El Salvador, 2010

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”.