Guide Juan Carlos, the boyfriend of hostel owner Andrea, met me and Luke at the Zona Hostel at 11:00 for a promised full day tour of San Salvador. Andrea said the trip would include seven stops and some nice neighborhoods, and the center of the city, and some poor areas. Cool, we'll get to see some slums! I had a pretty good slum tour in Mumbai two years ago. They can be interesting.

Well, it wasn’t exactly like that . Juan Carlos began to explain. El Salvador, of course, had a very violent civil war through the 1980s which ended with a peace agreement in 1990. During the era two major Salvadorean gangs were formed in the United States. Their members were deported from the U.S. or returned to El Salvador after the war and gained members and influence over more than two decades since, particularly in the drug trade since much of the cocaine that makes its way from South America to the United States passes through El Salvador, but also through prostitution and other illegal activities like extortion. Going to a San Salvador slum? You’ve got to be kidding. Outsiders would immediately be killed by the rival gangs that control them in neighborhoods even the police and military can’t enter.

As we drove towards San Salvador’s central city things got progressively shabbier. Getting towards the heart of town things start to take on the look of an African city with most buildings in disrepair and most activity taking place in informal daily markets on the sidewalks and spilling into the streets to the degree of blocking some lanes of traffic . San Salvador’s center is probably the grimmest city I’ve seen in the Americas. Juan Carlos says the city center is effectively controlled by the rival gangs with the different ones controlling different blocks of the city and demanding extortion money from business owners. They allow business to be conducted during the day, but by dusk the center city becomes a ghost town too dangerous to walk around in or even drive through. There are certain rules of conduct and dress as well that everyone understands; certain athletic shoes and certain numbers on football (soccer) jerseys signify gang membership or affiliation. Wearing the wrong Nikes or Real Madrid shirt on the streets of downtown San Salvador can well get you killed.

We made two quick stops downtown at what are considered the major sites of touristic interest, walked into the squares besides them for better pictures, and quickly continued on. The first was Iglesia El Rosario, an architecturally unique modern church in concrete and glass which replaced a historic one which was lost to fire . The second was the Catedral Metropolitana, the city’s main cathedral which was packed with people for a Saturday morning mass. The religious service prevented us from going forward to see the tomb of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the charismatic Catholic leader who supported land reform and lefty causes and was assassinated by paramilitaries in 1980 during mass at a hospital chapel in the city’s outskirts. I vaguely recall the event on the news, big news at the time, because I was 13 at the time and it was right around the time I beginning to follow politics and current events.

It’s interesting that El Salvador still has the same dominant political parties as it had in the 1980s the right-wing ARENA party and the left-wing FMLN which emerged out of the guerilla opposition to the government. ARENA controlled things until a few years ago when the FMLN was elected to power for the first time. Juan Carlos just refers to the FMLN as "The Communists". He claims the FMLN made a deal with the gang bosses in prison to make their living conditions better if they reduced the number of murders during his reelection campaign to help them get reelected . It was a success, but when the FMLN reneged on its promises after being reelected the gang bosses called on a nationwide strike by transportation workers to cripple the economy. They then killed more than 20 bus and taxi drivers who violated the order and went to work anyway during the strike time. Scary country!

So while El Salvador has had 25 years of peace in the sense of the absence of armed conflict between government and rebels, the level of violence brought about by gangs and overall lawlessness has escalated to a level comparable to the years of the Civil War during which an estimated 70,000 people were killed.

So the rest of the day was entirely in the nicer areas of El Salvador and included quick stop after quick stop with Juan Carlos clearly trying to create a positive impression with us about his city and his country. These stops included an viewpoint on a hill overlooking the national stadium, the national crafts market, a popular weekend market where we stopped for a bucket of beers and some Crema de Mariscos (seafood soup), two big modern malls, an impressive viewpoint over the city quite high on the San Salvador Volcano, a walk through a neighboring town named Santa Tecla that’s become a big restaurant and nightlife center, a drive past the U .S. embassy and the wealthy Santa Elena neighborhood, and finally a stop in the busy Antiguo Cuscutlan neighborhood for shrimp pupusas as it started to get dark.

Well, the rest of the day in the western part of San Salvador and the hills and towns around it after we left the city center could well have been California. San Salvador is probably the most Americanized city I’ve been in outside the U.S. Most of what I saw on the west side of town was affluent and safe, completely under control of the government and police with little gang activity or extortion taking place. People seem to be very conscious of safety, though, one of the things making huge modern malls so popular in San Salvador. I recognize that overall I saw mostly the better parts of the city, but the reality is that if the country’s problems with violence could be solved, El Salvador could well become a significantly more prosperous country and even one that could be a significant travel and retirement destination since the climate and scenery are so nice.