“El Boyita”—little buoy—is only a couple of years away from coming of age, but his eyes have already seen four murders. They were perpetrated by mareros—gang members—years ago, at a hillside of the Bálsamo—Balm—Coast, near the slum of El Chumpe, in El Salvador. One took place in a milpa—A Mesoamerican agroecosystem based on corn, beans and squash. An overweight man ran slowly through the rows of corn, until he was shot in the back.

Boyita simulates a complex surfing maneuver.

This I’m told by El Boyita; he speaks with a withdrawn look, while clutching the lean skin of his belly. If he was chubby as a child, today, his body looks like the exoskeleton of a crab after countless hours in the water. And his personality is just as tough as the crustacean. He is difficult to tame.

A ‘Punche’, or mud crab from the Central American Pacific, for sale at the market.

He lost his mother at an early age due to an avoidable tragedy. He grew up without his father. He was cared for by relatives in Puerto de la Libertad. Although he has only completed one grade of elementary school, his smart phone helps him improve his use of language and numbers. He is rebellious and self-taught.

But the waves of El Salvador focus his mind on the present. He lives to interpret them, ride them, merge with them. In their maelstrom, he finds calm and forges excellence. On Saturdays, he takes a certified lifeguard course, his version of preparing for life.

El Boyita, a young surfer once accredited by his federation, is part of the first generation of Salvadoran teenagers free from the oppression of extreme violence. He was too young when Nayib Bukele’s government launched its war on gangs. Unlike other older neighbors, he was not arrested, but rather went on to roam the streets in freedom.

Boyita dominates the wave by extending his arms, like crab claws.

His transition from child to teenager occurs, against all odds, in the calm after the storm in El Salvador—today the safest country in Latin America. He has grown up in peace. Physical security is a public good within his reach, not a “premium” to be paid. And in words attributed to the champion, Muhammad Ali: it ain’t bragging if you can back it up.  

 According to Insightcrime.org‘s 2023 balance of homicide rates in Latin America, El Salvador had the lowest at 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. Far behind Colombia’s 25.7; Mexico’s 23.3; and neighboring Honduras’s 31.1.

In fact, the official Salvadoran numbers are half that of the United States—5.7 in 2023, according to the FBI. And they compete for the lowest in the entire continent with Canada—1.94 in 2023, according to Statistics Canada.

Waves as a symbol of transition

El Boyita’s homeland redefines itself within this peace, unprecedented in the region. It postulates itself as a surf destination—Surfcity—after long and cruel decades of bloodshed. Once ignored, the waves of El Salvador, constant, warm and well-formed, today symbolize a possible change of era.

Surf City advertising at El Salvador’s international airport.

“We have more than 70 good surf spots in this country, not counting beach breaks,” explains Tourism Minister Morena Valdez about the Surf City strategy, which includes six stages to develop tourism in the 200-mile-long Salvadoran coastline.

The first two include the mountainous stretches with rocky points of both the Balm Coast and the cliffs to the east of the Lempa River, where decades ago, the guerrillas hid in their stronghold. The rest include the wide, flat beaches of the Costa del Sol and Sonsonate—popular among tourists with little confidence in the water, who are looking for urban-friendly sun and beach leisure. 

The volcanic stone cove of “El Cabildón” (The big town tall) at low tide, in Jucuarán.

“If we have that scene, let’s take advantage of it. President Bukele said: we will not go to fairs like countries already positioned in tourism. We will invest in bringing events of international stature,” repeats Valdéz, who, in previous governments, led the ‘country branding’ of El Salvador.

Tragic times, which, up to yesterday, were due to the National Civil War in the midst of the global Cold War. Then, due to three decades of gang warfare deprived of ideals between Maras 18 and Salvatrucha, during the era of corruption and misrule of the Salvadoran two-party democracy.

Victim of the brawl, the process of modernization and development of El Salvador was left floating static, like a buoy, while children like Boyita were born and demographics boomed.

“It was believed to be a dead-end problem—that the maras were inseparable from society and politics, and their tyranny had to be accepted,” explains Salvadoran historian Adolfo Bonilla.

Surf or maras, but not both

Bonilla recalls that the corrugated Balm Coast between La Libertad and Acajutla—today Surf City 1—was a stronghold of both gangs. The people experienced sadism and cruelty proper to war crimes. One of two outcomes: the Balm Coast would be allotted either for surfing or for the gangs.

There, the steep basins on the slopes of the extinct Jayaque volcano fill the rivers during the rainy season with pebbles. These are then deposited in front of the river mouths once they reach the Pacific. They form triangular points that set up perfect waves, such as Punta Roca, El Zunzal, or El Zonte. These point breaks, breaking to the right, give the country its surf fame.

A surfer named Erickson watches the sunset over the town of El Zonte.

But because of its rugged relief, the basins of the Balm Coast were marginal lands before the surf driven boom. Hamlets, slums and popular seaside bathing sites grew on them as an extension of San Salvador’s extreme poverty belt. Because precariousness without social mobility is the breeding ground of the maras, these communities were “plagued” with them.

Places on the bypass from La Libertad to San Salvador like El Punche—where Boyita lived with his mother as a newborn baby—concentrated mareros like leaf-cutter ants in their nests. It was a borderline world in which to grow up, between rough waves and ant nests of crime.

 But before the tragedy of Salvadoran modernity, the essence of this tiny nation was portrayed by the pilot, watercolorist, and writer Antoine Saint Exupéry, in the most widely-read book written in French. It is the small world of the rose of The Little Prince.

This is the homeland of Consuelo Sunzil, wife of Saint Exupéry—author of Night Flight—who died far away, a year after the publication of The Little Prince, flying over the sea off of Corsica in 1944.

Asteroid B-612, home to both in the story, is defined by the volcanic landscape of the Pacific Ring of Fire as it passes through Central America. Although small, B-612 is a world that deserves care and offers the beauty of infinite sunsets. The preoccupation of its exiled protagonist, moreover, is a parallel dilemma to El Salvador’s recent escape from violence.

The Prince asks for a lamb to eat the weeds on his planet in time to prevent giant trees from growing and strangling it. But he needs a rope and a lasso to tie the lamb up. For he doesn’t want it to eat his rose too—who fills him with love, even though she hurts him.

Pitahyas (wild dragon fruit cacti) and herbs growing on the coastal cliffs of eastern El Salvador.

Salvadoran escape from “the league of violence”

The countries on the land continuum south of the United States, where emigration is rampant and transnational crime has reigned supreme, are at a crossroads as tourist destinations. They play in a “league of violence” from which they all want to disassociate themselves.

“Colombia. The only risk is wanting to stay,” promised the viral advertising campaign of a few years ago, without it implying an end to FARC, paramilitaries, drug cartels, high levels of crime, or police corruption. 

A similar situation occurs today with Mexico. The long-term policies of the Mexican left, re-elected in September 2024, including “hugs not bullets” to those who commit crimes, do not guarantee citizen security in the present.

And it also happens with some small republics of an ever so fragmented Central America, occluded from mass tourism by the moonless night of its recent history. Think of Honduras, a par exemple pupil and recipient of foreign recipes and donations, which does not transcend this paradigm.

“Countries larger than us but with similar problems have benefited from the fact that the stigma as the most violent country in the world fell on Honduras during the past decade,” says Donaldo Suazo, former president of the Honduran chamber of small hoteliers.

 The same stigma marked El Salvador’s hide between 1994 and 2019. It was an outlaw’s brand for this land in the stretch of America occupied towards the Caribbean by Honduras, its twin society in accent, pupusas, and misfortunes.

The change of one Californian concept for another

In 2019, El Salvador embarked on its escape from “the league of violence”, thanks to a transitory truce with the maras and a cynical swap with the Trump administration. During the migrant caravan crisis, the White House paid favors to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in exchange for declaring themselves ‘safe countries’ for third-country migrants.

Everyone played their cards. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, for example, negotiated his immediate political survival. He ended up last year as a cell mate to Sean Combs “Puff Daddy” in Manhattan, serving forty-five years for drug trafficking.

 And El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele negotiated his country’s removal from the State Department’s list of dangerous countries to host a stage of the World Surf League in 2020. The homicide rate in 2019 was 18.1, similar to Costa Rica’s 17.2 in 2023.

“The World Surfing Cup came when the perception changed, when the United States says, it’s a safe country,” explains Vanderbilt University anthropologist Norbert Ross, who travels to El Salvador for fieldwork and knows the importance of international perception.

“Every year I go to Utila, Honduras, with mostly gringo students. When I propose it, I have to explain that we will fly to the island of Roatan, which looks like Florida. It has no resemblance to Central America. We don’t touch mainland Honduras,” says Ross.

For El Salvador, getting rid of this stigma opened a loophole to supplant one Californian concept for another. Just as the gangs sprang up around MacArthur Park, Los Angeles—El Salvador became infested with Bill Clinton’s deportations campaign starting in 1994—its surf campaign was launched under the Huntington Beach concept, the original Surf City.

Surf City El Salvador was launched under the frailness of a truce arising from secret negotiations initiated by the presidency of Mauricio Fúnes, continued by Sánchez Cerén and then Bukele in his first years. But the pacification, yet to reach its climax, would be as decisive as it was turbulent.

In March 2022, the country entered a state of war. A state of exception declared the mareros terrorists and enemies of the state. Incarcerations were massive, expeditious and unbureaucratic. The number of police and military personnel increased exponentially.

The public forces did not split. Months later, they prevailed. Streets, fields, and beaches under the oppressive rule of the maras became public spaces, liberated of this decades-long tyranny.

A newspaper article addresses the lack of homicides in official state figures for 700 consecutive days.

The citizenry backed its government as if it had won a war fought in their homes for their own survival. But just as strong was the international opposition during the process, with accusations of autocracy and human rights violations running rampant in global forums.

International questioning and public support

El Salvador received extra scrutiny from the international community and the press—both traditional and foreign-funded—compared to its neighbors, who follow the orthodoxy of the moment. The country was especially condemned for the imprisonment of more than 78,000 citizens in two years, according to the government of this country of 6 million people. 

“There are fewer homicides. But in return, you have the highest incarceration rate and the largest prison in the world. That’s violence too,” says Ross, author of articles on the subject in El Faro, a digital newspaper partially financed by the Open Society Foundation.

Bukele defends that by imprisoning the 1%, the 99% was freed, because El Salvador was a big prison for all. As a comparison, Hayat Tahrir al-Shan—HTS—the main insurgent group that took control of Syria at the end of 2024, totals 30,000 armed men, according to Al Jazeera. 

Others question the validity of the official figures. An article in Foreign Policy by Jeremy Giles of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government argues that Salvadoran homicide rates in 2023 are 45% higher if deaths from police confrontations, incarcerations, and mass graves found are counted. The total would be 4.5, not 2.4.

But Giles points out that the United States also does not count deaths from police crashes, and that the FBI’s figures—5.7 in 2023—do not include prison homicides either. He does not, however, offer the adjusted US total using the same yardstick.

Discord spreads doubt. However, it is the citizens who have the last word as sovereigns; in February 2024, 85% of the population’s vote elected the government for a second term. They thus legitimized the State’s monopoly on violence. And the government is able to proclaim the triumph of its peace process. 

“We were coming from a vicious cycle. There was no improvement in social and security issues after the civil war. We wanted to fix everything else without having fixed the base,” explains Tourism Minister Morena Valdéz. 

 “President Bukele told me: we don’t have oil, but we have waves. We need to figure out how to create development around them. And how that anchor will make others see us differently.”

Anchor of a Salvadoran fishing boat at La Ventana Beach, Chirilagua.