This is the fourth in a series of articles on El Salvador by Honduran writer Gustavo Peña Flores.

The son of the land. Watercolor inspired by life in the upper El Palmar basin.

Upstream from Chepe Aleta, following the winding road alongside the river that ends at El Palmarcito, after crossing what Yovani Hernández Ramírez calls the “Puentes de Plata y de Oro” (Silver and Gold Bridges), you arrive at the hamlet of Acahuaspán. It is a cooperative that has owned the Upper Palmar Basin since the 1980s Agrarian Reform, which sought to alleviate the lack of access to land ownership that ultimately led to the civil war. 

Upper El Palmar basin.

Yovani named the bridges between Chepe Aleta’s restaurant and his house—a fifteen-minute motorbike ride away—given how long it took for the government to build them. There is a third bridge at the top, between the milpas of “El Cabro” and the “Piedra Campana”, which he calls the “Puente de Piedra” (Stone Bridge). But the “Puente de Piedra” was crossed centuries before Spanish was even spoken in these lands.

Stone carved in pre-Columbian times.

Today, the milpas that grow in the Palmar Canyon are the living heritage of the Corn People. The peasants of Acahuaspan are, to a large extent, genetic and cultural descendants of the Mesoamerican people, who domesticated this grain and so many other valuable plants, such as tomatoes, avocados and loroco. Their tradition is a bastion of agro-ecosystems.

Genetically diverse, high-quality organic corn stored during the dry season for annual planting in a family milpa.

It is the legacy of more than 10,000 years of human life on the land. The opposite of the premise with which García Márquez opens One Hundred Years of Solitude: “The world was so recent that many things lacked a name, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” They are the people who safeguard names for life and matter in the world we now know as El Salvador.  

“The milpa is an ancient key to human civilized life. A diversified agriculture with knowledge of the soil, the climactic calendar throughout the year and the relationship of the plants to each other. It produces a myriad of high-quality foods. Not only maize, beans and zucchini, but so many plants for the ‘con-qué’ (filling) of pupusas,” says anthropologist Mario Ardón.

“In El Salvador, pupusa [originally a fast-food for travel] is the synthesis of the milpa. It is a corn pancake stuffed with beans, flowers or herbs from this agro-ecosystem,” explains Ardón, a native of the Honduran side of the tri-border with El Salvador and Guatemala. Today, meat and dairy products brought in from abroad, from the first centuries of European maritime expansion, are added to the filling.

Yovani Ramirez’s father eats a pupusa with squash filling for dinner.

For five decades, Ardón has studied the peasant culture of Central America—inherited from the pre-Columbian era and the Mediterranean influence  —Latin, Sephardic and Arabic—, after contact with the Spanish Empire. This history is recorded today from La Cueva del Gigante—a 10,000-year-old habitational site with maize, pumpkin and avocado remains in the Honduran mountains some ten miles from El Salvador. 

Sunset over the Giant’s Cave, La Estanzuela, La Paz, Honduras.

“Few regions have contributed as many plants to the world’s diet as Mesoamerica. And there is still richness in the milpa that modern society is unaware of. The izote flower, loroco, hierba mora, purslane, chipilín, jucama, spontaneously generated plants… And the trees!” he says.

“It is an agro-ecosystem as opposed to monoculture. It feeds the soil and produces a varied local diet,” Ardón explains about this cultural remnant devalued in our times.

 Corn people in the times of Surf City

The peasant tradition of the Costa del Balsamo—Balm Coast—despite its erosion, is the living and authentic cultural offer that can provide depth to Surf City—even if Salvadoran society does not know this about itself. Those who make their living from the milpas today are the most invisible and marginalized.

Acahuaspan is just a twenty-minute drive away from waves like El Zonte or El Zunzal.

But they are also people recently liberated from violence. Yovani Hernández Ramírez’s life was shattered at the age of 18. The Salvatrucha gunned down two of his brothers, Santos and José Antonio, twenty-three and twenty-five at the time. They were left lying before the Puente de Oro, on the main street, alive, but left for dead. He was next.

Yovani, in a rage, wanted to join the opposing gang to take revenge. But in 2010, his family made a decision. When his brothers were healed, months later, as in pre-Columbian times, they set out on a Mesoamerican exodus to Belize, in search of peace.

His parents and several of the thirteen siblings gradually left to find the eldest, who today works in Bermuda after becoming a Belizean, and thus Commonwealth, citizen. Yovani spent eleven years in exile. His anger evaporated as he learned to build palm-roofed huts facing a different ocean. During that time, an infinite flow of water crossed under the bridges leading to Acahuaspán. 

Interior of a Garifuna palm-roofed hut, typical of the Central American Caribbean.

Beginning in 2021, events aligned for Yovani, then thirty, to return to the land of his elders. His father, Don Ventura, became ill with prostate disease and returned to El Salvador for medical attention. His daughter, Dora Alicia, and granddaughter, Jocelyn, born in Belize, would live with him in El Salvador. Yovani’s mother, Doña Teresa de Jesús, was left behind, with four of her children raising their families there. The elders said goodbye. 

Dora Alicia, Jocelyn y Ventura Hernández en la puerta de su casa, en Acahuaspán. Dora Alicia, Jocelyn, and Ventura Hernández at the door of their home in Acahuaspán.

Devotion to his father reconciled Yovani with Acahuaspán. It was another rupture in his life, but a welcome one. His father was his childhood hero; he remembers the days when, alongside his brothers, he’d carry old truck tires up the steep slopes of the Palmar Canyon to dump them and watch them roll. His father taught him that peasant life was arduous, but fascinating, an eternal cycle of seasonal labor.

Yovani Hernández finds his home in the El Palmar Basin of the Balm Coast of El Salvador.

Like the Rains in May

Back in Belize, Yovany abandoned a palm-roofed house with no one to give it to. And in Acahuaspán, relatives and neighbors appropriated the lot that belonged to Don Ventura. “Abandonment,” they alleged. “The discord and dysfunction of the cooperatives was common due to a lack of mentality as owners. The design of the reform was terrible because of its ownership structure,” explains Salvadoran historian Adolfo Bonilla.

“The 1980 Agrarian Reform designed by the Jesuits made only the father of the family a member of the cooperative, his eldest son, and his wife, when widowed. It condemned the rest of the children to be salaried employees of the cooperative, which continued the legendary inequality,”  says this historian.

Dora Alicia Hernández, daughter of Ventura Hernández, who cares for him in his old age, prepares to leave for worship.

The Hernandez family turned to the Salvatrucha as an intermediary for their problem. As painful as it was to turn to their tormentors, they were the realm’s lords. With remittances sent by a sister in Atlanta, Georgia, they paid for the intervention of the current “feudal lord.” This consisted of “sending word” that Don Ventura’s land was to be respected. And nothing more.

Interior of Hernández family home in Acahuaspán.

Once he had land, Yovani built the only new palm-roofed house in Acahuaspán. He built it in front of the river, in the wake of a hundred-year-old Conacaste tree, where the breeze that whispers through the riverbed moves the palm tips and ushers in the coolness of the canyon’s inner peaks. He made the floor with wood from a Conacaste, like the doors of El Zonte’s famous Puro Surf  Hotel.

They called him crazy. Neighbors roof with imported sheeting, which, although much hotter in the merciless Salvadoran sun, is cheap and provides a sense of modernity—part of the current identity crisis and cultural erosion due to a sense of defeat. 

Yovani de pie sobre madera de Conacaste.

But in 2022, time changed for everyone when the state of emergency set in. The end of the maras arrived longingly in Acahuaspán, like the May rains that put an end to the Central American drought season. It has been three years since a gang member crossed the bench where Ventura Hernández sits during daylight hours. At 94—he believes—his life is a dialogue with what happens between his bench and the small river of his biography. These are his memories.

But in 2022, time changed for everyone when the state of emergency set in.

Don Ventura was born in this basin, upstream, long before the maras and the civil conflict. He dedicated his life to this land, with no ownership papers claiming it. And he is still here, after the violence’s end. For Yovani, civil peace lets him press against the inevitable tide of progress, a faithful guardian to his tradition. His madness is to evade cultural extinction. It is not profitable. But he manages to make Don Ventura smile.

Today, he takes masonry jobs as they become available in Surf City, while making a name for himself as a palm-roof master. He pays a cousin to plant a milpa with him up the hill in a site called Miramar (Oceanview). His crops can’t compete with the price of imported corn that is subsidized to sell to the urban majorities. But it’s not about that. It’s about giving life to the milpa and making sense of it.

Yovani, wearing a white shirt, supervises the beams on which the wooden floor of a ranch he is building in El Zonte will be nailed.

The Stone Bridge

On his days off, Yovani climbs alongside the basin’s river, the book of his family’s history. The first stop is the Agua Zarca (light-blue water) pool, near the place where his father was born. It is called the Ojushtal, named after the trees that bear chestnuts, a delicacy in times of famine. 

Going up the basin’s river

Then he stops at a cavity carved into the massive “talpetate,” or bedrock. A spring is born there. He collects “un tambito”, or gallon of water, which he carries on his back to his house, for his family.

Spring carved into the bedrock.

“That water you drink from a canister is useless. It’s dead,” Yovani reasons. As he climbs up the ridge, he names trees and countrymen, telling their stories, until he reaches the Miramar milpas.

Bagged water for sale being transported on the Balm Coast road.

As its name suggests, from this vantage point, the Pacific Ocean is vast. It serves as a backdrop to the raw stone ridges, like watchtowers, which separate the canyon basins from each other. The latter provide the edged stones from which waves are formed and break to the right.

On the top, there are plenty of mounds and stray pieces of obsidian, clay and stone, worked by people from another era, speakers of olden languages. Today, they lie worthless in the milpas as part of a past that flows into oblivion. Except for the dreaded “piedras de rayo”, obsidian axes, like prehistoric Acheulean bifaces, which are set aside in dread because they are presumed to have come from the sky.

Walking from Miramar and El Cabro toward the ocean, you cross the Puente de Piedra (Stone Bridge). This is a “talpetate”, or bedrock neck with vertical drops on both sides that opens into a narrow, flat tongue. There, an impossibly balanced boulder awaits its moment to fall—the Piedra Campana (bell boulder). You can see everything from the top. From the waves of El Zonte and El Sunzal, all the way to the proud mountaintop.

View of the Pacific after crossing the Stone Bridge.

 Symbolic appropriation of the territory

“The Balm Coast was named after the Spanish conquest because of the abundance of these medicinal trees which were harvested there. However, its period of greatest occupation was during the early Mesoamerican Postclassic period—from 800 to 1,200 AD—by Nahua-Pipil groups migrating from the Mexican highlands,” explains archaeologist Marlon Escamilla.

“There is a very high density of archaeological sites for this period all along the Balm Coast. It is a geographically defensive zone. Militarily strategic. With 360-degree visual control. But it also offers a symbolic appropriation of the territory,” says this Salvadoran archaeologist who received his PhD from Vanderbilt University with a thesis specializing in the subject.   

His fieldwork determined that all the sites look toward the summit at 5,000 feet above sea level, which is the highest point of the remnant of the Jayaque Volcano. The sites also look toward the ocean.

“The Nahua have their myth of origin in the deserts on the border between Mexico and the United States. That is why water was sacred to them. The Pipils migrated to present-day El Salvador in 800 AD and spoke Nahuatl with t and not tl at the end. By the time they arrived, the Classic Maya had collapsed as a civilization. We don’t know who they were defending themselves against,” says Escamilla.

In any case, “the Pipil Nahua sought a symbolic appropriation of the landscape, to make it their own. Because of their worldview, they sought the hill’s high parts to perform rituals in veneration of Tlaloc—the post-classical deity associated with water. Rain. They had the concept of Altepetl—in Nahuatl, a mountain of water. Here, they found it,” says Escamilla.

Like the Pipils, the twenty-first century Bukele administration symbolically appropriated this rocky coastline, and the small, moving mountains of salt water that impact with perfect shape against it. It is their show to the world of a pacified country of their own. It is a state.

Keyring with Nayib Bukele’s image, kept in a special place in their home by the Hernández family from Acahuaspan.

So close to the sun—gravity and sovereignty

Six years have elapsed since the famous swap that the first Trump administration offered to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, in exchange for declaring themselves safe countries to third-country migrants. Back then, these poor, eviscerated nations were the main source of migrant caravans.

Many voices in the region argue how well El Salvador played its cards; it achieved the unthinkable. The first step was easing off the list of dangerous countries to host the World Surf League. The Balm Coast—Surf City 1—served as its vehicle. Today, a Hispanic American country, once thought to be lost, exercises what Max Weber considers the state’s vital function: a legitimate monopoly of force.

Taking stock, the following  chapter  will address what many others see as Bukele’s negative attributes, specifically as they relate to the rule of law and the Salvadoran prison system. But what he has achieved is of such significance that its discussion throughout Spanish America—a region beset by the twin problems of violence and mismanagement, both considered intractable—is not to be dismissed or overlooked.

 In his country, Bukele stopped what historian Rafe Blaufarb calls “The Western Question”: the Spanish-American independences lead to weak, chaotic and malleable nations to this day. And he did so in the smallest Spanish-speaking republic in the Americas, and the world (recall that Puerto Rico which is smaller, is a US protectorate).

Sunrise behind the cliffs east of El Zonte.

 This is the president’s symbolic power in the face of a cultural bloc under bicentennial turmoil.

In it, extinguishing the evils of anarchy takes priority over addressing the significant lag in its political evolution.

 The challenge facing the republican government remains similar to the circumstances before the Spanish imperial collapse: the leap from despotism to self-government, with checks and balances and Congress at its center. In this sense, the indefinite reelection approved on the eve of El Salvador’s August festivities does not guarantee political transition. It only buys time for teams to form, reforms to be implemented, and relays to be carried out, at the high risk of creating a mold that allows a power cluster without checks and balances to perpetuate itself, under this ruler, or any successor.

 But the separation of powers is also mocked when those who seek elective office serve permanent economic powers that are not subject to any control—liberal democracy’s Achilles heel. Those who pay for campaigns,  get to choose the laws. The one-dimensional arguments of the propaganda war’s Manicheism do not offer political maturity, nor good results for the majority.

 Fire, teams, and relays

In any case, institutional peace and prosperity that outlives the caudillo—chieftain—is the political challenge for the region. “The night is high and Morazán watches / Is it today, yesterday, tomorrow? You know.” Thus begins Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s ode to Francisco Morazán. His words honor the Honduran military leader, buried at his own request in San Salvador, a man who served as the last president of the Federal Republic of Central America. There, darkness negotiated a bicentennial residence, dressed as Enlightenment.

“From the beginning, Hernán Cortés writes in his second relation: I will make His Majesty—Charles V of Germany, I of Spain—emperor of these lands with as much honor as he is of Germany, which he already possesses in his Holy Roman Empire. This resonates throughout his lineage until Charles III, who dismantles everything under French influence,” says Anthony Pagden, an English historian and author of Peoples and Empires, who grew up in Neruda’s country and interests himself in the era of darkness following the collapse of the Spanish Empire.

 The independence leaders were “Frenchified.” This is evidenced in a dialogue imagined by Honduran José Cecilio del Valle. In it, Charles V—the par excellence Spanish emperor—rebukes his Bourbon successor Charles III, the “enlightened despot”: “But by enlightening the Spanish, will they not know their rights? By spreading enlightenment in the Old World, will they not move on to the New? By aiding the insurrection of the English colonies, will they not prepare for that of the Spanish? You have forgotten the secret of kings.”

 In Spanish America, the republican paradigm is not the one conceived in the humanist revolution which burst to life on Market Street, Philadelphia, by craft and effort of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and company—a team. It is the paradigm of Napoleon, imposed by force of fire in France, then setting Spain and its empire ablaze.

Fire for a grill in Acahuaspán.

The secret of modern republics’ founders, as the greatest thinker of Central American independence, the Honduran José Cecilio del Valle learned late in life, is to form teams of thinkers, technocrats, and citizens, to whom to bequeath a framework and political project based on self-government. To transcend, El Salvador needs to make the transition from pacification to institutional peace, the transfer of power from the leader to the state. It needs to raise successors.

“That was Napoleon’s problem. When he took power, France was lawless. In anarchy. He installed military justice. The people of France loved him for that. But he was very good at moving from violent repression of anarchy to institutionalizing law and order by leaving martial law behind. He created a system of courts and the Napoleonic code,” says historian Rafe Blaufarb.

“My glory is not having won forty battles; Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. What nothing will erase, what will live on forever, is my Civil Code,” said the greatest military leader in modern European history, born in rugged Corsica, like the paternal ancestors of Francisco Morazán, the last president of this troubled Federal Republic, a corrugated Central America.

Noise

Today, however insignificant it may seem in the face of the great achievements of Western civilization, in a world of unjust and amoral international relations, Bukele negotiated a marketing loophole through which to escape the stigmas of a violent nation. And he backed it up with decisive political action.

He further neutralized transnational criminal gangs that, following the Clinton administration’s mass deportations in 1994, usurped power from the inert Central American states. Regional dynamics did not change. What changed was El Salvador. Its strategy did not come from the outside. The failure of other regional proposals to provide essential citizen security contrast darkly with the Salvadoran success.

It was hard. But in 2025, El Salvador is both a world-renowned surfing destination and the safest country—with the most popularly supported government—in continental America. Many from a generation that grew up in crime and neglect, without proper upbringing, are now in prison, so that a new generation, innocent of the past and no part of it, can grow up without violence. And since history, even if it does not repeat itself, more than often rhymes, this year witnesses another transaction between the same actors, which opens a new verse to this song—the lyrics are not yet known.

But we do know the noise that surrounds it—the rumble of a global era change. There are rumblings—like stones sculpted by the currents, crashing against each other beneath the waves—of a US policy toward the Western Hemisphere that forcibly evokes “America for Americans”. This prompts the open-ended, and perhaps naïve, question: who are Americans?

And even more acutely, the domestic squabbling between the politico-cultural factions of this twenty-first century version of the United States grates; to outsiders, this sounds cynical, dangerous and unengaging. In the midst of the digital age, grievances—and insults—are exchanged in seeming disregard of the media’s reach, or the erosion of its reputation and legitimacy as a center of global power.

In tiny Central America, so contiguous to that ultimate power core, geopolitical gravity squeezes sovereignties. And El Salvador needs to be given, or allowed to embody, a development boom that creates middle-class layers with its socio-economic outcasts, in order to stabilize its pacification. It may be like asking for mangoes from an oak tree. It is asking a system in decline to offer what it never gave before.

Surf City could have inadvertently left things on the threshold for the historical and cultural rescue of El Salvador and Central America.