Young people who want to transform the country

A new institutional framework is being set up to encourage youth participation in El Salvador. There’s still some way to go to meet this objective. But while this is being worked on, examples already exist of youth organizations on the left determined to change the unjust structures they’ve inherited. They know they are the heirs to a long history of resistance and are fighting enthusiastically to transform their country, which means fighting the dominant culture, the de-politicization and the dispersion.

Elaine Freedman

A national youth movement rooted in the grassroots sectors and able to spark the active participation of young people in the struggle to resolve their immediate and strategic needs is, without doubt, needed in the country right now. The main problems El Salvador’s population identified in recent surveys by the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP-UCA) are unemployment, the high cost of living and public insecurity. All three affect young people proportionally more. Society is talking about taking steps on behalf of young people and has in fact recently begun to create an entire institutional mechanism to encourage their participation and benefit them, but it is still far from realizing this goal.

A weighty history

The country’s youth have an important historical legacy. A group of university students—including the revolutionaries Farabundo Martí, Alfonso Luna and Mario Zapata, all of whom were killed in 1932—founded the General Association of Salvadoran University Students (AGEUS) in 1927. In those years AGEUS was the engine of worker and peasant mobilization, coupled to the Regional Federation of Salvadoran Workers (FRTS). Like the rest of the Salvadoran grassroots movement of the time, the student organization was dismembered during the 1932 massacre and what remained of it was paralyzed during the 12 years of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s dictatorship.

In April 1944 a sector of the army backed by the anti-dictatorial “civic” opposition, sectors of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie including a large group of students rose up in arms against Martinez, but they were crushed. A month later a strike committee was set up in the National University. Fabio Castillo, a two-time rector of the University of El Salvador and one of the founders of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), who died at 91 on November 4 of this year, was a member of that strike committee. He once described to Rufino Quezada, who more recently served as rector of the same university, how “the students were summoned to an extended meeting, although not as AGEUS, but rather as the student movement. The core that would appoint the strike committee was elected at that meeting. After the committee itself was appointed, its members went underground.” That committee led the “sit-down strikes” that finally put an end to the General Martínez dictatorship.

Young people also played a definitive role in the liberation struggle of the 1970s and 80s. Organizations of high school students such as the Revolutionary Student Movement (MERS), the Association of Salvadoran Students (AES), the Luis Moreno Revolutionary Student Front (FRELM), the Revolutionary Association of Secondary School Students (ADRES) and the Revolutionary Brigades of Secondary Students (MEN) assumed an undisputed leadership role in the acceleration of the grassroots struggles in the 1970s.

In the following decade, once the space for grassroots organizing had been decimated, they contributed a significant share of political-military cadres to the FMLN) during the height of the war years. University organizations also sprang up with the advance of the political-military organizations. The Salvador Allende Revolutionary University Students’ Front (FUERSA), July 19 Salvadoran University Revolutionaries, University Action Front (FAU) and Liberation Leagues turned the National University of El Salvador into the home of the entire grassroots movement, closing the gaps between students, peasants, workers and market venders.

How do young people live today?

Today, the 1,788,074 youths between 15 and 29 years old make up 28% of the total Salvadoran population and 25% of the economically active population. The 2011 Flacso study “Identidades, prácticas y expectativas juveniles al inicio del Siglo 21” (Identities, practices and expectations of young people at the turn of the 21st Century)” reported an average of sixth grade schooling, with only fourth grade in the rural area. A 2008 National Youth Survey showed that only 9.8% went on to higher education. While over 90% of the school age population is in school at a national level, in rural areas the dropout rate reaches 50%. The illiteracy rate is 9.2% in urban areas and 22.7% in rural areas. A study by the Manpower Group Movement reports that while El Salvador’s overall unemployment rate this year is 6.6%, it is 10.7% among young people. The study recorded 240,000 young people, 40% of them women, as “nees”—not in education or employment.

In the first half of 2012, 656 young people were the victims of homicides, of whom 89% were men (INJUVE, 2012). They represented 42% of all homicides committed during these six months. Among femicides, first place is occupied by women between the ages of 10 and 29 (ORMUSA).

Foundations of institutionality

In 2011 what was then called the National Youth Directorate conducted a consultation to design the current youth policy, involving 7,820 youths from all over the country. According to those consulted, the main problems facing young people are unemployment and poverty in first place, insecurity and violence in second place and little access to secondary and tertiary education, as well as alcoholism and drug addiction, in third place.

“We may demand passage of a youth law that clearly enunciates the State’s obligations to and with the young, thus improving the quality of life for all,” wrote Luis González, of the Romero Youth Movement, in the 2007 book Retos de la Juventud Mesoamericana en el Siglo 21 (Challenges for Meso-American Youth in the 21st Century), published by the Meso-American Youth Coordinator in 2007. Five years later, the foundations for the institutions González demanded are in place. El Salvador now has a National Youth Policy, a General Youth Law and the National Youth Institute (INJUVE). And Municipal Youth Networks and the Youth Council are being set up.

Approval of the General Youth Law was the result of a ten-year battle. The law encourages young people’s political, social, cultural and economic participation under conditions of equality, establishing principles that will govern public policies on behalf of Salvadoran youth and giving legal support to the creation of INJUVE. Miguel Pereira, INJUVE’s 27-year-old director and the current government’s youngest official, called it a “strategic law because we knew upon entering government that what we were doing on youth issues will hang by a very thin thread once this administration ends.”

INJUVE operates as an inter-ministerial coordinator to link efforts in the fields of employment, health, environment, violence prevention, education, sports and culture. Its board of directors consists of seven government ministers and its operational structure implements programs in the different designated areas. It currently supports legalization of the youth organizations to be included in a national registry that will be the basis for forming the Youth Council, a body with territorial representation of the registered youth organizations. Pereira hopes that the Council will be set up before the end of 2013. It will be made up of eight youth organizations, of which three will join the INJUVE board with voice and vote.

It remains to be seen
how it will be done

Saúl Alfaro, of the Cihuatán Youth Network, Francisco Rodríguez of the Jorge Arias Gómez Salvadoran Student Front and member of the Popular Youth Coordinator, and Gabriel Rodríguez, of the Popular Youth Bloc, agree that the nascent institutionality represents an opening and is a first step to promote youth participation in decisions that affect them, but it also displays a number of weaknesses that discourage young people. Among the latter they point to the hiring by INJUVE of young people who don’t represent any organization. They see as a risk the possibility that they only represent an institutional position and don’t respond to any sectoral demand. Another risk they identify is that youth participation is only symbolic in any event, as the representatives who will join the INJUVE Board of Directors will be a minority and won’t have all the resources the ministerial managers have to support their positions.

The requirement that youth organizations be legalized in order to enroll in INJUVE has been a point of discord since the process of approving the law and remains so. Jose Margarito Nolasco, national secretary of the FMLN Youth wing and an alternate legislator, shares Pereira’s assessment that this requirement doesn’t fit the financial or organizational reality of youth groups.

In addition, he pointed out the risk of denaturing these organizations by turning them into NGOs. What had been hoped for was that INJUVE would give the organizations “de facto” recognition but the other legislative benches opposed this and the most that could be achieved were certain facilities to obtain legal status with fast-tracked formalities and an INJUVE fund to finance some of the legalization processes. Twenty youth organizations are currently going through this process.

Although the construction of state institutionality in favor of young people is a welcome sign of good intentions and hope, in reality it remains to be seen how it turns out in order to be able to measure its real usefulness as a tool at the service of young people who are most in need.

Violence, submission,
consumerism, individualism...

A society’s cultural traits mark young people’s thoughts, attitudes and individual and collective behavior. And as in any society divided into classes, the ideas that dominate are those of the dominant class.

What first stands out is the culture of violence and authoritarianism, whose historical roots are found in the economic model and oligarchic political regime. It is expressed in authoritarian power relationships and the way conflicts are resolved. The other side of this same coin is the culture of subjugation, rooted in the history of conquest/colony and in the intimate relationship the governments in turn had, and still have, with American imperialism. The symptoms are passivity, conformity and submission, which generally go hand in hand with low individual and collective self-esteem.

The second great cultural trait that predominates in young people’s daily lives is consumerism. Ad campaigns by big private businesses promoting a market for goods that don’t answer to basic needs have created a consumerist culture based on the idea that “having is being.”

Linked to this cultural trait is the weight of migration as a factor that has influenced youth identity and culture. It has turned being “Salvadoran” into a borderless identity. And it has turned remittances into the engine that sustains the country’s economy, feeding back into the culture of consumerism and reconfiguring the work attitude of those who receive remittances. The flow of emigrants grew by 22.8% between 2004 and 2010. Although there seems to be a trend toward maintenance rather than growth, migration and remittances will continue influencing youth identity for a long time.

The access of a goodly part of the urban youth population and a significant minority of rural youth to cyber-technology, which has introduced them to the culture of social networking (Facebook, Twitter), also has an influence. Although technology isn’t a source of individualism, it does reflect and feed back into this pillar of Salvadoran society. In this sphere, daily routine, previously relegated to private life, becomes public and the intimate moves into the public domain. Social networks expand relationships among “real” people through a medium that is not physical and rework the relationship between “geographical proximity” and “interpersonal closeness.”

Crime as the axis of the world’s capitalist accumulation also has its cultural impact in Latin America and specifically in El Salvador. It fosters a culture marked by “every man for himself,” powerlessness and insecurity.

Finally, the great distance between the generation that lived and/or took part in the war and those born after it who only know this history from hearsay has widened. Today’s youth was born in a country structurally identical to that of their parents and grandparents, but different in its political regime and socioeconomic formation. Although it also incorporates elements of the culture of resistance that has left its stamp on all Salvadoran generations, its expressions today are already different and tend to reflect, and also enlarge, the generation gap.

None of these expressions of hegemonic culture favors youth organization, much less a project to structurally transform society. They require young people to develop their organizational efforts with a large dose of creativity to counteract them.

Youth or youths?

“Youth” is not a homogeneous group. Roy Arias Cruz is not wrong when he says that this sector “depends on the historical and social context and it is traversed by variables such as gender, social class, ethnicity and generation, among others.” In addition, youth is distinguished from other social sectors by being in constant generational renewal. People belong to the youth sector for some ten years but to other sectors associated with their gender identity or class for the whole of their lives. This compels us to view more specific faces of youth and to be aware of the limitations of the categories we use to build an accurate picture of reality.

Although the social construction of youth tends to homogenize the universe of young people, it also has different images, expectations and mandates for men and women, for rural and urban youth, for poor young people and rich ones. In the male population, for example, economic independence is a criterion that marks the passage from youth to adulthood but doesn’t do the same for women, because a significant number of them spend their whole lives without ever enjoying economic independence or even making it one of their goals. For young women, moving away from home, living with someone, getting married or becoming a mother are usually what identify this passage from youth to adulthood. Obviously, all this conditions young people and establishes the interests that can mobilize or paralyze their sectoral organization process. And it all requires us to speak of “youths” and not “youth.”

Grassroots youth organization

What remains of the young people who were the engine of the struggles for El Salvador’s structural transformation in the 1970s and 80s?

Recent research, such as that of FLACSO in 2011, shows that the vast majority of young people who belong to some organization are in religious (evangelical) and sports organizations. According to the study, they haven’t been educated to participate and organize so their associations are led by adults, or at least the adults have the power to decide.

Only 3.3% of young people say they belong to a political organization or party: 23.6 % define themselves as “left wing” and 16% as “right wing.” This suggests that most of the few political youth organizations have a leftist orientation and seek a transformation of society.

The University of El Salvador continues to be the center of leftwing youth organization. And the FMLN’s youth wing is the one that organizes and mobilizes more young people committed to the popular classes’ historic project. There are efforts at national coordination, such as Popular Youth or the Youth Movement for Life. There are also some local efforts such as the Cihuatán Youth Network, the Youth Organizations Front of Arambal, the Romero Youth Movement and others. The Young People’s Bloc and the Community Youth Alternative concentrate their efforts on San Salvador’s Metropolitan Area, although they do make efforts to expand beyond the capital.

These organizations keep their distance from the large youth organization networks that predominate in the sphere around INJUVE: the Inter-sectoral Pro Youth Coordinator of El Salvador (CIPJES) and the National Platform for Youth of El Salvador (PLANJES). There are two reasons for this. First, they consider them too compliant with the international cooperation agenda that finances and accompanies them. Second, they believe that their interest in “uniting all existing efforts by and for young people to improve the quality of life of our country’s youth and social inclusion as development actors” (PLANJES) restricts them from focusing on transformations that benefit the grassroots sectors, because it would threaten the interests of ruling class young people.

They outright reject youth organizations such as CREO, whose president is Marcos Llach, son of the oligarch Roberto Llach Hill and brother-in-law of Alfredo Cristiani. CREO works hand in hand with the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES), which receives funds from USAID and the Cato Institute. Likewise, they unmask “The Indignant,” which embodies the approach of the Salvadoran Right but takes its name from the Spanish movement that has mobilized thousands and thousands of young people against neoliberalism. “They wanted to import this name to attack the political parties, in particular the FMLN, distorting the Spanish movement’s original idea,” says Nolasco, secretary of the FMLN Youth wing.

What are leftwing youth fighting for?

The struggles of youth organizations have at their center the usual demands: education, employment, nondiscrimination and access to culture. Their members also join in the grassroots movement’s struggles for tax reform, against the high cost of living and also the electoral struggle.

Rodríguez, of the Young People’s Bloc, describes the dilemma of organizations that support the Funes government and at the same time demand unfulfilled expectations: “We set ourselves apart from the government in a specific way, without breaking with it. We hope our demands are accepted. We want a left government with a left program.”

To sharpen their struggle, organizations such as Popular Youth have been diligent in identifying the dominant classes’ role in rejecting their demands. They fight for an increase in the university budget to improve the quality of education and for the right of high school graduates to get a college education, since there are only 9,500 places at the public university for every 80,000 young people graduating from high school each year. They identify private enterprise as responsible for the budget, emphasizing that it evades paying nearly US$1.62 billion in taxes every year. Their marches have not only targeted the Legislative Assembly, but also the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) headquarters.

In the case of local organizations such as the Cihuatán Youth Network, political advocacy is a tool for change they use in fighting for specific demands. Gaining a foothold in structures such as Municipal Councils and ensuring exercises such as participatory budgeting in municipal provision for “youth” has allowed them to achieve some victories that encourage their members to participate in more long-term struggles with greater scope.

The main task:
Generate awareness

The Cihuatán Youth Network, Popular Youth, the Young People’s Bloc and the FMLN National Youth Secretariat agree that their main task in this period is to generate awareness among young people about the structural roots of their problems and the need to fight for their transformation.

In all cases, a school of political formation that emphasizes the basics of economic policy and grassroots organization is de rigeur for its militants. So too is getting involved in specific activities that not only benefit the community, but also help create values in young people of solidarity and commitment to the most needy sectors. In this quest, the FMLN Youth Secretariat involves its young militants in literacy work and several university student organizations send their members to support community efforts.

Almost all of El Salvador’s organizations work with young people who don’t belong to any organization in order to attract them to their collectives and “remove the blindfold that prevents them from seeing reality.” For this they employ the most varied methods, from artistic and cultural festivals and sports tournaments to training in areas such as participatory communication and radio or video techniques. José Margarito Nolasco clarifies that in any one of these spaces the message seeks to demonstrate the structural causes that underlie the everyday problems young people face.

“We have people trained in batucada music and through them give batucada classes at the university and also in some communities,” says Francisco Rodríguez of the Jorge Arias Gómez Salvadoran Student Front. “When we start to study the rhythms, we look at where they come from. Young people already identify Brazil as the cradle of batucada. This gets us talking about who invented it in Brazil and from there we start talking about slavery. Cultural work helps us identify the interests we respond to, thus encouraging class identity.”

How are young people politicized?

The main challenge for youth organizations is to get close to the 46.1% of the youth in the FLACSO study who say they have “no” political definition, providing conditions to move them to define themselves in favor of their sectoral and class interests.

This involves the construction of counter-hegemony with respect to society’s dominant ideas, which permeate and guide youth culture. Nolasco emphasizes that this leads to “recognizing and appreciating our roots and distancing ourselves from consumerism.” Because it’s all about rescuing the culture of Salvadoran and Latin American resistance, many organizations are looking to get into the field of historical memory.

The Cihuatán Youth Network and Popular Youth emphasize the need to work with community media that will allow them
to send alternative messages to young people, at the same time involving them in producing these messages. They
also believe that social networking is an important field of work in the ideas struggle, mostly but not exclusively in urban settings. Building counter-hegemony also implies involving young people in economic production, not only to solve their material needs, but also to eradicate the passivity and accommodation implicit in the remittance culture.

Alfaro, of the Cihuatán Youth Network, agrees with Nolasco that it’s important to change the image young people have of politics. Centuries of corruption and deceit have left a negative perspective: 88.8% of the young people surveyed by FLACSO consider politicians to be barely or not at all attractive as role models. Obviously, it’s the task of politicians, not young people, to change that image with concrete deeds. But given that the Right, through Allies for Democracy, has mounted a campaign against all political parties to undermine support for the FMLN, the country’s dominant political force, it’s in the interest of the leftwing bloc to unmask that campaign and involve youth in the electoral struggle.

Still dispersed and divided

Finally, like the entire grassroots movement, youth organizations fighting for social transformation face the challenge of overcoming the dispersion and divisiveness that keep them from growing. An example of this is the University of El Salvador, where less than 3% of its 60,000 students are divided into approximately 60 student associations and fronts. It speaks volumes that many of the youth organizations committed to a common political project don’t even know or recognize each other.

The Salvadoran Student Coordinator brings together student organizations “to transform the university into a free public institution offering quality education in favor of the people”; the Youth Movement for Life brings together a number of scattered youth organizations around the issue of historical identity; and Popular Youth links urban student organizations with rural groups. Recent efforts such as these are a step in this direction, since a few years ago this type of coordination wasn’t seen.

Efforts such as the Cihuatán Youth Network, which maintains an organic link with other grassroots organizations and
at the same time has some autonomy facilitated by the fact that its multiple links allow it to be more than “the youth wing”
of a grassroots organization, brings new modalities for fighting dispersion.

In search of a dream

Salvadoran youths hold the reasoned hope of still being at a germinal stage and are increasingly excited about bringing dynamism to the struggle to build a new society. Fourteen years ago Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez sang these words in his unmistakable style: “In search of a dream this young man drew close, in search of a dream go generations, in search of a beautiful and rebellious dream.” Organized youth in El Salvador also have an unmistakable style: they are again beginning to show with deeds that their generation will not be the exception.

Elaine Freedman is a grassroots educator and the envio correspondent in El Salvador.

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