The Wall Street Journal is Playing Dirty in El Salvador, Again

May 6, 2016
The Wall Street Journal is Playing Dirty in El Salvador, Again

by Hilary Goodfriend

San Salvador, El Salvador.

As usual, Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady has raked up such a scandalous mountain of defamation, fabrication and redbaiting in her most recent piece on the power struggles within El Salvador’s oligarchic private sector that it’s hard to know where to start. The task of refuting Ms. O’Grady is daunting to the point of exhaustion. That is, of course, a hallmark of this kind of Reaganite Cold War propaganda: overwhelm the public with so much misinformation that those seeking the truth are left far behind as they scramble to disprove, fact-by-fact, the long-cold trail of lies.

Yet Ms. O’Grady’s column raises a deeply perplexing question: Why on earth should the internal elections within a remote Salvadoran business association make headlines in one of the country’s most widely circulated periodicals? To explore this, we must not lose ourselves in each incendiary absurdity, and instead examine the narrative.

Ms. O’Grady’s principal argument appears to be that bloodthirsty Soviet-Chavista-Cuban totalitarians have high-jacked El Salvador, turning what was once a free-market paradise into a Venezuelan hellscape of public pensions and environmental regulations.

It is worth noting that El Salvador’s government is not in fact trying to “nationalize the privatized pension system,” but in fact has proposed a mixed public-private system to reform the dismally unsustainable and inequitable current system that only covers 25% of the working population and has generated over $250 million in profits for private pension fund administrators while indebting the government to those same companies to the tune of millions.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/06/the-wall-street-journal-is-playing-dirty-in-el-salvador-again/