El^Salvador

EDITOR’S NOTE: WND staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi recently conducted an exclusive interview with Robert B. Loosle, Special Agent in Charge of the Criminal Division in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.

Corsi previously interviewed Loosle in El Salvador at an international anti-gang conference co-sponsored by the El Salvadoran national police force for two separate articles published here and here.

Salvadoran community leaders welcomed the mayor of San Salvador to San Francisco on Tuesday in hope of establishing a sister city relationship that could go beyond the usual trade delegations and cultural exchanges and tackle a grittier issue: an escalating transnational gang problem.

“Gang violence in San Salvador now impacts our youth,” said Ana Prez, director of the Central American Resource Center, a 22-year-old family service organization in San Francisco. “If our kids get deported, they end up in a world of extreme violence there. … And now we have youths fleeing from El Salvador because of the gangs,” who wind up as the street-level dealers for the same syndicates in San Francisco.

San Salvador, Dec 8 (Prensa Latina) Salvadorian social organizations demanded on Friday that the Antonio Saca government comply with recommendations by international bodies on the assassination of Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980.

Some 25 organizations that make up Concertacion por la Paz y la Justicia Social rejected the president’s refusal to derogate a General Amnesty Act, by virtue of which the charges against war criminals were dropped.

Salvadorian President Elias Antonio Saca branded as “good” his country’s relations with Venezuela, and denied any plans to severe diplomatic ties with Caracas.

“At the present time we are not considering the possibility to break diplomatic relations with Venezuela,” Saca said when asked about recent statements by a lawmaker and the Minister of Security and Justice Rene Figueroa.

SAN SALVADOR, Nov 30 (IPS) - The rise in new HIV/AIDS cases in El Salvador shows either that the government strategy to combat the epidemic is failing, or that a larger proportion of the population is being tested, depending on the respective viewpoints of non-governmental organisations and local authorities.

Mara de la Paz was diagnosed HIV-positive in March 2004. At first “it was very difficult; I didnt want to accept that I had the virus. I went through a phase when I was stigmatised and discriminated against by my partners family, and for weeks I just wanted the earth to swallow me up.”

San Salvador, Nov 23 (Prensa Latina) El Salvador reported 1,135 new HIV AIDS cases in the first half of 2007, the chapter of the UN Joint AIDS Program (UNAIDS) in this Central American country informed.

The pandemic worldwide spread since the late 20th Century has somewhat stabilized in the territory after affecting 0.8 percent of the population, noted UNAIDS Representative Herbert Betancourt.