Si me matan resuscitaré en el pueblo salvadoreño. —Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero
Shortly before his assassination on march 24, 1980, El Salvador’s legendary Monseñor Romero declared, “If they kill me, I shall be reborn in the Salvadoran people.” In the years that followed, President Reagan’s support for El Salvador’s death squads sowed seeds of blood, displacing thousands of people from their homeland. Today Salvadorans are a truly transnational people with an estimated quarter of the population living outside the country’s borders, mostly in the United States. In an unexpected fulfillment of the archbishop’s prophecy, the seeds sown during the war have taken root and are now bearing fruit in a new generation of Salvadorans that has taken up Romero’s struggle for justice—both in El Salvador and in the United States.
This new generation of social justice activists has a concrete legacy to draw upon: a transnational network and a particular model of organizing, one that emphasizes building human bonds with non-Salvadorans. This approach to pressuring the U.S. foreign policy establishment—unique in contemporary Latino politics—owes its existence to the Salvadorans, Salvadoran Americans, and North Americans who in the 1980s established a vibrant transnational movement to stop U.S. support for El Salvador’s military dictatorship and to help the many Salvadoran refugees fleeing the country’s civil war.
Although the activist networks are smaller today than they were at the movement’s peak in the 1980s and early 1990s, they have been reactivated on several important occasions during the last decade, most recently in 2008–9. Ahead of the Salvadoran presidential election in March 2009, Salvadoran and Salvadoran-solidarity groups pressured the Obama administration to issue a clear statement of respect for El Salvador’s democratic process. After months of intense grassroots organizing, these efforts culminated the week before the election, with official statements of neutrality from the State Department and U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. In part as a result of these efforts the election brought into office Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
The most prominent organizations leading this campaign included the FMLN’s U.S. Base Committees, the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the Salvadoran American National Association (SANA), and the SHARE Foundation, together with a coalition of academics and the Union Salvadoreña de Estudiantes Universitarios (Union of Salvadoran University Students, or USEU). These organizations received strong support from progressive congressional representatives like Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and succeeded in getting Representative Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to issue a statement repudiating interference in the Salvadoran election from Republican members of Congress.1
Later in the year, these same organizations, along with Nicaraguan solidarity organizations like the Nicaragua Network and the Quixote Center, launched a strong lobbying effort to pressure the Obama administration to denounce the Honduran military coup of June 28, 2009. Within 24 hours of the coup, thousands of activists across the United States had already mobilized to support the reinstatement of constitutional order in Honduras and to push the U.S. government to call for the immediate return of ousted president Manuel Zelaya to office. At the time, the Honduran community in the United States did not have its own solidarity network in place, and the U.S.-based Honduran organizations that did exist were often split over how to respond. According to Celina Benitez, director of the Los Angeles chapter of CISPES, U.S. Honduran groups were initially divided on whether to call it a coup or not.
“But ultimately and very quickly,” Benitez said, “they came out in support of [coup leader Roberto] Micheletti and the coup by having a counter-protest to the solidarity groups. Among those groups were Hondureños Unidos en Los Angeles [HULA] and Alianza Hondureña de Los Ángeles.” Benitez added: “I personally called [HULA] in order to unite forces and stand in solidarity with Zelaya and denounce the coup. I was told that internally they where divided but had decided that they would stand with the de facto government because Zelaya had broken the constitution and was trying to turn Honduras into a Communist country.”
As a result, in the first few days of protests outside the Honduran consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the large majority of protesters were Salvadorans. Many Salvadoran activists and organizations poured significant time, energy, and resources into helping pressure the U.S. government to support the reinstatement of Zelaya—not only out of solidarity with their Central American brothers and sisters, but also because they feared that the coup could trigger the destabilization of the Funes government and other leftist administrations in the region. Some Salvadoran activists also interpreted the coup as a shot across the bow of the Bolivarian Alliance for Latin America (ALBA), which Honduras had joined under Zelaya, and at Venezuela specifically.
In the case of pressuring the U.S. government to respect the Salvadoran election, the movement apparently gained a major victory; in the case of the Honduran coup, it suffered what appears to be a major setback. Despite the mobilization of the established Central American solidarity networks and others, including the newly established Honduras Solidarity Network and embryonic National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) structures, the U.S. government never insisted on Zelaya’s return to office. On the contrary, the Obama administration used negotiations to stall until it could recognize the tainted November 2009 election that brought Porfirio Lobo of the Conservative Party into office amid gross human rights violations, censorship of the media, and intimidation of social forces opposing the coup. To this day the U.S. government continues to seek the reincorporation of Honduras into the Organization of American States (OAS).2
Without a deeper analysis or contextual information, it is difficult to determine why the movement failed to accomplish its goal in the case of the Honduran coup but met with success in the case of the Salvadoran election—or was it really a success? Perhaps the U.S. government saw a Funes administration as a potential new “good left” government in Central America and figured it had nothing to lose in taking a neutral position on the election.3 Two facts seem to suggest that this may have been the case. First, in a meeting with CISPES and SANA activists in Los Angeles in late 2008, Berman revealed that his Latin American adviser had counseled him that Funes was not a “radical” leftist, but rather someone whom the United States could and should work with. As it turns out, Funes became one of the first Central American presidents to advocate for the reinstatement of Honduras into the OAS, even in the face of staunch opposition from the FMLN.
Second, Salvadoran foreign minister Hugo Martínez began championing the Lobo government’s cause shortly after Funes’s first official meeting with President Obama.4 Potentially more revealing is the fact that in the days after their meeting, the United States re-approved Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans in the United States, and El Salvador received an atypical IMF loan that allowed it to qualify for World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loans explicitly for immediate stimulus spending (allowing Funes to fund his campaign promises). Despite these considerations, it is doubtful that the Obama administration would have stated its neutrality in the Salvadoran election without direct grassroots pressure. In this way, Salvadoran organizations and the Salvadoran-focused solidarity movement have demonstrated an impressive organizational capacity, and they have several reasons to be optimistic, especially about their ability to grow and become even more effective.
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The first and probably the most important factor in the growth and strength of organizations like CISPES, SHARE, SANA, Central America Resource Center (CARECEN), and the FMLN Base Committees is the renewed energy that a new generation of Salvadoran activists has brought to them. Many of these organizations now have among their leadership young Salvadorans with a strong connection to their ancestral homeland and a clear sense of the origins of their or their parents’ migration to the United States. That trend is likely only to increase, as Salvadoran-born but U.S.-raised Salvadorans (known as the “1.5 generation”), as well as U.S.-born Salvadorans (the second generation), come of age.
A second factor is the creation and exponential growth of USEU—a student group founded in 2005 at the University of El Salvador—across California universities. The first statewide organization providing a space for Salvadoran students, this organization is playing a major role in politicizing and mobilizing young Salvadorans, and has the potential to provide Salvadoran and Salvadoran-solidarity organizations with a ready-made population of cadre and activists, both in the United States and El Salvador. In 2007, several U.S.-born or -raised Salvadoran university students traveled to participate in the São Paulo Forum, a conference of leftist political parties begun in Brazil, which was held in San Salvador that year. At the conference they met USEU’s founders, and after returning they decided to start their own chapter of the organization at Cal State Los Angeles and Long Beach City College.
From then on the organization expanded rapidly, first in southern and then in northern California. In fewer than three years, USEU has not only managed to open chapters statewide but has organized two statewide conferences; the first, held at UCLA, drew just under 200 students. The second annual statewide conference, titled “Paradigms of a New Consciousness: (Re)defining the Salvadoran Diaspora in the 21st Century,” was attended by almost 300 students from throughout California. The organization’s statewide conferences were the first to address several issues facing the Salvadoran population and its solidarity organizations. They consisted of workshops in which students, activists, and community members discussed the need to reconceptualize Salvadoran identity based on a transnational conception of nation, how to advocate for immigrants rights, how to heal the (inter-generationally displaced) traumatic effects of the civil war, how to improve academic achievement, and how to recover the community’s historical memory.
Student organizations like USEU have the potential to play a vital role in the growth of the Salvadoran transnational movement. At the same time, because young Salvadorans in the diaspora are organically linked to both Salvadoran and U.S. struggles, USEU provides a space to address the community’s most pressing issues regardless of geographic location. Thus, the organization has at different times taken on Salvadoran- and Latin American–focused causes, such as stopping U.S. interference in the Salvadoran presidential election, supporting the anti-mining movement in El Salvador, and opposing the coup in Honduras. It has also taken on U.S.-based causes such as fighting for immigrants’ rights (e.g., mobilizing against Arizona’s SB 1070), helping re-register Salvadorans to TPS, and supporting the work of Homies Unidos (a gang prevention and intervention group), especially its charismatic leader Alex Sanchez.
USEU has also adopted tactics similar to those used by solidarity organizations, including taking delegations of students to El Salvador to learn about the country’s struggle firsthand. In doing so, the organization is training future leaders who will continue the cycle of empowering and mobilizing youth. As more students are politicized by USEU, there will be ever larger numbers of fired-up Salvadoran youth ready to organize for social justice. Just as importantly, by providing a safe space to expand knowledge and awareness about their own history—in a way that is denied most Salvadoran youth because of the psychological scars of the civil war, which to this day keep many parents fearful of sharing what happened with their kids—USEU has created a support system to help lower dropout rates among Salvadoran students. The organization’s next big strategic challenge is the expansion of its work beyond California, to Texas and the East Coast.
A third factor in the growth of Salvadoran and solidarity organizations is a new recognition of and trend toward tapping into the potential of Salvadoran Americans. The most prominent grassroots organization to take the lead in this regard is CISPES, which has long sought to educate and mobilize North Americans to support Salvadoran self-determination and an end to U.S. military and economic intervention in the country. While Latinos and people of color played essential roles in the solidarity movement, most of the activists who supported the movement in the 1980s were white North Americans. Now CISPES has taken a strategic decision to begin mobilizing Salvadorans in the United States. In June, CISPES took their first group of Salvadoran and Salvadoran Americans on an inaugural “Radical Roots” delegation to reconnect with their heritage and background through the lens of social justice activism.
This strategy holds vast potential, since Salvadoran Americans not only have rights as U.S. citizens but also as Salvadoran citizens, which can be a politically useful resource. For example, Salvadoran American delegations have visited their U.S. representatives and the U.S. Embassy in Antiguo Cuscatlán as U.S. citizens, while also being received as Salvadorans in El Salvador’s National Assembly and attorney general’s office. In a sense this marks an important break with the traditional solidarity model, in which Salvadorans often worked behind the scenes. Today they have moved directly into lobbying on foreign policy issues, but unlike a traditional ethnic lobby, they are just as likely to pressure Salvadoran authorities as they are the U.S. government.
Yet the very potential for recruiting Salvadoran Americans is a double-edged sword. If solidarity organizations are not careful, a strategy focused on rallying Salvadoran Americans could actually impede the movement. Salvadoran American activists and the traditional Salvadoran solidarity organizations, impressed by the intense energy and passion of young Salvadorans in the United States to engage issues concerning El Salvador, might be led to target them at the expense of non-Salvadorans, who in contrast may know little about El Salvador and have no ties to or affinity for the country.
Despite the short-term gain that targeting exclusively Salvadoran Americans might produce, it would be a huge mistake. It would change the historic mission of these well-established solidarity organizations, moving Salvadoran solidarity toward the ethnic-lobby model of political mobilization typical of successive waves of immigrant populations. The genius of the Central American solidarity movement, and especially of its Salvadoran-focused organizations, is that it mobilizes North Americans and Central Americans into a genuinely transnational movement, with each population playing a distinct, but essential role.
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Settling on an effective model of political mobilization is particularly important for the two largest Salvadoran solidarity organizations, CISPES and the SHARE Foundation. Intelligently, both organizations have successfully enlarged their grassroots base with Salvadoran Americans, especially youth, while continuing to expand among progressive secular and religious North Americans. The challenge they face in the coming years is to continue implementing the right mix of programs and education geared toward both populations, which require quite distinct kinds of attention and information, so that both feel comfortable participating in multiracial, multicultural, and multi-class organizations. Nevertheless, Salvadoran Americans may eventually need to form their own political organization to channel the burgeoning youth activism into a separate group, which would work in coalition with the previously established solidarity organizations. In that case, organizations like CISPES and SHARE would still play an essential role.
Whatever the case, the future of Salvadoran political organizing in both the United States and El Salvador, while fraught with pitfalls, gives us plenty of reasons to be optimistic. It is impressive to see how many of today’s leaders in different sectors of the U.S. left cut their activist teeth fighting Reagan’s policy in Central America and standing in solidarity with the people of El Salvador. Among the many activists nationwide, these include Angela Sanbrano, president of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC); Cindy Buhl, legislative director at the office of Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.); Geoff Thale, program director at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA); Antonio Gonzales, president of the Willy C. Velasquez Institute; and Ken Jacobs, chair of the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education.
Meanwhile, Salvadorans in the United States have in one generation gone from a refugee population in desperate need of help to providing some of the fiercest activists for Latin American and Latino issues and social justice generally in the United States. One of the clearest examples is the Basta Dobbs campaign strategist Roberto Lovato, who led the effective online and offline mobilization that succeeded in ousting the anti-immigrant pundit Lou Dobbs from CNN. Likewise, many Salvadorans who fled the violence of the war are now central figures in the U.S. movements for immigrant and human rights, the labor movement, and other social justice movements across the country. This includes leaders such as Óscar Chacón, executive director of NALAAC; José Artiga, executive director of the SHARE Foundation; Werner Marroquin, an organizer with AFSCME and SANA; and Carlos Vaquerano, executive director of the Salvadoran American Leadership and Education Fund (SALEF).
And now the 1.5 generation and an early wave of second-generation Salvadorans have also taken up the struggle and are starting to reach leadership positions in different realms of U.S. civil society—people like Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos; Berny Moto, a field deputy for Los Angeles council member Bernard Parks; Celina Benitez of CISPES and the Southern California Immigration Coalition; Esther Portillo-Gonzales of SANA; Ivan and Alba Peña, Steven Osuna, Ernie Zavaleta, Nancy Zuñiga, Krissia Martinez, and Janette Linares of USEU; Cecilia Menjivar, Cowden Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University; Leisy Abrego, assistant professor at UCLA; and Patricia Castillo of SEIU.
By mobilizing for social justice, these activists guarantee the fulfillment of Romero’s prophecy. Today, the seed of Monseñor Romero’s blood is being reborn in the Salvadoran people, in greater numbers, in the United States as well as in El Salvador, and in ways that his killers and their supporters in the Reagan administration never intended and would have abhorred.
Héctor Perla Jr. is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The first U.S.-born Salvadoran to earn a doctorate in political science, he works with various grassroots Central American social justice organizations, including many of those mentioned in this article.
1. Alfonso Gonzales, “The FMLN Victory and Transnational Salvadoran Activism: Lessons for the Future,” NACLA Report on the Americas 42, no. 4 (September/October 2009): 4–5.
2. Adrienne Pine, “Honduras: ‘Reconciliation’ vs. Reality,” NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 4 (September/October 2010): 4–5.
3. Héctor Perla Jr., Marco Mojica, and Jared Bibler, “From Guerrillas to Governments,” in Jeffery R. Webber and Barry Carr, eds., The Resurgence of Latin American Radicalism: Between Cracks in the Empire and an Izquierda Permitida (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).
4. See “Presidente Funes se reúne con Barack Obama,” editorial, Diario Co-Latino (San Salvador), March 8, 2010, and René Serrano/Agencias, “Lobo rechaza el Alba y se normalizará lazo con país,” El Diario de Hoy (San Salvador), February 1, 2010.
