[Cispes-update] Labor, Environmental, Women's, Religious and Community Groups Announce Alliance to Fight Water Privatization

[CISPES National Office]

Labor, Environmental, Women’s, Religious and Community Groups Announce
Alliance to Fight Water Privatization

CISPES Update

Sept. 8, 2006

 

Yesterday Salvadoran activists representing 37 different organizations came
together to form the Foro Nacional por la Defensa de la Sustentabilidad y el
Derecho al Agua (National Forum for the Defense of the Sustainability and
Right to Water).  The Forum is people’s organized response to the
government’s intention to privatize the public service, which would
exacerbate the already precarious and deficient access to water and the lack
of an integral and sustainable approach to water administration.  This
purpose of the forum is to reclaim water as a public and social resource and
therefore oppose to the government’s neoliberal economic policies.

 

The newly-formed Forum agreed on a plan of action, which includes a major
mobilization against the government’s soon-to-be-presented General Water
Law.  This law, which the government has prepared in secret, would provide
the regulatory framework to pass the administration of the water resource
from public to private hands through concessions for up to 50 years.  A
community leader addressing the group was emphatic about the dire
implications of privatization, saying that “with the ratification of CAFTA,
we know that US companies are eyeing our water and we can’t allow them to
take over our resource for profit.”   The Forum is the latest expression of
resistance to water privatization, as SETA (the water workers’ union)
continues to organize in the rural municipalities against water
decentralization, an effort sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank
(IDB) to gradually reduce state responsibility for providing the service.

 

Government Negligence in Responding to Violence Draws Sharp Criticism

This past Wednesday, the FMLN introduced a legislative resolution calling on
Rodrigo Avila, director of the National Civilian Police (PNC), and Felix
Garrid Safie, Attorney General, to testify about why these institutions have
done nothing to investigate reports of extermination groups.  The existence
of these “social cleansing” bands has been denounced by several Human Rights
organizations based on the increasing number of assassinations carried out
in classic death-squad style.  The extrajudicial executions have targeted
not only youth from the marginal and excluded sectors of society, but also
recognized FMLN activists like the elderly Manzanares, and – more recently
–Alex Flores Montoya and Mercedes Peñate de Montoya.

 

Last month, the Human Right’s Office (PDDH) presented an investigation which
points to the existence of these groups in the department of Sonsonate, with
links to the PNC itself.  And in the last couple of weeks, two social
cleansing groups in San Miguel – the Sombra Negra and Comando Central
Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez – have re-emerged.  The FMLN legislative
fraction has pointed out that the government’s lack of investigation is
negligent at best and favors impunity.  There are growing fears on the left
that the crisis of violence, fear, and crime is sanctioned by the government
in order to ram through harsher laws, criminalize protest, promote
extermination groups and cover-up political assassinations within the
generalized climate of impunity.

 

ARENA Uses Midnight Legislative Session to Approve More Debt and Sideline
Democracy

At around midnight last night, ARENA pushed through a major financial reform
to the country’s retirement system that it had presented to the legislative
assembly a little more than a week ago.  The reform, which was opposed by
unions, the social movement, and the FMLN privatizes the remaining public
pensions by forcing the government to emit long-term certificates (like
bonds) that will be bought by the private pension administration companies
in order to pay retirees.  This political move bails the government out in
the very short term by delaying payment of debt, as the country is
experiencing a large public deficit which has been financed each year by
international loans.  At the same time, the new law guarantees profit for
the wealthy financial sector that has made $285 million dollars in
worker-paid commissions alone since the system was privatized in 1998.
Politically, ARENA seeks to avoid having to negotiate with the FMLN in the
legislative assembly around the national budget, since a qualified, or
two-thirds, majority is needed to approve international debt.  The FMLN
criticized the legislation as irresponsible and unconstitutional.

 

 

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