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Eric Fichtl

El Salvador

<p>Perquín, a town in the Morazán department of El Salvador, was a key stronghold of the FMLN guerrillas during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s. Today it hosts a museum dedicated to their revolutionary efforts.</p>
<p>In a rural Salvadoran cooperative, community members march under a banner of the slain Archbishop Oscar Romero, who dared to suggest that peasants like these might deserve an earthly bounty in addition to promises of posthumous salvation. For this heresy, he was assassinated by death squads linked to the Salvadoran establishment – a fate that awaited many of his flock.</p>
<p>A cluster of makeshift homes on the outskirts of San Salvador. Such homes represent years of effort by their inhabitants, but often these neighbourhoods lack essential services like plumbing, refuse collection, and official recognition of the residents' title to their land. These districts are peripheries not only in the geographical sense, but also in terms of political and economic attention.</p>
<p>Vegetable sellers set out their produce at the central market while a youngster waits to play. </p>
<p>Plaques expressing gratitude to Archbishop Oscar Romero fill a low wall outside the chapel where he was murdered. Renowned for his embrace of the poor, and an outspoken critic of the Salvadoran government and widespread human rights abuses in his country, Romero was shot and killed by right-wing death squads while conducting mass on 24 March 1980. <br /></p>
<p>A mural in San Salvador depicts the suffering and scale of the 1979-1992 civil war that had concluded in a peace agreement just a few years earlier.</p>
<p>A woman selling dried fish in San Salvador's central market.</p>