Monday, March 17, 2014
Mar 17 - With nine murders a day so far this year, and widespread extortion by the street gangs bringing daily misery to ordinary working folks, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world and security is the biggest concern for many…
The other big concern for people is jobs. More than a third of households live below the poverty line and remittances from the US accounted for 17 percent of GDP in 2011.
Unemployment, low wages and stubbornly slow economic growth continue to drive migration to the US where around two million Salvadorans now live (compared to 6.3 million in El Salvador)…
No-one should underestimate the challenges facing this divided country, which is still struggling to deal with the traumas and mistrust from the civil war (A truth commission investigated some of the worst massacres of El Salvador's war, but the country's Congress passed an amnesty law in 1993 that has impeded the prosecution of alleged war crimes.)… so the biggest challenge for the new government is to reduce this polarisation.
