San Salvador, El Salvador – Hundreds of Salvadorans marched through the main streets of this capital and other cities Thursday to show their rejection of the economic policies of the government of rightist President Tony Saca, who gave the legislature a balance sheet of his two years in power.
Union members, university students, peddlers, city workers and militants of the main opposition leftist FMLN carried placards and shouted slogans against the administration’s policies.
Police said that they made at least five arrests during the street protests.
The several separate marches, which started out from different points in the capital, converged in front of Congress, where Saca delivered a report on the first two years of his mandate to the Legislative Assembly, touting advances in the economic and social areas.
The president emphasized the entry into force of the CAFTA-DR trade pact linking El Salvador, four other Central American countries and the Dominican Republic with the United States, and the government’s attention to other Salvadorans abroad.
Saca heads the fourth successive government of the right-wing ARENA party, which has been in power since 1989. His term is set to conclude on June 1, 2009.
“After two years of k-saca (“lies”), more poverty, unemployment, crime and social inequality” read one of the posters carried by marching city hall employees in Cuscatancingo, a town to the north of El Salvador.
Foes of the president often refer to him as “Tony K-Saca,” a play on his name which roughly translates into “Tony Bulls–t.”
The demonstrators, grouped in various civil society organizations, protested the economic situation aggravated by high prices, the dollarization of the Salvadoran economy and the CAFTA-DR pact.
Nidia Diaz, an FMLN legislator in the Central American Parliament, told EFE during the march that “this is the response of the people to Saca’s management, a management that the people disapprove of and repudiate because the poor have become poorer and the rich richer.”
She added that Saca “has increased the cost of living, has worsened living conditions and created the conditions for more people to leave to work in the United States.”
For several years now, remittances from emigrants in the United States have constituted El Salvador’s chief source of revenue.
