Towards a response: addressing forced displacement by violence in El Salvador
by Noah Bullock
In the last two years 11,936 people have been murdered in El Salvador, a country with a population of 6.5 million; an estimated 550,000 left the country because of violence in 2016 alone. Based on violent death rates and displacement, El Salvador, and its neighbours in Central America’s Northern Triangle, Guatemala and Honduras, should sit at the top of the list of global humanitarian hotspots. Yet the humanitarian consequences of extreme violence, human rights violations and internal and external displacement in the sub-region remain almost invisible to most of the rest of the world. So-called ‘non-conventional violence’ lacks the compelling imagery of war-damaged infrastructure, siege-imposed scarcity, large concentrations of displaced people and immediately visible and quantifiable humanitarian needs.
The scars of today’s violence are visible, not in bombed-out buildings, but rather in the formidable security architecture, where barbed wire crowns nearly every wall and armed men stand watch over commercial premises and middle-class streets. The displaced prefer hiding in secrecy to camps, fleeing and fearing, to varying degrees, both criminals and the state. Amnesty International’s Secretary-General, Salil Shetty, accurately described the security and humanitarian situation in the sub-region as ‘virtual war zones where lives seem to be expendable and millions live in constant terror at what gang members or public security forces can do to them or their loved ones. These millions are now the protagonists in one of the world’s least visible refugee crises’.
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