Anillo Periférico Highway (El Salvador)

Keystone of the PPP

Just as the Plan Puebla Panamá (PPP) lays the foundations necessary for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and eventually the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the entire PPP hinges on San Salvador’s Anillo Periferico highway. According to Action for Community and Ecology in the Rainforests of Central America, the Anillo Periférico is the “critical node around which… the entire PPP network (gravitates).”

The city of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, occupies a critical position in American geography. The Central American isthmus is a bottleneck through which all commerce between South and North must pass. One of the simplest ways to move land cargo across Central America is the Panamerican highway, which passes right through San Salvador. Currently, such cargo loads must travel though the center of the city, leading to the kinds of delays familiar to anyone who has ever driven through a major urban center. Hence the plan for a highway bypass: the Anillo Periférico, or Peripheral Ring.

As a part of the PPP, the Anillo Periférico was initially conceived in 2001 as a project of the Salvadoran government, with the US$1 billion in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). It would be 7 lanes wide, running a 44 mile (70 kilometer) circuit around the city. The government has promised that the highway would reduce traffic and gas use in the city as well as increasing the accessibly from one part of the city to another. This happy picture is a lie, of course, and as that lie became apparent, the government’s plans quickly began to unravel.

The first problem with the story is that the Anillo Periférico, as planned, would not encircle the San Salvador metropolitan area; rather, it would circle the urban center, punching directly through densely populated communities at the city’s outskirts. In the past few decades, hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants have migrated to El Salvador’s cities because of poverty and war; estimates suggest that up to one in three Salvadorans was displaced by the country’s 12-year civil war. Now tens of thousands of these same families stand to be dislocated by the Anillo Periférico. Inhabitants of the communities that are not destroyed will be cut off from relatives in other villages and from the city center where many of them work. In fact, even a study by the government’s Salvadoran Fund for Pre-Investment Studies predicted that the highway would actually make transportation into and out of the city more difficult.

But can’t people just us the new highway to get around? In fact, the Anillo Periférico will have precisely zero benefit for those San Salvadorans without personal vehicles—more than 80 percent. Only one of the road’s stated purposes is accurate: to transport maquiladora (sweatshop)-assembled goods through Central America to markets in the North and South. Those who stand to be affected by the highway agree; when surveyed, 93 percent could think of no personal benefit from the project.

It is not only the neighborhoods in the highway’s path that stand to be harmed by its construction. El Salvador has already lost 95 percent of its total forest cover, making it the second most deforested country of the Americas. Yet 80,000 trees are to be clearcut in order to make way for the Anillo Periférico, some in protected ecological areas such as El Espino Reserve. This cutting is taking place on the slopes of the San Salvador Volcano, with a further 30 feet (10 meters) of soil to be excavated for construction. The communities on the volcano’s slopes already live under constant threat of landslides, which are exacerbated by deforestation.

Trees and other vegetation hold soil together even in the torrential rains that visit the tropics every Summer; when this cover is removed, catastrophe results. In 1998, mudslides and floods accounted for the majority of the 18,000 deaths caused by Hurricane Mitch in central America; aerial surveys found that the vast majority of the slides occurred on deforested slopes, while very few occurred on slopes that retained their forest cover. Increased flooding and erosion also stand to degrade the aquifers that all life in the region depends on; deforested slopes are less absorbent–as is land covered in concrete — leading to a steady and inevitable depletion of the area’s water recharge zones.

When the water is depleted from formerly humid soil, it is replaced by air pockets. Eventually, this pocket-filled soil settles. By summer 2006, sinkholes had begun appearing throughout San Salvador, causing the collapse of buildings, bridges and roads. In September, the downtown center flooded for the first time in recorded history. Critics of the Anillo Periférico have linked these disasters directly to the ongoing construction.

Resistance to the Anillo Periférico has been fierce from the beginning. The communities in the southeast section of the city, where construction was originally scheduled to begin, quickly organized themselves to fight their dislocation, and the movement quickly grew. More than 39 communities have declared themselves opposed to the project and lodged complaints with the Ministry of Public Works (MOP). Many of these communities have banded together to form the Association of Communities Affected by the Anillo Periférico (ACAP), which has organized popular mobilizations against a variety of the national and international institutions pushing the project. In October 2002, El Salvador was paralyzed when 28,000 protesters against the Anillo Periférico blocked highways, bridges and border crossings nationwide.

The government and the IDB were quickly forced into damage-control mode. Originally, the highway was to be built in four major stages, with the completion date of 2012. In 2002, however — the same year that the eastern portion was supposed to be completed — the IDB cut funding for the project, handing it off to the less transparent Central American Economic Integration Bank (BCIE). Immediately, the IDB began to insist that the Anillo Periférico was no longer part of the PPP.

Work on the northeastern portion was completed in 2004. The revised construction schedule has the complete highway scheduled for completion by 2015, with the southeast section scheduled for last.

Roadwork on a connector road in the southern portion began in April 2004, and construction in the west began in September 2005. When road-building crews first arrived for work in the west, they were confronted by a blockade of machete-wielding protesters. Unfortunately, the crews managed to bypass the blockades and resume work.

Nonetheless, the bulk of the highway (70 percent) remains unbuilt, and resistance is still strong. In addition to working to keep new sections of the highway from being built, ACAP is organizing communities that have suffered from flooding, landslides and other effects of construction to demand compensation from the government.

The MOP appears to be leaving the most controversial sections of the highway for last, but these are also the weak links that can cause the “ring” to remain incomplete. And as a member of ACAP told Root Force in 2006, “The battle against the Anillo Periférico is the battle for life itself. That’s why we’ve warned the government that if they come in here, we’ll set their machinery on fire. We’ll kick their asses.”