Lat/Am Daily » El Salvador

Martyr’s anniversary

Peter Krupa — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:27:08 +0000

Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of the assassination of El Salvadoran Bishop Óscar Romero by right-wing thugs. They shot him to death while he was saying mass. Tim’s El Salvador Blog has been doing a bang-up job during the last week or so blogging on the upcoming anniversary.

Of particular note is a recent post on a lengthy article published on ElFaro.net interviewing Álvaro Saravia, one of the very few people involved in Romero’s killing who is still alive. The article is kind of intense:

That’s how I was expecting to find one of the murders of Bishop Romero: Fat, tan, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Instead I found a gaunt old man, thin, with scarred and withered skin. His face was hidden behind a grizzled beard, and there was a rancid odor about him. He looked so small.

“And why do you want to talk now?

“For my children. Even they look at me like I’m Hitler.”

Álvaro Saravia denies being the trigger man and blames the son of a former president. Then for some reason, since the story was published on ElFaro.net, the site has been down. Huh. Tim was good enough to grab the content from the Google cache and drop it into a PDF. It’s 24 pages of good stuff.

Gang documentary wins award

Find something else to cry into

Peter Krupa — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:00:17 +0000

Now comes with less of what you bought it for.

Down near the bottom of the list of things you want during a recession is smaller beers with lower alcohol content. Unfortunately for Salvadoreans, that’s exactly what they’re getting, as domestic beer company Industrias La Constancia (ILC) reduces the size and punch of it’s beverages.

They say it’s supposed to “lower costs.” The Morenita, for example, has been cut down to 7.6 ounces and 4.4% alcohol. Too bad the price hasn’t been cut down as well. If I were a drinking man (which I am) and a resident of El Salvador (which I am not) I would be switching to liquor.

Two massacres

Two massacres

Peter Krupa — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:38:03 +0000

Scene of the crime (via La Prensa Gráfica)

Two massacres are unsettling a tenuous calm in El Salvador. The first took place about a week ago. A group of gunman wearing black ski masks and armed with an M-16, a 9mm handgun, and a .22 caliber handgun appeared at a swimming hole where about a dozen gang members were bathing. They opened fire, killing seven of them. President Funes insisted that the attack was an example of gang-on-gang violence.

But on Saturday, there was another massacre, in an area north of San Salvador. This time five gunmen wearing black ski masks entered a restaurant, with both M-16s and 9mm weapons. They separated out the men from the women, took them into a separate room, and checked them for tattoos (the sign of gang membership). When they found no tattoos, they said it didn’t matter, that someone had to die that night, and opened fire on the group.

Five were killed, six wounded.

While the police continue to blame the gangs, others are floating the theory that the massacres were incidents of social cleansing – that is, vigilante killings carried out by organized groups intended to eliminate mara members. Such vigilante groups are historically very dangerous and very hard to control.

Gang documentary wins award

Peter Krupa — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:06:59 +0000

The documentary film La Vida Loca, on El Salvador’s youth gangs, has won a critics award in France for best documentary film. The film’s director, Christian Poveda, was murdered last year while he was finishing the documentary. The government has made several arrests in connection with the crime, but no one has been convicted yet. There are a few clips from the documentary on YouTube. Here’s one with decent English subtitles.