Maras and Migration

El Salvador suffers from a couple of problems that I didn’t see in Peru, the country where I served previously as a Peace Corps volunteer.

There are an estimated 60,000 young men involved in street gangs (“maras”) here in El Sal. Another 250,000 Salvadorans are the gangbangers' dependents. The word “mara” comes from the word “marabunta”—army ant. The largest gangs are Salvatrucha-13 and Calle 18. The gangs virtually run many neighborhoods in San Salvador, the capital, charging “renta” to every business owner and engaging in drug activity, robbery, murder and mayhem in much the same way that their counterparts in L.A. and New York do. That’s no coincidence. Many of the leaders come from L.A. They’re young people whose families once migrated, legally or illegally, to the U.S. or who themselves migrated illegally. The young people lived in bad neighborhoods, found no employment opportunities, turned to crime, were imprisoned, deported, and put the skills they’d learned on the streets in the U.S. to work on the streets of San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana. 

As a result, El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world, averaging 10–15 a day. This is mostly gangbangers killing gangbangers. Even so, innocent people often get in the way or else die because they didn’t keep up with their renta or otherwise crossed a gang member.

Where I live, in Perquín, in northeastern El Salvador, maras still aren’t much of a problem. That’s changing, however. There are now active gangs in San Francisco de Gotera, about 30 km from Perquín. Three Salvadoran soldiers dressed in camouflage and carrying AK-47s patrol the streets of Perquín every night. Imelda, the proprietor of the pupusería above which I live, feeds them breakfast, lunch and dinner. They say that they’ve been assigned to Perquín because mareros from Gotera are attempting to establish themselves here and because the distribution of drugs—mostly marijuana—is becoming a problem at the local high school.

With so many Salvadorans in gangs or dependent upon gang members—nearly 5% of the population—it’s difficult to predict what might happen here in the future or how the country could ever possibly rid itself of the problems of gangs and gang violence. Some people say that the situation can be rectified only through the equivalent of another civil war like the war that tore the country apart in the 1980s. Except this time it will be a war between ordinary people and mareros.

As I mentioned previously, many of the gang members are imports from the U.S., which brings us to the other apparently insurmountable problem facing El Salvador. Every year 54,000 Salvadorans—nearly 1% of the population—abandon El Salvador to enter the U.S. illegally via Mexico. One out of six Salvadorans is now living in the U.S. In other words, 1.5 million Salvadorans live in the U.S. and 6.2 million Salvadorans live in El Salvador! If that same percentage of Americans fled America to look for work in El Salvador, 50 million Americans would be residing illegally in El Sal. And I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of thousands who’ve left El Salvador for Canada or Europe or other countries in Central or South America. 

Consequently, many talented people who could be helping to solve El Salvador’s gang problem and other problems are not here to do so. The Salvadorans who live in the U.S. save up money, send it back home, and other family members use this money to hire a “coyote” ($5,000 will get you from San Salvador to El Paso or Tucson) who accompanies them to the border and provides the contacts and pays the bribes necessary to allow the family member to enter the U.S. Recently, the twelve-year-old daughter of an acquaintance of mine and two even younger cousins left Perquín with a coyote and two months later sent word back to their family that they’d arrived safely at the home of a family member in Miami.

It’s that easy and that “safe.” That’s because the coyotes many times aren’t the dark, anonymous, reckless characters, preying on and exploiting the desperate and the helpless, that we imagine them to be. There are a couple living in every town the size of Perquín in all of El Salvador. Everybody knows them. Nobody mentions their names. Nobody would tell an outsider like me who they are, because one never knows when one might need or want the services of the local coyote, who’s really nothing more or less than a dude with connections, experience, and an unusual, somewhat perverse form of entrepreneurial spirit, who moves people the way Red Ball Flyers move freight.

So what one frequently senses in El Salvador is a kind of dormancy—kids not really trying very hard in school but instead waiting for their turn to come to pack their duffel and head for “el otro lado”; families waiting for their “remesa” to arrive at the Western Union: the money that many family members send back home every month from the U.S. Sometimes there’s a sense that 6.2 million people have taken a number and are standing in line and waiting, not all that patiently, to get the hell out of here.

It’s not a pretty scenario. And it makes you wonder how even one, let alone both such immense roadblocks to development can ever be removed. Think about it. One-and-a-half million gone to the U.S.; another million in Europe or elsewhere; another 60,000 in gangs. That’s more than 3 million people pulling the country down while only 6 million—and many of them not very enthusiastically—struggle to build it up. It’s a tug-of-war and the team in the black Spandex has two fat guys on its side.

But let’s try to end on a positive note here. Entropy is our friend. What tends to happen in most situations is that apparently unbeatable entities beat themselves. Either the gangs will kill each other off and save the government the trouble or they’ll overplay their hand and commit so many atrocities (or else commit a single atrocity against someone of the wrong nationality and economic status) and international resolve will take over. If there’s less violence and insecurity in the country and more economic opportunity, more people will stay home; some of the Salvadorans residing in other countries will see that there’s a chance to make money here and they’ll return. 

More likely perhaps, it will be a combination of both factors that will lead to a solution. The gang problem will be partially resolved and the economic problems will be partially resolved and the majority in the middle—because there are always more people in the middle than at either extreme—will decide to cast their lot with the home team. Gang members who were never that enthusiastic in the first place will move into the economy. Ex-pats who weren’t that enthusiastic, either, will come home. The ordinary Salvadorans who never left and who never tattooed, goatee-ed and undershirted themselves to pledge allegiance to MS-13 or Calle 18, will cast their lot with what was always much more appealing and much less scary: they’ll get enthusiastic about opening businesses, making and spending money in El Salvador. At that point El Salvador will cease being a suburb of Miami and Houston and return to being its own country.

Sounds good to me. Let’s try it.

Coffee

We’re at 1,000–1,300 meters here in Perquín, around 3–4,000 feet, so the conditions are very good for growing coffee.

Since the early 1800s coffee’s been grown successfully in El Salvador. But in Honduras and Guatemala the production is much more advanced and there they sell more of their coffee to buyers capable of reselling it to Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, or one of the local independent retailers of gourmet coffees in your town. They grew good coffee in Peru, but not where I lived when I worked there—a desert at sea level. There you were as likely to get instant coffee as brewed coffee if you ordered a cup in a restaurant. The coffee is very tasty here in Perquín but we still have a ways to go to bring our coffees up to the standards required by the previously mentioned buyers.

Why is that? Mostly it’s the processing of the beans. The growers here have access to the same coffee that growers plant in Honduras, which, after all, is only 32 km from Perquín. However, the manner in which the coffee is harvested, dried, and roasted, and the quantity of beans produced by an individual grower or cooperative make all the difference.

As you can see from the picture below, the plants are beautiful—rich, dark green leaves which in May begin to produce “uvas”, what we call “cherries,” inside of which reside the coffee beans. The rainy season begins in May in El Salvador and so the coffee flourishes for seven months and in November comes the harvest. But fine coffees begin to distinguish themselves from mediocre coffees long before the harvest.

For nearly 200 years, producers in El Salvador grew arabica, an “indio” or wild, native coffee with a rich, full flavor. But the fact that they mainly grew that one variety led to their eventual downfall. Because they neglected to genetically differentiate their plants, diseases adapted and spread. Eventually one plant disease, “la roya” (leaf rust), wiped out virtually the entire Salvadoran coffee industry. 

These skinny, white, naked sticks were formerly coffee trees.

The growers are just beginning to emerge from this crisis. They’ve planted disease-resistant strains, especially “cuscataleco,” which supposedly comes from the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán but really originated in Honduras, where it was bred to resist leaf rust. Leaf rust had also decimated the Honduran coffee plantations. Another resistant variety is lempira, a tasty hybrid readily available in gourmet shops in the U.S. However, these varieties produce for only about 20 years, whereas some of the arabica trees destroyed by leaf rust were 100 years old. Also, unless the growers genetically diversify when they plant, some other disease will gain a foothold and again devastate their plantations of cuscataleco and lempira.

Genetic diversification doesn’t necessarily require that you grow several varieties of coffee. You could grow 4 or 5 clones of one variety and graft your plants. A graft offers the advantage of a robust rootstock plant—disease resistant, good root system—and a scion that produces flavorful beans but that if grown by itself would be disease-prone or otherwise unsuitable to local growing conditions.

And if you diversify and if you care for your plants well and fertilize and fumigate with chemical or organic pesticides and fungicides, are you guaranteed a good harvest and coffee beans that will bring top dollar? No, you’re not even close; not yet.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that growers make is poor quality control at the time of harvest. This part shouldn't really be that hard. All you have to do is pick the red cherries and shun the green cherries. The red cherries are the ripe cherries and the ones that produce the most flavorful beans. However, there's pressure on the grower to pick as much coffee as possible and there's a desire on the part of the seasonal pickers to pick as many cherries as possible since they get paid by the sack. So what too frequently occurs is that red cherries get mixed in with green cherries, which assures that the entire harvest, when processed, yields beans with a poor appearance—small, light-colored, broken beans mixed with large, whole, dark beans—and more importantly a compromised flavor.

The drying of the cherries is also a step that must be carried out carefully and correctly. The cherries need to be spread evenly on drying patios or African “camas”—raised beds; they need to be kept out of the rain; they need to be turned at regular intervals; bugs and animals need to be kept away. The beans can then be sold as “oro”—“gold” so-called, due to their color: the coffee beans before they’re roasted—or, in order to fetch a retail rather that wholesale price, can be roasted first. Roasting is an extremely exacting process and most coffee is ruined at this stage—the equivalent of fumbling the ball on the one yard-line. 

Here in Perquín much of the roasting is carried out in a decidedly “artisanal” fashion. In larger quantities the beans are sometimes roasted in roasters that resemble something you’d see at a backyard pig roast in Iowa—an oil drum cut in half with a mechanism inside for turning the beans continuously. Alternatively, small producers frequently roast beans on a comal—a flat, round ceramic griddle. If done correctly, the coffee roasted thusly is delicious. Imagine walking out to Prudencio’s finca in Pueblo Viejo, watching Prude’s wife roast beans before your very eyes, seeing Prude grind the beans by hand in a big, silver funnel-shaped mill, then taking the coffee home and brewing it! But this process can’t be carried out on a large scale and the results are unpredictable when Prude and his wife aren’t in charge.

And if you've managed to dodge all the bullets up to this point in the process you're still not done. You have to produce at least a container—around 250 sacks or 33,000 pounds—of beans or an international buyer won't even talk to you.

How does one reach that level of production? Most producers in Perquín own 1–5 manzanas of land. (A manzana is .7 hectares. A hectare is 2.47 acres.) On one manzana of land it’s possible to cram 1,200 or more coffee plants. One coffee plant, once it’s three years old, produces about 2 pounds of “oro”—dried but not roasted beans—a year. That means that one would need to be raising, harvesting and drying the yield of 1,100 plants (about what would grow on a manzana) in order to produce a metric ton of beans (2,200 pounds). It takes fifteen metric tons to fill a container. So realistically the only way farmers can hope to reach that level of production iis by organizing themselves into cooperatives. I’m working with a cooperative here in Perquín—La Asociación Cooperativa de Productores Agrícolas Cafés Especiales de Perquín (The Perquín Cooperative of Producers of Specialty Coffees). Let’s hope the number of integers in their bank balance someday matches the number of letters in their name.

So the next time you savor a cup of fine coffee at Northampton Coffee or whatever the name of the source of the best cup of coffee in your town happens to be, give a thought to where it came from and who produced it and why it tastes so good. And don't worry about running out; somewhere a cargo container full of the same beans is waiting for you.

Alfombras

“Alfombras” (carpets) are a Salvadoran Easter tradition brought over by the Spanish when they colonized El Salvador back in the 1500s.

Alfombras are sidewalk mosaics made out of sawdust, salt, flowers, cut-up newspaper and other found materials. Alfombras decorate the streets where Easter processions are held and act as metaphorical adornments of Jesus’s path to the cross. (It’s probably no coincidence that the chief material used in creating an alfombra is sawdust.)

Families, neighborhoods and friends as well as municipalities and large organizations create alfombras; so some of them can be intricate, elaborate and systematically planned and executed, while others look more rustic and improvisational. Vendors sell wooden molds in the form of Saints or other religious symbols that can be filled with sawdust dyed different colors to create a neat and well proportioned alfombra. Or you can throw down a layer of sawdust, draw figures into it with a finger or a stick, and create your own design. The colors are achieved by adding anilin dyes to the sawdust.

Below I include a photo of the elaboration of an alfombra from Perquín, where I live. This one depicts Monseñor Óscar Romero, the “Liberation Theology” cleric who was murdered in El Salvador during the Revolution of the 1980s. He’s still a hero to Salvadorans, young and old, and in fact is rumored to be close to qualifying for Sainthood alongside recently Sainted John Paul II and John XXIII.

The alfombra below was created by Gloria and Edith of the tortillería where I buy my daily bread. Their alfombra won first prize in the yearly competition that takes place in Perquín. The symbolism is complex and includes Christ’s path to the cross (on the left), Calvary (top), three crosses and three candles, plus homages to the aforementioned Monseñor Romero, who—the alfombra’s symbolism implies—sacrificed himself for his people in a Christlike manner.

As you can tell, the values of the Revolution are still very much alive here in Perquín. Perquín and Eastern El Salvador were the main battlegrounds during the fighting. Virtually all of Perquín was destroyed by bombs and artillery, including the Catholic church, which has since been rebuilt to resemble the original church. Every year in August the community organizes a Winter Festival that celebrates the Peace Accords that ended the Civil War. It’s said that the rough outlines of the accords were negotiated in the shade of a mango tree in back of what is now The Museum of the Revolution, Perquín’s chief tourist attraction.