International Solidarity Campaign
We are writing to inform you that on Friday November 22, our comrade Erick Alexander Zelaya Ramos, General Secretary of our union federation, the National Union for the Defence of the Workers’ Class (Unión Nacional para la Defensa de la Clase Trabajadora), which is made up of eight unions, who is also the General Secretary of the Workers’ Union of CONAMYPE-SITCO and the General Secretary for Education and Culture of the National Confederation of Salvadoran Workers (CNTS), which is made up of 40 unions, mainly in the public sector, was dismissed. He is a member of the Coordination of the Movement for the Defence of the Rights of the Working Class (MDCT), a grouping that was born out of the need to denounce the labour and social abuses of various national sectors and that have led the recent WHITE MARCHES.
This dismissal comes on top of the 500 dismissals of trade union leaders by the government of Nayib Bukele, whose repressive aim is to demoralise the organised working class and popular sectors in opposition to his policies, i.e. the consequences of the fiscal adjustment, with the complicity and following the orders of the International Monetary Fund, measures that will leave more than 11,000 public sector workers unemployed. This will lead to the precarisation of public services for the Salvadoran people, especially in the health and education sectors, and in the short term, to an economic recession that will be especially harmful to women in the working class and popular sectors.
In addition to our general secretary, 12 CONAMYPE workers have had their posts abolished, and there has been the closure of three micro and small business support centres in Zacatecoluca, La Libertad and La Unión, as well as Cojutepeque, which make up four important centres of economic development. These measures by Paul Steiner, president of CONAMYPE, contradict Bukele’s inaugural speech, which declared that this would be the period of ‘economic reactivation’, and are therefore an attack on the services provided to the important sector of MYPES, entrepreneurs and self-employed workers, who make up 90% of the country’s businesses, guarantee 70% of employment in El Salvador and contribute 35% to the GDP.
Among the positions that have been removed is that of our comrade José Angel Flores Granados, General Secretary of SITCO, Secretary for the Environment of the UNT and recognised leader in the struggle for the rights of nature and indigenous peoples as coordinator of the Indigenous Movement for the Integration of the Struggle of the Indigenous Peoples-MILPA.
With these actions the government is trying to silence the working class and repress human rights defenders in order to continue the strategy of eliminating the most hard-won conquests of the working people, and ensuring that they have no way of resisting against future attacks.
From the National Union for the Defence of the Working Class:
WE DECLARE OURSELVES IN RED ALERT with respect to the latent threat to our leadership.
WE CALL ON ALL human rights defenders not to lose heart in their struggle and to join the MDCT.
WE DECLARE a national and international campaign to defend the rights of trade union leaders whose fundamental rights to freedom of association and trade union freedom have been violated.
WE CALL UPON the international community, the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation, the Organisation of American States, and El Salvador’s embassies and consulates in democratic countries to renew their attention to what is happening in El Salvador and to use their offices to activate the relevant international mechanisms.
WE DECLARE that we will activate national and international legal mechanisms at the UN, ILO, IACHR, among others, as well as public denunciations at national and international levels.
WE URGE the population to use public services to defend their institutions, because the government’s neoliberal approach will lead to the privatisation of important public services as a consequence of the weakening of the state.
To all our comrades, defenders of labour, social, environmental, indigenous, LGBTQ, women, youth, pensioners, dismissed, and all the working people and popular sectors: we must strengthen the spaces of unity as a movement for the defence of the rights of the working class. Unity and permanent struggle are the ONLY GUARANTEES of victory, and just as they have led the country in economic and human rights issues, they are leading us to the GENERAL STRIKE to change oppression for justice. This is the important work our leaders are undertaking.
To the organisations of the working class at the international level, we ask you to join the campaign of denunciation and to send letters to Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, to Rolando Castro, Minister of Labour, to Raquel Caballero de Guevara, Deputy Attorney General for Human Rights, we also ask for motions of solidarity to the UNT, as well as video support from the trade union leaders in your countries.
We also ask for letters be sent to the embassies and consulates of El Salvador, preferably before December 21, the day on which we will carry out the NEGRA NAVIDAD cacerolazo (Black Christmas banging of pots and pans in protest).
In the face of the neoliberal attacks on our people: GENERAL STRIKE! UNITY, RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE FOR THE WORKING CLASS
National Union in Defence of the Working Class, UNTSan Salvador, 5 December 2024
