Two pompous portraits of the presidential couple welcome visitors upon arrival at the airport in Central America’s smallest country, ruled for three years by a millennial (people born between approximately 1980 and 1999) with a worldwide reputation as a dictator-in-the-making . The visitor has set foot in a geography favored by a natural and fertile beauty and, at the same time, threatened by the telluric forces of its volcanoes.
He has arrived at a broken society, disenchanted by old promises broken by the top brass on duty, and shaped by the American dream after decades of mass migration towards a prosperity that war, corruption and poverty have insisted on denying in their own homeland. . The visitor lands in a republic formed in the tradition of searching by hospitable people: six and a half million citizens settled on a topography furrowed by mountains that hide volcanic lakes, forests that invite you to explore on foot, pre-Hispanic ruins, benevolent climates for rest contemplative or beaches with perfect waves for surfing. It has also reached the cradle of the popular pupusa, the national snack: a tortilla stuffed with meat or beans that is sold everywhere.
The tourist does not know if he arrived at “the best country in the world”, as the hyperbolic Garcia Marquez described this wounded country, who wrote that “Salvadorans drink joy and bitterness from the same glass”. But he does know –impossible to ignore such a hackneyed cliche– that he has arrived in the country of the salvatrucha gangs, the feared and unfortunately famous multi-crime gangs.
El Salvador has suffered the scourge of gang members for three decades, a social group that wears baggy clothes, makes defiant signs and sports tattoos.
El Salvador has suffered for three decades from the scourge of gang members, those icons of the lumpen (a social group made up of socially marginalized individuals) who wear baggy clothes, wave their fingers defiantly and sport head-to-leg tattoos.
“There are tourists who come thinking they will find a gang member with an M-16 rifle on every corner, they tell me they want to see them and take pictures of them,” says the annoyed tourist businessman Alberto Marroquin.
Gang violence has dramatically impacted the development of the country, which once had the highest murder rates in the world: 71 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009 and 103 in 2015. The United Nations Infosegura Program reported that the rate it dropped to 35 homicides in 2019, after 50 per 100,000 people in 2018. The figure for 2021 was 19 murders. Despite the downward curve, El Salvador continues to carry the stigma of a dangerous country.
“Some clients tell me that before coming their friends told them: ‘You’re crazy for wanting to travel there. They are going to kidnap you, they are going to kill you’. But it is false, because as a tourist you can travel the country in an absolutely safe way”, says Marroquin.
When contrasting the recent flows of foreign tourists – more than 1,700,000 in 2019 and one million only in the first half of 2022, according to government data – with moments of extremely high insecurity, such as between 2008 and 2009, when the arrival of visitors fell 26% from one year to the next, it is obvious that violence is ceasing to be a destabilizing factor for the tourism industry.
To trace the violent legacy of El Salvador, we must refer to the failed modernization processes that, between the 1970s and the 2030s, led to the establishment of authoritarian regimes, to the accumulation of power in the hands of a few groups and successive crises that led to a civil war that claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people. All this was followed by some peace agreements signed in 1992. In the postwar period, two parties governed, until Nayib Bukele came to power, whose citizen approval, which is around 80%, is based on the fight against gangs.
The Global Peace Index (IGP) indicates that, in terms of state measures to curb violence, the costs of insecurity and homicidal crime represent at least 19% of the Salvadoran Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
A nourished itinerary
In a pupuseria in Ahuachapan, after spending the afternoon in a hot springs complex near this peaceful city located 100 kilometers from San Salvador, Adriana Sanchez, a Colombian biologist who arrived as a tourist, opens Google Maps to see her next route: the Santa Ana Volcano, the highest in the country. She is fascinated that a territory so modest in size has a bit of everything: mangroves, protected areas, lagoons. “In one day you can go from one extreme to another and see several places.”
This country, the size of Badajoz, can be crossed in a few hours: have breakfast in one of the five towns on the Ruta de las Flores and watch the sunset in the Gulf of Fonseca. And if days are added, the trip only gets better. A one-week tour could start, for example, on the beaches of La Libertad, a 45-minute drive from the capital, and continue west to Los Cobanos, a protected marine ecosystem that houses the second largest coral reef in the world. American Pacific and is a refuge for humpback whales. The next stop could be colonial Suchitoto, a town whose aesthetic splendor dates back to the indigo boom, the country’s main source of foreign currency before the rise of the coffee industry, and long before the injection of capital through family remittances that They come mainly from the United States.
To close the trip, it is worth exploring a couple of ecotourism experiences. Although it is still in its infancy in El Salvador, there are interesting options in Jiquilisco Bay, in El Imposible Park or in the surroundings of El Pital hill, the highest point in the country.
The Pital Ecolodge does not have Wi-Fi. In exchange, it offers connection with nature, a cool climate, privileged views and silence to reduce the noise of the city mind. With this hotel surrounded by forests and water sources, its owners propose a conscious balance between tourism and environmental protection.
At the other end of the country, on El Cocal beach, Mandala Eco Villas is also serious about sustainable tourism. Built with reusable materials and natural fibers, this ecological resort is based on permaculture, a sustainable and conscious agriculture system. It has organic crops of herbs, pumpkins and mushrooms.
We go to the beach
One Friday, after training in the sea all afternoon, a group of surfers chat animatedly next to a pool at a hostel in El Zonte, a beach with world-class waves. In the last year, the Zonte has tried to position itself as the Salvadoran capital of cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin Beach, where the movement began to take shape.
In El Zonte you can buy from a pupusa to a property, going through a night in a hotel or the electricity bill. “A friend sold her land next to the beach, which cost $180,000, and they paid her in bitcoins,” says a local surfer with a beer in her hand. The printed symbol of this virtual currency is in parades, restaurants, street stalls or garbage cans. However, merchants consulted by the local press have said that tourists prefer to pay with cash or card.
Every morning, David Torres consults the speed and size of the waves that await him in an app. He started surfing 15 years ago. “I was afraid of the sea, but one day my father, who is blind, told me that one of his dreams had been to surf. So I told him that I would do it for him. Soon after I bought a board and started”.
David runs the “Surftismo” program (surfing for children with autism) and founded the “Olas y sonrisas” project, to teach surfing to children who have suffered abuse. “We teach them that gangs are no longer an option, but that they can opt for a sport like this.” Torres witnesses the peaceful development of La Libertad in recent years. “Tourism has helped a lot to generate employment. Security has improved. It is already difficult to see gang members. What the government has done for these beaches is good”.
The Mayan past of the ‘Thumbnail of America’
Cuscatlan was the original name of El Salvador. In the fifth century, a tragedy split its history in two. A volcanic eruption destroyed a Mayan town located in the center of the territory. It is estimated that almost one million dead and the disappearance of an entire culture. During the centuries of repopulation, there was a multicultural heyday of enormous significance for Mesoamerica. From that golden age comes the tradition of ceramics, so important in El Salvador, and Mayan sites such as Cihuatan and the ruins of Tazumal. The vestiges of Joya de Ceren, on the other hand, date from before the explosion of the volcano.
“El Salvador is full of archaeological sites, there are many ceremonial nuclei, but most of them have been devastated by urbanization,” says Carlos Flores, a Salvadoran archaeologist who is pursuing his doctorate at Yale University, and who advocates that the archaeological and sustainable tourism mesh. “There are many vestiges that do not have the conditions to receive tourists, but circuits can be created and stories that have not been told about our past can be told.”
A mural at the entrance to the National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador sums up, in a tragic and colorful way, the social history of the “Thumbnail of America”, as the poet Alfonsina Storni called this country. Among the figures of indigenous people, colonizers, peasants, priests, soldiers and politicians painted by the artist Antonio Bonilla, is that of Roque Dalton, murdered by his own guerrilla comrades in 1975, and author of this verse about his homeland: “Who Are you, populated by masters, like the dog that scratches itself next to the same trees that pisses?
In the main square of San Salvador, Erick Calderon waits for a couple of tourists to guide them through the historic center of the city. Since he was a child, violence had haunted him: friends shot, a brother murdered. Calderon knows what it’s like to live in a neighborhood where gang law rules. That is why he celebrates the reduction in insecurity and the change that the center has had.
“The old town was a total mess, unsafe and dirty. With more police presence and recent renovations, the change is evident, now the tourist can feel calmer”, says Erick, whose tours include, among other places, a unique church with modernist architecture full of stained glass windows, the National Theater; the crypt of Monsignor Romero, killed while officiating mass in 1980; and La Dalia, a former dance club and now a gathering place for hipsters and pool players.
