes these actions also obey to the purpose of covering up the actual responsible of a crime.

     Any reform that would not consider those risks, and which also raises the civilian vulnerability towards the police power, cannot be interpreted as a step forward in the human rights subject. Despite of what the authorities might believe, the social suspicion and the stigma of potential delinquents, does not make easy the social harmony, this will not contribute to fight violence efficiently.

     Consequently with his offer to make El Salvador go back to "the conditions of January 12", President Francisco Flores announced a new strategy to rescue the coffee production, which means financing the amount of 558 million Dollars (nearly equivalent to a 25% of the General Budget of the Nation for 2001) to promote the reactivation of the coffee farming sector, considered as one of the most affected by the January 13 earthquake.

     Two contradictions are clearly perceived in the presidential posture. The first one is pretending to give priority to one of the sectors of less vulnerability among the population (the coffee impresarios), and which has not been the most affected in relative terms. The second one is pretending to reactivate an economic activity (coffee production) which is in permanent crisis ever since a decade, and which has demonstrated, during the last 150 years, that it only generates rural poverty. Without a doubt, the governmental option is highly questionable.

     Even though it does not seem logic to question a strategy that is presented as an option to recuperate rural employment, the fact that coffee-growing is an activity without perspective in the world market (the prices have dropped down steadily for twelve years, the world production has elevated and there have entered new competitors in the scene - Vietnam among them). The crossroad is similar to the one experimented during the first decades of the XIX century with the discovery of the synthetic dyes and the disappearance of the international demand for the Salvadoran main exportation product since then: indigo. In that time the option was to substitute it by coffee plantations, which have been with all the serious economic and social contradictions that it has generated, the main motor of economy since 150 years ago. Without a doubt, the option for coffee expresses a determined vision of the nation (in the economic order as well as in the territorial), and a perspective from where the development planning must go.

     Differently from the XIX century, in the dawn of the XXI century there are no proposals to make a quality turn to the development programs. Economic planning is also disdained by the public officers in an explicit form. The dollarization or monetary integration, through which the attributions to develop a monetary policy were eliminated, is the most evident proof.

     The "Integral program for the rescue and conservation of the coffee field", however, induces to think that President Flores does believe in planning, which would actually be used to challenge the market forces. This indicates that to cultivate coffee is not profitable anymore. This polemic governmental problem brings two important aspects into discussion in order to evaluate the adequacy and the impact of the initiative: the group to which this program is aimed to, and its potential effect.

     The coffee-growing sector had been, until the eighties, the most prosper sector of the Salvadoran economy.  Along a century and a half of cultivation, there have been bad seasons but, in general, favorable seasons compensated the loss of the first ones. During the bonanza periods, coffee brought a respectable 50% of the State's income. It represented a 73% of the exportations and a 50% of the farming production.

     Unfortunately, it must be said that no crisis has been as enormous as the one of the nineties, up to the point of expecting that the cultivation of coffee sooner or later reached its end. The increasing of the cultivated area in Brazil, the entrance of Asian competitors such as the Vietnamese and the relatively high costs of production in El Salvador are some of the threatening facts for the coffee sector.

     The crisis, however, goes back to 1989 with the rupture of the agreements of exportation fee regulations through the extinct International Coffee Organization (OIC, in Spanish). Ever since then, the ups and downs started in the international prices that have motivated successive measures of protectionism  -and even unsolicited servility-  to the coffee-growing sectors by the governments of ARENA: gradual elimination of taxes, creation of subsidiary funds in 1991, preferential lines of credit, renovation programs of the coffee field and, in the recent days, the already mentioned "Integral program of rescue and conservation of our coffee field".  This is no surprise considering that the coffee impresarios are organically integrated in ARENA. In any case it is a flagrant manipulation of the State and of the financial sector in favor of a particular group of the economic elite.

     The worst part of all this is that the solidarity gestures of the government are not even appreciated by a great part of the coffee impresarios. In fact, most of them rejected the preferential credits that President Flores granted them during the first half of the year 2000, in order to renovate the coffee field. According to them, the perspectives of the sector indicated that to acquire new loans to invest in coffee did not have economic sense. That means that they would uselessly get into debt.

     The situation becomes more aggravated if we consider that the most recent program in favor of the coffee-growing impresarios is given in a moment in which much more vulnerable sectors exist, and these are urged for post disaster development programs (not just assistance programs). Obviously, the level of damage is not the same to a coffee plantation owner with a 200 acre property (of which, for example, 20 suffered landslides) than it is to a family employed in a coffee plantation, whose only possessions  (a house and some furniture) were destroyed.

     The impact of the efforts for the recuperation of the coffee sector does not seem positive, not even in the most optimistic scene. Even if we suppose the unlikely situation of the coffee production of El Salvador being incremented, and that the international prices were raised, the workers of this sector would still be condemned to perceive salaries that will not even cover the basic food basket and, which is worst, to perceive those salaries only for a short period of the year (three or four months).

     This reminds us that one of the most notable counterparts of the coffee adoption was the concentration of the added value in the hands of the coffee plantation owners, the generation of seasonal low quality employment and, associated to the first one, the settlement of salaries inferior to the extreme poverty line. It is worth while to point out that for every extra Colón resulting from the coffee production, 70 cents are translated in profit for the plantation owner and only 30 cents are translated into salaries for an enormous mass of workers. This reality has been a never-ending source of national crisis -peasant movements included- from which the heroes of the "national reconstruction" seem to be forgotten.

     More than a reactivation in the coffee-growing production, what we need is a production option with more future in the international market, and a more equitable distribution of the added value. The fact that El Salvador is in a post disaster stage does not mean that rushed measures without practical viability have to be taken. This is the ideal moment to attack the real causes of the disasters and not only its effects. This effect  (stage passes) definitely pass through a redefinition of the economic model and of the strategic economic sector that must sustain it.
 

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