By ROGER HAMILTON

A town square in El Salvador: Young people cannot be fooled with promises, says president Flores

As one who came of age during this sad period in his country’s history, Salvadoran President Francisco Flores knows firsthand the challenges of encouraging youth to participate in public affairs. Speaking on this theme at a recent forum at the IDB’s Washington, D.C., headquarters marking the Bank’s 40th anniversary, he began by relating his own experience.

When war broke out, Flores was an 18-year-old student just starting college. “Members of my generation were being told that we had to go abroad, because there was no future in our country,” he said. In 1977 he left, but then returned in 1983, which was perhaps the worst year of the war.

“I set out to construct my own little world,” he said. “I and the other members of my generation rejected politics, which we considered a bad word. Instead, we looked for an isolated corner where we could live apart from the war.”

He found his refuge in El Tigre, a little community of 300 persons in the central part of the country. There he went to live and work with the farmers, founding a small school, establishing a health post and helping to build an irrigation system.

But Flores’s isolation was soon to end. In 1989, his father-in-law, who had often visited Flores in El Tigre, was appointed minister of the Presidency. The two were close, and knowing this, the guerillas went to El Tigre and set fire to Flores’s house.

“In that moment of brutal reality, I realized that in El Salvador it was impossible to build a world apart,” said Flores. “One had to participate.”

For Flores, this was a turning point, what he described as his “second birth.” It was up to him to choose whether to cast blame or be a “creative person.”

Francisco Flores, President of El Salvador

According to Flores, creativity is the crux of the matter: “One cause of underdevelopment is the inability to imagine options,” he said.

School reform. A major obstacle to creativity is the education system, he said. “The truth is, in El Salvador and many other Latin American countries, education is based on memorization, repetition, rigidity and obedience. The teacher is a superior person who transmits knowledge to an inferior person, who uses the knowledge passively.”

In a school system that fosters creativity, Flores said, the student must be exposed to many different perspectives and be encouraged to make up his own mind. The student body should be as heterogeneous as possible. The student should determine his own pace of learning. He will be on an equal level with the teachers, whose job will be to act as facilitators.
Out of such an educational ferment will emerge creative persons prepared to lead. “The mark of a leader is excellence, and the crux of excellence is pursuing one’s own goals. The cultural wealth of diversity can only be guaranteed by the profound individuality of each human being. These qualities cannot be developed in an environment that emphasizes obedience and control.”

“The magic word is participation,” said Flores. “Youth tend to keep their distance, but not when they are invited to join in. Even youths who are members of gangs aspire to get out of the gang, to become productive, get a job, achieve something as a member of society.

“We need a new way of doing politics,” continued Flores. “It cannot be a forced march to a Promised Land, behind a general-like leader who says, ‘Follow me.’ This style of leadership has come to an end because we have learned that the only Promised Land is the one we ourselves make with our work. Young people are not going to believe such a leader, because they know that large-scale public spending, manipulation of exchange rates, and large-scale social programs are an illusion. We must convince youth to shape their own future, and we must design the institutions to make this possible.”

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