A Trenton friend sends this along. Note the 15% estimate of remittances and GNP in contrast to our report: "2.3 million Salvadorans, unable to support themselves and their families at home, have left their country to work in the United States. Sending home $2.3 billion every year, these workers are sustaining the Salvadoran economy. This off-the-books sum equals roughly 70% of El Salvadoršs gross national product and 100% of its annual $2 billion trade deficit."
I thought the 70% was a mistake in our report. Where did you get it from Dennis? Bob ------ Forwarded Message From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 07:39:15 -0500 (EST) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A washingtonpost.com article from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] You have been sent this message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a courtesy of washingtonpost.com In El Salvador, a Christmas Avalanche By Mary Jordan SAN SALVADOR -- As the noon flight from Dulles Airport touched down, the brass band struck up a joyous tune and relatives wept and cheered, greeting Jose Martinez and scores of other returning emigrants the way astronauts used to be welcomed home in the United States. Martinez, a Hyattsville construction worker, breathed in the soft 90-degree air of the tropical homeland he left 20 years ago. His three children -- all born in the United States -- hugged cousins who had come to greet them. Claudia, 13, ran to her pet parakeet, which stays with a cousin here while she's living in Prince George's County. "It's good to see her," she said, smiling as the little green bird walked up and down her finger. After hugs and kisses and chitchat about the freezing temperatures in Washington, the Martinez family hopped into an open truck piled high with huge suitcases bulging with gifts, and began their Christmas ride to grandma's house in a village southwest of the capital. The Martinez family and an estimated 2 million other Salvadorans living in the United States are an ever-growing presence and economic force in their homeland, sending back $2 billion a year, the equivalent of 15 percent of this nation's gross domestic product. Money earned babysitting, working in hotels and building homes in the United States has transformed the look of emigrants' home towns, and the power of that money is growing. Beyond the year-round cash connection is the tremendous flow of emigrants back and forth between their homeland and the United States , which peaks at Christmas. In El Salvador, 3,000 people a day return in December, nearly all of them from the United States. Many arrive on the 21 direct flights from the United States. Some drive thousands of miles across the United States, Mexico and Guatemala in cars. Others hop buses in Houston. Some even buy old yellow school buses in Washington or Los Angeles, pack them with presents and passengers and rumble south to a homeland that rolls out a hero's welcome for returnees who have reshaped their country. To handle the December flood of passengers from the United States to Mexico and Central America, many airports have tripled their staff and airlines have tripled the number of flights, according to airport and airline officials. One million Mexicans in the United States are expected to return south of the border for Christmas, according to Mexican immigration officials. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and other countries with large emigrant populations have been preparing for the returnees for months, many hanging welcome signs across main streets, organizing all-night block parties and planning special outdoor Masses where village churches can't accommodate the huge crowds. "It's a party -- there's so much emotion," said Vilma Elena Mendoza Quiroz, a Salvadoran immigration official who has seen returning emigrants get out of their cars at the border and start handing out toys to children, their cars stuffed with everything from chocolate candy to NBA T-shirts, favorites in this basketball-crazed nation. A new report by the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group based in Washington, estimated the annual flow of money from immigrants in the United States to their family members has risen from $10 billion in 1996 to $32 billion last year. Remittances, as the payments are called, are "Latin America's most important international flow of money," the organization said, and it is hard to exaggerate their importance. The Pew Hispanic Center in Washington estimated that 28 percent of Salvadoran adults receive cash from relatives in the United States. All year round, emigrants ship back goods, but they do so especially around Christmas, sending everything from toasters to Toyotas. "It's a river of goods, an avalanche," said Jose Edis Perez Lopez, a customs official in the cargo section of the San Salvador airport, as he surveyed mountains of boxes filled with stereos, clothes, Tupperware, microwave ovens, even tiny plastic replicas of the White House. The impact of emigration is particularly great in El Salvador, Central America's smallest and most densely populated country, about the size of Massachusetts. Salvadoran groups in Washington said there were more than 400,000 Salvadorans in the Washington area alone, a huge number for a country of only 6 million people. Customs officials have acknowledged the importance of the flood of Christmas presents emigrants carry by raising from $1,000 to $3,000 the value of goods they may bring in during the holidays without paying duty. Emigration boomed as people fled the civil war in the 1980s, when the United States spent billions of dollars to help the Salvadoran government fight a guerrilla insurgency. Now generations of Salvadorans have ties here and in the United States. That includes not only those who left the country but also their children and grandchildren born in the United States. El Salvador has 14 departments, or provinces, and the United States is known as the "15th department." Some analysts have expressed concern that remittances can foster a culture of dependence that discourages those receiving the constant aid from creating their own wealth. To try to encourage longer-term development, there are efforts to pool remittances, to have home towns and local government match the money and to use it to create permanent jobs. Luis Felipe Romero, head of the United Salvadoran Communities of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area, said Salvadorans in Washington are currently involved in building nutrition centers and other community improvements back home. He said many Salvadorans in the United States plan to use their money to finance small businesses here, such as a brick factory in a rural area that has no construction materials. A recent event at El Tamarindo, a Salvadoran restaurant in Adams Morgan, raised money to buy school supplies for 5,000 children in El Salvador. He said that in exchange for the notepads, crayons, colored pencils, erasers and rulers, each child must agree to plant and take care of a tree in El Salvador. But the heart and soul of remittances continues to be the person-to-person, family-to-family donations. Juan Gavidia, a Maryland construction worker who spends most of the year helping build the Washington Metro's Blue Line extension to Largo, said he has sent cash and goods home every year since he emigrated to the Washington area 15 years ago. He went home again this Christmas, as usual, and was in the crowd of people waiting to retrieve excess baggage from a cargo storage warehouse. "I love the United States; it has lots of opportunity for every kind of job," Gavidia said. "But I was born in Salvador. It's my homeland." Gavidia said he has worked second and third jobs, painting and remodeling Washington homes, to send money to El Salvador , allowing his parents to turn their once-modest home into a lovely country house. This year, he brought home remote-controlled cars for a nephew, comfortable walking shoes for his mother, electric juicers and irons for neighbors. He even brought an artificial Christmas tree to put up in this land of coconut palms. "There's just not enough money here," he said. At the airport, near the throngs of returnees heading straight for a nostalgic fix of Pollo Campero, an immensely popular fried chicken restaurant chain, Mario Alberto Rivera surveyed the festive scene from behind the bar where he works. Rivera talked about how much the returning money meant to his country, and he smiled as he watched reunited family members walking arm in arm out of the airport on their way to Christmas celebrations. "It's the happiest time of the year," he said. 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