Columnas / Politics

US Government Aid to El Salvador should be a moral obligation


Friday, April 26, 2019
Alberto Valiente Thoresen

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Recently, some of the discussion about the presidencial race in the Democratic Party in the United States has centered on how certain presidencial candidates, for example Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have decided to reclaim Christian morality from the political right. At the same time, a central issue in the presidencial race in general has been immigration. On Friday 12 April, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the news to explain the administration’s decision to stop foreign aid from the United States to the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Central America, which consists of the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The aid is to be withheld, until the governments of these countries do something to stop the illegal emigration to the United States.  

Withdrawing foreign aid from these countries, as the situation is now, can by no means be considered an ethical act. This is the case, if such a policy is evaluated either on the basis of mere principles or pragmatics.  

From a pragmatic standpoint,  it is clear that it will be much harder for these governments to avoid their citizens from emigrating, when they have less public resources to do so. Not even the government of a country like Cuba, surrounded by the sea, which imposes considerably greater regulations on the civil liberties of its citizens, has been able to stop Cubans from emigrating, when they decide to do so.  If you look at the question from the perspective of principles, the usual view would be to claim that the United States Government (US Government) is in its full right to decide whether to withdraw charity or not. Thus, this logic goes, it is just a matter of the US Government being less compassionate than it has already been up until now, in order to get necessary concessions from the governments of these countries. However, it would be mistaken to characterize US aid to these countries as mere charity.  US Government aid in the Northern Triangle of Central America has primarily been justified as an investment for the United States. In this case, it should be treated as such. It should also be considered a moral obligation. 

For example, according to estimates by Quan (2005) and the then Mayor Paul P. Cale (1996), the US Government poured around US$6 billion in military aid to the Salvadoran Government during the Salvadoran Civil War, from 1980 to 1992. That would roughly be equivalent to around US$12 billion today. Some, as Cale (1996) does, consider this aid as charity, to help the Salvadoran Government fend off the communist threat. However, this would be a one-sided and simplistic take on what went on. In any case, it would be hard to argue that the US Government was not willingly investing this money to protect its own economic and geopolitical interests by, among other things, fueling a repressive military apparatus and training death squads, who murdered innocent persons. One of these victims, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, has recently been made a saint by the Catholic Church. This investment, in a particular version of US-American geopolitical interests, also contributed to destroy important social institutions and infrastructure in El Salvador, and to postpone the development of vital projects for the development of the country. It is one of the reasons that agriculture in El Salvador collapsed. This caused massive migration from rural areas to urban centers in the country, or in other cases, emigration to other countries, like the United States. 

Some would argue that the Salvadoran Civil War ended 27 years ago, and that this should be plenty of time to rebuild the country. Comparatively speaking, Western Europe managed to get on its feet in much less time after such a devastating conflict as the Second World War. In any case, let’s dig a little bit deeper into this analogy. 

According to some rough estimates, the US-American participation in the Second World War cost American tax payers US$4.1 trillion in today’s money, adjusted for inflation. This amount was not entirely used in the Western Front, but it could safely be assumed that at least half of that amount was spent in Western Europe. After the war, the so-called Marshall Plan, consisting of US-American aid for the reconstruction of Western Europe, amounted to US$100 billion in today’s money, adjusted for inflation. But it is estimated that the US Government gave Western Europe a total of around US$182 billion in today’s money, adjusted for inflation, with the purpose of reconstruction, during the period 1946-52.

This means that, for six years, the US Government invested roughly 4.4 % of the US-American Second World War military expenditures in Western Europe, to aid in the economic reconstruction of Western Europe. This excludes demobilization costs, and the costs of ending the war. It also excludes all other aid and cooperation that followed the Marshall Plan, which exceeded this amount. For example, in 1952, the Harvard economist John Henry Williams wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs that the US budget beginning in the fiscal year of 1 July 1952 (after the Marshall Plan) included aid to Europe equivalent to 75 % of the entire Marshall Plan budget. This cooperation continued in time, and became more militaristic in nature, as NATO was consolidated and developed further. Few would disagree with the suggestion that US-American reconstruction efforts in Western Europe after the Second World War constituted an investment in US-American economic and geopolitical interests.  It is a cooperation that continues to this day, which is probably the reason that Donald Trump’s White House has suggested that the US defense budget subsidizes NATO’s defense budget. 

An equivalent commitment for rebuilding El Salvador, a comparatively poorer country than Western Europe,  implied an economic reconstruction program with at least US$540 million of today’s money financed by the US Government, during the period 1993-99.  Actually, the US Government initially promised US$500 million of today’s money, just to implement the peace accords. Unfortunately, this aid and the cooperation from other states, fell short of covering the total budget that was initially outlined for the implementation of the totality of the peace accords. It implied that the country was initially missing US$1,2 billion of the US$3,2 billion (in current US$, adjusted for inflation) that were needed to implement the peace accords. The aid was eventually secured with the help of the international community, and the peace accords were implemented in an exemplary manner. However, parts of the plan concerned with economic and social reconstruction were postponed, restructured, financed by loans incurred later or, in certain cases, not done as initially suggested. However, as in Western Europe, cooperation and assistance from the US Government to El Salvador would not stop there. It would develop and adapt to other needs that came up and influenced the reconstruction process. For example, when the country experienced hurricanes and major flooding in the late nineties, and two devastating earthquakes in 2001. The aid has continued and, according to USAID, the current annual foreign assistance budget for El Salvador from all US agencies exceeds $US100 million. 

Why then, has this cooperation and assistance proven insufficient to stop Salvadoran emigration to the United States? The answer to this question lies in the fact that money alone does not solve all problems, especially if it is counteracted by policy. And it is also possible to identify the shared responsibility, when it comes to policy matters. 

One of the biggest causes of migration in El Salvador is the collapse of the agricultural sector and the rural areas of the country. This was a gradual process. It happened in part because of the Salvadoran Civil War, but also because the agricultural sector was mostly affected by the trade adjustment costs of the poorly designed and implemented liberalization policies, which were facilitated and promoted by assistance and cooperation from the US Government. In contrast, one of the central policies for the reconstruction of Western Europe was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which allowed Western Europe to subsidize and protect its rural areas and achieve food security, before considering liberalizations in this sector. In El Salvador, unilateral liberalization of the agricultural trade, first through policies championed by the US Government, and consequently through the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), left vulnerable sectors of rural society exposed to unemployment. These policies would have worked better, if individuals were also allowed to emigrate freely to the places in the agreement where more labor is needed, as goods and capital can move freely across the borders. But as we all know, the US Government wants to build walls instead.

Coupled with indiscriminate deportation to El Salvador of criminals who were born in El Salvador but bred in the US, this created the conditions for exacerbated gang violence, which many migrants are fleeing. On top of that, the Northern Triangle is part of the trade routes growingly employed by organized crime to transport illegal drugs from South America to the United States. This has partly become this way, because of US Government efforts to deviate drug trafficking from the Caribbean to the American mainland. This has made the problem of violence in the area even worse. 

The US Government has invested heavily in molding Salvadoran institutions to serve its own economic and geopolitical interests. Although some of the US Government’s objectives have been achieved, others have backfired, and there have been unintended results. To pretend that the US Government does not share part of the responsibility for El Salvador’s plight is not compatible with US Government interests nor its investments in El Salvador. Many of the same arguments apply for the other countries in the Northern Triangle. It is plainly unethical to let weaker allies, who have stood in the line of fire for US interests, stand alone in the face of adversity, and to make the help they desperately need conditional to undeliverable results. The otherwise generally accepted pottery store rule, which says “you break it, you fix it”, does not seem to apply any longer in US relations with El Salvador.

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