Obama's Drug War in El Salvador

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“The police invaded our organization because they said they were searching for drugs,” said Ana Maria. “They came in with the excuse that we had heavy quantities of Diazepam [sleeping medicine] to enter university, to justify their attempts to create chaos among student groups. Ridiculo!” 

In tones reminiscent of the feral voices of youth harassed by security forces in places as distinct as the Banlieues of Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris, the vecindades of Tepito in Mexico City or the Jordan Downs Housing projects in Los Angeles, Ana Maria recounted how the “repression” extends beyond the political realm of the university to the more personal space of her neighborhood in the very densely populated Salvadoran suburb of Mejicanos. “You get up, leave your house and there’s an [armed police officer] outside your building. You go to the bus stop and there’s another one. My [8-year-old] little sister goes to her school and there’s a soldier with an M-16 there at 8 a.m. and when she leaves. Wherever you are, they will ask you ‘Why do you cut your hair this way? Why you wear jeans a certain way?’ or ‘Do you use drugs?’ “

And with the political astuteness characteristic of a Salvadoran revolutionary movement and culture that the U.S. State Department has called one of the “most formidable” in the hemisphere, Ana Maria flips from the personal back to the geopolitical street. “Obama is visiting El Salvador so that the U.S. can continue trying  to control the Latin American region,” she says. “Those bases in Colombia, the reinforcement of the anti-narcotics division here, are there to put down our social movements. They are all part of maintaining a military position here—and we will continue to oppose it!” 

It’s not just El Salvador. What Ana Maria describes there is part of an accelerating re-militarization of the Americas under the Obama administration. There’s Plan Mexico, Plan Colombia and now the Central American regional plan Obama highlighted during his El Salvador visit. Ana Maria’s concerns reflect the belief of many that the biggest difference between the Cold War era and the Obama era is one of targets. Rather than being hunting communist sympathizers and radical nuns, today’s security forces are obsessed with finding the mostly youthful alleged enemies of the drug wars—Salvadoran gangs, narcotraficantes and, in the words of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, “narcoinsurgents.”

On the other side of San Salvador, in a heavily air-conditioned meeting hall of the Central American Parliament, Stanford-educated international relations expert Hector Perla responds to a recurring question from the crowd of academics, legislators, journalists and policymakers gathered to discuss U.S.-Salvadoran relations in the Obama era: “Are you saying that President Obama is no different from other U.S. Presidents?”

 “What makes Obama different is the Obama doctrine,” says Perla, an organizer of the conference who is a colleague of mine and an assistant Professor of Latino and Latin America Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The Obama doctrine,” he explains, “uses the rhetoric of respect for human rights, the rhetoric of  peace, poverty alleviation and social justice on the one hand, while promoting militarization with the other hand. You can see it clearly in [Obama’s] visit to the tomb of Monsenor Romero, a man recognized for his calls for peace. Obama visited the tomb as he was ordering the bombing and killing in Libya.” 

Nowhere are the contours of the Obama doctrine clearer, said Perla, than in the recent announcement of his $200 million anti-narco-trafficking initiative for Central America. Obama says it is the foundation for a “new joint security strategy” set to begin this spring. Perla noted that, in talking about the program, Obama emphasized its aim to “strengthen courts, civil society groups and institutions that uphold the rule of law”—but he left out mention of the funds to train and equip El Salvador’s police and military forces.