So, first of all, El Salvador is not at war anymore. ..the peace accords were signed eighteen years ago, in 1992, and the nation has put in heroic efforts to heal.
Secondly, yes there is a presence of gangs, but only in certain spots, and we are intertwined with their history more than we realize — see the gang heading below.
This past and present violence is very real — a part of El Salvador that should be acknowledged. But, truly: such a small part. Wikipedia´s page will give you the typical country stats and history-in-brief, but my posts on the front page are where I hope to reveal the full face of El Salvador — the one that I see and engage with every day. It is gentle, positive, and focused on families. These posts are the more honest “About El Salvador” entries.
But to clear the air about about the infamous aspects of the nation, here´s a bit of background:
Wasn’t there a civil war or something?
Yep — a nasty one from 1932 to 1992, starting with a week-long genocide of El Salvador’s indigenous population and ending with twelve years of armed conflict. It shredded this small nation, slaughtering well over 100,000, displacing hundreds of thousands more, and affecting every single soul.
The roots of the war have been seen the world over: the majority of land in El Salvador was owned by a few megawealthy families, and the peasant farmers who worked that land wanted their due. So they revolted, and did pretty well for themselves. In fact, the revolution would have been successful and over swiftly had not . . . the United States jumped in to aid the conservative armed forces that were trying to beat back the rebels.
This was the 1980s when the Cold War was still ticking, and the U.S. was terrified that communism would gain traction in Latin America. So we trained Salvadoran military leaders in brutal death squad tactics at our School of the Americas in Georgia, and pumped over $1,000,000.00 a day into military hands in El Salvador. ..which is an awful lot of money in the 1980s to be dumping into a tiny nation dubbed “The Little Thumb of Central America.”
Still, the guerilla forces were emboldened and continued to gain ground despite the financial and equipment imbalances. So the U.S. upped our game and sent helicopters and fighter jets down here. This broke the back of the rebels, because the military’s new ability to air bomb them meant enormous casualties (90% of the war’s deaths were at the hands of the military) and the loss of the ability to work or travel in groups. Yet they fought on for years, and the U.N.-brokered peace accords in 1992 included some triumphs for the rebels, including official recognition as a political party. In 2009, the FMLN revolutionary party’s Mauricio Funes finally won the presidency of El Salvador in a landslide.
But make no mistake: everybody lost the war — the armed forces, the rebels, the USA, and most profoundly the nation of El Salvador. It is pretty common to say that a war can set a country’s development back a generation, and it did that here — shutting down many schools for a decade, destroying bridges and infrastructure and so much human potential. But in this globalizing age, it did more than that: it stole El Salvador’s ability to be self-sufficient by setting into motion a massive trans-national migration.
Nearly a third of El Salvador´s population now lives abroad in the U.S., Spain, Italy, and other Western nations. Over 70% of the money in El Salvador has been sent here as remittances from abroad. Those stats are disheartening — many Salvadorans have grown distracted from their own land and culture.
But we´ll just see what this coming era holds. As the global economy fluxuates, and environmental challenges demand that we re-engage with local economies and local food harvests, El Salvador still sits in a prime position. People here have not forgotten how to live off of their own land. So . . . stayed tuned.
What’s the deal with the gangs?
Salvadoran gangs (maras) are an upshot of the war, but in a surprising way. During the 1980s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled this land to the United States as refugees, asylum seekers, or simply crushed family members seeking a better life. It was a tough transition: they arrived without English or established social or professional networks. More, they arrived as the new kids on the block, and historical tensions between El Salvador and Mexico left them being bullied around in places like East L.A., which already owned deep gang activity.
But the Salvadorans had just come from a brutal civil war in which people slaughtered each other with machetes — comparatively, the U.S. gangs were tame. So after a while the Salvadorans started hooking up and fighting back as new gangs/maras like MS-13, quickly developing a reputation as some of the dirtiest bangers yet. With time and U.S. immigration policy, hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran-Americans were deported or forced to return south, including many individuals who had been involved in the maras. But the El Salvador they repatriated was poverty-stricken and depleted of jobs. Over the years, these conditions frustrated the deportees and left them recreating their gangbanging posses down here, using the same MS-13, MS-18, Maratruchas names.
So:
Are there gangs in El Salvador and Salvadoran gangs in the U.S.? Yes.
Are they nasty and terrible? Yes. El Salvador now has the most homicides per capita of any nation not at war.
Are we — the U.S. — responsible? Not entirely, but yes. We deepened and elongated El Salvador’s civil war, training their leaders in the death squad warfare principles that are still used today in the gangs. Then, through our/IMF/World Bank’s neo-liberal loan policies and structural adjustment programs, and our muscling of “free” trade agreements through the Americas, we helped undercut El Salvador’s self-sufficiency, worsening their poverty, ripening the conditions for gang activity, and multiplying (exponentially) the number of immigrants crossing our borders. Finally, Salvadorans living in our cities learned the ins and outs of gangs from local leaders then were forced to leave the country by short-sighted immigration policy.
I am obviously biased about this and apologize for that — I want to use this site to honor El Salvador rather than criticize decisions made in D.C. and New York. But those decisions have profoundly altered the face and trajectory of this and many other poor nations around the world. Some of these changes have been positive for El Salvador, but few of the actions have been purely benevolent on our part. We never lose track of the bottom line.
And aren’t people there dying all the time from natural disasters?
Not exactly, but there has been no shortage of natural catastrophes since the end of the war. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch slammed into Honduras’s Caribbean coast and brought massive flooding and landslides to El Salvador. In early 2001, back-to-back earthquakes demolished the nation, leaving few buildings standing in many parts. And in 2005 and 2009, Tropical Storms Stan and Ida brought some of the worst landslides yet, wiping out the village next to my training site, among many others.
These disasters bring international attention and aid to El Salvador, but they also crush the spirit of the nation, send more people fleeing to the U.S., and foment a hand-out mentality that does no one any good and makes self-dependence that much harder to attain.
Sooo……..
So those left in El Salvador are resilient and honest. They have seen their children fall is so many many ways: hacked down by the junta’s thugs, wasted away from diarrhea and dehydration, psychologically deformed by the war and its perversity, washed down the mountain in a landslide, crushed by a wall in an earthquake, enfeebled by dengue and other tropical diseases, or, most common now, stolen by the promise of quick riches in the United States or other Western nations.
But over 5 million people still live in this land, and they live with dignity. Salvadorans get up at dawn to sweep the sidewalks in front of their homes. They greet those they pass on the street profusely and without fail. They are clean and well-dressed, shining their shoes every morning even if there´s nothing but dirt paths for miles. And they´re known throughout Central America as the hardest workers (afternoon siestas don’t exist here).
And, more than anything, Salvadorans love their families. They revolve their lives around them, dreaming that every child will go on to earn a university degree and every grandparent will have a loving home and arms to grow old in.
I remain so moved to have the opportunity to nestle into this nation for a time.
