El Salvador Perspectives

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...

You can spend a lot of time in El Salvador's cities in traffic, particularly in San Salvador.  Growing number of vehicles on the roads in crowded cities produce rush hours which can seem to last throughout the day and challenge your ability to arrive on time. On the one hand, the growth in the number of vehicles is a positive sign of a growing number of Salvadoran households able to afford car ownership.   On the other hand, the country has to struggle with congestion and the need to adapt its street and highway system to the ever increasing vehicle total. Here is a set of statistics about traffic in El Salvador: 1.5 million .  That's the number of vehicles  registered to drive on El Salvador's roads according to the vice minister of Transportation .   That total includes slightly more than 1 million cars and 451 thousand motorcycles. 10 thousand .  The number of additional vehicles which arrive in the country each month, the majority of them bein...

Ballot for San Salvador Mayor Salvadorans will be going to the polls Sunday to elect mayors in all 262 municipalities across the country. Unlike elections for legislators which also happen that day, local mayoral elections are much more about the individuals running for office, how well incumbents have done their jobs, and about the strength of on-the-ground organizing efforts.  Simply put, people know the name of their mayor and how well they are serving the local neighborhood, while they frequently have no idea of the names of the deputies who represent their department in the national congress. The marquee mayoral race is the competition for mayor of San Salvador, the capital and El Salvador's largest city.  The current mayor is Ernesto Muyshondt from ARENA who is seeking re-election.   Muyshondt won the post in 2018 by a landslide after the FMLN expelled the incumbent mayor, Nayib Bukele, from the party.  The fact that Muyshondt has been linked to deliverin...

Over the weekend, the municipal government of San Salvador unveiled renovations to Plaza Gerardo Barrios in the historic center of the city.  The renovation features lighting, new pavement, fountains and other upgrades. The plaza is bordered by the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Palace and is named for a 19th century general and president of El Salvador. The nighttime events were intended to portray a message of reclaiming important public spaces.  Images of families strolling and taking selfies after dark in a zone often associated with gang-sponsored crime poured out of the Twitter feed of the city government. The plaza is a location of great historic significance.   Demonstrations in the 70s and 80s were often violently repressed by government troops.   The funerals of martyrs Rutilio Grande, Oscar Romero and others took place on the steps of the cathedral facing the plaza.  And troops stationed on top of the National Palace o...

San Salvador volcano -- El Boquerón June 7 was the 100 year anniversary of the last great eruption of the San Salvador volcano , also known as "El Boquerón."  The eruption occurred on June 7, 1917 at 8:11 p.m.    It was preceded by two killer earthquakes at 6:55 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. which killed approximately 1050 people and left only 200 of the 9000 houses in the city intact. The 1917 eruption was a flank eruption of the volcano along one fissure. During this eruption, the crater lake inside the Boqueron evaporated and a cinder cone appeared within the crater, christened 'Boqueroncito'.   Lava would continue to flow for five months after the initial eruption. El Diario de Hoy has a collection of historic images of the 1917 eruption at this link .   There is a special exhibition regarding the eruption going on now at the Guzman national anthropology museum (MUNA). Boqueroncito

Yesterday Nayib Bukele used the medium of Facebook Live to announce that he would seek reelection as mayor of San Salvador as a candidate for the FMLN.    Wearing a baseball cap backwards on his head, seated in his home office with two electric guitars leaning on the wall behind him, Bukele explained the factors he had to weigh before deciding to run for mayor.   Claiming that he had only made up his mind to run on Sunday, Bukele stated that he could not walk away and allow ARENA to undo what he had accomplished in the capital city.    The FMLN has already stated that it will back Bukele for a second term, despite the independent track which Bukele keeps apart from his party. You can watch his announcement here . Currently the leading candidate from ARENA appears to be Norman Quijano.   Quijano was the mayor of San Salvador from 2012-2015, and unsuccessfully ran for president in 2014 against Salvador Sanchez Ceren. As of Monday morning, Bukele...

The historic center of San Salvador is the location of many important historic and cultural sites including the Metropolitan Cathedral with the crypt of Blessed Oscar Romero, the former National Palace, the National Theater, Plaza Libertad, Plaza Gerardo Barrios, El Rosario Church, the National Library, the Museum of the Central Reserve Bank and more.  The historic center is also the location of a huge sprawling formal and informal market which spills out of market buildings and onto the streets and sidewalks for many blocks.   Finally, the historic center has been a place where El Salvador's street gangs are deeply entrenched and where extortion demands backed up with threats of deadly violence predominate. Restoring the historic center has been one of the focal points of San Salvador mayor Nayib Bukele's time in office.   Currently the city government is remodeling the two most important plazas in the sector, Plaza Libertad and Plaza Gerardo Barrios, seeking to m...

Located close to the historic center of San Salvador is Cuscatlán Park.   This  tree-filled urban park is a welcome oasis from the noise and congestion of central San Salvador.  On any given day you will see lovers embracing on park benches, scouts engaged in group activities, or an older couple strolling.   It is also home to the Monument to Memory and Truth as well as a small art museum. But the park which opened in 1939 is showing the effects of age and a lack of care and maintenance.  The unpaved roads inside are rutted and dusty; vegetation is trampled, and sidewalks and steps have cracks and holes.   Now the city of San Salvador and USAID are teaming up to give the venerable park an overhaul to make it a point of civic pride for the city.  The $8 million remodeling project has a goal of providing modern public spaces to promote a culture of peace. The project will include overhead walkways, new exhibition space for art, areas for children,...

They are images that hearken back to the bloody years of El Salvador's civil war.   Heavily armed troops deployed in front of National Palace and Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador's historic center.   On Tuesday, the government of Salvador Sánchez Cerén made a public show of the deployment of "Task Force Historic Center" which includes 800 military and police. From the Facebook page of the Salvadoran armed forces : The historic Center Task Force was deployed this day in 29 sectors with the objective of reducing the activity of criminal structures and bands of organized crime that affect the citizenry and the commercial activity in the zones involved.   All this done through joint permanent patrols by foot and vehicle, the capture of criminals in the act or per judicial order, guaranteeing with this free movement and healthy living in the Salvadoran capital. This deployment is part of the ongoing "exceptional measures" which the Sánche...

He was elected less than a year ago, but Nayib Bukele is already a different kind of mayor for San Salvador, and people are noticing.    At the end of last year, mayor Bukele was  named by Forbes  magazine's Mexico edition as one of the 25 most influential people in Central America for 2015.   The thirty-four year old businessman turned politician was easily elected in 2015, carried on a wave of popular support by the young people in the city.    Although Bukele ran as a candidate of the FMLN, he distanced himself from the party in a campaign focused on his own charisma and ideas and not based on party affiliation. Since coming into office, he has not disappointed.    Under Bukele's guidance, the city government has focused on a series of projects aimed at quality of life in San Salvador.  The city's new infrastructure initiatives are performed under the slogan:   one thing done every day .   Some of those projects includ...

The final days of July saw the bus system of greater San Salvador shut down as El Salvador's powerful gangs threatened death for any bus drivers who ventured out on their routes.   It was a powerful show of power by the maras .   And it has the country's government on the defensive to try and explain why the gangs seem ever more powerful and the toll of victims is ever increasing. Al Jazeera produced a video report with a good overview of the situation.   The Washington Post also tried to summarize the situation in a piece titled Driving a bus is a death sentence in El Salvador's capital city .    But if you read Spanish, the best analysis, as always, came from El Faro in an analysis by Roberto Valencia providing ten answers to help understand the bus stoppage.   Among the points made by Valencia: The stoppage was initially the product of all three main gangs, but after Tuesday, only the 18 Revolucionario gang was continuing to prevent buses from run...

Our friends at Voices from El Salvador blog have a new post about threats to El Espino , the forested natural area on San Salvador's western border along the slopes of the volcano.   Parcels of the preserve are getting sold off, leading to fears that more of the land will give way to development.  The area is often referred to as the "lung" of San Salvador.  These forested acres are important as a carbon sink, as a filter for waters flowing down the slopes, and as a natural break from the sprawling urbanization of the capital city. As Voices notes, the recent sales cause concern: Most of El Espino, including the sections that were recently auctioned off, is technically still a protected area, so it’s unlikely that Argueta Manzano and Arguello González will be breaking out chainsaws in the immediate future. But they and others have invested millions of dollars in buying land, surely with the expectation that they will be able to develop it sometime in the futu...