El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador would like to increase tourism in the country. Foreign tourists, with their dollars to spend, represent a possible source of positive economic growth, and the country has many assets to showcase if it could figure out how to package them. A couple of stories recently make this point. The first is a story titled El Salvador puts out a welcome mat by a travel writer on Canada.com . The story begins: This Central American country is cautiously emerging from a civil war and devastating earthquake to take its first steps as a tourist destination. and ends with: Do I recommend El Salvador? Yes. Highly. However, as in any situation anywhere, let caution and discretion be your first guide. The Associated Press recently ran this story about the efforts of Central American countries to promote tourism. Included are statistics about El Salvador's tourism industry: For El Salvador and Guatemala, two countries that survived years of civil conflict, tourism has become the countr...

The opening ceremonies for the first Special Olympics Latin America games occurred in San Salvador last night. The games bring together more than 600 athletes from 18 Latin American countries to compete in a wide variety of events over the next week. La Prensa Grafica has special coverage on its website. A gallery of images from the opening cermonies can be found here .

As the US Senate debates immigration reform, mention is often made of the money which migrants send home to their families. In a recent article titled Latin America's Faulty Lifeline , Catherine Elton at the MIT Center for International Studies argues that an economy propped up by remittances may be hiding deep structural problems. She points in particular to El Salvador: In El Salvador, where studies show that anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of the population has emigrated, remittances are an astounding 16 percent of the GDP. They are 133 percent of all exports, 655 percent of foreign direct investment, and 91 percent of the government budget. While El Salvador's migration patterns to the United States are usually linked to the nation's bloody civil war in the 1980s, migration rates during the late 1990s and first half of this decade were higher than during the armed conflict. Once celebrated, along with Chile, as the honor roll student of the Washington Consensus, El Sal...

Two weeks after Salvadorans went to the polls in polarized elections, here are some additional observations about the process: Joe DeRaymond is an activist who has been an election observer several times in El Salvador. He writes a lengthy account of his observations and experiences in Counterpunch . The whole article is worth reading, but one interesting section is his description of the role of the US: Also, the role of the United States cannot be underestimated in a critical election. This year, the US played a relatively reduced role, yet still managed to extend Temporary Protective Status to 250,000 Salvadorans living in the United States on February 24, with the well publicized lobbying of Tony Saca. On election day, the US Ambassador to El Salvador, H. Douglas Barclay, personally accompanied the ARENA Vice President of El Salvador, Ana Vilma de Escobar, to a busy polling center in San Salvador, making clear his sympathies toward ARENA to the voters at the polls. El Faro is a...

One of the atrocities of the Salvadoran civil war was the abduction of children from their families. Most prominent was the case of the Serrano sisters , abducted by government forces during the early years of the civil war. In the aftermath of the civil war, lawyers for the family sued the Salvadoran government for redress, including requiring the government to search for the sisters as well as the hundreds of other missing children. After years of denials and legal wrangling, the government lost and the judgment of the Interamerican Court of Human Rights in March 2005, among many other things, required the Salvadoran government to make an act of public apology in the presence of high officials and members of the Serrano family. After dragging its feet for more than a year, the Salvadoran government took actions it said complied with the judgment. An account from US-El Salvador Sister Cities, describes what happened: Salvadoran President Tony Saca sent administration representa...

On March 24, 1980, archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered while saying mass, a crime which remains unpunished. His example and love will never be forgotten in El Salvador. From the Religious Task Force on Central America web site : In seeking to explain the real purpose, the motivation that animates the celebrations in El Salvador, the need of the poor to come together on March 24 each year, the editors of Letters to the Churches, a publication of the Central America University, write: 'Msgr. Romero remains alive and continues to be a real point of reference for many Salvadorans...He continues to offer hope, courage, inspiration, direction and dignity to those who suffer the most. His importance doesn't lie so much in the fact that he offers concrete solutions to contemporary problems but rather that his vision, attitude and fundamental commitment were based in the reality of El Salvador. When he spoke the truth clearly, fearlessly denounced atrocities, visited and accompanied...

Twenty-six years after Archbishop Romero's assassination, one of the men involved in the plot has begun to speak to the press and to ask for forgiveness from the Catholic church. Alvaro Saravia gave an interview published today in El Nuevo Herald , where he acknowledges his role and says that he is writing a book where he will name others responsible in the assassination plot. On September 3, 2004 a court in California issued a judgment holding Alvaro Saravia responsible for his role in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and ordered him to pay $10 million to the plaintiff, a relative of the Archbishop. Saravia had not attended the trial and did not put on a defense and had apparently already fled the US. Excerpts from the El Nuevo Herald article follow: BY GERARDO REYESEl Nuevo Herald A former Salvadoran air force captain accused in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero has broken a 26-year silence to ask the Catholic Church for forgiveness and pro...