El Salvador Perspectives

September 2023 parade in Tonacatepeque I do not often write in the first person in this space, but as I develop this series of posts at the start of the third year of the State of Exception, it feels important to describe how I have seen El Salvador change during that time. I have spent more than twenty years visiting and getting to know well a small community in the municipality of Tonacatepeque, northeast of San Salvador.  This collection of small houses, with water which arrives some of the days, with chickens and dogs and small children roaming the streets, is dear to me. And for most of the time I have known it, the community has been under control of the MS-13 gang. Two years into the State of Exception, the "muchachos" are no longer present, and the difference it makes in people's lives is real and observable. Residents now cross gang boundaries from one territory to another, no longer fearing deadly retribution as a consequence.  New little businesses have opened

This is the second of my series on the State of Exception in El Salvador as it starts its third year.   Today we look at the prisons holding those persons arrested during Bukele's war on the gangs. Since the beginning of the State of Exception two years ago, the prison population in El Salvador has skyrocketed.   Today El Salvador incarcerates people at a rate higher than anywhere else in the world, with almost 2% of the adult population behind bars.  The 78,000 people captured under the State of Exception, and held without trial, live in the hellish conditions of the Salvadoran prison system.  And, sadly, a significant majority of the Salvadoran public, thirsty for vengeance, applauds. To add to the prison capacity of El Salvador, the Bukele regime built its new mega-prison, the Center for Confinement of Terrorism or CECOT.  This new prison grabs all the headlines.  But the story is not CECOT.  CECOT is the story Bukele wants to tell, but it is not the story that we should focus

March 27 is the two year anniversary of the State of Exception in El Salvador.  This suspension of constitutional due process protections as part of a war on gangs was adopted by the Salvadoran  Legislative Assembly in the midst of a bloody weekend in March 2022 in which gangs murdered at least 87 people around the country. Under the State of Exception, security forces of the police and military can arrest anyone without a warrant or observing them commit a crime, can hold them for 15 days before appearing before a judge and without telling them the charges, and can freely intercept communications without a judicial order. Those detained receive initial hearings, before judges with their identities masked, in groups that often number in the hundreds where the charges are simply gang affiliation. Judges routinely order defendants into El Salvador's hellishly overcrowded prisons without bail, to await for their next hearing which could come in six months. The Minister of Security G

Sunday March 24 is the 44th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero.  For this year's post commemorating the anniversary of Romero's martyrdom, we listen to Romero's voice in sermons he gave on the final two days of his life. On Sunday March 23, 1980, the archbishop preached his Sunday sermon which was broadcast by radio throughout the country.   His homily concluded with these powerful words: I would like to make an appeal especially to the men of the army, and concretely to the National Guard, the police, and the troops. Brothers, you are of part of our own people. You are killing your own brother and sister campesinos, and against any order a man may give to kill, God’s law must prevail: «You shall not kill!» No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God.  No one has to observe an immoral law. It is time now for you to reclaim your conscience and to obey your conscience rather than the command to sin. The church defends the

El Salvador is continuing to experience a tourism boom.   One way to measure this is just be looking at the number of people arriving at the country's international airport.  The number of travelers arriving by air into El Salvador increased from 1.5 million to 2 million, jumping by 33% from 2022 to 2023. By any measure, that is a significant jump and represents a strong indicator that tourism is surging in El Salvador.  The Ministry of Tourism stated that, when entries to El Salvador from neighboring countries were included, there were a total of 3.4 million visitors in 2023.      The country is about to enter an important time of visits.  The Ministry of Tourism is projecting that during Semana Santa, which begins on Saturday, the country will receive 126,000 international visitors, with $110 million in tourism spending and  4.2 million visits to touristic sites, beaches and the Historic Center of San Salvador.  On El Salvador's Pacific coast, from my personal observations

A recent run-up of the price of Bitcoin has Nayib Bukele and all his supporters wanting to say "I told you so."  The price of Bitcoin today is $65,335USD, up 26% from September 6, 2021 when El Salvador's Bitcoin law went into effect.   In between those dates, however, the price had dropped below $17,000 in December 2022, increasing the skepticism around Bukele's Bitcoin gambit.     Bitcoin price history since El Salvador Bitcoin law went into effect As the volatile price of Bitcoin started surging again beginning in November 2023, Bukele repetitively posted that he was " still waiting " for the critics of his Bitcoin strategy to admit they were wrong.  Skeptics, myself included , wanted to see the actual financial records and evidence of income and expenses for the Bitcoin project. On March 14, 2024, Bukele went on X.com to post a screen shot showing 5690 BTC worth $406 million USD that day, being received at specific address on the blockchain. Bukele announ

This article was originally published at El Salvador Info under the title Minimum Wage in El Salvador in 2024: Understanding the Economic Realities of Salvadorans  and is reprinted here with permission of the author. By Eddie Galdamez Updated on Jan 29, 2024 The monthly minimum wage in El Salvador in 2024 is $365.00 for commerce, industrial, service, and sugar mill workers; $359.16 for maquila workers that manufacture textiles and clothing; $272.66 for coffee mill and sugar cane harvesting workers; and $243.46 for agriculture, fishing, and coffee harvesting workers. The last minimum wage increase occurred in August 2021 during the Nayib Bukele administration; before that, it happened in 2018, under the Salvador Sanchez Ceren presidency. In 2024, the Salvadoran minimum wage is divided into four sectors, with two specifically designated for urban areas and two for rural regions. Commerce, Services, Industry, and Sugar Mills Wages The minimum wage rate for workers in the fields of comme