El Salvador Has Become a Basket Case

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Many of the migrants streaming across the American border with Mexico come from El Salvador. This small poverty-stricken and violence-plagued Central American country has seen more than its fair share of misfortune.

A terrible civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992 took the lives of approximately 80,000 soldiers and civilians. The military and its allied death squads were responsible for an overwhelming majority of the killings during the war. The archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, was among those murdered.

Nearly half of the country’s population fled, and children were recruited as soldiers by both the military-run government and the left-wing guerrilla group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

El Salvador remains one of the most violent nations in the world, with 69.2 murders per 100,000 residents. (The U.S. rate is 4.6) 

Gangs continue to wreak havoc, two of the most notorious being M-18, known as 18th Street, and M-13 or Mara Salvatrucha.

As a result, there are nearly 1.4 million Salvadorans living in the United States.

Can a new president change all that? The 38-year-old Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador, the country’s capital, has promised to bring “a new era” to the country after he won election in early February.

Although he began his political career with the FMNL, Bukele ran as the candidate of the centre-right Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA).

The FMLN, which agreed to lay down its arms in the peace accords, and the conservative National Republican Alliance (ARENA) had alternated in power since the end of the war.

Bukele, who is of Palestinian ancestry and the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, wants to tackle El Salvador’s gang violence and corruption. 

He has called for social programmes to prevent youths from being recruited in the first place, and for social reinsertion programmes to prevent re-offending.

Bukele has acknowledged that the two main forces driving so many to take their chances on a perilous migration north in search of a better life were insecurity and economic duress. He vowed to address the poverty and lack of employment opportunities that so many migrants cite as their reason for fleeing.

Bukele admitted that his country was to blame for driving tens of thousands of its citizens to emigrate every year.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to,” he said on June 30 at a news conference in San Salvador. “They flee their homes because they feel they have to.

“They fled our country, they fled El Salvador,” he continued. “It is our fault.

They feel safer crossing a desert and three frontiers because they feel that’s more secure than living in the country, he added.

“If people have an opportunity for a decent job, a decent education, a decent health care system and security, I know that forceful migration will be reduced to zero.”

Bukele also wishes to break with the left-wing foreign policy alliances forged by his predecessor in office, Salvador Sanchez Cerén. 

Cerén had maintained close alliances with the rulers of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. Instead the new leader will strengthen ties with the United States.