El Salvador Perspectives

President Nayib Bukele has proclaimed that El Salvador is the safest country in Latin America and now enjoys a historic level of security as a consequence of the State of Exception which has been in place since March 27.  He regularly tweets about dramatically lower homicide rates and the number of days without homicides the country has enjoyed this month and this year.    On August 18, he retweeted a post from the National Civilian Police (PNC) which stated there were zero homicides on August 17 and showing daily homicide counts for the month: The most important news of the century in our  country is not material for a single report of the "journalists" and the "important communications media" Strange? No, we already know that they are just political activists. We continue.. #GuerraContraPandillas In light of the president’s invitation here for us to discuss the homicide statistics, this post will take a serious look at these numbers.  In fact, we can agree with t

I began writing El Salvador Perspectives (then called Tim's El Salvador Blog) 18 years ago.  At the time, there was little other coverage of news from El Salvador in English. Today there are a number of additional options.  El Faro English The English language version of the award-winning investigative journalism site El Faro.  You can subscribe to a regular newsletter and also available as a podcast .    El Salvador Info El Salvador Info is a website produced by Salvadoran Eddie Vasquez.  Eddie has a mix of information from different viewpoints on his site in English, with a definite emphasis on promoting all the beautiful things El Salvador has to offer. News articles are generally found under the heading "Life in El Salvador." El Salvador Now According to this site: El Salvador Now was born from a group of Salvadoran citizens concerned about the deterioration of democracy in their country and the need to create communication links with people and institutions abroad.

Reading recent articles about current events in El Salvador, I was struck by how many include religion as a theme.  Remarks by the Archbishop of San Salvador, Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, recently caught the attention of the Associated Press, generating the headline  Salvadoran Archbishop praises government crackdown on gangs . The archbishop said in a press conference “People don't want the violence to return,.... They not only want these things maintained, they want them to advance, to end the violence" and the prelate urged the president to avoid "margins of error."      In making those remarks, the archbishop may have turned a blind eye to just how gross those "margins of error" have been producing thousands of complaints of arbitrary detentions.  In a report today titled  State of Exception Files: Hundreds Arrested for Prior Convictions or “Looking Nervous”  reporters from El Faro described their conclusions after obtaining hundreds of files pre