El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador Perspectives has been gone for a few weeks to start the year, but luckily there were many others in the English language press covering events in El Salvador.   A recent series of articles has a common thread of looking at the impact of violence in El Salvador which forces people to be flee their homes.  We’re deporting people back to gangs. What about offering refuge and aid?    In an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mark Fazlollah writes   "I found that the economic forces and violence driving people to leave are so strong that I don’t see how we can address our immigration problems without helping El Salvador tackle those issues. Short-term solutions are not going to work for problems that have been decades in the making, sometimes resulting from problematic U.S. policies." El Salvador's Top Anglican Bishop Urges U.S. to Not Deport Son . Reuters reports that "The top Anglican bishop of El Salvador has urged the United...

In 2017 I wrote a post about forced internal displacement which starts with this true story: The message was slipped under the door of their tiny home during the night. Leave the community where they lived for years within 48 hours. The note did not spell out what would happen if the family did not leave. It wasn't necessary. Too many people had been killed in their community already. The family grabbed their belongings and left under cover of darkness. Another family to add to the total of those forcibly displaced by gang violence in El Salvador. It was a tale similar to the accounts of tens of thousands displaced from their homes within El Salvador.  This story did not have a happy ending.  Earlier this year, gangs murdered in gruesome fashion one of the boys in the family near the community where they had relocated.  If the gangs want to find you and kill you in El Salvador, they will.   That story is played out time and again in El Salva...