When Francisco Altschul went off to the University of El Salvador to become an architect, he never expected to one day be his country’s ambassador.

Nor did he expect his country would be dragged into a decade of civil war and that he would flee after his name appeared on a death squad’s hit list.

Yet almost 20 years after war ended, Altschul spoke at Verde Valley School and the Sedona Public Library about how far his country has come. Among those achievements was the peaceful election of leftist President Maurico Funes from the political party that once led the fight against an oppressive regime.

When Altschul spoke at Verde Valley School on Oct. 8, he remarked that the school was founded in the wake of World War II and aimed to create an international community of young people. That vision’s purpose was to prevent another great war.

Speaking of his own country’s recent conflict, Altschul said, “For us, this was our great war.”

The VVS students going to El Salvador will see firsthand what Altschul said he is most proud of: After a dark history, Salvadorans are finding a way to peace, to become better citizens of the world, and bridge the gaps between rich and poor, left and right, the few and the majority.

El Salvador Today

El Salvador is located on the Pacific Coast of Central America. It is only 4 square miles smaller than Yavapai County and home to 7.2 million people.

The civil war of 1980 to 1992 displaced tens of thousands, while others fled El Salvador to neighboring countries and the United States.

Numbers are sketchy, but 1.8 million to 2.1 million Salvadorans live in the United States, with more than 60 percent as legalized workers or naturalized citizens.

More than 214,000 are legally here under Temporary Protected Status, granted after devastating earthquakes and hurricanes hit the country in 2004 and 2005.

Some 236,000 Salvadorans have contributed more than $400 million just in paperwork fees to the federal government the seven times the 18-month-long TPS program has been renewed. They also pay income and sales taxes as legal workers.

Economic Struggles

One of the major problems the country faces is its economy.

Remittances — roughly $3 billion sent home by Salvadorans working in the United States — now account for more than 20 percent of El Salvador’s gross domestic product.

While the government relies on that income to help the country stay solvent, Altschul said most of the money is used on consumption, not investments. The country is stuck in an economic Catch-22 — wanting to end emigration and retain talent, but reliant on remittances to stabilize the economy.

“We realize that we have a lot of work to do in our own house,” Altschul said.

His country’s goal, he said, is not to export its people, but create economic opportunities in El Salvador so Salvadorans don’t leave.

Historically, he said, those who emigrate are some of the more creative, adventurous and enterprising individuals in a population. By retaining them, a country keeps some of its best and brightest minds.

However, he said, “You can not change by decree the economy.”

El Salvador also faces problems from nature. It is susceptible to hurricanes, huge floods, landslides and major earthquakes — one about every 20 years.

Climate change is also dramatically affecting local agriculture. Seasonal winds now come weeks or months later than normal.

Altschul said he hasn’t been able to grow mangoes on his organic farm because the regular “October winds” now come in February, making germination impossible.

The country’s public works department had to adjust codes and standards on roadways and bridges because 100-year flood levels have risen.

Landslides are more common now because heavy rains saturate the soil.

Beginnings of a Diplomat

Since gaining independence from Spain, El Salvador was historically governed by a land-owning oligarchy of 14 families, which profited by running the country’s coffee plantations.

Altschul’s father worked as a manager for one of those families. As a child, Altschul saw the disparity between the very rich and the poor campesinos, or peasants, living side by side. The University of El Salvador’s architectural school, where Altschul studied, was located next to a shanty town, where students practiced their skills in various community projects.

He studied urban development, housing and planning at Bouwcentrum International Education in Holland and the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

Altschul later went to work for a nongovernmental organization, headed by a Jesuit priest, which improved water and sewage lines, electricity and low-income housing for campesinos. The NGO also helped residents deal with government officials to build schools and pave streets.

“It was an instrument to get people organized,” Altschul said.

Inevitable Revolution

Altschul said there were signs a revolution was inevitable.

In the 1970s, Altschul worked in a poor neighborhood through which a pipe brought water to irrigate a landowner’s compound and coffee plantation.

The local campesinos asked to pay and tap the line, but the landowner denied them.

Instead, the local women had to walk several miles to another tap and carry water home. They were also charged six times as much as Altschul said he and others with indoor plumbing were paying for water.

In 1974, Altschul was an elections observer. As the votes came in and were broadcast, the opposition was clearly winning. Altschul and his partner decided to stay in their precinct to wait for the local results.

In the evening, the area lost power and the radio went dead. Armed paramilitaries who had been shadowing Altschul and other observers pounded on their door and threatened to kill them if they came out.

When power was restored, the right-wing ruling party declared victory over the radio. Altschul said the government had no interest in fair elections.

The Salvadoran Civil War

In the late 1970s, members of the left-wing opposition began to take up arms and train in the rural areas while civil unrest was spreading throughout the cities.

The government suspended more and more constitutional rights and paramilitaries formed death squads to “disappear” dissidents.

A military junta staged a coup d’etat in 1979. Paramilitaries and death squads stepped up summary executions to silence the opposition.

Altschul and other students debated what to do. Altschul said he was not cut out to become a guerrilla, but if a revolution came, the students decided they would not oppose it.

As tensions mounted, a revolutionary asked Altschul to hide a dissident. However, he was living at home with his mother and to hide someone would put her at risk.

“I decided to move out because I could not provide refuge,” Altschul said.

Archbishop Óscar Romero Assassinated

In March 1980, after calling for peace and an end to the death squads, Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador was shot dead during Mass.

Shortly thereafter, five left-wing political groups formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, and began a guerrilla war against the government.

In 1980, Altschul said his roommate decided to open an art gallery.

“Are you crazy? Why do you want to open an art gallery when the country is going to pieces?” Altschul asked.

His roommate opened the gallery nonetheless. It was actually a front, operating as a safe house under direction by FMLN leader Schafik Handal.

After government forces raided the gallery and captured a revolutionary, Altschul and his roommate both received phone call warnings. They went into hiding for several days as government officials ransacked their home.

An officer’s wife who was friend of Altschul’s mother told her she saw his name on a death list and Altschul made plans to leave the country.

Altschul clearly remembers when he fled El Salvador — between two heinous acts perpetrated the government.

In December, paramilitaries raped and murdered three American nuns and a Catholic laywoman. Shortly afterward, uniformed soldiers surrounded a Jesuit school and massacred the leadership of FDR, one of the FMLN’s component groups.

After leaving, Altschul stayed first in Mexico. Friends told him to stay there because the FMLN would soon win and the revolution would be over.

In January 1981, the FMLN launched a major offensive. However, the guerrillas failed to capture the capital of San Salvador, and the country realized a long war was ahead.

Well-educated, articulate and fluent in English, Altschul was tapped to represent the political interests of the FDR and FMLN as a diplomat to the United States.

U.S. Involvement

After the Nicaraguan Revolution led to the assent of communist Sandinistas, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was determined to prevent a left-wing government from taking power in Central America.

“What we see in El Salvador is an attempt to destabilize the entire region and eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border,” Reagan stated in May 1984.

The U.S. Embassy in San Salvador is the second largest U.S. embassy compound in the world. El Salvador received billions of dollars in direct and indirect military aid in the 1980s, second only to Israel and Turkey. For three straight years, Altschul said, the Salvadoran government was receiving more than $1 million a day.

In December 1981, an American-trained government unit advanced into the village of El Mozote, inhabited by 200 residents and almost 1,000 refugees. Under the pretext of fighting the guerrillas, the soldiers machine gunned the population and raped women and girls as young as 10.

The Salvadoran and U.S. government blamed the FMLN, until a single survivor, Rufina Amaya, who had hidden in a tree, came forward with her story.

Contributing to the chaos was corruption. Guerrillas were buying weapons and even aircraft from government forces. Pro-government paramilitaries were kidnapping the wealthy, holding them for ransom and blaming or even hiring guerrillas to hold the victims hostage.

Approximately one-third of the population were informants for government forces while an equal number helped the rebels. Much of it was a matter of convenience and circumstance.

“It was much more complex,” Altschul said. “We were not taking direction from Cuba or Moscow.”

El Salvador was the last Cold War mentality before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.

In 1989, the FMLN launched a major offensive to end the war. Guerillas seized parts of San Salvador but failed to hold them. Government forces bombed residential areas held by the rebels, forcing the FMLN to retreat. Tactically the offensive failed, but politically it showed both sides and the American government that a military victory would not be possible, he said.

Because the U.S. government was funding the counterrevolution, once it chose negotiation, Altschul said peace talks were soon under way. Altschul returned to the country shortly before the Chapultepec Peace Accords ended the war in 1992.

“Political settlements are always second best,” he said.

The treaty dissolved the National Guard, the National Police, the paramilitary death squads and disarmed the FMLN rebels. The treaty also turned the FMLN into a legitimate political party.

After the War

With the war over, Altschul went back to work with a nonprofit creating local economic projects and starting up small businesses.

Since 1992, the leading right-wing ARENA party held the presidency. The leftists, although united during the war, were an amalgamation of various smaller factions, some Marxist revolutionaries, others traditional socialists, others merely left-of-center groups aimed at protecting the rights of the poor.
The right labeled the left as communists who, if elected, would immediately take direction from Cuba and ruin relations with the United States.

Demonstrating to Salvadoran voters that the left could take power and be responsible with it has been a slow process.

First, smaller municipalities in rural areas elected leftist leaders, then larger ones. In 1997, Altschul was among a group of leftists elected to the San Salvador City Council. He was reelected and served a second term until 2003.

“It was a training period for the government,” Altschul said.

President Mauricio Funes

That political experience paid off in 2009, when Salvadorans elected broadcast journalist and FMLN member Mauricio Funes president. A respected reporter, 50-year-old Funes interviewed leftist leaders during the war and investigated the government and political figures. Funes is El Salvador’s “Ted Koppel,” Altschul said.

ARENA opponents suggested Funes would take the country into the fold of Cuba, ruin U.S. relations and devastate El Salvador’s fragile economy as it would lead to the deportation of Salvadorans in the United States, which would end the remittances to their poor families.

Members of the left suggested Funes should abandon the Central American Free Trade Agreement and repeal dollarization — El Salvador has used the American dollar as its currency since 1996.

However, Funes told his party he would stay in CAFTA, even though it generally only benefits major corporations in El Salvador. His reasoning, Altschul said, is that entrepreneurs of those firms would still be in the country and smaller business owners would still learn the ins and outs of running a company. By also protecting workers’ rights, CAFTA could benefit even poor workers.

El Salvador has shown that there is a path between oppressive right-wing dictatorships and the extreme left of Fidel Casto’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a progressive left-of-center path that dramatically benefits the poor while still maintaining close ties to the United States.

While one of Funes’ first acts was to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba — the last Central American country to do so — he also strengthened ties with the U.S. To date, El Salvador is the only Central American leader formally received at the White House by President Barack Obama.

Although not a member of the FMLN, Altschul was asked to be El Salvador’s chargé d’affaires because of his diplomatic experience during the war.

This summer, Altschul was promoted to ambassador and presented his credentials to Obama on June 28.
The Left’s Middle Way

Most of Funes and FMLN’s work, now that the left is power, is benefiting the poor. The programs are pragmatic and non-ideological, Altschul said. If a program benefits El Salvador’s population, it stays, regardless of which party or government may have created it.

Taking a cue from Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, El Salvador stepped up a program that pays mothers a stipend of roughly $60 a month if their children get preventive medical care and nutritious food.

Altschul said the results are clearly measurable in the decrease in infant mortality, increase in infant body weights and drop in the number children who visit hospitals for preventable diseases.

The program began small under the previous ARENA government, but Funes expanded it first to the rural areas and now to the cities.

Funes’ government is also hiring more medical personnel, not hospital doctors in the cities, but 14,000 nurses and paramedics in rural and outlying areas.

An after-school program to keep students out of gangs will pay $100 for a six-month commitment if they volunteer at community programs managed through their local municipality.

Salvadoran Emigration

There is a misconception that immigrants’ only dangerous passage is crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Altschul said thousands of Salvadorans and other Central Americans are robbed, beaten, killed or simply disappear between their home country and the Mexican-American border. One study suggests 80 percent of women are raped before they even reach the border.

The Salvadoran government has opened two Offices of Migration Protection in Mexico along the migrant route to offer some protection. But he said the problem does not belong to one country, but the region as a whole and most of the problems have their roots entirely in economics.

Altschul said El Salvador wants to cut the cycle of migration and create opportunities in the country, such as small and medium businesses producing locally made goods and creating jobs at the local level.
“We don’t think it’s sound economic policy to expel the population,” he said.

The recent backlash against immigrants in the United States, such as Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, is based on economics.

A weak economy always creates a xenophobic feeling, Altschul said, and turns people against “the other;” in this day and age, it’s immigrants. He pointed to recent studies that prove immigrant labor increases U.S. productivity and economically benefits American workers.

“For some, migration is an obligation, not an option. People who come here have been forced,” Altschul said. “Their only sin is that they could not find the opportunities in their home country.”

The problems in El Salvador are complex, but Funes’ leftist Salvadoran government is consolidating democratic institutions and engaging in a frontal attack on poverty. Reconciliation between left and right is helping the poor and the country as a whole, Altschul said. While it will take work, El Salvador faces a better future coming out of the darkness of its past.