SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — California Gov. Gavin Newsom arrived in El Salvador to learn about the poverty and violence forcing thousands to flee and demonstrate an alternative to what he called President Donald Trump’s demoralizing rhetoric about the Central American nation.
He kicked off his four-day trip Sunday with harsh words for Trump, who recently moved to halt foreign aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala and has mocked people seeking asylum amid a surge of families and children arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. About 3,000 unaccompanied children and 12,000 family members from El Salvador have arrived since October.
“Right now you have a president that talks down to people, talks past them, demoralizing folks living here and their relatives in the United States,” Newsom told reporters. “I think it’s important to let folks know that’s not our country — that’s an individual in our country who happens at this moment to be president.”
Newsom, a Democrat who took office in January, chose El Salvador as his first international trip because California is home to both the United States’ largest Salvadoran population and its busiest border crossing.
He visited the tomb of Saint Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest assassinated in 1980 at the start of the nation’s civil war, because of his advocacy for human rights and the poor, a symbolic way to begin a trip that’s designed to give Newsom a better sense of the deep social and economic challenges Salvadorans face.
California governor counters Trump in visit to El Salvador
Gavin Newsom by Franco Folini is licensed under Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Source:
The Washington Post
Gavin Newsom by Franco Folini is licensed under Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.