It is an honour and a great responsibility to address the
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Assembly today. It is a responsibility because we need
to make the right analysis of the serious problems we
face and, in my particular case, of the difficult reality
in my country. El Salvador is one of many nations on
this planet beset by the problems of poverty,
backwardness and, above all, injustice. The more a
leader is weighed down by the tragedy of his people,
the greater the responsibility, as we know well.
When the Assembly reviews the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) and the struggle against
poverty in the world, and we look at the reality in
Central America, we can say that the efforts made have
not yet yielded the expected results. It is not easy for
me to be so blunt in my assessment, but that is the
reality and the international community must be
sensitive to the plight of the vast majority of the
world’s population. For many years now, the agenda of
the United Nations and other multilateral forums has
included the struggle against poverty. The hoped-for
improvements, however, cannot be discerned. As far as
social justice is concerned, far from achieving the
desired progress, the gap between rich and poor
countries, and between the rich and poor within
individual countries, has widened. Injustice has
prevailed over our good intentions. That is the truth.
The recent massacre in the Mexican state of
Tamaulipas of 72 migrants, of whom 14 have been
identified as Salvadorans — and we continue to try to
identify others — reveals the magnitude of the tragedy
that, while centred on Mexico and Central America,
affects the whole world. Those 72 murdered desperate
young men and women, who lost their lives trying to
find a future in the United States or Canada, are an
expression of the tragedy in the region, as well as a
metaphor for global injustice. This tragedy was not the
result of a plane crash or climate change. It was the
result, essentially, of three factors that point to the lack
of positive results in the fight against poverty and
injustice.
I am referring first to the lack of opportunities,
exclusion, backwardness and widespread injustice that
affect Central American societies and account for the
mass emigration of their young people. The second is
that of migration, a consequence of the first. The third
is violence, crime and the shadow business of
organized crime, which exploits the breeding ground of
poverty and the transit of dispossessed migrants for its
illicit purposes.
El Salvador has 6 million inhabitants in its
territory and 3 million more living elsewhere, mainly
in the United States. Migration has grown year by year
in the wake of Governments’ lack of response to the
aforementioned problems. Our migrants — indeed, the
migrants of the entire world — leave their civil rights
behind when they leave their country and arrive in new
lands that do not recognize those rights. As experts on
migration have said, the migrant is a pariah, a human
being without rights. For the more than 200 million
migrants around the world, mostly young people,
human and social rights, such as those embodied in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are not
guaranteed. Another reality in our region is the very
high incidence of violence against women, which also
calls for our special attention.
We note the close relationship between poverty,
injustice and migration. Furthermore, another, closely
related factor in our region is the strong presence of
organized crime and the extremely high incidence of
violence and criminality. We can say without
exaggeration that the map of poverty and injustice is
the same as the map of migration; of the traffic in
drugs, humans and weapons; civic insecurity; money-
laundering and crime on a major scale.
I mentioned the lack of positive results in fighting
poverty and injustice on a global scale, especially in
Central America. I will now offer an example of the
failure of policies implemented in my country over the
past decade. According to a report of the United
Nations Development Programme, the wealthiest
segment of the population in El Salvador received
23 per cent of the State’s social spending. The lowest
segment — the poor and marginal population —
received only 18 per cent of that social spending. The
State actually promoted and expanded injustice and
contributed to greater poverty. It is obvious that the
neoliberal policies implemented in recent decades have
run counter to the desire of the international
community to reduce poverty, as expressed in the
Millennium Development Goals.
Let us therefore keep in mind the wise words of
Albert Einstein, who said that an insane person is he
who does the same thing over and over again and
expects different results. I am not speaking of my
country alone. I believe that everyone has to undertake
profound changes in the way social policies are
designed in order not to perpetuate failure. It would be
naïve, for example, to think that a coercive, repressive
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State that invests more and more in its security forces
or that mobilizes its army to support the police to
combat crime — as I have ordered done in El Salvador,
given the rise in crime that I inherited upon assuming
office — can in and of itself resolve the problem of
insecurity. We would be making a historic mistake if
we did not address the root causes of violence and
crime. The indolent State that has prevailed in recent
times must be transformed into a social State that
wages as its chief battle the reduction of poverty and
injustice.
In this regard, I would like to lay out some
thoughts based on that reality. First, the righteous
battle against organized crime and on behalf of the
human rights of migrants does not fall exclusively to
Mexico and Central America. Here, I would like to say
that we must not leave it to Mexico or to Central
America alone. Our region is not the main consumer of
drugs. Our countries are not the major recipients of the
uninterrupted flow of laundered drug money, the
product of the failure of stricter controls. It is not only
our people who will be hurt if the drug cartels continue
to grow stronger and to endanger our countries’
survival. This battle is not irrelevant to anyone. It
would be a mistake to believe that Mexico and Central
America can defeat crime alone. The territory of
criminal violence today is the border between the
United States and our small countries, but tomorrow it
will be in the major cities of the developed world, the
capitals of America, Europe, Africa and Asia. So let us
not leave it to Mexico alone, and let us not leave it to
Central America alone.
This is my appeal to the international community.
The help our countries need is economic; it is
intelligence; it is support for training and equipping
our law-and-order forces to combat crime and control
money-laundering. But we also need help with the new
social and regional policies that the Central American
Integration System has prepared, because those
investments will address the causes of our tragedies.
For these reasons, I wish to bring two proposals
to the General Assembly. First, we should establish,
under the auspices of the United Nations, a Central
American commission to investigate organized crime.
The establishment of such a body would be based on
the good experience of the International Commission
against Impunity in Guatemala known as CICIG, which
was established with the support of the United Nations,
the United States, Canada and Spain. Such a
commission would no doubt contribute to
strengthening institutions. We must recognize that State
organizations have been infiltrated by organized crime
and that all means must be made available to recover
them and to wage the war against crime.
My proposal is based on an implicit
acknowledgement of the obvious truth that organized
crime does not recognize borders or respect States. Our
response must therefore also transcend these
boundaries; our response must be integration. Until the
establishment of such a commission, my country shall
work along these lines and has launched dialogue and
action with neighbouring countries with a view to
coordinating policies to prevent and punish crime.
My second proposal concerns the establishment
of an international alliance to support the priorities of
regional integration, which are the fight against
poverty and inequality and the creation of opportunities
that will allow our populations to stay in their
communities of origin.
Central Americans understand this, and are
willing to give battle to poverty, exclusion, and
organized crime. To that end, we have started joint
work by relaunching our integration organization, the
Central American Integration System. Central
Americans are striving to create strong, democratic and
just societies. In the specific case of El Salvador, my
Government is moving forward with the building of a
social State that reformulates social policy, taking into
account the failure of past mechanisms that I
mentioned earlier.
Gangs have become veritable criminal
organizations coordinated with organized crime. We
shall not overcome this reality with mere assistance
policies or improvements in the standards of living.
This phenomenon is found among young people who,
from earliest childhood and adolescence, join gangs,
and is so widespread that gangs have become a
complex subculture. Our response must be equally so.
Within the framework of a social State, we must
deepen democracy and strengthen republican
institutions. We know that corruption is one of the
worst enemies of the democratic system; therefore,
working for transparency has become a fundamental
aspect of our national and regional strategies.
Throughout Central America, this struggle is a
matter not only of ethics, but also of democratic
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survival. In other words, we must oppose the potential
emergence of a drug State by building strongly
democratic and transparent States. It has been proven
that the more corruption there is, the less economic
development there is. Corruption poisons public
policies, especially those that assist the poor; it reduces
citizens’ trust in their system and makes markets
inefficient.
My Government has created a specialized body to
fight corruption. The Under Secretariat of
Transparency and Anti-Corruption is the first body in
America to submit itself to the in situ control by the
Inter-American Program of Cooperation to Fight
Corruption of the Organization of American States, and
has been commended as such. According to the
Government of the United States, El Salvador is also
the Central American country with the best
performance in fighting organized crime and drug
trafficking. Thus, it is not on the high-risk map which
that Government has just published. Without
transparent institutions, strong and independent
institutions and without a true vocation to fighting
organized crime, it will not be possible to meet the
great challenges before us.
We are waging a war. It is a new war unlike those
of the past. We are not waging it against another nation
or standing army. We are facing a powerful,
sophisticated, diffuse enemy that has blended in with
our society, and we must fight it with new weapons,
creativity, intelligence, and the cooperation of our
societies and the global community. Only thus will our
efforts be commensurate with the circumstances. Only
thus will we be able to meet today’s challenges. Only
thus will we provide sound responses to the needs of
the majority of our peoples, who await opportunities to
believe once again in democracy, institutions and
politics.
Once again, I appeal to the conscience and
sensibility of the international community. In
conclusion, I wish to do so by quoting President John
F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech, which reflects
what I have tried to convey today. He said that “if a
free society cannot help the many who are poor, it
cannot save the few who are rich”.