El Salvador
The steep road to gender equity
“We have to transform our way of thinking
and our machista culture; we have to change,”
said President Salvador Sánchez Cerén
on International Women’s Day this year.
One step forward, two steps back...
That’s how change has been
on the steep road of gender equity,
but a long stretch has been traveled
Elaine Freedman
The achievements around women’s rights and gender equality in this country are the fruit of women’s arduous and self-sacrificing struggles throughout our history. They haven’t appeared by spontaneous generation or thanks to the goodwill of authorities.
Names of the first women
During the colonial period, the lives of women played out between the home, the church, the hospital and the fields. Whether Latin American-born Spanish women (Criollas), mixed indigenous-European women (mestizas), indigenous women or African slave women, they lived without access to gynecological health care or even basic education. Those who learned to read and write did so as part of their preparation to become nuns. Some were taught to read and write personal and legal documents by their fathers, brothers or husbands. And yet, the Spanish Crown was not above taxing women so it allowed criolla women to conduct transactions involving big sums of money for land or cattle herds.
Faced with these injustices, many women from Metapán (Juana de Dios Arriaga, Micaela Arbizú, Sebastiana Martínez, Manuela Marroquín, Patricia Recinos, Rosa Ruiz, María Isabel Fajardo, Luciana Vásquez, Juana Vásquez, Juliana Posada, Feliciana Ramírez, Petrona Miranda, Teresa Sánchez, Eusebia Josefa Molina and María Teresa Escobar) and Santa Ana (Juana Ascencio, Dominga Fabia Juárez de Reina, Juana Evangelista, Inés Anselma Ascencio de Román, Cirila Regalado, Irene Aragón, Romana Abad Carranza, María Nieves Solórzano and Teodora Martín Quezada) played an active role in the independence struggles of 1811 and 1814. Úrsula Guzmán and Gertrudis Lemus provided stones and arms to the indigenous and mulattoes who participated in the confrontations in Metapán on November 24, 1811. Months later, María Feliciana de los Ángeles Miranda was executed in San Vicente’s Central Plaza for engaging in pro-independence activities in the Sensuntepeque region.
The first suffragette lights
The Adela de Barrios Feminist Club, formed in Ahuachapán in the late 19th century and named after the wife of Salvadoran President Gerardo Barrios (1859-1863), embraced feminist ideals from Europe and North America that were quickly condemned by priests from the pulpits. While its members and those of similar organizations demanded social recognition and the right to vote for women, threats of excommunication carried more weight than their claim for justice. These organizations were short lived.
In the 1920s, women became active around concrete demands during a period of grassroots protests that were convulsing El Salvador. Jeffrey Gould and Aldo Lauria-Santiago documented the most outstanding actions in their book To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-32. Writing that ”In 1921 a protest of market women led to the regime’s first full-scale use of violent repression,” the authors explain that these women were shot down by soldiers in San Salvador as they protested against removal of the currency in circulation to make way for new monetary policies attached to establishing the gold standard.
Before this, women had taken over a police station, and a year later, the Army and Police in San Salvador opened fire with machine-guns against a demonstration led by women on behalf of opposition presidential candidate Miguel Tomás Molin, injuring and killing many women and men. Hundreds of women participated in this march even though they couldn’t vote.
Prudencia Ayala runs for President
By then, women’s suffrage struggles had achieved visibility in Anglo-Saxon and European countries. In 1930, a time when Salvadoran laws still did not even recognize women as citizens, Prudencia Ayala launched her candidacy for President of the Republic. Her platform included the defense of women’s rights, and included aspects such as support for unions, honesty in public administration, limited distribution and consumption of liquor, respect for freedom of religion, and the recognition of illegitimate children. Though she was unable to officially register, her campaign had important symbolic value.
Eight years later, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly granted voting rights to married women over 25 and single women over 30, as long as they had a school degreee.
The first organizations
The 1940s witnessed grassroots uprisings against the dictator General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Years later, writer Matilde Elena López told how the sit-down strike of April and May 1944 was coordinated via leaflets whose message was typed on individual sheets of paper by hundreds of women working night and day. The role of these women was vital to putting an end to the dictatorship.
Martínez’s downfall brought a small political opening in the country, which allowed the birth of two women’s groups led by Communist militants: the Feminine Democratic Front headed by Matilde Elena López, with its publication Mujer Democrática (Democratic Woman), and Feminine Torch, led by Graciela García, which joined the National Workers’ Union, a more political than union association that was backing Arturo Romero’s candidacy. A year later, Rosa Amelia Guzmán and Ana Rosa Ochoa founded El Salvador’s Association of Democratic Women, with its publication Tribuna Feminista.
In 1947 the women organized in this same association formed the Salvadoran Feminine League, which successfully fought to get women’s right to vote and to run for public office established in the 1950 Constitution. Their outreach publication was the Heraldo Femenina. In 1950, the Feminine League decided to support the campaign of the Democratic Union Revolutionary Party’s presidential candidate Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Osorio. Several militants of the association opposed the decision, seeing Osorio as merely a new face of the dictatorship, split from the League, which later disappeared.
The Salvadoran women’s fellowship
”We created the Salvadoran Women’s Fraternity (FMS) in early 1956 with the objective of struggling for the defense of women’s and children’s rights,” recalls Berta Deras de Aguiñada. Tula Alvarenga adds: ”We saw ourselves as part of the people’s overall struggle, a compliment to grassroots organizations, working for women’s rights. Women earned less in factories and if they showed up pregnant they were denied employment. We needed a women’s organization that would concentrate on these demands. And we also needed an organization that would be part of the union, based on solidarity among women.”
Once again, Communist and progressive women joined together to carry forward women’s demands for their rights. They organized women vendors into the Street Vendors’ Society to fight against municipal police abuse; tenants in public housing to defend against eviction, and tried to free working women from night shifts in the factories. In addition, they taught women to read and write, educated around health issues and did cultural activities to raise women’s educational levels. They supported political prisoners and organized their families, participated in the overthrow of the José María Lemus dictatorship in 1960 and backed Fabio Castillo’s candidacy for President in 1967. At the end of the sixties, the Salvadoran Communist Party suffered a split, which gave birth to the political-military organization Popular Liberation Forces (FPL). The FMS was a victim of that split, ending its important contribution to the struggle for women’s rights.
Other women’s
movements bloom
The Women Unionists’ Committee emerged in 1969, made up of women from the unions affiliated to the Salvadoran Unitary Union Federation and the Union Federation of Workers in the Poultry, Apparel, Textile and Similar and Related Industries of El Salvador. Shortly after that, the Provisional Committee of Salvadoran Women was created, made up of FMS women from the union, university student and domestic worker sectors. In 1975 the joint efforts of both committees gave birth to the Association of El Salvador’s Progressive Women, whose objective was to ”organize women in the cities and countryside, provide them political formation and integrate them into the struggle for their political, economic and social demands.” From there on, more new women’s organizations were created to add strength to the growing grassroots movement, among them the ”Lil Milagro Ramirez” Association of Women for Democracy.
The efforts during the seventies were directed more towards the struggle for national liberation than women’s liberation. The women’s organizations added their weight to the demands and actions of the grassroots movement as a whole instead of presenting their own specific demands. This was consistent with the historical moment the country was going through, but at the same time contributed to the struggle for women’s rights since they were complementary struggles.
During the war:
”Rebellious maternity”
The organizations of mothers of political prisoners and disappeared people during the eighties deserve special mention:
the ”Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero” Committee of Mothers and Families of Politically Imprisoned, Disappeared and Murdered Persons of El Salvador, the ”Octavio Ortiz-Hermana Silvia” Committee of Christian Mothers and Families of Prisoners, Disappeared and Murdered Persons and the ”Marianella García Villas” Committee of Families of Victims of Human Rights Violations. As Lola Luna explains it, by demanding their sons’ and daughters’ right to life, these movements’ political actions ”synthesized the private aspect, their maternal role and the public aspect, human rights, breaking with the traditional separation between the private female sphere and the public and political male sphere... They used their motherhood to rebel.”
Norma Guirola, long-time fighter and founder of the Institute for Research, Training and Development of Women during the second half of the war, described the situation in 1983 this way: ”We’re aware that Salvadoran women still have to resolve many of our own demands, but we’re clear and aware that at this time everyone’s main struggle is against the criollo oligarchy and Yankee imperialism. That’s why women have massively joined the battle on all fronts. And in our daily struggle to free ourselves, we will also conquer our legitimate rights for equality.” Throughout the seventies and eighties, women were protagonists in their history. Their living example was worth much more than a thousand words in building gender equality.
New challenges,
new opportunities
Once the war was over, during the 1990s and beginning of this new century, hundreds of women who shared Guirola’s assessment set out to strengthen these embryos of women’s movements and take their stance both nationally and internationally in favor of gender equality. Once again and with more force, they introduced their own agenda demanding women’s rights, resuming previous demands such as ”equal pay for equal work” and the right to land ownership in rural areas.
New demands were included in this agenda: the need for responsible paternity and those related to sexual and reproductive health rights, previously left invisible, along with the right to decide over pregnancy and maternity. Later came the issues of physical integrity, domestic violence and femicide. El Salvador saw many social and political struggles around the whole issue of violence against women.
Despite differences in political stances amidst the post-war confusion and on how to approach the relationship between gender and class, the women’s movement managed to place its demands within the national agenda. With support from international entities, they also forced the government to open spaces of assistance for women and promote these issues within the State’s institutional framework.
As feminist activist Vilma Vásquez recalls: ”After the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, all our women’s organizations met to formulate a framework for what would be the Salvadoran Institute for Women’s Development (ISDEMU) and the Women’s National Policy. Later we saw that ISDEMU did nothing of what was intended. It didn’t assume its place as the governing entity of the Women’s National Policy and stood in silence until 2009, when it recovered its presence as an institution defending women’s rights.”
How Women’s City was born
Under Mauricio Funes’ government starting in 2009, there was a major commitment in favor of women’s cause. This brought about new ideas, new instruments and new mechanisms. The first sign of this advance was the launching of the ”Women’s City” program.
Its founder, Vanda Pignato, recalls how this project came about: ”The idea of Women’s City was born during Mauricio Funes’ presidential campaign. As First Lady, I accompanied him on all his visits around the country, pregnant for the first time at age 45. This gave me a different perspective. Besides, during these visits I was invisible because I was only the candidate’s wife. So I decided to get to know others who were invisible: the women who came to the rallies. I would go and talk with them. I realized the major needs were the same in both the rural areas and the urban areas.”
An emblematic program
Women’s City is structured around these needs: Sexual and Reproductive Health, Violence Prevention, Economic Autonomy, Collective Education and Child Care.
In the six branches of Women’s City around the country, women receive health care, legal and psychological assistance, protection services for women and their children who are victims of violence, technical training courses, banking services, advice and accompaniment for productive, marketing and micro-credit projects. While the mothers are being tended to, their children get recreational, educational, psychological and pediatric care as well.
The topic of collective education is developing in the different territories with training courses on human rights and gender for women and men, and joint actions with the municipal governments to promote women’s rights and prevent gender violence. Local leadership training for women is an important focus of collective education.
According to Yanira Argueta, director of ISDEMU, ”If a woman goes to court with a referral from Women’s City, they are treated differently, with more respect. In the judges’ and other officials’ view of things, Women’s City has weight.”
Women’s City became an emblematic program during the Funes government. It won international awards, serving as an example on how to guarantee women’s rights in Brazil, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Trinidad Tobago. It has assisted thousands of women, who acknowledge that the services they receive are of greater quality in terms of assistance than what they had received before in any of the state institutions.
The laws against violence
The Special Comprehensive Law for a Life Free of Violence for Women and the Law of Equality, Equity and Eradication of Discrimination Against Women, both of which went into effect in 2012, marked milestones in compliance with women’s rights and gender equality in the country. The law against violence towards women is an important step forward because it goes beyond physical and psychological violence. It also includes economic and sexual violence and regulates symbolic violence, which refers to messages, values, icons or signs that transmit and reproduce relationships of dominance, inequality and discrimination established between people in social relations that make women’s subordination in society seem natural.
Article 22 states that the media ”may not publish sexist contents or broadcast sexist programs or publicity, considering this to be the promotion of aggression, mistreatment or discrimination towards women, health, dignity and equality.”
Despite the law, however, ads in El Salvador still promote male and female stereotypes. In spite of these national and international regulations and self-regulation, sexist values are still being inseminated that do harm to women’s development by fostering traditionally established roles for men and women in which women are subordinate to men.
Figures on violence
In 2013, according to the Attorney General’s Office, 1,216 women filed charges for psychological violence, 514 for patrimonial violence, 543 for economic violence, 327 for sexual violence, 545 for physical violence and 40 for symbolic violence.
The impact of this law is still limited, however. As Argueta reflects: ”We knew a lot of work would have to be done to promote reporting violence, because iviolence is seen as something natural. But we weren’t prepared for the legal system to not enforce it. Of 300 cases of women’s murders with femicide features this year, only 84 were categorized as such. The legal system is the biggest threat preventing the law from being effective.”
The law of equality
The Law of Equality was launched by the ”Prudencia Ayala” Feminist Coalition. Its objective is to create a legal base to direct the design and execution of public policies to guarantee true and effective equality between women and men in economic, social, political and cultural spheres throughout the country. It instructs the State to ”implement ongoing actions to develop socialization guidelines for women and men based on recognition of the full human, political, social, economic and cultural equivalence of both; mutual respect for their differences; respect for their personal and collective potentials and talents; recognition of their equivalent co-responsibilities and efforts for human subsistence and survival; their contributions towards development and democracy and their capacity to participate in society’s leadership and management.” This also applies to local governments, which must assign the financial and administrative resources needed, drawing up budgets that take into account women and men’s different needs.
Women in public office
The original proposal was that the State should guarantee equal representation of both genders in elected offices and should not be less than 40% for women. In the end, quotas were left out. It wasn’t until last year’s approval of the Political Parties Law that a 30% quota was established for women in electoral candidacies, far below the female population, which is 53%.
Currently, only 27 of the 262 mayor’s offices in the country are governed by women. In the 13 ministries that make up the government’s Cabinet, only three ministers are women: Labor, Health and Environment. And of the 84 seats in the Legislative Assembly, only 27 (32%) are held by women.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has 15 congresswomen (out of 31), including the Congress president. The National Republican Alliance (ARENA) has 11 (out of 35) and the National Coalition Party (PCN) has 1 (out of 6). The Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) has 11 and the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) only 1, men in both cases. This puts El Salvador above the Latin American average of female legislative representation, which is 24%, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Overcoming old patterns
The Organization of Salvadoran Women for Peace (ORMUSA) regrets that the Law of Equality, Equity and Eradication of Discrimination Against Women did not mandate secularism in education and instead opted to emphasize that education should be based on ”principles and values.” As Argueta explained: ”If it’s hard to enforce the Special Comprehensive Law against Violence, it’s even harder to enforce this law, because it involves personal schemes. We’ve had to resort to different strategies, education and coercion. On the one hand, our School of Substantive Equality for public workers is important to overcome old patterns. But we’ve also searched for ways to pressure institutions; for example, we negotiated with an NGO supporting a potable water project with a mayor’s office in Morazan to make the project contingent on strengthening the Gender Unit and training the Municipal Council and their staff. And it worked.”
Few state institutions have applied the law in its entirety. In practice, it still isn’t binding. Even so, its existence is an important step towards changing a world view that legitimizes the capitalist and patriarchal system.
Recognition for
reproductive work
The introduction of a ”co-responsibility” policy in the Equality Law gave birth to the commitment to recognize both unpaid household work and the satellite accounts project in El Salvador as a step towards women’s economic justice and autonomy. A satellite account is a framework designed by the United Nations to measure the dimensions of economic sectors not defined as productive in a country’s national accounts. Satellite accounts in different spheres of life provide important information about specific economic fields that aren’t usually measured. In this case, it will measure the value of time spent on household chores and community support, both of them unpaid activities traditionally done by women and left out of national accounts.
In 2012, an agreement between ISDEMU, ECLAC, the Central Reserve Bank and the Department of Statistics and Censuses guided an effort to establish the value of unpaid household work and its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The hope is that El Salvador will join Ecuador, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico and Costa Rica, which are already developing incipient public policies to do justice using satellite accounts. The contribution made by unpaid household work to El Salvador’s GDP was to have been by the first semester of this year.
According to Ledy Moreno, an ISDEMU technician, the satellite accounts should above all serve to get housewives included into the pension system. ”It would recognize a quota for women according to the number of children born... In general, women reach retirement age without enough years of contribution because during different periods of their lives they were absent from the labor market fulfilling their household duties, not to mention all those women who’ve worked only as housewives.”
The country is going through a crisis in its pension system due to its privatization in 1998. ”The government could see it from that point of view and say there are no resources. But we see it from a gender analysis and need to be acknowledged for the years we’ve dedicated to housework.”
Reproductive work is more than caring for children. It’s all the care and maintenance of household spaces and goods and the social relationships in the home including emotional support for all family members. If all of this is essential to sustain life, it’s also essential to the reproduction of the work force and contributes to increasing capital gains for private enterprise.
Moreno speaks about how difficult it is for private businesses to acknowledge and take on their responsibilities. ”In the 1983 Constitution, article 42 mandates that public and private businesses should establish daycare centers for their employees’ children. Twenty two years later, there’s still no secondary law that can put this article into operation because this benefit means a cost for business owners.”
This year, the Concertation for Dignified Work in the Maquilas filed an appeal on the grounds of unconstitutionality by omission. The appeal was in fact admitted, but the Constitutional Bench still hasn’t ruled on the case. As Moreno concludes, ”We help generate profits and riches for business owners. They in return, beyond salaries, should give back something for our reproductive work.”
Domestic workers
The situation of the 116,000 domestic workers in the country isn’t much better than that of housewives. The Labor Code establishes a special set of rules that strips domestic workers of certain labor rights such as an 8-hour workday and the right to a written contract specifying working conditions. Their right to days off is denied and there are three special causes for their dismissal without holding the employer responsible: having an infectious or contagious disease, ”vices or bad habits” and committing serious acts of infidelity or insubordination against the employer or his/her family.
Feminist activist Vilma Vasquez recalls that ”during Funes’ government there were advances with the Executive Agreement, which allows domestic workers to affiliate to Social Security. However an Executive Agreement is voluntary; it has no coercive power. At that time, Funes saw injustice, opened a way and said to expect 27,000 affiliations.” But to date, only 4% of the sector is insured.
El Salvador still has to ratify Convention 189 of the International Labor Organiztion as a legal framework for domestic workers’ rights and effective protection against abuse and harassment. Along with women’s organizations demanding its ratification and a change in the Labor Code, three domestic workers’ unions currently in formation will also have to fight for equal labor rights.
Land and credit for women
To promote economic autonomy for women it’s essential to provide them land, credit, training and employment. 2009 data from the Department of Statistics and Censuses shows that only18% of the land used for agriculture in the country belonged to women. Between then and 2015, the Salvadoran Agrarian Transformation Institute (ISTA) has given 14.070 land deeds to rural women and 65% of lots for housing were given to women heads of families.
Between 2009 and 2013, women also received more loans than men, with those given by Women’s City crucial to this advance. Special mention should be made of the specific loans for women victims of violence and women with cancer who are denied credit by private banks due to their illness. Despite all this, there’s still a gap related to amounts granted. On the average men are given 30% more and in some cases over 50% more than what’s granted to women.
The women’s bank program
At the end of last year, President Sánchez Cerén introduced the Women’s Bank program, which supplies credit lines and guarantees in addition to technical assistance for businesswomen. In eight months, 103 loans were granted to women for a total of US$971,673 destined to different economic activities.
The new banking system’s Achilles’ heel has been what Yanira Argueta calls ”the predominance of the private banks’ financial culture. The requirements asked for and the lack of attention to women’s specific reality are the same as those of the traditional banks. The rules haven’t changed; they continue to be very male. They certainly will have to change with the Law of Equality, Equity and Eradication of Discrimination against Women.”
Sexual and reproductive health
Physical autonomy is the backbone of the fight against violence towards women and control over their bodies starts with the recognition of sexual and reproductive health rights. In 2012, the Health Ministry launched its first Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy. It involves traditionally excluded populations such as people with disabilities, non-traditional sexual orientation or HIV, among others. It also includes a program on sexual education and prevention of teenage pregnancies and is working on guaranteeing the right to intimacy and confidentiality in recording systems.
Vilma Vaquerano, from the Salvadoran Women for Peace Organization (ORMUSA) calls the fact that there’s a policy that takes up sexual and reproductive health ”very positive because its purpose is to protect women’s integrity and guarantee their human right to health.”
The right to decide
The Gordian knot in the compliance of sexual and reproductive health rights, however, continues to be the criminalizing of abortion.
In the Penal Code of 1998 abortion became absolutely prohibited in El Salvador. It was allowed previously if the pregnancy was the result of rape, the fetus had malformations or the woman’s life was at risk. As Carlos García, El Salvador’s ambassador to the UN, sees it, ”Abortion is one thing and sexual and reproductive health another.” However this law represents a serious setback in the rights of women in poverty who don’t have the resources to pay for
an illegal but safe abortion or to leave the country, adolescents who had no access to adequate education and get pregnant and women who get pregnant from rape.
The fact that suicide is the cause of death of 57% of pregnant teenagers between the ages of 10 and 19 attests to the tragedy lived by women who still haven’t known physical autonomy. Cristina Quintanilla, who was separated from her eldest son and imprisoned with a 30-year sentence for aggravated murder after having lost her seven-month-old fetus, believes this law ”discriminates against women with little education, like me, who do not understand their rights or the system.” The Citizens’ Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion says 129 women were sentenced for crimes related to abortion between 2000 and 2011.
25 years of efforts
Vilma Vasquéz offers this reflection: ”Culture has changed a little since the feminist organizations started the struggle back in the early nineties. Important work has been done in raising awareness over these 25 years. Violence towards women is less seen as natural and women’s autonomy is less frightening to women and society in general. All this contributes to the advancement of reporting harassment, domestic violence and abuse. For example, there are 700 complaints filed by domestic workers in the Ministry of Labor. But the legal system continues to be misogynist and conservative, and the other institutions aren’t much better. They continue to blame the victims and ignore them.”
Misogyny in the education system
Despite the attempts to make changes in teacher’s plans and educational materials to promote non-sexist teaching in the education system, there’s still a ways to go. As Yanira Argueta from ISDEMU says, ”We still haven’t worked on the curriculum.” There has been progress in including sexual and reproductive health rights for adolescents, but according to Vilma Vasquez, ”Sexuality is still demonized as something that women shouldn’t enjoy.”
The draft of an official textbook on sexual and reproductive health written during the FMLN’s first period in government, continued to perpetuate myths related to differences ”by nature,” posiitng ”scientifically” that the female brain is slightly larger and leads women to be more ”emotional” while the smaller male brain leads them to have greater sexual impulses, an argument that among other things totally ignores socialization processes. Fortunately, the document was changed and this approach was left out when published.
A study done by ORMUSA in 2011 states that ”the pedagogical strategy has been infiltrated, almost always undetected, by diverse misogynist practices that include language, prejudices, attitudes, stereotypes, etc. that entail rejection or contempt against all that is female. In conclusion, a misogynist culture is present in the classrooms, usually disguised though sometimes explicit or evident.” That’s why the training of educators is crucial to overcoming the patriarchal culture. ORMUSA adds: ”Institutions continue to be plagued with sexual harassment and abuse. In 2010, according to ISDEMU, 52% of the sexual harassment cases recorded by the institution were committed in the schools.”
Deepening non-sexist education in the formal curriculum and in the hidden curriculum is an unavoidable challenge if this country’s patriarchal culture is to be changed.
And we have to change
The institutional changes in the last six years may seem small, but they are monumental for a society characterized throughout its post-Conquest history by its authoritarian, repressive, military, machista traits. On International Women’s Day this year, President Sánchez Cerén said: ”We have to transform our way of thinking and our machista culture. We have to change and respect women’s rights; we have to achieve this change in humanity.”
”We go inch by inch,” says Vilma Vasquez. ”The struggle is to transform a capitalist, patriarchal society because capitalism and patriarchy are two pillars of our unjust system. We need to be radical in our principles and demands, but when it comes to applying them, we need to understand that things have their own rhythm.”
We need to arm ourselves with patience and impatience at the same time, to celebrate the advances and face the challenges.
Elaine Freedman is a grassroots educator and the envío correspondent in El Salvador
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