If there is one thing that makes El Salvador a subject of conversations abroad, it is the country’s extraordinarily high crime rates. Crime—and the environment of fear and insecurity it creates—is one of the ways in which Central American oligarchies discipline the region’s population into accepting the economic system that has been established in the region in the past three decades. William Castro has aptly named this phenomenon ‘a criminal globalization,’ explaining that “in the context of this criminal globalization, oligarchic forces manipulate the fear of crime to maintain their stronghold on political and economic power” (125). The successive post-war administrations have used a variety of strategies to create an impression that they are addressing the high rates of criminal activity in the country, yet most Salvadorans perceive no significant change in the fear that haunts their daily lives.

Many Salvadorans respond to this unending terror by abandoning the country. This is not an unwelcome phenomenon for the country’s ruling classes, given that migration has become a “development strategy embraced by the state and elites in El Salvador” (Gammage 75). The official vision of El Salvador’s nationhood as described in a document titled Política Nacional para la Protección y Desarrollo de la Persona Migrante Salvadoreña y su Familia that was published by the government of El Salvador in 2017 begins with the following statement:

The concept of nation that the government of El Salvador promotes is one that transcends borders. It remembers and includes our brothers and sisters who decided to take the path of migration and settle in other countries, but who, regardless of the time elapsed or the geographical distances, continue to be an essential part of the Salvadoran people. (Política 6)

These words are part of the introductory section of the report that was written in the first person and signed by Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who served as the president of El Salvador between 2014 and 2019.[1] What hides behind these appeals to brotherhood, however, is “a complete lack of interest on the part of the politicians who govern various countries of Latin America to ensure the right of their compatriots to stay and not migrate” (Cruz González 18). It is not surprising that migrants see successive Salvadoran governments’ efforts to reach out to them as utilitarian and aimed only at “guaranteeing a continued flow of remittances to the country” (Andrade-Eekhoff and Silva-Avalos 37).

The idea of ‘a borderless nation’ that the report puts forward rests on an insuperable contradiction between the concept of state sovereignty and the attempts to adapt it to the ethos of transnationalization: “Identifying the linkage between sending states and their members on foreign soil as exemplifying the ‘deterritorialized nation-state,’ stretches the definition of the state beyond meaning. States only legitimately possess the power of coercion within their own borders, and consular activities abroad depend on the acquiescence of hosts” (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 1180). Given the extraordinary difficulty that El Salvador’s successive governments have had in wrestling any degree of control over large parts of the country’s territory from gangs, there is no question of El Salvador having much of a say in what happens to Salvadorans residing abroad. The document’s definition of the nation only makes sense if we see it not as a political or a cultural statement but as an economic one. For as long as migrants feel some degree of attachment to their country of origin, they can be counted on sending back remittances which will allow the government to maintain the fiction of at least a somewhat functioning society.

Policy papers issued by the government are, of course, not the only source of information which imparts to the people of El Salvador the idea that the best thing that a Salvadoran can do for his or her country is leave it. In Salvadoran Imaginaries, Cecilia Rivas analyzes in great detail the ‘Departamento 15,’ a section of La Prensa Gráfica, a Salvadoran daily newspaper that “constructs Salvadorans as model transnational citizens in the global division of labor” (21). ‘Departamento 15’ covers the experiences of Salvadorans residing abroad and has adopted the same vision of El Salvador as a nation without borders that informs the report signed by Sánchez Cerén. An advertisement for ‘Departamento 15’ published in 2000 opens with a large-type statement, “Our country does not end at the border” (Rivas 33). The advertisement invites Salvadorans who still live in the country to appreciate those who emigrated for “their successes, achievements and business initiatives that this cultural exchange has brought about” (Rivas 33). The advertisement fails to mention that the ‘cultural exchange’ which, according to the newspaper, has created these feats of entrepreneurialism is both uneven and exploitative. The equality that the term ‘exchange’ presupposes is absent from the relationship between the United States (the recipient of the largest share of Salvadoran migrants) and El Salvador. The ad does not ask what prevents many Salvadorans from being successful and capable of undertaking entrepreneurial initiatives at home. Instead, the neoliberal vocabulary of entrepreneurialism and achievement masks the reality of many Salvadoran immigrants to the US who experience hopelessness and poverty in the receiving country.

The language of the ads in ‘Departamento 15’ is curiously similar to that of capitalists who make extraordinarily large amounts of money by exploiting the transformation of tens of millions of people worldwide into economic migrants. For instance, Michael Kent, the founder of multi-billion companies Small World Financial Services Group and Azimo that facilitate off-line and online money transfers, uses similar vocabulary to present emigration as a sign that one is a higher-quality human being: “The thing that people often forget is that people who migrate are the brightest and best of their generation. It takes guts and determination to leave family and friends for what can be a tough and sometimes hostile new environment. Migrants are very entrepreneurial” (Mavadiya n. pag.). Kent has made a fortune by creating one of the largest remittance-processing companies in the world, and his enthusiasm for large-scale migration is hardly surprising.

As it affirms the idea of a ‘borderless nation’, the advertisement belies its message of borderless inclusion through the vocabulary it uses: “The use of the pronouns ‘their’ (‘their accomplishments’) and ‘our’ (‘our people abroad’) construct semantic borders—in this case, emigrants are outside, and not only literally. They are not among the imagined audience for this advertisement” (Rivas 33-4). The paradox of the ad lies in its suggestion that a model Salvadoran is the one who left the country and no longer is part of ‘us,’ insinuating that the newspaper’s readers are deficient by virtue of not having yet joined the ranks of the high-achieving, entrepreneurial émigrés. In its avoidance of any mention of the objective conditions that force many people to leave the country, the ad mimics the neoliberal vision of migration as an expression of an unmediated individual choice that entrepreneurs of self pursue in order to maximize their opportunities: “A portrayal of migration as a process of purely individual choices and opportunities would erase other institutional factors associated with neoliberalism or structural adjustment in Latin America, policies which are often associated with a rise in economic inequality” (Rivas 35). In the receiving countries, there is very little interest as to what drives Central Americans to “choose” migration and the majority of political battles around migration is fought over the legal status that is to be assigned to the human capital extracted from the region.

Latin America is rapidly turning into the largest supplier of transnational capital liquidity.[3] In 2016, Latin American migrants sent US$74.3 billion in remittances through official channels (such as banks) to their countries of origin (Budiman and Connor n. pag.). This number almost doubled the US$40 billion in remittances sent to Latin America twelve years earlier, in 2004 (Gammage 76), yet it does not include money transfers made through informal channels, making the total of remittances into the region much larger (Budiman and Connor n. pag.).

In El Salvador, the remittances that Salvadorans who work abroad sent back home constituted 20.3% of the country’s entire GDP for the year 2018 (Teos n. pag). By 2015, at least a third of Salvadorans was receiving remittances from emigrant relatives and relying upon them, for such basic expenditures as housing and consumer goods (Wade, “Civil War” 408). This staggering number, however, does not constitute the only way in which Salvadoran migrants unwittingly contribute to preserving the deeply flawed economic system of their country of origin that forced them to leave the country in the first place. By the beginning of the second decade of this century, a growing percentage of the country’s tax revenue was coming from migrants. In 2010, for instance, 12,9% of the nation’s VAT collected by the state came from the remittance-sending migrants (Cuevas Molina 41, n. 5). Of course, there are also hidden financial benefits that come from exporting overseas a large migrant population which remains tied by affective and cultural links to the country of origin. Migrants spend their earnings on international travel—whether their own or that of relatives they bring over to their new country for a visit—that maintains the illusion of closeness, telephone calls, and a variety of other purchases related to their migrant status, and this contribution to the functioning of the economies both in their home country and in the new one is usually excluded from the calculations of the economic impact of migration (Cuevas Molina 41, n. 5). A report published in 2010 by the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities on the financial contribution of Central American migrants to the economies of their native countries was titled “Paying Their Share: Migrants’ Contribution to Fiscal Health in Mexico and El Salvador.” In a typically neoliberal fashion, this title anthropomorphizes the economy[4] and links its health to the state’s capacity to expel migrants.

Both the Salvadoran state and the supranational financial organizations, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), have been making significant efforts to channel the informal economy of family-based remittances into formalized “remittance networks [that] increase the capture of remittances by large banks and financial services” (Gammage 76). Over sixty-six percent of Salvadorans who send the remittances to support their relatives back home have no plans to return to the country in the foreseeable future (Teos n. pag). This is not surprising given that there have been no significant changes for the better in El Salvador’s economy. Poverty, however, is not the only reason behind the migrant flows out of the region. In 2019, El Salvador’s Institute of Public Opinion, which is part of José Simeón Cañas Central American University, published a study estimating that, in the previous year, 5.2% of Salvadorans had to change residence because of threats or fear of violence. Sixty percent of them considered abandoning El Salvador for another country (IUDOP 1-2). The incapacity of successive Salvadoran governments to achieve a stable reduction of crime rates is due to a variety of objective factors, yet one would be justified in wondering whether the country’s political forces are truly motivated to address gang violence when the environment of terror that gangs create is bringing such great profits through an increase in emigration.

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[1] Sánchez Cerén was the first former guerrilla leader to become president of the country, and at the time, his election gave rise to the hope that the legacy of the Civil War would finally be put to rest.

[2] Castellanos Moya’s Moronga, which is analyzed later in this chapter, demonstrates the differences and the similarities between the immigrant experiences of a college professor and a part-time blue-collar worker who, in spite of the disparities in their economic status and educational background, find themselves similarly alienated and confused by the reality of living in the US.

[3] In 2016, as flows of remittance funds declined everywhere else in the world, remittances sent to Latin American and the Caribbean experienced a sharp increase (Budiman and Connor n. pag.).

[4] See John Patrick Leary’s Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism for a discussion of how biological and environmental metaphors are used to support the neoliberal view of the economy at large and individual businesses as a living organism of sorts that often receives more care than the actual human beings who work to sustain the economy or a business.