Economic reforms pushed by the US would “leave the State like a public relations office for big business”

In his visit to New York City for the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Funes addressed the Council of the Americas, a conservative business association, hailing the Partnership for Growth and touting the proposed reforms. “We are of the opinion that the only way that we can grow is if there is more private investment,” declared Funes.

Funes’ embrace of neoliberal economic policy comes as the US government and its international financial appendages like the World Bank and the IMF are pushing policies of fiscal austerity and private investment as the recipe for stimulating economic growth and threatening to withhold access to loans if the Salvadoran government does not comply. But social movement leaders and many economic and labor experts in El Salvador recognize that the insistence on foreign investment is part of the same failed economic strategy imposed for decades under the previous right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) administrations. This strategy has produced precisely the poor economic conditions that foreign and national financial elites now decry. Dr. Salvador Arias, economist and advisor to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party’s legislative group argues that “investment now is a mechanism to extract money… We have been exporting capital.”And according to Gilberto García, a coordinator at the Center for Labor Studies and Support (CEAL), measures like the proposed Public Private Partenrship law, will only “leave the State like a public relations office for big business.”As Funes’ proposals head to the Legislative Assembly for consideration, labor and social movement groups are going on the offensive, presenting counterproposals around foreign investment and fair labor practices, pressuring legislators to oppose these neoliberal measures and informing their bases about the dangerous implications of proposals like the Public Private Partnership Law.Meanwhile, communities across the United States continue to face similar efforts to privatize public goods and weaken labor protections. “We don’t have an isolated situation in this country, but a generalized economic current throughout the world,” says Gilberto García, “It’s very much related to all the mobilizations that occurred last year in Wisconsin against efforts to take away the rights won by the working class, and it’s very much related to the recent movements in defense of teacher’s labor rights in the United States; it’s very much related to the fact that it’s the 1%, the wealthiest, who would benefit, giving them more investments, ‘bringing more meat to the wolves,’ as we say.” In the transnational fight against the interests of big business, solidarity between peoples is, as ever before, a critical tool in the defense workers’ rights and the public good