Love pounds, tons of inequities

News¹ alerted to El Salvador in 2004: in four decades young people died for the first time by hunger. It was an announced death: the undernutrition, re-emergent disease is a direct consequence of the neoliberal era, and has deepened. The suppression of the agricultural subsidies annihilated food security and the subsistence cultures of poor farmers. The minimum wage was frozen to compete with low production costs, in the globalised market of the textile manufacturing. An economy dominated by dollars and an increasing cost of the basic basket, especially foods, completed the picture. These factors featured heavily in a report of the Office of the Judge Advocate General for the Defence of the Human Rights.² The answer: an assisted programme of nutritional consultation and food distribution called “Pounds of love”.³ But the inequities, exacerbated by unequal international trade relations, unjust distribution of the wealth, unemployment, payments in the public health system, and poor social investment continue to grow and generate poverty, social violence, and insanity to a rate that soon will end in the inability to govern.

A tee shirt legend on the 25 year anniversary of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero—“It is a cartoon of love when it is wanted to patch up with gifts that which is already owed by justice”. (Taken from the 12 April 1979 homily of the Archbishop Romero whose assassination in 1980 unleashed a civil war of 12 years in El Salvador).