El Salvador Perspectives

I have called him before the "dean of Salvadoran bloggers."   For more than eight years, Ernesto Rivas Gallont has posted multiple times per day on his blog, Conversations with Neto Rivas .   He offers insights and perspectives on news and politics in El Salvador, often rooted in his own acquaintance with the players involved. But before he was a blogger, one of the roles Ernesto Rivas filled was the ambassador to the United States from El Salvador during much of El Salvador's civil war.   After his arrival in Washington in March 1981, he often was called upon to act as an apologist for the actions of the country's army, actions which often included massacres and atrocities.   On orders of his superiors back in El Salvador, then ambassador Rivas denied his government's involvement in the massacre which occurred in December 1981 at El Mozote.   We now know that Salvadoran army troops from the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion killed more than 900 defenseless me...

The press continues to cover the story of children coming across the southwestern US border without documents, although the ebola scare and ISIS have pushed the story from the front pages. The newest statistics on the flow of children are out.  US Customs and Border Protection reports that in the year ended September 30, 2014 there were detentions of 68,541 children aged 17 and under who crossed the border unaccompanied by a parent or relative.    This compared to 38,759 the year before. There were a total of  16,404 unaccompanied children from El Salvador in the year ended September 30, almost a 12 fold increase from the number of children detained in 2011.   In addition to the unaccompanied children detained, there were more than 14,000 "family units" of adults with children from El Salvador detained at the southwest US border this year.  Combining just the unaccompanied children with the family units would average out to approximately 124 Salvadora...

This article was originally published on October 22 on the website of InsightCrime Written by Steven Dudley Since the dissolution of the gang truce, assassinations of police and military personnel and clashes between gangs and security forces have changed the security equation in El Salvador , closing any small window left to revive the short-lived and highly criticized ceasefire. As of October 17, the violence had left 31 policemen and various military personnel dead in 2014, including six police in October alone. The victims range from low- to high-ranking members of the security forces and are spread across a wide geographic area. This gives the impression that they were not pre-selected or targeted, but rather were killed when the opportunity presented itself, or following security force disputes with local gang factions. Clashes between security forces and gangs are also on the rise, officials in the police and army told InSight Crime. The police have reported 130 clashes wit...

The 7.3 magnitude earthquake which shook El Salvador last week and left one person dead and caused some minor damage was a reminder of El Salvador's history of large, killer earthquakes.   This week the country's Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) delivered a set of historic documents and photographs to the country's national archives for safekeeping.   Some of the photos were released online which you can view here . You can see scenes from the 1951 earthquake in this newsreel footage from the time:

Each year in El Salvador, the rainy season brings the problem of mosquito-borne illnesses.   This year, in addition to dengue fever, mosquitoes have brought the Chikungunya virus for the first time.   This diseases which originated in Africa arrived for the first time in the Americas in 2013. El Salvador's health ministry is reporting that the number of cases of  Chikungunya has finally stabilized after increasing steadily since May of this year.   The country has reported some 59,000 suspected cases of the mosquito-borne disease since the virus first appeared in El Salvador in 2014.  Symptoms of the disease include a high fever and severe joint pain which can become chronic. The 59,000 cases exceeds this year's total cases of dengue fever which currently stand at 46,830 suspected cases.     Both diseases are transmitted by the same breeds of mosquitoes, the aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus, There is no vaccine or treatment for chikung...

The 1992 Peace Accords brought an end to twelve long bloody years of civil war in El Salvador.   Yet the original signed document had not been in the possession of the government.   Former president Alfredo Cristiani has been keeping the original signed document at his house for the past 20 years.   Today he returned the historic document to the government.   And in the picture above we see Cristiani, the former ARENA president who governed during the last years of the war, delivering the Peace Accords to current president Salvador Sanchez Ceren, the former commander in the FMLN guerrilla army.   Both Cristiani and Sanchez Ceren were among the original signers of the accords in 1992.

A strong earthquake struck off the shore of eastern El Salvador last night.   Reports this morning say that one person was killed after electricity lines fell on him.    Approximately 20 houses have been reported damaged and some areas are still without power this morning. From Reuters and The Guardian : A magnitude-7.3 earthquake struck off the coast of El Salvador and Nicaragua late on Monday and was felt across Central America, killing at least one person.  There were no immediate reports of major damage. El Salvador’s emergency services said a dozen homes in the department of Usulutan had been slightly damaged but that coastal areas appeared calm and the country’s international airport was unaffected.  Wilfredo Salgado, mayor of the city of San Miguel in El Salvador, tweeted to say that a man was killed when an electricity post fell on him. “It felt really powerful, suddenly the whole house started to move,” said Xiomara Amaya, 30, who lives in Usulu...