El Salvador is squeezed onto the Pacific coast of the isthmus of Central America, between Guatemala and Honduras. It is a small but beautiful country which has suffered an enormous amount of political repression and violence. Civil war, between the rightwing military government and the leftwing FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), raged between 1980 and 1992. This period witnessed the government-sponsored assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and other crimes such as the mass murder of more than 1000 men, women, and children living in the village of El Mozote. In another notorious Central American adventure, the Reagan administration channelled large amounts of money and matériel to the government in order to support their fight against the insurgency. When I began working in El Salvador, in 2008, the civil war was of course long over, but the security situation was alarming. Today’s violence is largely related to the maras, El Salvador’s infamous transnational youth gangs. The year 2009 was one of the worst, with 4365 homicides (just under twelve per day) in the country. On my second trip there, I arrived on March 15, 2009, the day of the historic presidential elections which saw the FMLN, led by Mauricio Funes, voted into power. I drove from the airport with an ecstatic taxi driver, who gave me a blow-by-blow description of the day’s momentous events which had culminated in the election of the country’s first centre-left government.
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