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The Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) affirms our solidarity with the uprisings throughout the country demanding an end to white supremacy and police violence. Policing institutions in this country are born from slavery and continue to serve the purpose of protecting the interests of the elite at the expense of the lives of the dispossessed. We join Black-led organizations in their calls for justice, including the calls from the Movement for Black Lives to defund the police, invest in Black communities and end systemic racism.

May the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and all those whose lives have been taken by white supremacy and state violence compel us all to join forcefully in these demands.

As an organization committed to accompanying the Salvadoran popular movement in its revolutionary work to realize an inspiring vision of participatory democracy and economic justice, we recognize that Black leaders have for centuries led an intersectional fight for liberation and advanced internationalist struggles.

Be it Franz Fanon, whose contributions to the development of international solidarity have influenced generations, activists such as Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman credited for her leadership in the Stonewall Uprising of 1969, Dorothy Lee Bolden, who helped establish the Domestic Workers’ Union of America in 1934, or the countless Black organizers whose leadership across all movement sectors have largely gone unsung, Black people have been and continue to be at the forefront of movements for justice and liberation in the United States and abroad.

We honor the legacies of Black liberation struggles and commit to following the leadership of the Black organizers building the movement for Black lives.

The legacy of anti-Blackness also continues in Central America and within the Central American diaspora, which is another reason why for CISPES, solidarity with El Salvador must actively undermine white supremacy. We see that Black struggles are often erased from Central American history despite Black organizers’ contributions to revolutionary struggles across the region. In 1930, when Prudencia Ayala, an Afro-Indigenous, anti-imperialist Salvadoran, ran for president in El Salvador on a platform that advocated for the equal rights of women, including the right to vote, she became the first woman presidential candidate in all of Latin America.

In El Salvador, Black and Afro-descendant Salvadorans continue to fight for visibility and an acknowledgement of the historic violence that the Salvadoran state has perpetrated against them. Black and Afro-descendant Salvadorans living in the diaspora also share this history of struggle and continue to fight against anti-Black racism not only within the Central American community but in the United States. In Honduras, Garifuna communities are targets of state repression as organizations such as OFRANEH (Black Honduran Fraternal Organization) lead campaigns to defend economic and social rights in Honduras.

Thus, solidarity with the people of Central America is incomplete without the fight for Black lives.

CISPES has accompanied the popular struggles in El Salvador for 40 years and we understand well how the racist police institutions in the United States that endanger and cruelly end Black lives are exported to the rest of the world. From the years of the Salvadoran Civil War to the present under the Bukele administration, the United States has funded and trained Salvadoran armed forces and police on the violent tactics used in the U.S.

We recognize that U.S. imperial violence abroad and police violence at home serve the same brutal project of racial capitalism, that our struggles are connected and that we must continue to rise up together against state violence.

We challenge ourselves to continually learn and do more to end violence against Black people.

Black lives matter.

CISPES is devastated by the news that our dear compañero David Ayala Zamora passed away on October 17.

As a young union organizer in El Salvador in the late-1980s, David was captured and tortured by the US-funded Salvadoran military. Later in his life, he spoke often about how the international pressure that CISPES and other solidarity activists in the United States mobilized helped secure his release.

(David is the right in the El Salvador “ES” shirt)

After coming to the US, David applied his organizing skills and knowledge to build the movement for immigrant and worker rights, working at unions and organizations such as SEIU, OneAmerica and Working Washington, and was the field director of Pramila Jayapal’s successful 2016 Congressional campaign.

But he always kept the revolutionary struggle of the Salvadoran people close to his heart. He was a close friend and mentor to several generations of solidarity organizers in Seattle. He was a keynote speaker at the the 2005 CISPES National Convention in Portland, as well at the 2015 Seattle CISPES 35th Anniversary celebration. In between, he engaged with CISPES as a board member, volunteer, monthly donor, summer camp participant, and “Solidarity Cycler.”

As Heather Day, Director of the Community Alliance for Global Justice, wrote, “We met in 1997 when I was a new organizer with Seattle CISPES, and he accompanied me to the airport to meet our Salvadoran guests, as he did every time we hosted people on tour. He gave me so much confidence and he shared his respect for me with our guests in a way that gave me pride that I’ve always carried with me. His willingness to share about his experience as a political prisoner was always very moving and profound, especially given that he credited the solidarity movement with saving his life. I will miss his warm laughter, his often-surprising political perspectives, and the way he made comrades feel like equals even when we knew we were in the presence of greatness. My heart goes out to his family, for we lost him much too soon.”

David was the consummate organizer, always thinking about how to support the leadership and political development the next generations of organizers. CISPES is honored to have worked with David for many years and we know his legacy will live on in the many struggles he strengthened and organizers he inspired and mentored.

¡Compañero David Ayala, presente!