Salvadorans Take Pride in No-Nonsense President, Distinctive Food

The smallest and most densely populated country in Central America, El Salvador’s homicide rate has steadily fallen from a high of 104 per 100,000 residents in 2015, according to the U.S. State Department.

And with police now regularly raiding gang hideouts, residents say, there has been a dramatic reduction in murders, rapes and robberies.

Bukele is also lauded for his handling of the pandemic. In its early days, Patricio said, Bukele obtained funding for a state-of-the-art hospital that has become one of the region’s best Covid-treatment hospitals.

 El Salvador has the lowest numbers of Covid-19 infections and deaths in Latin America, despite courts deeming unconstitutional a requirement to wear masks in public and quarantine measures that forced travelers to hole up in hotels for 30 days upon entering the country.

Emigration has also fallen sharply under Bukele, Patricio said in an email.

Bukele’s administration runs public service announcements on TV and radio warning would-be emigrants they could be kidnapped and imprisoned in Mexico and the United States.

“The recruitment by smugglers to take Salvadorans through Mexico is a criminal offense punishable by a prison term. Persons leaving the country are carefully screened at the Guatemalan border. The Salvadoran government discourages the attempt to reach the U.S. without a proper visa,” Patricio said.

Numerous polls show Bukele enjoys a more than 90% job approval rating and his popularity extends to the Salvadoran diaspora.

“I think Bukele is a great president. He has a lot of new ideas,” Giron said, a nod to the Nuevas Ideas political party Bukele founded. “I've heard from people from Honduras, people from Guatemala, thinking, ‘You know what, we ought to write a constitution where Bukele will be president of Central America.’”

Giron was raised by his grandparents because his mother had moved to the U.S. His grandparents made him work in the fields at an early age, he said, cultivating rice, sesame seeds, corn and green beans.

But with a civil war raging in El Salvador at the time, Giron often ran into checkpoints while traveling with relatives.

“Either the military or the guerillas would make a bus stop, and would get everybody out,” Giron said. “And some of the youth would be left there to be taken, to join their forces. A few times it happened. And so my mom said, 'I don't want my son to be taken by force, so I'm not going to allow that to happen.'”

More than 35 years later, he vividly recalls scenes from his journey to the U.S.

“We used to see those antennas, big radio antennas,” he said. “And at night you can see the little light blinking. I remember the coyote used to tell us, 'You see where those blinking lights are?' 'Yeah.' 'Well, that's the United States. That's where we’re going.'

“And we'd swing by those freaking antennas and we were like, 'Wait a minute I thought that was the United States?' 'Oh no there's some more up there.'”

Hungry, thirsty and exhausted after more than month of traveling by foot, Giron said, he and his traveling companions had huddled under a bridge for the night when a Border Patrol agent heard them talking, arrested them and took them to a detention center for minors.

A Salvadoran youth coming to the country today has a slim chance of winning asylum. Former President Donald Trump’s administration tightened up the standards, so applicants must now prove the governments of their home countries had a role in persecuting them.

They cannot qualify, for instance, by providing evidence gangsters threatened to kill them.

And immigration courts, particularly on the U.S. southern border, have been notoriously stingy in granting asylum since former President Ronald Reagan’s tenure.

“During FY 2020, 73.7 percent of immigration judge decisions denied asylum, and asylum itself was granted just 26.3 percent of the time,” according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Giron was among an estimated 2.7 million immigrants who caught a break when Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986.

It granted lawful status to undocumented immigrants who had come to the country before Jan. 1, 1982, and immigrants who had done seasonal agricultural work for a minimum of 90 days in the year prior to May 1986.

Giron said his mother “fixed her papers through [this] amnesty,” and he became a lawful permanent resident after she sponsored his green card application.

Avoiding the word amnesty, President Biden aims to do what Reagan did on a larger scale. He wants to work with Congress to offer a roadmap to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

But experts say such sweeping legislation is virtually impossible, given that immigration has become perhaps the most contentious issue in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats rarely finding common ground.

Now a naturalized citizen, Giron leads a 50-member nondenominational church called Iglesia Cristiana Buenas Nuevas in a Houston strip mall unit.

He has a small office in front where he makes phone calls and meets with clients for his insurance business, and a large room in back where he holds services on Sundays and Tuesdays.

Every Saturday morning, rain or shine, he and several of his parishioners set up white canopy tents and fire up gas griddles.

The women make the pupusas by patting out balls of corn flour dough, tucking in shredded pork, refried beans and cheese and working them back into the shape of pancakes.

The men cook the pupusas until they are golden brown.

Giron now sells them three for $6, including a soda or bottle of water, and two toppings: a bit of shredded cabbage marinated in pineapple vinegar and hot sauce, both bundled tight in plastic wrap.

He pointed to a grassy lot across the street.

“That's our lot. We bought it, selling pupusas. We are going to build a church out of pupusas.”

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