El Salvador Perspectives

A recent surge in the price of Bitcoin has increased the value of El Salvador's Bitcoin reserves and led president Nayib Bukele to say "I told you so."  The value of the country's  declared Bitcoin reserves is around $575 million.   At the same time, to obtain a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Bukele is being required to dismantle key parts of his Bitcoin law and cut back on government spending. The price of Bitcoin increased 50% after the election of Donald Trump to all time highs above $100,000 US.  Since Bitcoin hit $100,00 on December 4, Nayib Bukele has been regularly patting himself on the back on social media:   Despite the surge in the value of Bitcoin as an investment asset held by El Salvador in its reserves. the digital asset never caught on as the form for ordinary daily cash transactions in El Salvador.  One of the major skeptics of the designation of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador and Bukele's large investme...

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in which close to one thousand civilians were killed by a US-trained elite unit of El Salvador's army.  Most of the dead were children, women and the elderly. Of the documented victims, 553, or 57%, were under 18 years of age and 477 were 12 and under. This year's anniversary saw some different visitors to the massacre site : Representatives from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC) traveled to El Salvador this week to remember the victims of the largest single massacre of civilians in modern Latin American history and commemorate the Dec. 10 United Nations Human Rights Day. The ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)-led HRVWCC brings together criminal investigators, attorneys, intelligence analysts, criminal research specialists and historians from various sectors of the federal government to investigate global atrocities and pursue the perpetrato...

Seven years after El Salvador became the first country to ban metallic mining within its borders, especially gold mining, president Nayib Bukele is calling the prohibition "absurd."  The Salvadoran president took to social media with a post on X to proclaim that El Salvador needs to exploit gold deposits in the country (translated here to English):  GOD PLACED A GIGANTIC TREASURE UNDER OUR FEET: El Salvador potentially has the highest density gold deposits per km² in the world. Located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the richest areas in mineral resources thanks to its volcanic activity… Studies carried out in only 4% of the potential area identified 50 million ounces of gold, valued today at $131.6 billion. This is equivalent to 380% of El Salvador's GDP. The total potential could exceed $3 trillion, more than 8,800% of our Gross Domestic Product. Tapping into this wealth could transform El Salvador: Create thousands of quality jobs. Finance infrastructure throughou...

Twenty years ago today I wrote the first post on what was then called simply Tim's El Salvador Blog. This post will be number 3,300 over those twenty years.   The posts in those early years were not much longer than a tweet today.   A few sentences and a link to what someone else had written.   Today I do not write as frequently, but I try to delve into topics I write about more deeply. Throughout these 20 years, my goal in writing continues to be the same: to be a credible source of information about El Salvador for an English-speaking audience.   I hope that I have achieved that goal for some of you. If I have one bias when writing El Salvador Perspectives, it is to stand with the victims. That meant standing with the victims when they were being extorted and killed by gang members, but it also means telling the stories of the victims of a government who can arrest persons without cause and send them into hellish prisons without information to t...

November 16th is the 35th anniversary of the 1989 massacre by Salvadoran troops of six Jesuit priests and a female coworker and her daughter at the University of Central America. 35 years after the crime, a criminal prosecution is slowly moving forward in a Salvadoran courtroom. The case charges senior military leaders involved in the order to kill the Jesuits along with the former president Alfredo Cristiani, and Rodolfo Parker, a military lawyer who went on to be a prominent political figure. Both men fled the country in June 2021 when Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas party deposed the attorney general and magistrates of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Judicial Court and inserted Bukele allies in those roles.  Although various arrest warrants have been issued, Cristiani and Parker have never appeared in the case and have not returned to the country. They are being tried in absentia along with the various members of the military high command. Despite the notoriety of t...

Salvadoran population from last 6 national census tallies This year El Salvador conducted its first national census of the population since 2007.   Thousands of census takers  went door to door to compile a statistical picture of the country.    Several results pop out.  For one, the population is smaller than the recent estimates.   Prior to the 2024 census , the population was estimated by various sources to be between 6.3 and 6.5 million people.  The actual count by the new census is 6.029 million people.  In the 2007 census , the population was 5.744 million.  Thus the population grew by just 5% or 285,000 over the last 17 years.   The reasons the population could be lower than expected include lower birth rates in the country, higher mortality rates from violence and disease, and the impact of outward migration by persons seeking safety from violence or pursuing economic sustenance. 52.8% of the population is female a...

As the world now knows, Donald Trump will again be president of the United States after a major victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele tweeted his congratulations: What does the return of Trump to the White House portend for El Salvador? Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele   met Donald Trump   on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and famously called the American president "nice and cool."  Trump was pleased with Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration and sent multiple high level officials to meetings in the country.  Bukele assisted on migration despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") which protects 195,000 Salvadorans from removal, and despite Trump calling El Salvador ...