Portland carpenter heads to El Salvador to fight NAFTA II

By Don McIntosh, Associate Editor

It’s coming soon to the U.S. Congress: CAFTA, a trade treaty that would do with Central America what NAFTA did with Mexico — tear down barriers to the off-shoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs and build up protections for corporate investors. The treaty is complete, and could be voted on in Congress as early as summer. But some trade policy experts in Washington, D.C., think President George W. Bush may wait until after the election to schedule a vote because Congress is so divided.

The vote is in doubt in one other signatory nation. El Salvador has presidential elections March 21 and the race is close between the candidate of ARENA, the right-wing party now in the presidency, and the candidate of the FMLN, a left-wing party that opposes the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as currently written The election outcome — and CAFTA — could depend on how free of fraud the vote proves to be.

That’s where Portlander Jason Sheckler, a union Carpenter, comes in. With support from a handful of local unions, Sheckler, 31, left for El Salvador on March 13. There, he’s training to be an accredited election observer, and will work to assure the Salvadoran election isn’t stolen by fraud.

A few years ago, Sheckler was working as a non-union carpenter until his dad, a retired Teamster, insisted he join the union. He’s now in the last year of a four-year Carpenters apprenticeship training program, and has become an active member of Local 247 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Just as carpenters must stick together in a union to protect their rights, members of different unions need to support each others’ struggles, Sheckler reasoned. So he joined the workers’ rights group Portland Jobs With Justice. But there still needed to be a third degree of solidarity: In a globalizing economy, Sheckler concluded, even American workers can no longer go it alone.

“We need to organize internationally, just like the bosses are doing,” Sheckler said.

Sheckler joined a Portland group called the Cross-Border Labor Organizing Committee (CBLOC) to see what he could do to extend the hand of solidarity to workers in other countries.

CBLOC was working with the New York-based Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) to recruit international election observers. Sheckler volunteered.

“[One] way to stop CAFTA from happening is to make sure El Salvador has fair elections,” Sheckler said. “It’s pretty important that we go as working people.”

Sheckler went to local union meetings, explaining his mission and preaching the gospel of global solidarity with a PowerPoint presentation outlining the threat of CAFTA to workers. His own Local 247 decided to back him, and so did Multnomah County Employees Local 88, an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Service Employees Local 49, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 8, the Portland Association of Teachers, and Tualatin Valley Fire Fighters Local 1660.

“We have to organize internationally against these agreements,” Sheckler said.

The Salvadorans are way ahead, he added. “In El Salvador, labor is organized against CAFTA. There are things we need to learn as unions here. A lot of unions here have never heard of CAFTA.”

While they’re down there, Sheckler and other members of the CISPES delegation are also meeting with members and leaders of Salvadoran unions.

“I want to learn from them. The labor movement in El Salvador is very strong despite all the repression.”

Before its civil war ended in 1992, El Salvador had a bloody history, as right-wing military juntas fought against leftist rebels — and anyone else who advocated redistributing the wealth in El Salvador’s deeply unequal society. In 1980, government-organized death squads assassinated populist archbishop Oscar Romero as he said mass, and raped and murdered a group of four American nuns. In 1989, government soldiers assassinated a group of six Jesuit priests. Much worse was the violence against the FMLN and their alleged supporters, including labor union organizers. An estimated 75,000 people were killed during the 12-year civil war.

The conflict continues between the two sides, but for now it’s with ballots, not bullets.

Polls show the FMLN and ARENA neck and neck for the presidency.

The FMLN was a group of political parties that became a guerrilla movement after a military junta overthrew an elected president in 1979. Under United Nations-brokered peace accords in 1992, FMLN rebels laid down their arms and became a political party again. Today they are the largest party in the national assembly and control most of the municipalities.

ARENA, the party that negotiated CAFTA with the United States and currently occupies the presidency, was founded by the late Roberto D’Aubisson, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler. Repression against trade unionists increased when ARENA came to power in 1982. ARENA had the backing of the Reagan Administration, and today has support from the current Bush Administration. Several State Department officials have suggested to Salvadorans that their relationship with the United States won’t be so warm if ARENA is voted out.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, traveled to El Salvador in late February to underscore the point – and not for the first time. In 2001, Jeb Bush put a full-page ad in a Salvadoran newspaper calling the FMLN presidential candidate an enemy of everything the United States represents.

More than one observer has noted the comparison of Bush’s Florida and ARENA’s El Salvador, where elections have been marred by allegations of fraud.

CISPES national program organizer Alicia Grogan-Brown predicts there will be at least some attempts at voter fraud in the March 21 election. In previous elections, full ballot boxes showed up in a river afterward. Voter rolls included the names of dead people, while living supporters of the FMLN found themselves not on the list even though they’d registered to vote. And ARENA supporters were bused around to different locations, voting more than once. Press reports from El Salvador exposed plans to bus in hired campesinos from neighboring Honduras to cast ballots.

Grogan-Brown hopes the presence of hundreds of international observers will deter the worst abuses.

Sheckler doesn’t speak Spanish, but will have a local interpreter and may be able to document any irregularities with a video camera.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.