Antonio Rodriguez

Fear and loathing in El Salvador

I had not returned to El Salvador for 20 years, since the end of the country’s civil war, so I was of course, expecting it to be very changed.

I knew that there was now an acute economic crisis, and that the right-wing death squads that used to terrorise the country when I was covering the war in the late 1980s, had been replaced by violent gangs and drug traffickers.

I also knew that for the first time in its history, central America’s smallest and most densely populated country had a moderate left-wing president, Mauricio Funes.