Sister cities success story.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Madison, Wisconsin and Arcatao, Chalatenango in El Salvador

IT WAS APRIL 1986, IN THE MIDST of El Salvador's civil war, when Madison, Wisconsin, became a sister city to Arcatao, Chalatenango, a tiny Salvadoran village that the U.S.-backed military was in the process of razing.

Soldiers came in, rounded up the young people, and forced everybody into the church. The army told people that if they didn't leave soon, they'd be killed.

This was no idle threat. The army and paramilitaries had killed thousands of civilians in a series of massacres throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

By coincidence, the attack on Arcatao took place at the same time that the Madison city council voted to become its sister city. The International Committee of the Red Cross informed people within Arcatao that Madison had sistered with them. The people in Arcatao decided to stay. And residents of Arcatao who had previously fled into the mountains decided to come back.

"We took out an ad in the Salvadoran papers stating that we held the government of El Salvador responsible for whatever happened to the people of Arcatao," says Marc Rosenthal, a Madison-based nurse who has been involved with the sister city project since its inception.

This type of sistering went beyond the Usual cultural exchanges. This relationship was based on a firm commitment to human rights and economic justice in both countries.

"The sistering didn't take place in a vacuum either here or there," says Rosenthal. "We were bringing together two organized people in a common program that made it polkically viable."

The sister city relationship between Madison and Arcatao didn't end when the peace accords were signed in 1992. The work simply changed. It's a fluid, dynamic relationship. Instead of a focus on moving refugees out of camps and down from the mountains, the emphasis changed to land reform, debt relief, and the fights against privatization of social services such as health care and water. Sister cities activists were talking about privatization, neoliberalism, and austerity before The Shock Doctrine was even written.

Alexandra Early is a staff person for the U.S.-El Salvador Sister City Network. Before moving to El Salvador, she was involved in student-labor organizing and also worked at a union. She says that one of the great things about the network is that Salvadorans and Americans get to learn from each other.

"It's a sistering of social movements just as much as it is a sistering of people and individual strong ties," she says.

One network project is...