El Salvador: clamorous protest over food prices

[AlphaCentauri]

Some 400 protesters beat on pots and pans and blew whistles outside the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador to protest the rise in prices of staple food items.

"I’m desperate, we can't take any more," Guadalupe López, who is raising four children on her own, told IPS. "Besides, we don't have jobs that pay us enough to support our children, to feed them and pay for their education."

Francisco Marroquín, 26, said the government should establish price controls and raise the minimum wage, "so that people can survive." Participants in Wednesday’s pots and pans protest distributed leaflets demanding government action to guarantee "food sovereignty and security."

A demonstration of this kind has not been seen in the Salvadoran capital since the 1980s, when rightwing women’s groups protested against the Christian Democratic government of then president Napoleón Duarte (1984-1989).

El Salvador’s Consumer Defence Centre (CDC) said that between January 2007 and January 2008, the retail price of beans has risen 68 percent, in addition to price increases for rice (56.2 percent) and maize (37.5 percent) -- all basic staples in the diets of poor Salvadoran households.

http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=14759&t=El+Salvador%3A+clamorous+protest+over+food+prices

[Judi Lynn]

1. Amazing how much is being ignored by our own corporate media, wouldn't you say?

It's been that way forever. No wonder it's so easy for corporate assholes to load up our own news sources with pure inane drivel, while they run roughshod over the poorer countries, particulary Latin America, or as the complete P.O.S.'s call, it, "our own backyard."

Thanks so much for being the one who brought this information about El Salvador's food crisis here. You've alerted us, and now we'll be reminded to keep an eye out for more info. Really apppreciate it.