Tribute to Margarita Posada, a leading figure in the Salvadoran social and health movement

From the CLACSO Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty With great affection, admiration and sorrow, we wish to bid farewell to the popular Salvadoran and Latin American leader Margarita Posada (58 years old, El Salvador). 

Margarita Posada was one of the most prominent Latin American and Caribbean social leaders in the fight for collective health and health sovereignty. 

Margarita, from a revolutionary Salvadoran family, had to go into exile in Costa Rica due to the military dictatorship; later she distinguished herself by being part of the revolution in El Salvador.

As a pioneer amidst the rise of the neoliberal reform cycle to health systems, he created the Alliance Against the Privatization of Health in El Salvador, which managed to halt some of the privatizations of the country's public hospitals during that period. 

From that experience she became one of the main social activists for the Universal Right to Health, being one of the founders and national coordinator of the National Health Forum (FNS), a large national network of organization, popular participation and advocacy for the health of the Salvadoran people.

She was also part of the founding members of the Alliance for Governance and Justice, as well as, more recently, the Salvadoran Coordinating Committee of Popular Movements. Her struggles involved water rights, opposition to mining and agrochemicals, gender equality, tax justice, and other issues. 

Margarita Posada, as a woman of struggle, was one of the leaders of social health movements in Latin America and the Caribbean who always maintained a questioning praxis from and with society, maintaining an exemplary trajectory of critical autonomy and demanding a deepening of transformation in the face of various government administrations in El Salvador without obsequiousness or complicit silence.I've always been somewhat rebellious"I would say." 

Her female and popular leadership will continue to inspire new generations to organize, mobilize, and fight for the transformation of collective health and a dignified life in El Salvador. 

From the GT we express our special fraternal greetings, support and solidarity with their families, fellow fighters and social references of the National Health Forum of El Salvador.  

July 2020
CLACSO Working Group
International health and health sovereignty

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group on International Health and Health Sovereignty and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.