Global Issues
EL SALVADOR: Women at the Forefront of Grassroots Organising
Women are playing a leading role in a powerful social movement addressing natural resource protection, adaptation to climate change, and corporate accountability in this coastal village in El Salvador.
Cristina Reyes is currently in her second term as president of the local community council in Ciudad Romero, located in the department (province) of Usulután, on the Pacific Ocean. Her work bringing electricity, potable water, roads and services for women to her area helped get her elected as head of the community council.
Her life before this -- and the lives of many others living in this area -- reads more like an epic story of adventure, survival, and resistance. Reyes and her family had to flee their home village during the political violence that preceded the 1980-1992 civil war that claimed some 75,000 lives.
After living in the jungle and caves with her sister while fleeing the U.S.-backed counterinsurgency forces, Reyes finally sought refuge in neighbouring Honduras. 'But in 1980 we had to return to El Salvador because the Honduran military were conducting a campaign of repression against civil society that was just like what the military in El Salvador were doing,' Reyes told IPS at her home in Ciudad Romero. 'Back in El Salvador, however, the military here was still doing the same thing.'
Reyes described a brutal campaign that included the burning down of homes, arrests, and repression of Catholic priests who were defending human rights. The village where she now lives was named in honour of one of them, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated by a sniper in 1980 while celebrating mass.
'When I came back home there was nothing left, not even a dog,' Reyes continued. 'We became guerillas because of the massacres we were witnessing.' By then, various leftwing groups had joined together in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). She and her sister worked at a radio station run by the guerrillas, while working to assist and comfort women who had lost their husbands and children in the war.
This led to her work in women's organisations in the capital city of San Salvador, before she moved to the Lower Lempa River region in Usulután, where Ciudad Romero and other communities were built by former insurgents and refugees who returned to the country after the war. 'We helped start food programmes, and now we're working on improving electricity availability,' Reyes said. 'And we have plans to build a hospital here.'
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service