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165 6 (Re)Writing National History from Exile Declining Aid in the Name of the Nation “Most Excellent Madame Minister of Public Education,” began a 25 July 1987 letter from the Salvadoran refugees to the Honduran minister Elisa Valle Martínez de Pauveti. The letter continued, “We have been informed that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has designated additional budget funds to the area of education in our camps. These funds would be used to increase the number of certified teachers for the children in our camps. Although we are always interested in improving our children’s education , we believe that the educational needs of our fellow Honduran pueblo are greater than our own.” For this reason the refugees had decided to pass on the offer of additional assistance. They informed Martínez that they had already requested that the United Nations funds be channeled to the Honduran Ministry of Education for use in the Honduran villages neighboring the refugee camps. “As refugees,” the letter concluded, “we aspire to neither wealth nor privilege at the cost of the Honduran people, and our only desire is to return to a new El Salvador filled with peace and love.”1 This letter to Minister Martínez de Pauveti followed closely on the heels of the “Memorandum of Understanding” signed by Honduran and UN officials just a few weeks earlier. The memorandum set forth new guidelines for the management of the refugees in Honduras, with Honduran officials moving into a dominant position. Although the memorandum as a whole caused great worry among the refugees, of particular concern was article 5, which announced that “Honduran teachers, under the supervision of the [Honduran] Secretary of State for Public Education, will be in charge of educational  programs [in the refugee camps].”2 This announcement prompted a series of mobilizations among Salvadoran campesinos in the refugee camps. Committees prepared letters for Minister Martínez, as well as the high commissioner of the UNHCR, Jean-Pierre Hocké, to announce their decision to pass the offer to the Honduran campesinos. Letters to international solidarity groups explained that “the rural schools in Honduras are in need of many teachers. As campesinos, we are always concerned about the situation of our Honduran brothers, since it was they who received us at the border when we came fleeing from El Salvador.”3 The refugees also placed paid advertisements in Honduran newspapers to publicly affirm their intention to transfer the promised funds directly to the Honduran Ministry of Education. And, as described in chapter 4, the “Memorandum” prompted sometimes violent confrontations with officials, including Colonel Abrahám García Turcios of CONARE. This decision to pass on additional funds and support for education in the camps is rather surprising given how diligently Salvadoran refugees worked over their years in exile to secure assistance, improve conditions in their sites of refuge, and advance their various organizational efforts. Why would they now refuse aid? The short answer to this question is that the citizen refugees considered education to be a crucial component of their role in El Salvador’s national liberation struggle. As the preceding chapter illustrated, Salvadoran refugees in Honduras remained deeply committed to El Salvador despite their physical location beyond the borders of their patria. Borders were in many ways irrelevant for them. They defined their spaces of exile as extensions of El Salvador, they defined themselves as essentially Salvadoran, and they considered it their duty as Salvadoran citizens to do whatever they could to bring about El Salvador’s “new dawn.” Although much of the refugees’ attention and energy focused on the big picture—transforming El Salvador into a peaceful and just nation—they also recognized the value of the smaller, individual contributions to this goal, which calls to mind the image that introduced the previous chapter, a campesino crossing into a new and prosperous future over a stone bridge. In the sketch, the campesino evolves from an illiterate and ignorant person into a “New Man” by learning to “read reality” and “write history.” The two stone steps clearly represent the campesino’s process of personal transformation , of conscientización, the development of critical consciousness. Education , in a variety of formats, formed the backbone of this personal transformation process in the refugee camps of Honduras. This chapter examines in more detail the Salvadorans’ commitment to conscientización while in exile, focusing in particular on educación popular (popular education). It reveals how the...

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