At the beginning of 2018, the US "Grand Commander" Trump spoke wildly again, this time so rude that the US government criticized him for going too far.
What did Trump say?
Mr. Trump was at a meeting at the White House where lawmakers pitched him immigration proposals to admit more immigrants from East Africa and Central America. These include Haiti, El Salvador, Somalia and others.
After listening to the congressman's introduction, Trump complained: "Why should we admit people from these countries? ”
"country", this is not a translation problem, Trump's original words are "Holly Xu", which can be translated as "" or "" and "toilet".
This kind of term is very rare in political circles, and it should be said that it has never appeared, because this kind of term is too dirty even in the lives of ordinary people.
Subsequently, Haiti, El Salvador and the League of African States jointly protested to the United States, demanding that the United States apologize.
But on the Internet, Trump's words have also been supported by some people, after all, these countries mentioned by lawmakers are all negative teaching materials "hand-handed" by the United Nations, and they are the "dragon and phoenix chicks" in failed countries.
In this country, 105 out of every 100,000 people are murdered, more than 20 times the probability of the United States and more than 300 times that of Japan, and 1 in 10 people in the country has a gangster background, and street fires are as normal as eating and drinking.
The desperation of the people of that country to flee their homeland was able to form an army of 300,000 refugees to cross the border of the United States through Central America.
In the United States, Salvadoran gangs have also caused huge social problems, gang vendettas, drug trafficking, smuggling, arms trafficking, which is why Trump angrily called the country a "cesspool".
So, what is El Salvador's history? Why did the country let gangsters run rampant so much that they were disparagedly called "shitholes"? Does the country have a future?
First, the heaven of coffee, the hell on earth
El Salvador, known as the "country of dung pits", was originally a land of abundance, famous for its coffee production. But in the last 200 years, the brutal social division in the region has led to many civil wars, which have plunged the country into the abyss of darkness.
El Salvador is located on the west coast of Central America, bordered by Honduras and Guatemala, and separated from Nicaragua by a strait. With an area of only 21,000 square kilometers but a population of 6.7 million, El Salvador is the most densely populated region in all of Central America.
El Salvador was originally home to the famous "Mayan civilization", and modern scientists have verified that the ancestors of the Maya people were active in El Salvador 2900 years ago.
The Spaniards arrived in the 16th century, but the Maya civilization was long extinct, and their descendants formed loose tribes on the land.
Later, the Spanish conquistadors colonized all of Central America, including El Salvador, and the Spaniards discovered that there were many volcanoes here, and the volcanic ash of the mountains enriched the soil with nutrients, so they planted tropical crops here.
El Salvador's main crop is coffee, where the coffee beans are fragrant, full-bodied, and of the highest quality, and in the following centuries, El Salvador has become an important coffee producer in the world.
El Salvador was ruled by the Spanish for 300 years, during which time the local race changed dramatically.
Originally, the local area was dominated by Indians, but after 300 years, after ethnic integration, more than 90% of the country's people were "Indo-European mixed", that is, Indians and Europeans were mixed, and their faith became Catholic.
It was not until the early 19th century, with the rise of Napoleon, the French army entered Spain, and the Spanish Empire began to decline, and uprisings against Spanish colonists were launched throughout Latin America.
In 1821, El Salvador declared its independence, but it was immediately occupied by Mexico and the Central American Federation. It took another 20 years before the country declared itself a republic and became an independent state.
At that time, El Salvador was known as "coffee paradise", and the country's main export product was coffee beans, accounting for 90% of the country's total income.
The Salvadorans at this time were divided into two parts, one was the owners of the estates and their networks of interests, including high-ranking intellectuals, soldiers, comprador businessmen, politicians.
The other part is peasants, the homesteaders with better conditions have their own land, while more peasants can only work on the estates and belong to the proletarian and extremely poor class.
Meanwhile, there were only two parties in 19th-century El Salvador, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, which were copied from Europe.
The two parties, the palm and the back of the hand, served the big landlord class, and they cooperated with the European capitalists, who took over the country's coffee bean imports, gave the large landowners sufficient funds, let the landlords continue to acquire land, and more and more Salvadorans became landless peasants.
At the beginning of the 20th century, through victory in World War I, the United States drove European forces out of the Americas and turned China and the United States into "American caravans."
American companies invested in local plantations, and in order to obtain the most favorable treatment, the United States also extended its tentacles into the Salvadoran government, and finally even the country's tariffs were decided by the Americans.
This act of "eating and wiping" has cost the Salvadoran government a lot of revenue, and the country has become poorer and poorer.
Second, foreign wars and civil wars have raised deformed "gangsters"
After the outbreak of the capitalist world crisis in 1929, Salvadoran coffee beans could not be sold, and a serious economic crisis broke out in the country.
If large landowners cannot sell coffee beans, they have no income, they cannot pay wages, and in the end, they can only pay coffee beans to workers to pay off debts. But the farmers who dragged their families could not feed themselves with coffee beans, and large numbers of Salvadorans went bankrupt or fell into famine.
In this desperate situation, in 1930, Salvadorans returning from Europe brought communism and quickly won popular support. In 1932, the Communist Party entered the general election, and the popularity soared, which frightened the landlords in the country.
Soon, the head of the junta, Martínez, refused to recognize the elections and announced the arrest of leftists, so the communist leader Farabundo Smith announced the arrest of leftists. Under Martí's leadership, more than 40,000 Salvadoran peasants staged a major uprising.
The communist uprising was the first fire in the Americas, and the United States was so frightened that it announced its support for the Martinez government and sent troops to the south to support.
After that, the government of Martinez and the rightist forces fought the peasant rebels, and finally the uprising turned into a massacre, with about 70,000 casualties, of which 30,000 died, most of them peasants, and Europeans reported this brutal uprising with "blood-soaked coffee beans".
In 1944, although Martinez was overthrown in a strike march, the move did not affect cooperation between the United States and El Salvador.
After World War II, El Salvador was still the producer of coffee beans and cotton in the United States, and Guatemala next door was called the "Banana Republic", and El Salvador was the "Coffee Republic".
According to the pattern of the first 100 years, this small country may continue the script of the past and be exploited by the capital empire, but at that time mankind ushered in a new era - the Cold War, which gave El Salvador a chance.
After the start of the Cold War, the American bloc and the Soviet bloc competed globally, the Soviet Union supported the global communist movement, and communism blossomed throughout Latin America. From Central America to South America, communist parties and bourgeois governments struggled, and guerrillas moved around in the mountains.
In the early years of the Cold War, El Salvador was relatively stable, but after the end of the "football war" in 1969, the Salvadoran government collapsed and the military government came back.
At the end of the 70s, the military dictator Romero went on a rampage, which led to a boil of popular resentment, and the people began to support guerrillas everywhere, and the Salvadoran Civil War broke out.
In 1980, the communist guerrilla armed Farabendo. The Martí People's Liberation Army, the Salvadoran People's Revolutionary Army, the Popular Resistance Force, the Democratic Front of the Revolutionary Party and others joined forces to form the "Front for Liberation" and wage war against the government.
The Liberation Front has the support of Cuba and the Soviet Big Brother behind it, and the El Salvadoran government army has the support of the United States, relying on the blood transfusion of the superpower, the warring sides are small and strong that cannot be killed, and this war is 12 years long.
The Salvadoran Civil War was fought until the end of the Cold War, and the process was extremely tragic, because it was a class war, and both sides committed a large number of crimes against humanity, including the appropriation of property, the massacre of civilians, the abuse of prisoners of war, and the rape of women.
With the financial support of the United States, the Salvadoran government army caused the massacre of "Las Edas Village" and "Ermozote Village" that shocked the world, and thousands of men, the elderly, women and children were spared.
The wave of protests in the United States rose from wave to wave, and finally the United States had to demand that El Salvador restrain its behavior, and reshuffled the disaffected military junta and replaced a group of people in power.
But the hatred caused by the Holocaust has been sown, and the civil war in El Salvador has not stopped, but has intensified.
In 1992, El Salvador's civil war ended, the government was reorganized, the military junta was down, the army was dissolved by 70%, and the "Front de libération" was dissolved, and the head leadership became a political party in parliament.
The civil war caused 70,000 direct deaths and 200,000 injuries to varying degrees, but what is even more terrifying is that about 500,000 people died as a result of the war, of which 100,000 were missing, alive or dead.
Peace has finally ushered in in El Salvador, but an even bigger crisis has already arrived.
Third, the country that belongs to the gangsters has its roots in the United States
Twelve years of civil war had devastated El Salvador, with a large number of farms destroyed, peasants fleeing the country, landless peasants and unemployed labourers doing nothing, and a high crime rate in the country.
War crimes brought a large number of orphans, who lacked centralized management and grew up on the streets to become the first gang members.
El Salvador's economic and political power is in the hands of hereditary oligarchs, who form large and small alliances through marriage, and seven of the millions of people below are in abject poverty, and the huge gap between rich and poor makes social contradictions sharper than before the war.
After the end of the civil war, a large number of soldiers were demobilized, they had no jobs, no subsidies, and the killing skills they practiced in the war were their only strengths.
In the early days, these gangs were just poor organizations for survival, and they had not completely lost their humanity. But the United States added fuel to the fire, and the Clinton administration sent back 300,000 Salvadoran criminals taken in during the civil war.
This group of "international students" brought advanced criminal experience, including organizational structure, crime patterns, and connections to the American underground market, and then a large number of young adults joined gangs to survive, and gangs spread like a virus in El Salvador.
The famous MS13 "Savage Salvadoran" and M18 "Block 18" have activities in the United States and El Salvador, and the perennial fire between the two gangsters has made El Salvador the most insecure country in the world.
One of the characteristics of Salvador's gangsters is that they have a lot of tattoos, and unlike other countries, locals like to tattoo their faces.
It is often interpreted as an ancient Mayan custom, but in fact, it is to make it difficult for gang members to wash off their tattoos and become the gang's little brother forever until they are killed by the enemy.
The main livelihood of Salvadoran gangsters is extortion, protection fees, tolls, drug trafficking, etc., and the average Salvadoran pays $7 a year for the gangster's protection in exchange for safety.
In some areas, if the local security is good and the police are active, gangsters will shoot the police on the street to show their presence, or kill the policeman's family to keep the police from being nosy.
Businessmen or intellectuals with better civil families will become fat sheep for the gangsters, and the gangsters will repeatedly exploit them until they go bankrupt.
In addition to looting the people, Salvadoran gangs prefer firefights, and there is no holiday for vendettas between them.
When two different gang members met, gunfire rang out immediately, and enemy members captured alive were brutally tortured to death, and their bodies were dumped in a conspicuous place as a warning.
In 2015, El Salvador's murder rate was 105 per 100,000, compared to 6 per 100,000 in the United States and 0.6 per 100,000 in China.
In the face of the unmanageable gangster problem, the Salvadoran government has combined "suppression" and "appeasement", and has also gained gains in recent years.
In March 2022, the Salvadoran government began a large-scale anti-gang campaign, and then the two major domestic gangs declared a war against the government, and the gangsters killed people indiscriminately in more than a dozen regions of the country, and El Salvador entered a state of emergency.
In the following half month, President Bukele led a bloody battle between military and police gangs, arresting more than 10,000 members of the MS13 gang and filling prisons across El Salvador.
These prisoners were densely held in iron cages, without even space to sleep, and people were huddled together, eating, drinking, and Lasa were in cages, without any opportunity to let the wind go.
Logically, such behavior would be attacked by human rights groups, but countries are silent because the gangs in the country are too barbaric and no one wants to speak up for them.
Salvador officials say about 50,000 people are gang members, but in reality, about 500,000 to 700,000 people are gang-related people who make a living from the trade.
Salvadoran gangs are the world's smallest mafia organizations with an average age, with a large number of members joining gangs between the ages of 12 and 14 and then being tied up for life until they are killed by enemies or arrested and imprisoned.
In this brutal country, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans left their country in 2021 alone to go north to the United States to survive, and in the past this wave of migration was only seen in countries at war, such as Syria.
There is no hope for El Salvador to get out of this predicament, because if the country wants to change the social situation, it will need to reform its economy in order to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and allow the people at the bottom to live and work in peace.
Reforming the economy requires the government, but the government is the monopoly of the state oligarchy, and no class at the bottom can touch their cake.
To move the cake of the oligarchs is to move the interests of the United States, and if the American forces are to be driven out of El Salvador, then the civil war of the 80s is a lesson in the past.
Like other countries in the Americas, the root cause of the fall of El Salvador, a "gangster state", is actually the United States.
Literature / Commerce
Resources:
1, "The Unquelable Salvadoran Civil War", Guan Yanzhong
2. "Increasingly Active Transnational Criminal Groups in Central America", Zhao Nianyu