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...

It has happened before.   It will happen again.   When a local city government attempts to relocate the places where informal vendors hawk their wares in the crowded streets of a city, conflict develops.   This time the location was the city of Santa Tecla, a middle class suburb to the west of San Salvador.   When the ARENA led city government of Roberto D'Aubuisson, Jr. announced that it wanted to relocate informal vendors from one street in the center of Santa Tecla, violent protests ensued.  It was not immediately clear who was to blame for the violence.  At the end of the day, more than 50 people had been wounded and one killed, as protesters threw rocks and security forces responded with force including bullets.   This report from LaPagina offers photos from the disturbances as well as links to video on Twitter where you can hear gunshots and see people running away.  #AlertaSV Disturbios en centro de Santa Tec...

The weekend was filled with conflict in the historic city center of San Salvador. Mayor Norman Quijano, like mayors before him of other political parties, is trying to relocate the informal vendors whose stalls clog the sidewalks and streets in the center. The vendors don't want to go, and as in times before , the conflict resulted in clashes with fires, vandalism, rock-throwing and phalanxes of riot police. The video above from La Prensa Grafica shows some of the scene. The disturbances resulted in damage to both the National Theater and the National Palace in the city center. An estimated 16,000 vendors sell their wares in the streets around the Metropolitan Cathedral and the central plazas. The mayor wants to relocate them to specific market areas, but El Faro reports this week that the mayor's plan only has spaces for about half of the vendors. In the same article, the mayor asserts that his efforts are not directed at the humble campesina woman selling som...

It is one of the perpetual themes of life in San Salvador --the clash between street vendors and the municipal government which wants to impose some order on the stalls which clog the streets and sidewalks of the city's historic center. An article titled Street Vendors Defend Right to Make a Living in San Salvador from IPS does a good job of describing the ongoing conflict: Since June, the mayor has ordered the forced eviction of 1,053 hawkers, as part of an attempt to regulate street vending in a city where more than 16,000 street vendors hawk their wares, occupying many streets and plazas. Several of the evictions, which form part of what the metropolitan police has dubbed "Operation Thunder", have ended in pitched battles, with dozens of people arrested or injured. Civil society organisations, the Catholic Church, legislators and the human rights ombudsman have called for talks, in order for the two sides to come up with a negotiated solution to address their o...

In a rare sight this week, a cruise ship pulled into the port at Acajutla. More than 300 European tourists disembarked and received an introduction to El Salvador and its culture. Meanwhile, in an oft-repeated sight in the old center of San Salvador, street vendors clashed violently today with police who were dislodging them from unauthorized locations. There was damage to property and at least 7 people arrested. See more in this photo gallery from El Faro.

San Salvador's historic center has many important building from its history including the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral. And this time of the year, it becomes a location of conflict as the number of informal vendors on the streets swells by thousands in the Christmas shopping season. San Salvador authorities try to place some rules on where vendors can sell their wares, and violence can break out when the police try to dislodge the informal stores from a street or sidewalk. This weekend violence broke out as the police tried to enforce rules against the informal stalls being set up on the grounds of the National Palace. Every year it's the same. Human desperation to earn money in the informal economy clashes with the need of any city government to preserve a semblance of order and to make streets passable for traffic and pedestrians.

It is a scene which repeats itself with unfortunate regularity in central San Salvador. The authorities take some action against the informal street vendors who fill the streets in the city's central center. The vendors clash with police, windows are smashed, something is burned, tear-gas is fired. Yesterday it was the seizure of pirated DVDs and CDs being sold on the streets in the city center which touched off the clashes. For four hours, police clashed with vendors. A police car and two other vehicles were set ablaze. Several businesses were looted, including a bicycle shop where news photos showed looters carrying off their ill-gotten bicycles down the streets. Seventeen persons were arrested during the disturbances. The government plans to charge them as terrorists under the new anti-terrorism law . The auxiliary archbishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez, described the supposed street vendors involved in the disturbances as "vandals," and called for a...

El Salvador passed an anti-terrorism law in September 2006. At the time it was passed, many opposed the law on the grounds that its harsh penalties would be used to quash dissent and protests. Now it appears that some of those concerns may have been justified. The leader of the street vendors in San Salvador, Vicente Ramírez, has been arrested under the new anti-terrorism law for his alleged involvement in street protests which turned violent in Apopa on February 10. In those demonstrations, street vendors had been protesting the Apopa city government's restrictions on their activities on the streets of the city. The protests turned violent, and Apopa government buildings were damaged, three persons were injured and other property destroyed. (You can read about those disturbances and see a photo gallery at the LPG website ). Ramirez was arrested about one week later under the provisions of the anti-terrorism law. After an initial hearing today, a magistrate in Apopa ordere...

Protesters took to the streets and blocked traffic in many regions of El Salvador today. In many parts of the country demonstrators blocked streets to show opposition to implementation of the CAFTA treaty. Street vendors who sell pirated CDs and DVDs protested against heightened copyright infringement penalties which are part of CAFTA implementation. Health workers demonstrated near certain hospitals to demonstrate for increased wages and better working conditions. Elsewhere in the country, demonstrators blocked highways to demand that potable drinking water be brought to their communities. Diario CoLatino and El Diario de Hoy have coverage from the left and the right respectively. Photo galleries of the protests are online here and here . Showing that the gloves are off following a one week truce during funeral ceremonies for Schafik Handal, president Tony Saca, accused the FMLN of "radicalizing" the population with protests following Handal's death. He repe...

For years, street vendors and authorities in San Salvador have been engaged in conflict. The vendors, who set up shop to sell everything from T-shirts to pupusas to illegally copied DVDs and much more, clog the streets and sidewalks in central San Salvador. Their unsanctioned stalls cause traffic congestion and irritate established merchants in nearby buildings. This informal economy, however, represents a livelihood, albeit a meager one, for hundreds or thousands of Salvadorans. From time to time, the authorities take action against the vendors, primarily seeking to limit the locations where they can sell their goods. The conflicts with authorities have recently flared up. During the August festivals, street vendors blocked the progress of the opening parade, the Desafile de Correos, with protests. This week street vendors caused disturbances described in La Prensa Grafica and El Diario de Hoy in the center of the city. Authorities had dislodged vendors from their stalls al...