El^Salvador

MONTGOMERY The image of the little girl with short brown hair and freckles begging for coins at the El Salvador and Honduras border crossing haunted Ron Hicks long after he returned home from a two-week motorcycle trip in Central America.

A construction project manager in Montgomery, Hicks finally decided to go back to Honduras, find the girl and help her a journey that didnt end with locating the child.

NEW YORK—Travel in 2007 was marked by high gas prices, new passport rules, record lows for the dollar, and record-high air travel.

LATIN AMERICA: Travel by U.S. residents in the first nine months of this year was up 8 percent to Central America and 7.6 percent to South America, according to the Commerce Department.

Why the surge? The dollar goes further in Latin America than in Europe, and “the old image of South American countries - dictatorships and machine guns - is gone,” said Bob Whitley, president of the USTOA. “Instead, South America and Central America are the new hot destinations.”

Travelocity bookings show “Guatemala is up considerably, Panama is a trendsetter destination and with Nicaragua, people are getting curious about what’s there,” Ziff said.

Yahoo! Travel also reports El Salvador and Panama among its up-and-coming destinations for 2008.

In September 2006, after the Salvadoran Congress passed the Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism, then-US Ambassador H. Douglas Barclay congratulated the Salvadoran people.

“The US and El Salvador are [now] partners in the war on terror,” he beamed.

The law, modeled on the USA Patriot Act, establishes a special terrorism tribunal and allows for anonymous witnesses and undercover agents to participate in those trials. It also criminalizes acts such as public protests, street blockades and “publicly justifying terrorism” with punishments of up to eighty years in prison. More than a year later, this law has turned scores of Salvadoran citizens into fugitives.
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María Silvia Guillén, executive director in El Salvador of the Foundation for Studies of Applied Law, believes the law is being used as a political weapon. It creates “wild cards that allow the concepts and penalties of the law to be invoked or left aside at any given time, influenced by any political motive,” she says.

Pedro Juan Hernández, a professor of economics at the University of El Salvador, concurs. “The objective of these antiterrorist laws isn’t to fight terrorism, because there haven’t been acts of terrorism [in El Salvador] in many years,” he recently told In These Times.

The Bush and Saca administrations maintain close ties. El Salvador is the only Latin American country with troops still in Iraq and was the first to sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The country receives $461 million over five years in US aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation and is home to the controversial US-run International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in San Salvador.
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US economic interests run deep in El Salvador. After the 1996 privatization of the country’s electricity industry, corporations like North Carolina-based giant Duke Energy, once a business partner with Enron, swooped in to invest.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Mauricio Funes, a well known independent journalist, was recently nominated presidential candidate for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party in El Salvador. He will be visiting Washington, D.C. next week and is holding an event at the Press Club on Tuesday morning, December 18th. During the rest of his time here he will be meeting with U.S. politicians, think-tanks, human rights and Salvadoran-American organizations in Washington to share his vision for change in El Salvador based on the current socio-political situation and the slow economic growth in El Salvador.

Funes was certified as the FMLN’s candidate at the party’s recent convention. Some 70,000 members celebrated the announcement in San Salvador’s largest stadium, and much excitement has been generated in El Salvador and amongst Salvadorans living in the United States, where more than one million Salvadorans currently live. According to U.S. Census figures, about 60 percent of Latinos in the Washington D.C. region are originally from El Salvador.

12/14/2007 ;- ;DORAL, Fla. (AFPN) ;– ;A U.S. Southern Command team, consisting of approximately 16Air Force medical professionals, completed a medical readiness training exercise in La Union, El Salvador Dec. 13, where they provided general medical services to 7,300 patients from communities near the country’s southeastern coast.

The medical exercise is the first of 65 bilateral medical readiness training exercises the command will sponsor in 17 Caribbean, Central and South American countries through Sept. 30, 2008.

When Milagros told her godmother about a job offer in a casino in El Salvador, Rafaela was immediately suspicious.

Attracted by El Salvador’s dollar economy, she thought she would be able to save money.

But Milagros had been duped.

San Salvador is a noisy, busy city overlooked by a spectacular volcano. The streets are crowded with bars, in many sex is for sale.

Bars, where sex is for sale, line many of the streets of San Salvador

I accompanied Sgt Jose Noe Ayala on a drive around the city to see the places where police have discovered trafficked women and children.

In one of the upmarket areas of the city, he pointed out a non-descript building, this was where Milagros was held.

“We rescued four girls that day,” he tells me.

“Three were teenagers under the age of 18, all Salvadorians. And then there was Milagros, from Nicaragua.”

Pursuant to guidelines established in the 2014 National Plan for Tourism (PNT) to position El Salvador as a world-class tourist destination, and seeking to increase the flow of visitors, particularly from the United States and Europe, there was greater participation at tourism fairs in countries in both these regions.

The campaign included articles in specialized tourism magazines such as Foreign Policy in Spain, Viajes (Travels) in Costa Rica and a special supplement in the prestigious Fortune magazine. To present the country’s new image, the services of the renowned public relations firm Hill and Knowlton were contracted, which set about presenting information on the country to more than 30,000 companies engaged in print journalism and the Internet, giving readers and users a chance to learn what El Salvador has to offer, as well as the latest developments.

Deserving of special mention is the TV program E! Special EL SALVADOR IMPRESIONANTE (Amazing El Salvador), which was broadcast Saturday, December 8, in North and South America.

San Salvador, Dec 4 (Prensa Latina) El Salvador President Elias Antonio Saca begins a three-day official visit to Brazil Tuesday, accompanied by Foreign Minister Francisco Lainez, and other officials.

A presidential spokesperson announced Saca and his counterpart, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will meet Wednesday at the Planalto Palace, to discuss issues of common interest such as the setting up in El Salvador of a plant to produce ethanol from sugar cane.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) - A free trade agreement between El Salvador and the United States is boosting economic growth in the Central American country, Salvadoran and U.S. officials said Wednesday.

El Salvador’s economy grew 4 percent since it joined the Central American Free Trade Act, or CAFTA-DR, last year, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Sullivan said.

El Salvador’s economy grew 4 percent since it joined the Central American Free Trade Act, or CAFTA-DR, last year, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Sullivan said.

“This hadn’t happened in more than 10 years,” Sullivan told reporters while visiting a San Salvador factory that manufactures pupusas — thick, stuffed corn tortillas served with pickled cabbage — to sell in cities throughout the U.S.