El Salvador

The smallest and most densely populated mainland American country, whose civil war was fought over land held by a very few families. Coffee cultivation from the 1870s required the abolition of communal indigenous landholding, which was done by decree, concentrating ownership in a small oligarchy remembered as the fourteen families. A peasant rising in 1932 was answered with La Matanza, in which the army killed perhaps ten to thirty thousand people, mostly Pipil, and effectively ended indigenous public identity in the country. Military governments ran the state for the next fifty years. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had asked American soldiers to disobey orders to kill, was shot while saying mass in March 1980, and the civil war between the government and the FMLN killed around seventy-five thousand people over twelve years, with American funding and a death-squad campaign; the massacre at El Mozote killed around a thousand villagers in 1981. Peace accords in 1992 turned the FMLN into a political party. Gangs formed among deportees from Los Angeles then made the country among the most violent on earth, until a mass-incarceration crackdown from 2022 cut homicides sharply while suspending civil liberties. It adopted the dollar in 2001 and bitcoin as legal tender in 2021. The country has about 6.3 million people in twenty-one thousand square kilometres. It is the only Central American state without a Caribbean coast. Joya de Ceren, a village buried by ash around 600 CE, is a World Heritage site and preserves everyday life in unusual detail. Around a fifth of Salvadorans live in the United States. Remittances are close to a quarter of national income.

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