the rest of the transcript, transcribed by Sara!!! (thankyou!) will follow
as soon as I finish formatting it! I think this is the section everyone
was particularly asking for.
If not let me know. The rest will follow very soon.
Sr. Villalona: I’ll tell you a story. It’s like this. I am a corn producer. I don’t have any credit. I have two hectares of land. Christiani has a bank but he won’t give me a loan. No big owner will give me a loan. When I buy the fertilizer, seeds, etc, Christiani sells them to me through a company called Christiani Burca, and he sells it to me very experience because he controls that whole market. Then I grow my corn, but I can’t take it out of my community because there’s just a dirt road. I can’t transport it so I can’t sell it in the market. And so a truck comes through and it buys it from me at a low price. And so this intermediary that comes to the community, they call him a “coyote,” and he brings that to a company that’s called the Agricultural Products Market. That’s a company owned by Christiani. And then he sells it in the market. Because of that situation I decide to go to the United States. So I go, however I can. They don’t give me a visa but I’ll go. And I go to Los Angeles and I work in a restaurant. I think that if I’m illegal they’re not going to pay me very well. I clean the bathroom, whatever. They pay me. And then I take $200 a month I get on the train and I get on a bank to send it to El Salvador. I send it to my mom. The bank charges me $40 for that $200. It could be Christiani’s Banco CusAtlan or the Salvadoran Bank owned by Ciman or Agricola Comercial. Then I go back home and call my mom and I say, “The remittance is there.” My mom takes it out of the Banco CusAtlan here in El Salvador. She buys rice in the supermarket, Christiani’s supermarket. And also a Guatemalan papaya. They’re associated together they’re partners. The supermarket puts those $200 in the bank – Banco CusAtlan, owned by Christiani. Christiani then gives a loan to a business that imports rice from Miami. It’s called Arroza San Francisco. It’s owned by Christiani. Those $200 go back to the United States, and from there comes the rice. Who won in all of this? In the United States, the owner of the restaurant won. I think that the municipality that owns the metro won. I don’t know if that’s already privatized. The telephone company won when I called my mother. And the rice company won that brought the rice here. Here, the supermarket won, the bank won, and the rice importer won, and that’s all one person. And my mom won. And with the telephone call I made, the telephone company here wins. And this company is owned by a French company. That’s the fixed line to my house. But there’s also Salvadoran capital when it was privatized they were left with a percentage. It called a Salvadoran consortium. They have shares, not a lot, but a few. And Christiani in that too. And then multiply that by ten million because the $200 in the example – it’s not $200, it’s $2 billion. And so, the Free Trade Agreement isn’t to reactivate this rice. It’s not to augment to production of rice, corn, beans or vegetables. It’s to definitively import that from the United States, for the peasant to leave his land, go to the United States, or if it’s a young woman go to a maquila, sell the land. Christiani is going to buy it and he going to have large extensions of pineapple plantations, mango plantations, and sell that in the United States. That’s the plan. What they’re negotiating they know that’s what is going to happen. As well Christiani’s bank is going to be a savings bank in the United States and give some loans. He gets that power through the Free Trade Agreement because he will get national treatment there.
