MEET THE RESILIENT EL SALVADORIAN COMMUNITY OF LOS ANGELES

(photo (c) Michelle Moore of shade grown coffee beans)

Oliver Moore travels into the hills of El Salvador, where he encounters an especially resilient community

I took a trip with Trocaire up the hills to San Julian in El Salvador on a national holiday, the day of the dead. Like All Souls Day, its a day for remembering past loved ones.

The busy graveyards were all festooned with tinsel and flowers, and scaffolded with intricate sculptures, visible even from the road as we whizzed past.

As we travelled deeper into San Julian we passed field after field of tall green sugar cane plants.

In San Julian, almost 2/3 live below the national poverty line. It was a typically hot day in the low 30s, when we arrived in the small community of Los Angeles. As we walked towards the meeting place the temperature dropped a comfortable few degrees.

Our meeting was outdoors, in the agro-forest the community maintained. Shade grown coffee accompanied taller and smaller companion planted fruit and nut trees, as well crops on the ground.

Trocaire support an NGO called UNES to help the community with growing equipment, seed banks  allotments and in the development of an agro-ecology school.

Though it wasn't planned as a trip to organic farming locations, this community, like the others visited with Trocaire, practiced organic farming methods. Its affordable techniques coupled with available labour simply made sense.

The Los Angeles community of 58 families in San Julian is extraordinarily resilient, in the face of earthquakes and ever more extreme weather.

Los Angeles Community in agroforest (c) Oliver Moore

First Los Angeles had its water supply badly contaminated, for 15 years, by a nearby pig farm. Slowly they developed their organisational skills and ran, with others in the region, a two year campaign, culminating in a 3 month ultimatum, and, finally,  blockade of the pig farm. Despite death threats, in a country where these really mean something, the community were successful.

Next came a tire incineration plant, of a type not allowed in most parts of the world. Better organised, the community resisted and won again, but this time in a shorter timeframe. So when the sugar cane owners came to try to buy out their forest garden, resistance came easier.

There are still challenges. The school Dennis Lopez, 7, attends is just a short walk from his home. On route, he usually has a quick kickaround in the football pitch next door to the school building.

Denis Lopez (c) Michelle Moore

  The school, like everything else in Los Angeles, is completely surrounded by the tall sugar cane plants. The plants come right up to the school fence, and right up to the edge of the football pitch.

Without any kind of warning, aerial spraying of pesticides occurs. “The last time it happened, the children were outside playing in the school yard at lunchtime when the helicopters came” community activist Walberto Herrera, 44, tells me. The pesticides allowable in El Salvador are strong, and include organophosphates.

“Our next campaign will be about this spraying” he tells me, adding that there is currently no buffer zone, no warning and that the wind is unpredictable. Any consequences of pesticide drift on human health here isn't recorded.

School wall close to the sugar beet plantation (c) Oliver Moore

All over the region, the sugar cane is set on fire just before harvest, when the crop is at its tallest and most dense. Done to dispose of 'trash' such as straw, tops and leaves, this envelopes the community in a wall of think black unhealthy smoke, as well as a fearful fiery inferno.

Later that week I spoke to Lourdes Palacios, former rebel fighter, who moved to the jungle to fight for the rebel FLMN as a teenager. She now sits on an environment committee in the parliament. Her  FMLN party have been in shared government since 2009, taking over from the right wing Arena party, who had been in power since the war ended in 1992.

Lourdes spoke of her work in trying to get the most persistent and toxic of pesticides banned, and to introduce stricter regulations on pesticides in general. A landmark report had revealed that 400 people die in El Salvador each year from direct pesticide poisonings, she claimed, which influenced her efforts.

“But its difficult, we are not a majority government, and the ex-president from the Arena party is the countries largest importer of pesticides”.

Difficult no doubt, but the people of El Salvador in general, and Los Angeles in particular, have faced tougher battles before.

See Trocaire's photo gallery of the trip here

(all pics (c) Oliver Moore unless otherwise  assigned)

Future football stars of Los Angeles, El Salvador (c) Oliver Moore

agroforestry climate change el salvador environment FMLN pesticides trocaire

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