Salvadoran Campesino Struggles for the Right to Land
CRISPAZ volunteer Paul Darilek worked with CEBES, Ecclesiastical
Base Communities of El Salvador, spending three days a
week in Los Pajales, one of the CEBES communities. Justo
was his roommate.
In 1990, Justo Ramírez began to meet with the people
of his community of Los Pajales to discuss how they could
obtain land to farm. Even if life had not been made worse
by the war, living conditions had not much improved since
Justo’s great-grandparents and four other families
settled the area at the turn of the century. Just as Justo’s
great-grandparents did nearly a century ago, the families
of Los Pajales still drink from the nearest spring that
hasn’t dried up from a lack of rain, live in leaky
stick houses which are a three-hour walk from the port
of La Libertad, cook over wood fires, get wet when it rains
and sick when their water is polluted. Even worse, they
still cut back on how much of their crops they eat in order
to sell more to make money. That money goes to the hacienda
owner from whom they rent land to farm.
Fighting for land is a new second job for Justo. His first
has always been farming—that will never change. From
1955, when he was 16 years old, until 1990, when he was
51, Justo was the community’s catechism teacher.
It was a dangerous job that he did out of love for his
community. “Catechists were considered guerrilla
leaders at that time,” he remarked to me, smiling,
his teeth as white against his leathered face as the plastic-wicker
hat he used to fan the fire on which he cooked his beans.
In 1980, the Salvadoran armed forces invaded Los Pajales
in search of guerrilla soldiers. They left Justo and others
who knew nothing about guerrilla soldiers beaten and face
down in the mud with the warning that they would return
to bomb the town. People fled, some forever and some returning
six months later to plant the next crop.
In 1990, Justo’s group began to meet with ANTA,
the National Association of Agricultural Workers, which
is represented politically by the FMLN. In 1991, with ANTA’s
help in the form of food and tin for shelter, they began
to squat a piece of land. They were removed soon afterward
at gunpoint by the armed forces. Children, adults and elderly
alike were left in the street, prohibited even from taking
their tin roofs with them. The group continued to meet
regularly and to receive support from ANTA, but optimism
dwindled. By October 26, 1995, when land was to be occupied
to create the Tierra Nueva cooperative, Justo and two of
his nephews,
Eleazar and Douglas, ages seven and one-and-a-half, were
the only members willing to participate. They made their
home on the ground under a giant mango tree. “Don’t
worry uncle,” Eleazar told Justo, “we will
take care of you.” Justo says now that he would have
left from loneliness without the company of his nephews.
Thirty families now live on and farm the once unused land
claimed that day, but by law it does not belong to them.
The Tierra Nueva Cooperative will be sold to the people
who farm it through a credit from a government organization
called ISTA, the Institute of Agrarian Transformation.
But the real fate of the land and the people involved depends
on whether or not the government pardons the agrarian debt.
For the members of Tierra Nueva, pardoning agrarian debt
would mean many things. On a personal level it would mean
a sense of security, triumph, pride, renewed energy and
hope for the future. More concretely, the cooperative would
be able to use money that would normally disappear into
bank interest to introduce plantains and yucca root to
the land they farm collectively. They would be able to
invest in a wider variety of vegetables and buy goats to
produce milk and cheese, which they could then sell. They
could farm more efficiently and invest in a wider variety
of crops which would be less taxing on the soil, improve
the diets of those in the community, drive prices down
for consumers and create new goods for the market.
That is the dream. The current reality is continued work
in the corn and bean fields while waiting for the government’s
decision.
On Thursday, October 16, hundreds of campesinos from all
over the country came by bus-and truckloads to gather at
the Legislative Assembly to hear the decision on the debt
situation. Many representatives from Tierra Nueva were
there; Justo was present in his new straw hat. He was chosen
by the community to present the Assembly with an immaculate,
white, typewritten statement demanding the total pardoning
of the debt. He was one of about two hundred such representatives
of some of the world’s poorest, hardest-working people.
Children, women and men, all strangers to the city, held
signs, shouted slogans and sang songs glorifying their
work and making fun of the millionaire President whose
expansive hacienda can be seen from Tierra Nueva. The farmers
filled the Assembly hall and waited patiently for a response.
They waited the better part of the day before they were
informed that the Assembly would not discuss the announced
proposal. The Assembly had known since early that morning
that they would be talking about the phone company rather
than the agrarian debt. Nobody had the decency or the courage
to tell the campesinos they were there for nothing.
This scene was repeated on October 22 and again the people
were left disheartened. On October 31, the Legislative
Assembly approved a plan (which might still be vetoed by
the president) to forgive 93% of the agrarian debt. When
I told Justo of the vote he commented “We won . .
. more or less.”
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