With the presidential elections in El Salvador just a few days away, many here in the U.S., especially those who are not Salvadorian, don’t understand or have a sense of the complicated politics in the Central American country. Most don’t even know anything about el Salvador save stories of gang murders.

A right-wing party has dominated Salvadorian politics for the last 20 or so years at the expense of “minority” populations like indigenous peoples. Roberto Lovato from Of America gives us some historical context:

To understand the current presidential elections in El Salvador, you have to understand the cities, towns and campo, El Salvador’s countryside, located outside the capital of San Salvador. What follows is my attempt to provide further context for the media’s description of the horse race between the FMLN and the ARENA parties. A good starting point is the fact that both parties trace all or some of their political roots to Izalco, a relatively small town in the western, coffee-growing part of the country. Izalco is also home to one of the largest concentrations of El Salvador’s small (less than 1% of the population) indigenous population….

And you can find the indigenous presence in the deep, dark soil of Izalco’s history. Almost all of the children from Izalco’s Mario Calvo school pictured above are descendants-great, great and great, great, great, grandchildren- of the 20,000-30,000 indigenous people who rebelled against deadly poverty and abuse and were then slaughtered in 1932 by General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, the dictator who perpetrated what is known as “La Matanza” (the Great Killing). Martinez and his troops did all this in less than a month, according to scholars like my friend Aldo Lauria-Santiago, whose book is pictured below with a cover of the Izalco volcano.

Read the entire article aqui.