By Michael O. Garvey '74
At his dinner party Zablah did advance one political opinion: that the Salvadoran
government should devote its entire budget for at least two years to economic programs directed
toward the poorest sector of the population, enacting a sort of indigenous Marshall Plan. To a
North American suburbanite, this seemed a humane and commonsensical suggestion, but it
sounded oddly radical in this poor country at this sumptuous table around which smiling mestizo
waiters hovered obligingly with bottles of good French wine.
A welcome anomaly in a neuralgic political environment, Zablah is able to elicit respect
and even affection from an often contentious range of people. One stoutly anti-capitalist
academic recalled, after meeting him, George Orwell's grudging praise for Gandhi: "Compared
with the other leading figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!"
But the widespread approval of this good-natured man does not so easily accrue to FUSADES,
the organization of which he is the founding chairman and which he regards as indispensable to
the just and prosperous country he envisions. The foundation was established in 1983 as a think
tank promoting "economic and social progress of all Salvadorans, through sustainable
development, in a system of democracy and individual liberties." FUSADES also administers
and sponsors a variety of development projects, from bridge construction to the establishment of
rudimentary health clinics. Student interns have been sent from Notre Dame's Center for Social
Concerns and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies to work in some of these projects.
Some critics argue that the foundation is reprehensibly in thrall to the "neoliberals," those
capitalist ideologues who seem to have deified unregulated international markets. They see
FUSADES as a corporate deception that projects a benevolent image of humane economic
growth while consolidating the power of a wealthy business class, coddling rapacious
multinational corporations and exploiting El Salvador's desperately poor majority. One such
critic is J. Matthew Ashley, associate professor of theology at Notre Dame, who teaches a course
titled "Church and Society in El Salvador" and visits the country frequently. "Whatever else it
does," says Ashley, "FUSADES certainly pushes the agro-industrial elite's view, which is the
same neoliberalism that Latin American bishops, even Pope John Paul's conservative appointees,
have condemned over and over again."
As an FMLN commander during the war, Roberto Gonzalez opposed the agro-industrial
elite's views even more strongly than the bishops did. When the peace accords transformed the
guerrilla army into a political party, and he was elected mayor of the hilltop town of Santiago de
Maria in the Usulutan province, Gonzalez continued to do so politically. Even before the war,
which was fought ferociously in the province; before Hurricane Mitch, in whose path it lay;
before the two earthquakes; and before mud slides became a routine rainy season phenomenon,
Usulutan was among El Salvador's poorest regions.
"I must say, FUSADES has been quite a help to us here," Gonzalez said one hot afternoon
shortly after Easter. He was showing some visitors around his dusty town, whose population has
swollen by a third, to nearly 30,000 people, as the calamities of the last decade have driven
terrified refugees from the lowlands to the questionable security of higher ground. Roughly half
the town was demolished in the earthquakes and mud slides last year. Here, in these battered
mountains, the foundation has assisted in the coordination and funding of disaster relief and
reconstruction. Gonzalez and his guests toured one rapidly expanding housing project, arranged
like stair steps ascending the slope of Tecapa Volcano.
The tour threaded several rows of gray, cinderblock units roofed with sheets of corrugated
steel through whose alleyways trickled rivulets of wastewater milky with soap and sewage. The
mortar in many of the walls was still damp and cool to the touch, even late in the tropical dry
season and in a year of drought. The neighborhood's water was sparingly supplied by a
communal cistern uphill from where the visitors had paused to listen as the mayor described the
plight of his constituents. One of them, a pretty, intensely attentive little girl in a filthy but bright
yellow dress, sat on an overturned washtub next to the cistern, cradling a white puppy in her lap
and staring at Gonzalez and his visitors. "Here in Santiago, we're grateful for anything at all. We
can use all the help we can get," the mayor said. As if on cue, the little girl, no more than 5 years
old, began to nod vigorously, her eyes wide.
Last year's tremors cracked the San Vicente Volcano, about 40 miles northwest of
Santiago de Maria, dislodging a few cubic miles of rock, earth, mud and forest and entombing
the campesino families whose misfortune it was to have built makeshift homes on its unstable
slope. Late Thursday afternoon following Easter, David Antonio, a civil engineer at FUSADES,
pointed out the white, chalky gash that remained glaringly visible on the mountainside above the
road into El Chile. "To know how many were killed, you'd need to know how many lived up
there to begin with," he said ruefully. Large-scale death is not unprecedented in the province of
San Vicente, around whose eponymous volcano two armies spent the years of the civil war
chasing each other in a swirl of carnage.
