world: el salvador | From the Heart of Europe

El Salvador is on the Pacific coast of Central America, with Guatemala to the northwest, Honduras to the northeast and the ocean to the south. Like all the other Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, it became independent from Spain in 1821 and independent from its neighbours in 1841. Its subsequent history was one of military coups and authoritarian governments, with heavy US interference towards the end of the 1931-79 military regime.

A bitter and brutal civil war between left-wing guerilla groups and the US-backed government ran from 1979 to 1992. Most notoriously, a government-backed death squad assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass at a hospital chapel in 1980. 75,000 people (of a population then of roughly 5 million) are reckoned to have died in the conflict. The war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords which established a peaceful settlement that has lasted to this day.

The current government is led by President Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019 and re-elected in 2024. He has controversially cracked down on organised crime, reportedly at the expense of civil liberties, and adopted Bitcoin as legal currency. Having said that, El Salvador has the lowest income inequality of any Central American country. Its main exports are textiles, sugar and coffee.

The one personal contact I had with El Salvador was my colleague from NDI days, Gerardo Le Chevallier, who had been a negotiator for the government side in the process that led to the Chapultepec Accords. We had a couple of very collegial evenings at internal work events in 1997 and 1998. He later joined the United Nations, and was killed in the Haiti earthquake of 2010, when the entire leadership of the UN mission there was wiped out.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if, as far as I can tell, less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of El Salvador.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
Salvador	Joan Didion	3,961	791	704
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance	Carolyn Forché	3,516	297	623
The Country Between Us	Carolyn Forché	2,823	477	303
Archive of Unknown Universes	Ruben Reyes Jr.	2,546	83	702
The Massacre at El Mozote	Mark Danner	1,687	352	241
There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: Stories	Ruben Reyes Jr.	1,251	91	638
One Day of Life	Manlio Argueta	1,025	421	153
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador	Horacio Castellanos Moya	1,871	169	135

This week’s winner, Salvador by Joan Didion, is well ahead on LibraryThing and wins on Goodreads and StoryGraph too, the latter by a hair’s breadth. It was published in 1987 and adapts three essays by Didion from the New York Review of Books, her first substantial publication on foreign policy (she was already well known as a commentator on US culture).

Carolyn Forché is also American, but has written a lot about El Salvador. What You Have Heard Is True is non-fiction. The Country Between Us is poetry, and I believe the majority of it is inspired by Forché’s experiences in El Salvador.

Ruben Reyes Jr is another American writer, though his parents are from El Salvador. Archive of Unknown Universes is about two Salvadoran students at Harvard using a time machine to explore different alternate histories of the civil war. There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is a short story collection, and the majority of them appear to be set in El Salvador.

The Massacre at El Mozote is about a particularly awful incident in 1981 during the civil war, when government forces killed 811 non-combatant villagers, and also about the Reagan administration’s successful suppression of coverage of the story in the US media.

Manlio Argueta is the top writer on this week’s list who actually lives in El Salvador. One Day of Life is about one woman’s experience of state violence immediately before the war.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is also Salvadoran (though born in Honduras and having spent much of his life in exile). Revulsion is a 119 page book written as a single paragraph, about an exiled writer returning to San Salvador in the 1990s and hating the place.

Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained the two books by Ruben Reyes Jr. and lost two by Sandra Benitez, The Weight of All Things and Bitter Grounds.

Benitez grew up in El Salvador but her parents were from Puerto Rico and she identified as American, as far as I know. The top woman Salvadoran writer who I found was Claudia Hernández, best known for her novel Slash and Burn (originally Roza, Tumba, Quema).

I did not have any tough disqualification choices (or rather, I hesitated with both The Country Between Us and There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, but ruled them in rather than out). Two novels that scored very well on all the systems, but are mainly set outside El Salvador, are Solito by Javier Zamora and The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende.

The Soccer War, by Ryszard Kapuściński, is a collection of articles including the title piece, which is about the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras sparked by a soccer match, but it is just one of a number of geographically varied essays in the book.

Apart from Gerardo, mentioned above, I have no personal connection with El Salvador, and there are no books on my own shelves about the country.

Coming next: Denmark, Singapore, Lebanon and Liberia.

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The best known books set in each country: El Salvador