El Salvador

El Salvador, which is Spanish for The Savior, is a little country squeezed right between Honduras, Guatemala and the Pacific Ocean.

Once upon a time, the land was inhabited by Mayas and other Mesoamerican cultures you don’t hear too much about (like the Pipil and Lenca civilizations). When the Spanish came along, the tribes resisted the conquest a long time, but were eventually dominated by the 1530s.

The land was part of the General Captaincy of Guatemala until the Mexican Independence, when all the countries of Central America lost their status as Spanish dependencies and joined the new Mexican Empire. However, unlike his neighbors, El Salvador didn’t want to join The Empire, so they had to convince them… with military power… just in time for the other countries to decide not to join Mexico but to form their own federation. Oh well.

Since then, El Salvador has been a struggling country plagued with economical problems and military coups; their lands were fertile enough to attract the attention of the United Fruit Company (you know, the one who instigated most of the Banana Republics of the region.

In 1969, as a result of the political tensions originated by the United Fruit Company’s administration of the zone, El Salvador went to war with Honduras in The Football War, proving that The Beautiful Game is indeed a Serious Business (in any case, the football issue was just the trigger, the resentment had been piling up since way before that). The victory was to Honduras, who annexed the disputed land. The bad management of the war from the government’s part, coupled with all the problems in the country and the lack of support to the expatriates from Honduras led in 1980 to a civil war that only ended in 1992, but the turmoil still lingers today (to the point it’s considered the murder capital), so it was not very recommended to visit the country,though in the recent years, it has become more modernized and safer.

One curious (so to speak) detail about El Salvador is that it’s the only country in the region without an African population. This is because it has no coast on the Atlantic and the fact that a dictator in the 1930s issued race laws prohibiting the entry of Africans, Gypsies, Arabs, Asians and others to the country.

DJ Keoki was born in El Salvador. Other people with Salvadoran ancestry include the actress Anita Page and the model Christy Turlington.