A tenuous truce between rival street gangs has held up for four months and counting, halving El Salvador’s horrific homicide rate and raising hopes among some daring optimists of a lasting “peace process.” Read the rest of this entry ?
Posts Tagged ‘El Salvador’
World Bank Helps Canadian Miner Continue Its Pursuit Of Salvadoran Gold
January 24, 2013
Civil society groups lobby to keep mining out of El Salvador (zambomba/flckr)
El Salvador has already paid dearly for its trend-bucking decision not to open up the country to foreign mining interests. The government has had to shell out millions of dollars in legal fees to fend off arbitration suits filed by jilted mining firms. For anti-mining groups operating on the grassroots level, the high-stakes standoff has been even costlier: at least four Salvadoran activists have been murdered in recent years. Read the rest of this entry ?
Legislature Finally Turns Its Attention To El Salvador’s Water Woes
January 24, 2013
El Salvador’s Rio Lempa (IUCNweb/Flickr)
For the million or so residents of greater San Salvador whose faucets run dry on a regular basis, the message they received in late April from the Administración de Acueductos y Alcantarillados (ANDA) was a familiar one: “It’s going to be a while.” Read the rest of this entry ?
Tenuous Gang Truce Halves Homicides In El Salvador
September 5, 2012
Salvadoran gang members surrender weapons (Departamento de Seguridad Publica OEA)
Something remarkable recently occurred – or rather didn’t occur – in violence plagued El Salvador. On April 14, for the first time in nearly three years, police did not record a single murder. For a country that normally counts its daily homicide figures in double digits, the sudden absence of murder reports wasn’t just good news; it was huge news. Read the rest of this entry ?
El Salvador Elections: Modest Victory For Right-Wing ARENA
September 5, 2012
El Salvador’s rightist ARENA party picks up seats in the unicameral legislature (Flickr/-Chupacabras-)
The opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) eked out a narrow victory in El Salvador’s March 11 midterm elections to maintain a numbers advantage in the country’s municipal governments and earn a slim lead in the unicameral legislature. Hardly a rout, the results nevertheless marked a major reversal of fortunes for the far-right party, which stumbled after losing the last presidential election. Read the rest of this entry ?
El Salvador: President Funes Irks Armed Forces With Emotional El Mozote Apology
July 4, 2012
Memorial to the Civil War-era massacre in El Mozote (Alison McKeller/Flickr)
As El Salvador marked the 20th anniversary of the UN-brokered peace accords that ended its dozen-year Civil War (1980-1992), President Mauricio Funes broke with tradition by directing the nation’s attention to what was arguably the darkest moment of that conflict: the El Mozote massacre. Read the rest of this entry ?
A Look Ahead At El Salvador’s Municipal And Parliamentary Elections
May 1, 2012
The left-wing FMLN hopes to maintain its congressional majority (dignidadrebelde/Flickr)
Even though President Mauricio Funes continues to enjoy strong popular support, the party that catapulted him to power three years ago, the left-wing Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), may soon lose ground in El Salvador’s Asamblea Legislativa (AL). Read the rest of this entry ?
Billion-Dollar Deluge Socks El Salvador
January 7, 2012
Tropical deluge '12-E' caused widespread damage in October, 2011 (YouTube)
The devastating tropical depression that pounded Central America for 10 days last month won’t go down as the deadliest act of Mother Nature to strike disaster prone El Salvador. But when it’s all said and done, tropical storm 12-E, as it was officially called, is likely to be one of the costliest. Read the rest of this entry ?
Macabre Milestone In El Salvador: ‘Peacetime’ Murders Now On Par With Civil War Death Toll
January 7, 2012
Salvadoran police (Flickr/Lshave)
The bodies of two men, victims of apparent strangulation, lay along a road in El Ceibillo. Passersby discovered the bullet-riddled corpse of a 21-year-old man near the corner of 6Av. and Bulevar Rufino Barrios in San Salvador. Twelve kilometers outside of the city, a dead man turned up in a sewer. The list goes on. In total, the Oct. 12 edition of Prensa Libre put the day’s homicide count at 10. Read the rest of this entry ?
El Salvador Returns Its Attention To 1989 Jesuit Massacre
October 5, 2011
A San Francisco, CA mural depicting scenes from El Salvador's bloody civil war (credit - pagedesign/flickr)
For the past 18 years, an amnesty law has kept a tight legal lid on the numerous massacres and other human rights violations committed during El Salvador’s dozen-year civil war (1980-1992). Thanks to the legal maneuverings of a judge in Spain, however, one of those cases – the infamous Jesuit massacre of 1989 – is now putting the country’s ‘hear no evil, see no evil’ policy to the test. Read the rest of this entry ?
