Salvadoran Community in Quebec Meets to Discuss Their Homeland's Future
On November 18, over 50 members of the Salvadoran community gathered in Montreal to meet Werner Marroquin, the vice-presidential candidate for the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) ahead of El Salvador's presidential elections in February 2024. The meeting, which took place at Patro Villeray, was broadcast live on Facebook to reach Salvadorans living in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere in the world.
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Werner MarroquinThe aim of Marroquin's visit was to inform the community of the FMLN's assessment of its 2019 electoral defeat and the program it has given itself to unify the Salvadoran people around their aspirations to build a promising future.
El Salvador's population is 6.3 million people, while 3 million Salvadorans live outside the country. More than 50,000 live in Canada, with most in Ontario, as well as sizeable populations in Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta.
Salvadorans living abroad are mainly political refugees, undocumented people and economic migrants who fled the country with their families due to conditions related to the civil war. These communities abroad remit funds that enable their compatriots to cope with El Salvador's serious economic difficulties. Salvadoran citizen living abroad can vote in the country's elections via the Internet due to measures introduced by the FMLN when it was in power.
"It's important to recognize that the story we're telling [about El Salvador's present-day situation] didn't start yesterday or three years ago," Marroquin said, "even if that's the ruling party's narrative." He said that Salvadorans should approach the situation in El Salvador as a narrative that they themselves recount, based on their own experiences, that "includes great moments of tragedy [that] forced them to leave the country. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans were expelled from our homeland, and the story of that is what brings us together here today." He said this is his own story, as he and his family had to flee the country without papers to live abroad.
He spoke about the situation facing the Salvadoran people since the election of President Nayib Bukele in 2019. There is a major struggle against the Bukele government which declared a state of emergency on March 27, 2022, that was originally supposed to be one-month long, but has been extended on a monthly basis to the present. The purported aim of the state of emergency is to rid the country of gangs. Under the state of emergency, 72,000 people have been arrested, tortured and killed. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans have been imprisoned, notably in the mega-prison inaugurated in February 2023, the largest prison in the Americas, capable of holding 40,000 prisoners and located very close to El Salvador's anti-terrorism containment centre. Added to this is a new law, adopted in August, allowing up to 900 defendants to be tried in the same criminal trial.
Marroquin addressed the Bukele government's neo-liberal governance and impunity. There are disappeared promises, the impoverishment of the population who are struggling to feed themselves, the persecutions and disappearances, the dismissal of Supreme Court judges deemed to be hostile to the president, the budget which is to be kept secret for the next seven years, etc. Bukele has also authorized himself to run again for the presidency of the country in February 2024, even though the Constitution prohibits it. There could be even more changes to the electoral system and regulations between now and the election, he said. For the FMLN, "We say that they [the reactionary forces] will not succeed in stopping us or annihilating us because we are a party linked to the people by history and by our program for the right to self-determination and independence."
Participants in the meeting greatly appreciated Marroquin's remarks and the event, for permitting them to see a way to act in the best interests of their homeland and its people.
This article was published in
Volume 53
Number 11 - November 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M5301112.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca