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Articles on El Salvador

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A worker from Hope House, an organization that sponsors the use of cryptocurrencies on El Zonte beach, makes a purchase at a small shop that accepts bitcoins, in Tamanique, El Salvador, June 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)

Cryptocurrencies are in crisis, but they are not going to disappear

An expert in the field of cryptocurrencies answers the question: Is crypto really here to stay or is it just a fad?
Armed Salvadoran soldiers, following presidential orders, surrounded lawmakers in 2020. AP Photo/Salvador Melendez

Support for democracy is waning across the Americas

For the commitment to democracy to regain strength across the Americas, citizens need to become more confident in the integrity of their elections and their elected officials.
A bitcoin symbol is seen on an LED screen during the closing ceremony of a gathering of cryptocurrency investors in Santa Maria Mizata, El Salvador, in November 2021. President Nayib Bukele announced his government is building an oceanside Bitcoin City. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)

After a big year for cryptocurrencies, what’s on the horizon in 2022?

The market for cryptocurrencies has expanded dramatically in the last year. With this uptick of activity, what’s next in 2022 for cryptocurrencies?
El Salvador is likely to become the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Momentum Fotograh/Shutterstock

Bitcoin: El Salvador’s grand experiment

El Salvador has become the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. This is a noble idea, but unworkable in the long term.
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele promised voters change. Instead, he seems to be reviving El Salvador’s authoritarian past. Camilo Freedman/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

El Salvador’s façade of democracy crumbles as president purges his political opponents

El Salvador ‘is inching back toward its authoritarian past’ after President Nayib Bukele fired five supreme court justices and the attorney general – essentially the only checks on his power.
Children play in Las Flores village, Comitancillo, Guatemala, home of a 22-year-old migrant murdered in January 2021 on his journey through Mexico. Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images

Money alone can’t fix Central America – or stop migration to US

Biden’s $4 billion plan to fight crime, corruption and poverty in Central America is massive. But aid can’t build viable democracies if ‘predatory elites’ won’t help their own people.
U.S. Border Patrol detains tens of thousands of the families and children who try to cross U.S. borders every year. AP Photo/Julio Cortez

The situation at the US-Mexico border is a crisis – but is it new?

Children and families have been fleeing to the US in rising numbers for nearly a decade. So why is the current situation at the US-Mexico border being viewed as something new?
Members of a Salvadoran feminist group watch a virtual hearing March 10 on El Salvador’s abortion laws by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images

El Salvador’s abortion ban jails women for miscarriages and stillbirths – now one woman’s family seeks international justice

Hundreds of Salvadoran women have been prosecuted for homicide for having abortions, miscarriages or stillbirths since 1997. Now an international court must decide: Is that legal?
Lawmakers hide in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol as Trump supporters raid the building on Jan. 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

By inciting Capitol mob, Trump pushes U.S. closer to a banana republic

Rather than denigrating other nations as banana republics for their penchant for insurrections and lawless coups, the United States needs to take a long look inward following the raid on the Capitol.
In this July 2020 photo, a woman is comforted in her home during a wake for her son who was killed along with at least 26 others in an attack by drug cartels on a drug rehabilitation centre where he was being treated in Irapuato, Mexico. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Trump and Biden ignore how the war on drugs fuels violence in Latin America

The American public should understand that the United States has played a critical role in creating and fuelling violence in Latin America via its unsuccessful war on drugs.
Singer-songwriter Norberto Amaya, pictured in the hat, singing at a refugee camp for El Salvadorians fleeing their country’s civil war, in La Virtud, Honduras, 1981. (Photo courtesy of Meyer Brownstone/Oxfam Canada)

Music helps us remember who we are and how we belong during difficult and traumatic times

People rely on familiar music to get through difficult times. Refugees from El Salvador’s civil war used music to light up memories of their past.
Even before COVID-19, El Salvador’s prisons were contagious disease hotspots. Here, MS-13 gang members with tuberculosis at Chalatenango prison, March 29, 2019. Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images

Mass arrests and overcrowded prisons in El Salvador spark fear of coronavirus crisis

El Salvador is arresting thousands of people for violating its COVID-19 quarantine, further packing a ‘hellish’ penal system once described as a ‘petri dish’ for infectious disease.

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