What does Jimmy Carter have to do with New Brunswick? The story begins in El Salvador

Jimmy Carter has died. He lived to be 100 years old.

Tributes are pouring in about a peanut farmer from Georgia who became America’s great peace-making president. Carter built houses for the homeless with his two hands in the words of US President Joe Biden. CBC’s coverage highlighted the renaming of a village in India to Carterpuri upon his visit there in 1978.

Who didn’t get to live to be 100? Or 50 for that matter? Or 20? Their numbers are too many, their names not important enough to be recorded. But their deaths are undeniably linked to the foreign policies of Jimmy Carter when he was president of the United States.

The early dead were the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. The Maya of Guatemala. They were teachers, farmers and poets. They were journalists and lawyers. They were priests and nuns trained in liberation theology. They were children.

Jimmy Carter will have two funerals. He spent his final days in Plains, Georgia, where he was born and raised. Who didn’t get to live and die near their families, like Carter? Countless refugees forced to leave their countries because of the scorched earth policies supported by Carter.

Where did the refugees go?

Fredericton was one of many places where Salvadoran families ended up in the 1990s. One Salvadoran friend wears a t-shirt with San Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero’s face on it. He laments that people here don’t know who the martyr is.

On February 17, 1980, weeks before Romero was murdered by US-trained assassins, he wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter begging him to stop sending military aid to the Salvadoran military dictatorship.

Romero pleaded with Carter as a fellow Christian and human rights defender. He told him that restoration of military aid would “undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their most basic human rights.”

Romero believed that the Salvadoran people should be in charge of their own destiny, writing to Carter: “In these moments we are living through a grave economic and political crisis in our country, but it is certain that it is increasingly the people who are awakening and organizing and have begun to prepare themselves to manage and be responsible for the future of El Salvador, as only they are capable of overcoming the crisis.”

Carter never responded to the letter and weeks later Romero was dead, gunned down as he was saying mass in a church on March 24, 1980.

Carter had previously restricted military assistance to El Salvador over human rights concerns. However, the 1979 Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua alarmed the United States. After a reformist military-civilian junta took power in El Salvador in October, Carter restored “non-lethal” military aid, hoping to prevent the spread of revolution.

Carter’s non-lethal military assistance included Huey UH-1H helicopters that terrorized Salvadorans. We perhaps know about this because the weapons were also used on an American anthropologist Philippe Bourgois who documented how he and Salvadoran families fled what became a 11-day scorched-earth military operation in November of 1981.

“The only difference between ‘non-lethal’ helicopters and military-grade ones was the removal of the external machine-gun parapet with its 360-degree pivot,” wrote Bourgois. “Instead, the gunners had to open their side door when strafing civilians from their ‘human rights’ helicopters.”

Only after the Salvadoran military had abducted, raped, and murdered three American nuns and one lay missionary did Carter temporarily sever US support in December of 1980. A few weeks later, after a major guerilla offensive in January of 1981, Carter renewed military assistance to El Salvador’s dictatorship. That dictatorship would go on to murder and disappear some 80,000 people by the time the civil war ended in 1992.

Saving capitalism in Central America

What would Central America be like today had the United States not interfered in the region? Had Canada not intervened on behalf of its mining companies?

Would Berta Cáceres, the Lenca land defender from Honduras, have lived to mark her 50th  birthday?

Would Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo have lived to write more poetry for the oppressed?

What would have become of the Metallica-loving teen poet Topacio Reynosa Pacheco had she not been assassinated on her way home from a meeting of opponents to the Tahoe Escobal silver mine?

Would Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto and her unborn child have lived to grow old along the banks of Titihuapa in Cabañas? Would Chico Montes and other water defenders who amplified Dora’s opposition to a Canadian-owned gold mine not face jail time today?

Santa Marta 5 stand trial in El Salvador

In 2008, Chico Montes told an audience at the New Brunswick Social Forum in Fredericton about how a Canadian-owned gold mine, Pacific Rim, was threatening the water of his community. The NB Media Co-op was born out of this forum of social justice activists. The activists gathered there decided that they needed to tell their own stories. The media was not interested in Chico’s story.

Chico’s brave storytelling and calls in Fredericton is why the NB Media Co-op has signed letters in support of him and the Santa Marta 5 who are facing bogus criminal charges. To sign the most recent letter as an organization or individual, go here.

Five years after Chico spoke in Fredericton, another land defender from El Salvador, Sandra Carolina Ascencio, told an audience at Wilmot United Church in Fredericton in 2013 that we all share the same problem: Canadian mining companies. El Salvador would later ban large-scale metal mining, in 2017, but Canadian and American mining companies never gave up their quest to open mines there, despite local opposition.

The criminalization of Chico Montes and the Santa Marta 5 is being linked to President Nayib Bukele’s ambitions to allow the mine that Chico Montes fought to stop.

In October, the NB Media Co-op celebrated a court ruling that unanimously acquitted the Santa Marta 5 on all charges. Unfortunately, that ruling was short-lived. An appeals court threw out the innocent verdict and announced that the five men would be retried, despite no new evidence being presented. The new trial is scheduled to start on February 3.

In December, Bukele told his social media followers that the 2017 countrywide ban on metals mining is “absurd” and stands in the way of progress and prosperity. On December 23, El Salvador reversed its mining ban.

Again, imperialist interests are having their way, but the people of the Global South dream of other paths forward for their homelands, inspired by other philosophies of how to live, such as buen vivir, vivir sabroso and sumac kawsay.

Decades of U.S. interference in Central America have taken its toll. Imperialist interests continue to invade the countries. Whether it’s in the name of prosperity and progress or transition, billionaires are becoming even bigger billionaires and migrants unable to make a living continue to flow into the United States and Canada.

The migrants come even though it is perhaps more dangerous than ever with Trump becoming president. More than any other president, he has openly vilified immigrants. Other presidents kept the anti-immigrant rhetoric down as they closed borders to and deported immigrants in record numbers.

Archbishop Óscar Romero is now Saint Óscar Romero, canonized by the Catholic Church in 2018.

As Carter is eulogized, let’s commemorate the many unnamed dead who did not have a funeral. By remembering them and how they died, their deaths are not in vain.

Tracy Glynn, an editorial board member of the NB Media Co-op, engages in Latin American solidarity work with the Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network and the Fredericton chapter of the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network.