the story of gang violence in El Salvador isn't safely tucked far away in Central America like you might think its effects have spread to the United States where the Salvadoran gang MS13 has grown exponentially meanwhile the solution to destroying these gangs has forced us to ask uncomfortable questions about choosing between freedom and Security El Salvador itself is not a large country at only 21,000 Square kilomet making it roughly the size of my state of New Jersey with 6. 5 million people living in El Salvador the nation is the smallest yet most densely packed country in all of Central America part of the El Salvador geopolitical importance comes from the fact that they're located on the coast of the Pacific near important shipping lanes and they neighbor countries that are close to the Panama Canal instability could and has in the past quickly overflowed into neighboring countries El Salvador is way more closely entwined with the United States than you might think total trade between the two was $6. 7 billion in 2021 and 2.
5 million Salvadorans call the United States home remittances from Salvadorans who live and work in the United States total a whopping $7. 1 billion in 2021 that's equal to 25% of El Salvador's total GDP do imp part to this the United States in El Salvador are tied by the hip in an economic common law Union the relationship between them is so tight that El Salvador was actually one of the only Latin American nations to join the United States military Coalition in the 2003 war in Iraq if that's not in sickness and health I don't know what is looking at the natural beauty of the nation you'd be surprised to learn it's dealt with Decades of ugly Civil War and gang violence and poverty stability in El Salvador is pretty important to the United States for a few big reasons one of them being that El Salvador's International Airport is one of only two in all of Latin America that the US military is authorized to conduct anti-narcotic missions from the US also has an interest in keeping immigration levels at a certain rate and violence and instability in Al Salvador can send those rates skyrocketing up nearly 20,000 people were killed in Al Salvador by gang violence from 2014 to 2017 around 20% of the country's citizenry now live abroad in other Latin American countries and the United States by the end of 2022 the global number of Asylum Seekers and refugees from El Salvador had reached 200,000 people so what steps were taken to help keep El Salvador stable US military assistance to El Salvador was about $15 million between 2016 and 2020 to help address the gang violence but in 2020 that Aid stopped partly because of criticisms about a perception that El Salvador was sliding into authoritarianism the reason for that slide has to do with their fight against gang violence and the country was known as one of the most dangerous places in the entire world so what sparked all this violence in Al Salvador in the first place how did homicides reach a peak in 2015 at a rate of 106 per 100,000 residents the answer is of course widely debated El Salvador's history is plagued by instability corruption and violent conflict that all combined to supercharge the gang problem but I think one of the root causes of the instability in El Salvador has to do with your favorite drink coffee yes that Sweet Bitter nectar of the Gods the only kind of woke I want to be caffeine a woke because in the late 1800s the coffee industry boomed in El Salvador coffee brought in 95% of El Salvador's GDP at that point but this created a problem because this income was largely restricted to just the part of the population that already owned land this made a terrible divide 77% of the arable land belonged to .
