Reflections on Our Trip to El Salvador

Last week I had the good fortune of joining two of my Latino Economic Development Corporation colleagues and 63 others from Montgomery County to visit El Salvador – the Department of Morazan in the eastern part of the country to be exact.  We went as delegates of Montgomery County Sister Cities Inc., a private, non-profit organization with a mission to connect Montgomery County to the world by encouraging and fostering friendship, partnership, and mutual cooperation between the people of Montgomery County and people from various nations around the world.  Our delegation was made up of an eclectic mix of people from government, corporate, and non-profit sectors as well as plenty of private citizens wanting to improve their understanding of the land from which a majority of our county’s foreign residents hail.  County Executive Ike Leggett, Councilman George Leventhal, State Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez, and former Congresswoman Connie Morella were among the many movers and shakers in our delegation.

Montgomery County is home to over 50,000 Salvadorans, a majority of them from the eastern part of the country - namely Morazan, San Miguel, and La Union.  It was in this part of the country where the civil war of the 80’s was particularly fierce.  By war’s end over 75,000 people were killed across the country - a majority of them innocent, non-combatants caught in the cross-fire.  Several families from Morazan who escaped the civil war decades ago and settled in Montgomery County played a key role in organizing our journey to their homeland.  I was particularly amazed by Evelyn Gonzalez, a counselor at Montgomery College who serves on the board of Sister Cities and coordinated the lion’s share of the week’s activities.  She had the arduous task of managing the logistics of the trip and overcoming the many challenges inherent in any voyage of this kind.  I often wondered how it was that she was able to keep so calm and consistently joyful under such pressure and then I’d experience the warm embrace of a Salvadoreño and it all made sense. 

The Salvadoran people are among the most generous, loving, and hard-working people I’ve ever met.  Although poverty is still rampant, a genuine spirit of peace and reconciliation now permeates the country opening the door to a world of new possibilities since the end of the war.  Transnational ties between Salvadoran families in the US and El Salvador are strong and growing stronger as a new generation of Salvadoran-Americans are born.  Our challenge now is to leverage these transnational ties so that the economies of Morazan and Montgomery County are able to flourish.

At LEDC we’ve decided to meet this challenge by developing a formal partnership with Morazan’s largest and most effective non-governmental organization - La Asociacion de Desarollo Economico Local (Association for Local Economic Development) or ADEL Morazan as its known locally.  ADEL Morazan was launched two years after peace accords were signed by the government and the rebels in 1992.  It was created with seed funding from the United Nations to expand economic development opportunities in Morazan by providing in-depth technical assistance, training, and micro-loans to existing and aspiring entrepreneurs.  In 1999 they decided to separate their micro-lending program into a stand-alone, for-profit subsidiary called AMC which now has a portfolio of 14,000 borrowers worth $16 million and 18 branches throughout El Salvador.  Each year AMC contributes 70% of its profits to ADEL Morazan so it may continue fulfilling its non-profit mission. 

In partnership with AMC and ADEL Morazan, LEDC has launched AMC International with our first branch right next door to our Maryland headquarters in Wheaton.  Through AMC International we have continued to offer all of the alternative financial services to the un-banked and under-banked that we did through our social enterprise, Community First Financial Center, yet as a transnational operation we will be able to do much more.  Soon we will be making micro-loans for Salvadorans in our region seeking to launch new businesses or purchase homes in their home country.  In essence, we will be serving as a conduit for lasting economic development in El Salvador that over time will stem the unbalanced flow of people leaving the country by allowing more wealth to be built at home.  Through LEDC’s Micro-Loan Program we will continue helping Salvadoran-Americans strengthen their roots in the DC region adding to a rich, multicultural fabric that is at the core of our region's identity. 

We know that the ultimate solution to our nation’s immigration challenge is to help build more economic opportunities in the nation’s from which people are migrating.  Yet we also know that immigrant enclaves like the one Salvadorans have built in Montgomery County are an important source of social, political, and economic power that helps make our region strong.  Working with Salvadorans here and in El Salvador we look forward to strengthening the ties that bind them and broadening the economic opportunities that exist in both countries.  We also look forward to more non-Salvadorans engaging in a flourishing transnational economy and taking advantage of everything such an economy has to offer.