El Salvador

• 1. Introduction

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  El Salvador sits at the western edge of Central America, the smallest and most densely packed country on the continental mainland, a place its own people call Pulgarcito de America, the Tom Thumb of the Americas. It covers just 21,041 square kilometres, yet it holds more than six million people, more volcanoes than almost any of its neighbours, and a history layered so deeply that megafauna bones rest beneath the same volcanic soil that once buried entire Maya cities. How does a country this size accumulate so much? How does a place that declared independence from Spain in 1821 end up cycling through coups, a coffee oligarchy, a savage civil war, and a bitcoin experiment all within two centuries? And what do you do with a leader who wins re-election with 84% of the vote in a constitution that formally banned consecutive terms? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Before the Spanish Arrived

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  During the Pleistocene, the territory that would become El Salvador was roamed by an elephant-sized ground sloth called Eremotherium, alongside a rhinoceros-like creature known as Mixotoxodon, a gomphothere named Cuvieronius, and a native horse, Equus conversidens. All of them are now extinct. Fluted stone points found in western El Salvador suggest humans arrived during the Paleoindian period, though the archaeological record is frustratingly thin. Volcanic eruptions have buried countless sites, and the country's sheer population density leaves little room for excavation.

  Chalchuapa, in western El Salvador, was first settled around 1200 BC and grew into a major urban centre on the edge of Maya civilisation during the Preclassic Period, trading ceramics, obsidian, cacao, and hematite. Around the year 430 AD, a volcanic eruption heavily damaged the settlement and it never fully recovered. Cara Sucia, further west, had a different arc: a small settlement dating to around 800 BC, it rose to become a major urban place during the Late Classic period between 600 and 900 AD, only to be abruptly destroyed in the 10th century.

  The Pipil people, Nahua-speaking groups who migrated from Anahuac beginning around 800 AD, were the last indigenous group to arrive. They named their territory Kuskatan, a Nawat word meaning "The Place of Precious Jewels," which was back-formed into Classical Nahuatl as Cuzcatlan. It was the largest domain in Salvadoran territory at the time of European contact. The term Cuzcatleco is still used today to identify someone of Salvadoran heritage. In the east, the Lenca site of Quelepa stood as a major cultural centre with demonstrable links to the Maya site of Copan in western Honduras.

• 3. Conquest and Resistance

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  On the 31st of May 1522, the Spanish admiral Andrés Niño became the first known European to enter what is now Salvadoran territory, disembarking at Meanguera island in the Gulf of Fonseca and naming it Petronila. By that point, smallpox had already devastated the broader Mesoamerican population, though it had not yet reached pandemic levels in Cuzcatlan.

  In June 1524, Pedro de Alvarado, fresh from the conquest of the Aztec Empire, crossed the Rio Paz southward into Cuzcatlec territory. He arrived expecting the same swift result he had seen in Mexico and Guatemala. He was wrong. The Cuzcatlec warriors had evacuated their civilians and moved to the coastal city of Acajutla, where they waited. Alvarado described their soldiers as carrying shields decorated with colourful exotic feathers and wearing a cotton armour three inches thick that arrows could not penetrate. Both sides took heavy casualties. A wounded Alvarado sent Spanish horsemen forward, expecting the sight of the animals to scatter the enemy. The Cuzcatlec did not retreat. They attacked again and captured Spanish weapons. When Alvarado sent messengers demanding their return and the surrender of the Cuzcatlec king, the response was direct: "If you want your weapons, come get them." The messengers sent after that were never seen again.

  Alvarado eventually handed command to his brother Gonzalo and withdrew. Two subsequent expeditions, in 1525 and 1528, finally brought the Pipil under Spanish control, aided partly by a regional smallpox epidemic. The Spanish could not reach eastern El Salvador at all. In 1526, Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, nephew of Pedro, founded the garrison town of San Miguel in Lenca territory, but a Maya-Lenca crown princess named Antu Silan Ulap I organised resistance, travelling from village to village to unite the Lenca towns of present-day El Salvador and Honduras. Through surprise attacks and superior numbers they drove the Spanish out and destroyed the garrison. For ten years, no permanent Spanish settlement existed in that region. The Spanish returned with more soldiers, including around 2,000 forced conscripts from Guatemalan indigenous communities, pursuing Lenca leaders into the mountains of Intibuca. Antu Silan eventually passed command to Lempira, who fought for six more years before being killed in battle. In 1537, the Spanish rebuilt San Miguel.

• 4. Coffee, Land, and La Matanza

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  After independence in 1821 and the eventual dissolution of the Federal Republic of Central America in 1841, El Salvador's economy pivoted around a single crop at a time. In the colonial era that had meant cacao and then indigo, mainly grown for dye. When synthetic dyes appeared in the 19th century, the country turned to coffee. By the early 20th century, coffee accounted for 90% of export earnings.

  The wealth coffee generated was not shared. The enormous profits flowed into the hands of an oligarchy of just a few families, who used their political influence to eliminate communal landholdings, build railways and port facilities in service of the coffee trade, and pass anti-vagrancy laws that ensured displaced rural workers had no choice but to labour on their plantations. A succession of presidents across the late 19th century, nominally both conservative and liberal, broadly agreed on this arrangement. In 1912, the national guard was created as a rural police force.

  Social activist Farabundo Martí had helped found the Communist Party of Central America and led a communist alternative to the Red Cross called International Red Aid. In December 1930, at the height of economic and social depression, he was exiled for the second time because of his popularity among the country's poor. On the 22nd of January 1932, thousands of poorly armed peasants in western El Salvador rose against the government of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who had seized power in a coup the previous December. The rebels were largely composed of indigenous people and communists, led by Feliciano Ama and Farabundo Martí. They initially captured several towns, killing an estimated 2,000 people. The government's response was to kill between 10,000 and 40,000 people, mostly Pipil peasants. Ama and Martí were captured and executed. This event became known as La Matanza, the massacre. Martínez ruled until 1944, when a general strike forced his resignation after he had refused to honour the constitutional prohibition on re-election.

• 5. Civil War and Its Aftermath

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  Carlos Humberto Romero was the final president in a military dictatorship that had begun in 1931. By October 1979, the Carter administration had decided El Salvador needed regime change. On the 15th of October 1979, a coup brought the Revolutionary Government Junta to power. The junta nationalised companies and took over private land, but pressure from the oligarchy dissolved it before it could hold together.

  Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, had become the loudest voice against the violence, denouncing massacres committed by government forces. He was called "the voice of the voiceless." A death squad assassinated him while he was saying Mass on the 24th of March 1980. Some mark that day as the beginning of the full civil war. By the end of the 1970s, government-contracted death squads were killing around 10 people each day. The FMLN, which several guerrilla groups had formed together in October 1980, had between 6,000 and 8,000 active fighters plus hundreds of thousands of part-time supporters.

  The US-trained Atlacatl Battalion carried out the El Mozote massacre, where more than 800 civilians were killed, over half of them children. The UN reports that more than 75,000 people were killed across the conflict's duration. On the 16th of January 1992, at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, President Alfredo Cristiani and the commanders of the five FMLN guerrilla groups signed the peace accords that ended the 12-year war. Those commanders were Schafik Handal, Joaquin Villalobos, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, Francisco Jovel, and Eduardo Sancho. After signing, Cristiani stood and shook hands with each of them.

  The Chapultepec Accords mandated cuts to the army, the dissolution of the National Police, the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and a paramilitary group called the Civilian Defence. In 1993, a Commission on Truth delivered findings of human rights violations on both sides. Five days later, the legislature passed an amnesty law for all acts of violence during the period. From 1980 to 2008, nearly one million Salvadorans emigrated to the United States. By 2008, they were the sixth largest immigrant group in the country.

• 6. The Bukele Era

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  Nayib Bukele became president on the 1st of June 2019, representing the GANA party after being denied the right to run under his own newly formed Nuevas Ideas party. ARENA and the FMLN had dominated Salvadoran politics for three decades. Bukele broke that pattern entirely. By February 2021, Nuevas Ideas and its allies won around 63% of the vote in legislative elections, taking 61 of 84 seats, well past the supermajority threshold of 56. That majority allowed Bukele's party to appoint judiciary members and pass laws with minimal opposition, including the removal of presidential term limits.

  On the 8th of June 2021, pro-government deputies passed legislation making bitcoin legal tender, the first country in the world to do so. Bitcoin officially became legal tender on the 7th of September 2021. The law allowed foreigners to gain permanent residence by investing three bitcoin in the country. A survey conducted by the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce found that as of March 2022, only 14% of merchants had processed even a single bitcoin transaction. The IMF urged El Salvador to reverse the decision in January 2022, by which point bitcoin had lost roughly half its value. By April 2025, however, bitcoin's value had doubled from where it stood when El Salvador first made it legal tender. In February 2025, Congress agreed to remove bitcoin's legal tender status under IMF pressure, even as a government entity called the Bitcoin Office reported holding 5,750 bitcoin.

  In 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency targeting criminal gangs and extended it in July of that year. More than 53,000 suspected gang members were arrested, giving El Salvador the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. Amnesty International described the crackdown as the worst abuse of human rights in the country since its civil war. In January 2024, the government announced that the homicide rate had dropped nearly 70% year over year, with 154 homicides in 2023 compared to 495 in 2022. On the 4th of February 2024, Bukele won re-election with 84% of the vote. His party Nuevas Ideas won 58 of the parliament's 60 seats. In late July 2025, the Legislative Assembly approved constitutional changes that would remove presidential term limits and extend individual terms from five years to six.