El Salvador Archive

Juan Rojas: Recovering indigenous memory in El Salvador

Tracy Barnett

Published: November 12, 2010Posted in: El Salvador, Featured, Permaculture, Spiritual, WhyTags: El Salvador, El Salvador Permaculture Institute, Indigenous peoples, IPES, Juan Rojas, Mayan cosmovision, Organic agriculture, permaculture, traditional agriculture

Juan Rojas: Recovering indigenous memory in El Salvador

Story and videos by Tracy L. Barnett
Photos by Juan Rojas

LA FLORIDA, El Salvador – “That’s one of the purposes of the Salvadoran state, to make us forget,” Juan Rojas explains to me as we bump down the rugged dirt road that leads to his homestead, just six kilometers from San Salvador, but a world apart.

Rojas is determined to remember, and to help others remember, as well. It is here, and in rural villages elsewhere in the country, that Rojas is quietly working with indigenous peoples to recover the Mayan roots of this country. A country where the name Izalco, for most young people, just means a volcano, a town, or a street in San Salvador; but for the elders, it’s the name of a massacre, and of the native people who were extinguished on that day.

A curious mixture of Salvadoran revolutionary, Australian permaculturist and Mayan spiritualist, I met Juan Rojas on my first visit to El Salvador. He was one of the founders of the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador, a group teaching ecological design and agriculture principles to campesinos throughout the country. Rojas had stepped back from the institute in recent years to pursue other projects. His comments on that visit about restoring indigenous heritage in El Salvador made me curious, and I contacted him upon my return to learn more.

The story of his involvement in the revolution, of the attempts on his life and his escape to Mexico, his eventual move to Australia and his friendship with permaculture founder Bill Mollison, and his return to his country to help rebuild it after the war using the techniques of permaculture are worthy of an eco-adventure novel in themselves. He shares that story in this video.

Now, however, he’s turned the page to a new chapter in his life, and I’m here to learn more about that.

Through his work with the permaculture institute, which spread sustainable agriculture techniques through the farmer-to-farmer movement, he became acquainted with subsistence farmers throughout Mesoamerica, some of whom still practiced the indigenous traditions of their ancestors. It was then that Juan began to realize that the principles of permaculture aren’t so different from the traditional teachings about agriculture.

“That’s one of the first things we learn in permaculture, and Bill Mollison explained this very well: to watch and see where does the air enter your land in different seasons of the year? How does the water enter, and how does it leave? The same for the sun, and for the earth: they are objects of study, of analysis, when you are going to design a piece of land,” he said. “But when we’re living in a zone like Mesoamerica, among the ancestral cultures there’s already been an elaborate thought system developed about these principles, the wind, the water, the earth, the sun.

“Unfortunately, we in El Salvador have lost our cosmology, our understanding of life, and that’s why we’re in such a difficult position, environmentally speaking, in terms of food sovereignty issues, criminal violence, all the things that are making El Salvador famous around the world,” he told me.

Juan shared his thoughts with me about the Mayan cosmovision and climate change, which I recorded in this video:

This has been an exciting year for him, as the slow process of recovering the historical and ancestral memory has begun to yield fruit. Working in indigenous communities in his native Sonsonate and in Morazan, he has been teaching permaculture principles and incorporating the Mayan cosmovision.

Along the way, as they study the Popol Vuh, the Mayan holy book, or discuss certain traditions in planting, the students will stop and get a sudden look of recognition on their faces, Juan said. “Oh! So that’s why my grandfather did that!” they will say. Or, “Oh, yes – I remember hearing about the virgin who gave birth to the twins who were the first humans – that’s like the Virgin Mary!”

At the same time, indigenous visibility has been rising in El Salvador, once thought to be a country devoid of indigenous people since the massacre of 1932 in Izalco that claimed the lives of an estimated 32,000.

In August, a gathering of indigenous peoples in Izalco made a public demand for official recognition and asked that the government be a signatory to Article 169 of the International Labor Organization, an international law guaranteeing the rights of indigenous peoples.

And in October, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes made a public apology to the country’s indigenous people for the government’s historic role in their repression, and responding to their request to recognize El Salvador as a “multiethnic and multicultural society.”

After my visit with Juan, he sent me the famous words of Chief Seattle, which he asked me to include in closing this article:

“One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our God is the same God. You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for red man and the white. The Earth is precious to Him, and to harm the Earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes.

But in your perishing, you will shine brightly, fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the Eagle? Gone. The end of living and the beginning of survival.”

For more information on the Salvadoran indigenous communities and efforts to recover ancestral memory and heritage, write to Juan Rojas at mesopermacultura@yahoo.es.

Permaculture Institute heals the wounds of war

Tracy Barnett

Published: November 12, 2010Posted in: El Salvador, Featured, Permaculture, WhyTags: agroecology, agroforestry, El Salvador, environment, Guazapa, Juan Rojas, Karen Inwood, Latin America, Organic agriculture, permaculture, Permaculture Institute of El Salvador, Suchitoto

Permaculture Institute heals the wounds of war

By Tracy L. Barnett

SUCHITOTO, El Salvador – A gentle breeze ruffles the thatched roof of the hilltop shelter here at the Permaculture Institute. An electric-blue morpho butterfly flits past, a sharp accent against the muted blue of Volcano Guazapa in the background. An incongruously peaceful backdrop for the violence, massacres, scorched earth and forced evacuation that razed this region less than two decades ago.

That mountain, the hideout for guerilla forces for miles around, was bombed daily and burned repeatedly; the town of Suchitoto itself became a battlefield. Hundred of tons of artillery, white phosphorus and napalm rained down on the once lush jungles of these lands, drying up even the springs where people once retrieved their water.

But the Earth has a way of healing herself, and her inhabitants, and this land and the people who work it are living proof of that reality.

The Permaculture Institute of El Salvador or IPES (pronounced EE-Pace), for its Spanish acronym, has staked its claim on a stony, hilly hectare in this region. In part because of the strong community organizations that formed before the war, Suchitoto has proven fertile ground for a new approach to community development pioneered by peasant farmers, ex-combatants and a British permaculturist with a stubborn streak.

Karen Inwood was a community development specialist looking for a different approach when she met Juan Rojas, a former Salvadoran dissident forced to flee his country at the height of the civil war. Rojas, by a twist of fate, had ended up in Australia, where he met Bill Mollison, founder of an innovative new system of ecological design known as permaculture.

Rojas was excited by the idea of the system as an approach to rebuilding his country after the war, and returned in 1993 after the peace accords were signed to see what he could do. Realizing that permacultural principles have much in common with ancestral agricultural practices, he began in the heavily impacted department of Morazan, which is also where the largest concentration of indigenous Salvadorans still live. He began working with local farmers to learn their traditional practices. Utilizing the farmer-to-farmer method, he began working to disseminate these ideas along with permaculture principles, and later began working with leaders in the departments of La Libertad and his native Sonsonate.

The first Mesoamerican permaculture design course was held in Perquín, Morazan, in 1998 with the participation of campesinos from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Guatemala. These first Mesoamerican permaculturists went on to form the base for what later became IPES in El Salvador and IMAP in Guatemala, among others.

In 2000 he made a trip to England to attend an Ecovillage Training Course at the Findhorn Foundation and Karen, whom he met there, was intrigued with his project.

She headed to El Salvador to help him build the Permaculture Institute, and arrived to find a country in desperate need for the lessons in self-sufficiency and sustainability that Juan and others were working to spread.

“I’d always thought of ecovillages as an alternative lifestyle for those with the resources to buy land and move out to the country and do their thing,” she says. “My interest was to use permaculture for social change rather than as a lifestyle choice, and I came to El Salvador to do just that.”

Permaculture, as Inwood explains it, can be applied in everything from agriculture to architecture to community design. Its main application here, at the moment, is in teaching sustainable agriculture and living practices to the subsistence farmers that struggle at the edge of survival throughout the Salvadoran countryside. In practice, it can mean the difference between malnutrition and misery, and a life of good health, dignity and autonomy. And in an era of climate change, when this tiny and densely populated Central American nation has been named among the world’s most vulnerable, food security is on everyone’s lips, and permaculture seems to be taking on a new and bigger life.

After a decade working in the obscurity of this rugged countryside, with a bare minimum of financial support, mostly from individual donors and foundations in England, Inwood is beginning to see the group’s efforts bear fruit. More than 1,000 families have adopted permaculture practices on their land and are growing organic produce for self-consumption and for sale. A team of promotores, or farmers turned permaculture teachers, is using the farmer-to-farmer method, working through the regional ecological networks, spreading permaculture principles throughout the villages.

And this rugged, typically hilly and not particularly fertile parcel has been converted into an educational center and demonstration site for the dissemination of a new approach to rural life here in El Salvador, an approach that promises to lift its practitioners out of poverty and into self-sufficiency, in harmony with each other and with nature.

It’s a rustic and simple site, with structures built mostly from natural materials found on the land, and with a vast diversity of crops worked by a simple yet passionate team of campesinos.

Other projects in the remote department of Morazán, one of the poorest regions of the country and one of the hardest hit by the war, have taken off and are blossoming; municipal governments are lending their support, and several hundred families are now practicing permaculture, with a team of promoters there beginning to branch out even further into the countryside.

Now, after years of trying to meet with and work with other community development organizations in the region and being repeatedly ignored, regional leaders are beginning to seek out the advice and input of IPES.

And most recently, representatives of the new leftist government of Mauricio Funes have expressed interest in applying permaculture principles to a national food security program aimed at strengthening the role of the family farm.

Inwood isn’t sure what has caused the sudden surge of interest, but speculates it has to do with the recent crises brought on by climate change: crops are failing due to intense flooding, followed by drought. A huge part of Central America’s bean crop has failed, and the price of what remains has gone sky-high; the price of the family basket has risen 300 percent in September and October.

Ironically, just at the moment when IPES has begun to break the ice with government agencies, and just as the group’s services are being widely sought, its funding sources have declined precipitously. The drop in the price of the pound has taken a toll, just as the financial crisis has left funders with less to share.

At the same time, the Funes government inherited the traditional patronage system of agricultural assistance, in which $33 million in agricultural “packages” consisting of hybrid seeds and agrochemicals are distributed throughout the country.

In the first year of its administration, before the young government had a chance to organize an alternative, the agricultural packages went out in the traditional way and there was an outcry among those who weren’t on the receiving end. The government realized the old system wasn’t working, and is now looking for new alternatives, Karen said. Permaculture is one of those alternatives.

“We’re excited but at the same time, it’s challenging,” she confesses, her expressive blue eyes widening. Those blue eyes, together with her gentle, sweet manner and her British-accented Spanish, have worked their magic with more than one hard-hearted bureaucrat, I imagined, watching her present her ideas to a pair of authorities from the United Nations Development Fund. The pair left impressed with what they saw, and were scheduled to attend another meeting with IPES the following week.

Contrasting with Karen’s feminine, British touch are the passionate and very Salvadoran approach of Agustin “Maclobio” Duran and Alejandro Martínez, two former Salvadoran guerillas who took the design course and ended up converts to the permaculture cause. Both see permaculture as a means to achieve the same goals they strove for in the revolution: a dignified life for their families.

After the war, an army of nongovernmental organizations descended on El Salvador, each with a different proposal for solving the country’s deeply entrenched problems. Like others from IPES, Agustin is critical of their approach. None that he has seen were ultimately viable, he said, and some were even deceptive; together, they left communities with a dependency mentality and in some ways, worse off than they were before. Permaculture, on the other hand, offers a different model, one that empowers people to take control of their own lives.

“I see it as a different kind of revolution, one that achieves just what we were fighting for – a dignified life for our people, healthy food and an education,” he said.

“From what I’ve seen since the war and in fact in my whole life, permaculture is what convinces me the most; it’s a more integral proposal. Of course it requires a lot of sacrifice, but if we were able to withstand all the risks and hardships of the war, we can do this, too.”

For Alejandro, the shift to this form of agriculture is urgently necessary, not just individually but at the community level.

“If we continue with the same agricultural practices we’ve inherited, we are going to suffer a great famine,” he said. “If we can spread the ideas of permaculture, we can all live well, and have a better system to pass on to the future generations.”

Agustin nodded his agreement. “That’s the challenge we face,” he said. “If we can successfully transmit these ideas, in 20 years things will be very different here, and maybe we can shift a little the destructive direction we’re headed in. We already have the effects of climate change upon us – but from this battle trench of IPES, we can minimize the impact, the consequences that we have already been suffering.

“We as campesinos, people who don’t have economic power, want to show the world that relying on solutions and alternatives so simple as learning from what surrounds us in nature, we can have multiple solutions to great problems, and we can solve them. It’s just a question of education and consciousness.”

For more information about the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador, to pay a visit or to sign on as a volunteer, see their website and/or their Facebook page.

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Salvadoran environmental activists put their lives on the line

Tracy Barnett

Published: July 17, 2010Posted in: El Salvador, Featured, Mining, Spiritual, WhyTags: activism, Dolores Alicia Recinos, El Salvador, Marcelo Rivera, Mining, Pacific Rim

Salvadoran environmental activists put their lives on the line

(Above: “No to mining, yes to life” reads a poster commemorating the four Cabañas anti-mining activists killed last year: Marcelo Rivera; Dora Alicia Recinos; Manuel, her unborn child; and Ramiro Rivera.)

SAN ISIDRO, Cabañas, El Salvador – I came to this quiet mountain community last week for a commemoration ceremony for three anti-mining activists who were killed here last year in the wake of ongoing protests against the operations of Canadian mining company Pacific Rim.

Cabañas, the second-poorest department in the country, was a guerilla stronghold during the war and the site of several massacres. These days it’s a quiet backwater of subsistence agriculture whose barely pronounceable capital city, Sensuntepeque, is home to about 35,000 people.

That quiet was broken in 2005 with the arrival of Pacific Rim, which came bearing promises of economic development and something the previous corporate-friendly ARENA government termed “green mining.” The same party that had held power since the war, when it ran the death squads that imposed a reign of terror on the populace, granted the company exploration permits, provoking widespread dissent.

Tiny El Salvador, with the densest population in Latin America and a looming water crisis, is not an appropriate place for mining, opponents argued. The current president, FMLN leader Mauricio Funes, ran his campaign as an anti-mining candidate, and once in office, he declared the country off-limits to mining. Pacific Rim responded with a $77 million lawsuit against the country under the Central American Free Trade Agreement.

I arrived in San Isidro to find Father Neftali Ruíz at the head of the march for justice, with Father Luis Quintanilla and Bishop Gabriel Orellana not far behind. They were wearing white robes with colorful scarves influenced by El Salvador’s indigenous past, much like the vestments worn by Archbishop Oscar Romero and the four Jesuit priests who were assassinated during the civil war for their defense of human rights. Those priests’ garments, some of them bullet-ridden and stained with blood, are on display in a museum in San Salvador. But these fathers showed the truth in the Romero quote on banners and T-shirts all over the country: “If I die, I will be reborn among my people.”

Father Neftalí was an animated young man who rallied the crowds as they arrived at the Central Plaza. Later I was shocked to learn that he, too, has been receiving death threats.

“Que Viva Marcelo Rivera!” he cried. “Long live Marcelo Rivera, who still walks among us! Long live the martyrs of Cabañas!”

Marcelo Rivera was a teacher, an artist and a community leader who was outspoken in his opposition to Pacific Rim’s mining operations. He mysteriously disappeared a year ago, on June 18, 2009, and his body was found eight days later at the bottom of a well, with obvious signs of torture. Local authorities dismissed the incident as common delinquency, and to date, no one has been charged with his murder.

The cultural center where Rivera once taught has been renamed in his honor, and repainted with a mural featuring his face and the words, “Those who die for life cannot be called dead.”

In December, following Rivera’s death, two other anti-mining activists were murdered in Cabañas, including Dora Alicia Recinos, who was eight months pregnant at the time.

Friday’s march culminated with an outdoor interfaith religious service officiated by Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran ministers. The service was held in front of the cultural center, with Rivera’s somber face in the background like a benevolent ghost.

“We are here to honor the memory of our martyrs,” began Father Neftali. “They deserve all of our honor and respect because they gave their lives just like Jesus Christ, to defend their people and future generations…We are here to celebrate their lives and to bring together the people who believe in the God of life and who also believe another world is possible.”

Lutheran minister Carlos Najera Medardo Gomez then came forward. “Satan is acting to destroy the plan that God has for each of us to have a life with dignity,” he said. “Destroying nature so that a few can fill their pockets with money is not justice… The only thing the poor have is the land, and if that is taken, they have nothing.”

Father Quintanilla, whose life was also threatened last year by two hooded assailants, took up the words of the prophet Isaiah, who told of an honorable man who was murdered and his case was not taken seriously by the authorities.

“Marcelo Rivera was kidnapped, tortured, killed and then found, and the authorities say it’s common delinquency,” said Quintanilla. “But the antecedents that mark the disappearance of Marcelo are not being taken into account: that Marcelo confronted an imperialist system imposed on this place, governed by the right wing in service to Pacific Rim.

“Nevertheless the Word of God gives us the courage to continue in the struggle. They sacrificed the life of little Manuel, still in the womb of his mother, Dora. In the hole of a rock they have found gold and they want to worship it…. They want to destroy our environment. But we must be attentive to discover and unmask the lies that threaten our land and our people.”

And Bishop Orellana of the Renovated Anglican Church read the story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis. The words of God rang out as an accusation to a modern-day Cain: “What have you done? The voice and the blood of your brother cries to me from the earth.”

After the Mass, I visited with Vidalina Morales, one of the leading opponents of Pacific Rim, who had marched in protests and raised her voice alongside Marcelo Riveras. Morales is no stranger to violence, having fought with the guerillas for 12 years, and her tiny frame belies the steely strength in her voice as she lays out her case against mining in tiny, overpopulated El Salvador. Wells and springs are already drying up in the communities uphill from the company’s exploration wells, she says, and the mining hasn’t even begun.

“Most of us campesinos, we are barely growing enough food to survive,” she explained. “We can get by right now – but if they destroy our water, what will we do?”

I asked her if she’s ever afraid, and for a moment I saw the softer side of Vidalina.

“Of course I’m afraid – not for myself, but for my children, for my family, for those close to me,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “In the end, if they want to do something to me, they’ll do it, and so be it. But I’ve seen this in the struggles against the people – they seek to hurt us in the deepest ways possible, so yes, I’m afraid. But at the same time the fear gives us strength to keep fighting – and we will keep on fighting because justice is on our side.”

Vidalina is one of the directors of ADES, an organization that was born of the need to resettle the people of Santa Marta, a whole town that fled to Honduras during the height of the war. Vidalina was one of those who, as a child, was forced to cross the border under horrendous conditions to save their lives.

ADES, the Association for Economic and Social Development, has expanded its mission to the whole department of Cabañas, and is involved in an impressive array of programs to improve the lives of its citizens. Resistance to the mining operations is something they see as key to promoting equitable and sustainable development.

“They say they are going to bring development, but development is a mirage,” said Nelson Ventura, another ADES staff member who has been active in the resistance. Ventura narrowly escaped an apparent attempt on his life when a man swung a machete at him from behind. He saw it coming in the rearview mirror of a nearby car and dodged the blow. But when he reported the incident to the authorities, they just laughed it off and said, “Oh, he was just trying to scare you.”

Despite the threats on his life, and the loss of his friends and fellow activists, Nelson, the father of four, feels more committed than ever to the cause.

“Sure, I’ve thought of leaving, but what would I do? I have to teach my children to walk in the road of dignity. They have the right to a clean environment. If you don’t stand up for your rights, you have nothing.”
He ends with a favorite quote from Bertold Brecht, made famous in a song by Cuban revolutionary songwriter Silvio Rodriguez:

“There are good men who fight for a day, better men who fight for a year, and even better men who fight for several years. But the ones who fight all their lives are indispensable.”

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Podcast: Oscar Romero lives on in anti-mining movement

Tracy Barnett

Published: July 15, 2010Posted in: El Salvador, Featured, Latin America, Mining, Spiritual, WhyTags: Cabañas, El Salvador, liberation theology, Mining

Podcast: Oscar Romero lives on in anti-mining movement

(Above: An image of Archbishop Oscar Romero, slain by right-wing death squads in 1980 during El Salvador’s civil war. “If I die, I will be reborn among my people.”)

SAN ISIDRO, Cabañas, El Salvador – Cabañas is the second-poorest department in El Salvador, at the heart of a region that was a guerilla stronghold during the war and the site of several massacres. I went there last week for a commemoration of the four anti-mining activists killed last year in the town of San Isidro, where the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim is planning an open-air mine.

Here is a podcast and images from my time in Cabañas – story to come.

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