You don’t hear as much about El Salvador these days as you once did in the Bay Area, but the Coalition in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador is still very active, and the issues in thyat impoverished country, run by the right-wing equivalent of a dictator, are very real.
And now CISPES is furious that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is, according to Salvadoran press reports, planning to meet with Salvadoran president Antonio Saca. “Newsom is set to declare April 4 as the Day of Antonio Saca,” a CISPES statement says. This “has outraged the Salvadoran community of the Bay Area and allies because of ongoing human rights violations and state repression in El Salvador.“
I can’t get the mayor’s press office to confirm this, despite two emails and a phone call. In fact, I was told that only Nathan Ballard, the chief of the press office, could talk about this, and although I asked for a response by Thursday night, and emailed him directly as well, I have heard nothing. So possibly the Salvadoran press is wrong — and possibly Newsom doesn’t want to get a lot of press on the visit.
But CISPES is mobilizing to send a message that President Saca is not welcome in San Francisco and that the City should not honor him, and the group plans a press conference and demonstration Friday at 12 noon outside City Hall.
If Newsom is indeed meeting with Saca, it will put him in league with Dianne Feinstein, who used to love to meet with dictators. In the course of just one year, she hosted Ferdinand Marcos, Jose Napoleon Duarte and Muhammed Zia Ul-Haq.
At the time I called it her “third-world dictators hat trick.”
Newsom ought to know better.