El Salvador
Spring 2016 | Volume XV, Number 3
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
First Take
First Take: Twenty-Four Years Later
English + Español
It was midnight in Mexico, New Year’s Eve, 1991. Friends gathered in our home together with my family, marking the beginning of another year of exile from El Salvador. Shortly after midnight, the…
Public Policy, Public Politics
Beyond Polarization in 21st-century El Salvador
My father was a civil engineer who worked for the government during the civil war years. He specialized in roads and had to spend several days a month traveling to remote places in El Salvador. I was 10 in 1986, and I remember my mom asking my dad…
The Salvadoran Right Since 2009
English + Español
In 2009, as the FMLN celebrated its long-awaited first foray into the Casa Presidencial, El Salvador’s largest conservative party—the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana…
Beyond the Political Pendulum
In 1994, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa asked David Escobar Galindo what he thought was the most transcendental change in El Salvador between the elections held before the peace…
El Salvador’s Future
In 2005, I met María Chicas. The gaze of this young woman reflected the harshness of her life in Torola, one of the poorest municipalities of Morazán. For…
Perspectives
Indigenous Rights in El Salvador
English + Español
The story I will tell you here is of a remarkable woman, the last in a centuries-long line of Maya-Lenca matriarchs and a living conduit of ancient traditions brought into the modern world. It is…
Zika and Abortion
That was the essence of the recommendation the Ministry of Health in El Salvador made on January 21…
Postwar Kids
It’s not a good time to have great hopes for Salvadoran politics, especially if you are a young Salvadoran. As I write this, in mid-February, the country is still debating the legacy of former…
Art and Action
Roque Dalton
James Iffland is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Boston University. He is currently at work on a book on Roque Dalton. He was the 2005-2006 Central American Visiting Scholar at DRCLAS…
Reimagining the Future
My parents tell me how lucky I was to be born in a hospital. It was late November of 1989 amidst the “final offensive”—one of the last but more gruesome clashes…
Performing El Salvador
On March 9, 2014, Crack Rodríguez walked into a ballot station, penned his vote on a voting card, tore it in half, deposited one half into the ballot box and then…
The Past in the Present
Photojournalists in a Cauldron of Violence
His voice cracked and he fidgeted as he recounted the incident. He had raced out of his newspaper office to make photographs of yet another cadaver in the street. That’s part of his job…
A Nation at War with Itself
In January 1981 the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador headed by Robert White sent an urgent cable to the Department of State in Washington. The memo, labeled SECRET, alleged that the death…
Transitional Justice in El Salvador
On a warm morning in January 2016, in a small town far from the capital in El Salvador’s northern Morazan province, just off the shady central square, an extraordinary hearing is unfolding in a…
A Search for Justice in El Salvador
In the small rural town of Arcatao, Chalatenango, Rosa Rivera clung to the hope that one day she would find the remains of her disappeared mother and father and lay them to rest in peace…
Salvadoran Refugees in the Camp at Colomoncagua, Honduras, 1980-1991
In 1980 and 1981, more than 35,000 refugees fled from Salvadoran military actions into Honduras. In the mountainous northern part of Morazán department…
The Convulsions of War
The impact of the 1980-1992 war in El Salvador is as profound as the Civil War’s impact on the United States…
Remembering Romero
The Boy in the Photo
The mangy dogs strolled everywhere along the railroad track. I remembered dogs just like them from the long-ago day in La Chacra in 1979 with Archbishop Óscar Romero, just months before he was killed…
Remembering Romero
English + Español
As the meeting was ending, Romero—who hadn’t yet been installed — was asked if he’d like to say a few words. For all Schindler knew, they…
San Romero de América
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador—María Isabel Delario is crying. Her body is bent, her face buried in her arms, her hands rest on the metal cast depicting the face of a murdered archbishop, a man…
The Diaspora
Entre el Amor y la Distancia
I’m a first -generation child of immigrants, dealing with the complexities of familial love and the effects the Latin American diaspora has had on this love…
Santos y Sombras/Saints and Shadows
I come from peoples in exile. I became an adult with an extreme sensitivity to the irreconcilable…
A Personal View from the Diaspora
In 1992 the Chapultepec Peace Accords ended El Salvador’s brutal 12-year civil war. The government granted amnesty to all parties, protecting war criminal…
The Migrant Architecture of El Salvador
In the summer of 2015 I traveled to the city of San Salvador to meet photographer Walterio Iraheta. After publishing my book on the remittance…
The Legacy of War
Miguel was six years old when he was forced to witness the execution of his first-grade teacher for participating in a teachers’ strike. “What I remember is that the…
Beating Stereotypes
About one out of every ten Hispanics in the Boston metropolitan area is Salvadoran, according to the 2010 American Community Survey. Yet little is…
Book Talk
Guerras recicladas: Una historia periodística del paramilitarismo en Colombia
Guerras Recicladas is not just “a journalistic history of paramilitarism in Colombia,” as the subtitle describes it. It is also a very insightful book, and a key to understanding our own country…
Reflections on Memory and Democracy
Memory is tricky business. So is democracy. Both are invariably challenged and contested from within and from without. The struggle against the manipulation of…
State Building in Latin America
Hillel Soifer’s powerful new book proposes a solid and original theory of state-building in Latin America. In recent years the study of how states formed and…