El Salvador Perspectives

A select group of people is getting very rich in today's El Salvador ruled by Nayib Bukele.  Using tourism development funds and tax policy measures, the Bukele government is allowing an assortment of real estate developers, crypto-investors, and the Bukele family to acquire significant real estate holdings and wealth.   Such policy measures were on display again on February 20 when El Salvador's Legislative Assembly convened without proposals on its agenda.  Then the Nuevas Ideas-controlled body voted to suspend the rules to vote on a new development loan .  Without prior sharing of the underlying documentation, the Assembly voted to approve borrowing $114 million dollars for highway and infrastructure projects for Surf City 1.  "Surf City" is the branding for tourism development along El Salvador's Pacific coast, with phase 1 rolled out from Puerto La Libertad to El Zonte, also known as "Bitcoin Beach." The area which will be benefitted by this new loa...

This article was originally published at El Salvador Info under the title Minimum Wage in El Salvador in 2024: Understanding the Economic Realities of Salvadorans  and is reprinted here with permission of the author. By Eddie Galdamez Updated on Jan 29, 2024 The monthly minimum wage in El Salvador in 2024 is $365.00 for commerce, industrial, service, and sugar mill workers; $359.16 for maquila workers that manufacture textiles and clothing; $272.66 for coffee mill and sugar cane harvesting workers; and $243.46 for agriculture, fishing, and coffee harvesting workers. The last minimum wage increase occurred in August 2021 during the Nayib Bukele administration; before that, it happened in 2018, under the Salvador Sanchez Ceren presidency. In 2024, the Salvadoran minimum wage is divided into four sectors, with two specifically designated for urban areas and two for rural regions. Commerce, Services, Industry, and Sugar Mills Wages The minimum wage rate for workers in the fields of c...

For a significant percentage of families in El Salvador, putting food on the table continues to get more difficult.  Prices for food climbed after the COVID-19 pandemic and have remained high, and climate change and natural disasters put at risk the basic foodstuffs which can be grown locally.   Five UN agencies just released their 2023 Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition in Latin America and the Caribbean .   The UN report describes ranges of food insecurity countries may face: The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), is an estimate of the proportion of the population facing moderate or severe constraints on their ability to obtain sufficient food over the course of a year. People face moderate food insecurity when they are uncertain of their ability to obtain food and have been forced to reduce, at times over the year, the quality and/ or quantity of food they consume due to lack o...

The Historic Center of El Salvador's capital city, San Salvador is being transformed. Streets which were once crowded and overflowing with an informal economy of street vendors have been emptied.   Historic buildings are being seen once again.  Pedestrians stroll and take selfies as the government seeks to attract tourism and investment into the heart of the City. The overall purpose of the renovation is to encourage tourism in the Historic Center and to create a more “orderly” area of the city.  There is a new  Historic Center website  in Spanish and English which includes maps, virtual tours, and descriptions of available guided tours.  The site even contains links to a new smartphone app to guide visitors through the area. But what of the vendors who formerly earned their subsistence living on those streets? They have been displaced from the center with promises of spots in municipal markets around the City.  The government says they voluntaril...

The government of El Salvador released at the end of March its annual Multi-purpose Household Survey ("EHPM" for its initials in Spanish) for 2022.   Here are some of the statistics contained in this year's report regarding the people of El Salvador.  According to the estimates in the 2022 EHPM, the population of the country is 6.33 million people:   53.3% of the population is female 61.7% of the population lives in urban areas 30.7% of the population is younger than 20 27.4% of the population lives in the department of San Salvador 24.7% of young people between the ages of 15-29 are not in school or employed. The percentage of the population living in poverty in 2022 was 26.6%, while the percentage living in extreme poverty was 8.6%.  This was an increase in poverty rates compared to 2021, and was primarily due to inflation increasing the cost of that basic basket of goods which defines the poverty level in the country while household earnings were n...

El Salvador’s government delivered a Christmas gift to participants in its national pension system in the days before the holiday.  A pension reform law was passed on December 22 which increased benefits for persons receiving retirement pensions and made other changes to the financing of those benefits.      El Salvador's government run pension system is an individual account plan which functions by accumulating the contributions made on behalf of the employee, plus the credited interest on the account from the pension fund’s investment earnings.  At retirement age, a retiree’s monthly pension is the accumulated total divided by 260 (20 years at 13 payments per year).  If that calculation is less than the minimum pension ($400 under the new law), the minimum pension is paid. The retirement age for women is 55 and the retirement age for men is 60 years old.  Someone can start receiving a pension once they have reached retirement age and have 25 years o...

For those living in El Salvador, it can feel like life is being lived in a series of apocalyptic moments, as plagues, natural and man-made, buffet the country.   1 )   The newest plague – voracious locusts .    Swarms of flying locusts, which can devastate fields of crops in a matter of hours, have arrived in Central America .   The hungry insects have already caused damage in the department of Peten in Guatemala and the International Organizationfor Regional Agricultural Health (OIRSA)   has warned El Salvador to be on alert. Grasshoppers in field in Peten, Guatemala President Nayib Bukele promptly announced his government is taking immediate measures to confront the threat.   The government circulating images of soldiers walking through corn fields searching for the insects.   The president flew with a squad of military helicopters to hold a press conference in a corn field in San Vicente department to descr...

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in El Salvador has continued to grow.   As of the time of this post, the total is 46.  There have also now been two deaths from the virus.  Real time updates on confirmed cases and deaths are available here .  Part of the tragedy of this pandemic is that family members and other mourners are prohibited from attending the burial of those who perish from the disease. The primary response of the Salvadoran government to the pandemic continues to be a nationwide home quarantine  to avoid transmission of the virus and to give the government time to build up its capacity to respond to a the approaching health system crisis.  Of course the quarantine requires a means to support the millions of poor Salvadorans in the informal economy, who don't eat if they can't work.  The government's plan is a subsidy payment of $300 per household, while at the same time suspending their obligations to pay utilities, mortgages, ...