Upwards of 200,000 march in El Salvador

At least 200,000 Salvadorans, or 4% of the nation’s population (the proportional equivalent of 11 million people in the US), completely shut down San Salvador yesterday morning as they took to the streets in the second “White March” of the healthcare strike, now in its 35th day. Doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, patients, retirees, bus drivers, public-sector workers, women informal-sector vendors, sugarcane and coffee laborers, campesinos, students, teachers, Catholic and Evangelical churches, FMLN legislators and base communities, organizations from across the Salvadoran social movement, and even clowns on stilts came together to reject Salvadoran President Francisco Flores’s voucher privatization plan, and to demand that he sign the legislative decree outlawing the privatization of health care. 80% of classes at the University of El Salvador were cancelled as students and professors marched as a unified bloc; satellite campuses in the interior of the country could not rent enough busses to transport all of the students who wanted to attend the march. Entire hospitals emptied out as all of the personnel joined in the march. At the same time, thousands of campesinos protesting against privatization, CAFTA and the FTAA, blocked three of the major entrances into the city, and shut down the highway to the airport for an hour before police threatened arrest. ISSS Director Mauricio Ramos, who predicted that only 5,000 would march, was “not available for comment.”

In what STISSS Secretary-General Ricardo Monge describes as “a clear provocation,” riot police prevented marchers from reaching their final destination, Flores’s residence in the wealthy Escalón neighborhood. Police armed with automatic weapons had closed off a traffic circle with razor wire; two armored cars and a water cannon, stood ready to attack. An army helicopter circled overhead, and protesters at the front of the march could smell the tear gas being prepared. In other parts of the country, three police roadblocks detained bus caravans; two caravans were eventually allowed to pass and incorporated into the march near the end, but twelve busses at the Puente de Oro were turned back and protesters took over the bridge in protest. Monge worries that police are trying to provoke protesters, and may eventually decide to attack.

Seeking perhaps to starve workers back to work, the government has withheld monthly paychecks from striking workers and doctors, basing this action in a recent court decision declaring the strike to be illegal. However, because many striking workers still clock in at their worksites but do not work, the administration decided to withhold pay from every worker at the institution, including scabs who cross the picket lines. According to one worker from Ilopango who had not previously honored the strike but in the end joined in yesterday’s march, the measure had the opposite effect: it motivated dozens of scab workers to walk out and join their brothers and sisters in the march. The government also seeks to withhold paychecks from FMLN legislative assistants and secretaries who took off work to participate in the march.

On Friday the government illegally fired Alirio Romero, Secretary-General of the STSEL electricity workers union, and four other union activists without justification. The generation of electricity is yet another sector that the Salvadoran government seeks to privatize. The privatization of electricity, and its subsequent regionalization, are key components of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), the infrastructural mega-project meant to facilitate trade between Central America and the US. STSEL has been on the forefront of opposing privatization and the PPP. A total of 29 STSEL union members have been fired since March. In response to Friday’s firings, three union activists began an indefinite hunger strike. They are camped out in front of a government building, with permanent support from unions and organizations in the Salvadoran social movement, including the STISSS and SIMETRISSS. The STSEL demands that the government rehire all illegally fired workers and end the firings; end the privatization of electricity generation; and sign the decree outlawing the privatization of health care. Unless their demands are met, they have threatened to call a nationwide electricity strike, or in the words of Romero, “shut off the lights in all of El Salvador.”

That’s the news this morning from El Salvador…