Nearly one million Salvadorans —14 percent of the population— face severe levels of food insecurity. In their homes, no one eats three meals a day. There is no meat. There is no dairy. There is usually a little corn. Tortillas are counted and rationed. But when things get tight, they only eat fruit and flowers harvested from the hills. The families wash other people’s clothes and plough other people’s land so that they can eat. Many of the men who once provided the families with income are now in prison, taken away by the state of exception. This, despite the fact that some of the families were themselves the victims of gangs.
Víctor Peña
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Víctor Peña and Carlos Barrera
Today, Ruth Marleni and her nine children will eat flor de izote a few hours before noon — a lunch of Yucca flowers, harvested from their yard where it grows as a living fence. Ruth’s daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, who live with her and whom she cares for most days, will join them for the meal. To cook the izote, she simmers the flowers in water flavored with mint leaves that she picks from a small home garden, improvised out of rusty sheets of corrugated tin. Today, at her home in the canton of El Jícaro, in the municipality of Tacuba, Ahuachapán, she is cooking the izote over fire. The gas ran out a week ago, and the $8.04 subsidy provided by the government is not enough to cover the cost of a 25-pound tank, which typically lasts the family just ten days. Ruth and her family also lack the $0.35 they need to take their corn to the mill, so they make do by grinding it on stone, preparing the masa and tortillas at home to supplement the izote.
Vicente Mendoza, 78, pictured in the background, and Juan García Saldaña, 72, repair one of the roads leading to the community of El Jícaro Centro, in the municipality of Tacuba. Both work as volunteers, spending long hours swinging pickaxes and moving dirt with shovels to prevent the rain from flooding the road. Vicente was once a leader in the community, helping to manage the area’s electrical infrastructure projects. Now, he contributes as much as his age will allow. “I always watch Channel 10,” Vicente says, referring to the government-run television station. “All they ever talk about are wonderful things, but none of those wonders ever reach us here.”
The community of Monseñor Romero is part of the canton of El Corozal, in the municipality of Berlín, Usulután. There are roughly 75 families living there, in poverty, more than an hour’s drive from the closest town. Most of them survive on what they grow, and depend entirely on the rainy season for their harvests. If the rainy season is bad, their food stores for the summer suffer. A lack of access to water prevents the community from cultivating vegetable gardens at home. The nearest water source is a two-hour walk away.
To help feed her four children, Maura Dolores grows some herbs and vegetables alongside her home in the hamlet of El Jícaro Centro, in the municipality of Tacuba: A small garden of chipilín (an edible leafy green), basil, green chili peppers, tomatoes, and mint, all suspended by stick frames and plastic. Maura is 35 years old and assumed responsibility for her family’s expenses after the police arrested her husband in April 2022, in the first days of the state of exception. She has not received any news of his whereabouts, and has had to survive without the $150 a month he earned working at a carwash in San Salvador. From time to time, Maura travels to the city of Ahuachapán to wash and iron clothes for $10 a day — enough to pay for her family to have at least two meals a day.
Wendy Alicia Martínez, 37, lives with her two daughters, her son, and her husband in the community of El Rescate, Berlín, Usulatán. The family finds creative ways to make ends meet. They have a home garden that they maintain with water they collected over the winter. They grow tomatoes, chiles, and pipián (a type of squash), and struggle to grow cabbage, a crop they often lose because it’s not suited to the area. With her job at a nearby farm and the little money she makes selling products at market in Berlín, Wendy says she earns about $60 a month, which she uses to cover as much of her family’s needs as she can.
Ruth Marleni Rumualdo (left) is 45 years old and the mother of fourteen children. Nine still live with her and four have families of their own. Clara Yaneth, her youngest daughter, died on February 8, 2021 from a fever and severe diarrhea, when she was only six months old. Ruth also works as a hairdresser, running a business out of her dirt floor home, built of adobe and bamboo, and dodging chickens while she works. She must calculate the movements of her old, no-guard clippers carefully, earning one dollar per cut. When she’s lucky, she sees about one customer a week. She has no money to buy guards for the clippers. Fany Luna (right), 34, is a single mother from the community of El Rescate in Berlín. She has three daughters, ages 14, 10, and two. Fany earns her income seasonally by working on coffee plantations, and when there’s no work, she survives by selling oranges and eating izote. The Yucca blossom is a lifesaver for many poor families in rural Berlín. It is consumed at home and collected to sell at the village market. The izote flower is not cultivated like a normal crop — families find it in the wild or use it to make fences and delimit properties.
Kennedy, 11, and Odalis Asegurado, 6, live in the community of Monseñor Romero, in the canton of Corozalito, Berlín. Their father, José, is able to provide only two meals a day for his daughters, but they eat breakfast at the local school. “The situation is really hard here, we have no work, there’s no water, and we have nothing to grow,” he says. “The animals are only good for hauling firewood, they don’t provide us with milk or meat. We eat tortillas with something, like rice or corn, but we don’t eat chicken or other meat.”
Santos Ángeles Hernández, 63, makes regular trips to El Llano creek to wash her family’s clothes and dishes. They walk through the mountains and along dirt paths for about 15 minutes to reach the murky stream that flows down from the hills and springs up between two large boulders, after passing through most of the pastures that surround the village of Matazano, in the canton of Valle Grande, north of San Simón — one of the poorest and most remote municipalities in the department of Morazán. Santos scrubs and rinses her dishes in the water, puts them in a black plastic bag, and carries them back home. She, her husband, and their four grandchildren eat from these dishes. Santos also makes a living by washing her neighbors’ clothes; she earns about $5 a day, which she spends on the two pounds of beans that will feed her family for two weeks.
In the house of 66-year-old María Dolores Luna, tortillas are the daily fare. They are the family’s main source of calories, because there’s always some cord to go around. The tortillas are served with salt, and in times of plenty, beans or rice. The house is sweltering, its walls and roof built of tin and plastic, with an enormous, desiccated tree standing in the side-yard outside. There are no plants or wild fruits growing nearby: the land here is arid, and to get water, the family spends more than four hours traveling, which makes growing a home vegetable garden impossible. No one in the family has eaten any meat since last year. María is straightforward and sparing with words, and ends her brief comments with a simple, “Life is hard, it’s not easy.”
Celia Herminia López, 42, has been left to care for her grandson and five children alone since April 2, 2017, when gang members murdered her husband. On the Sunday morning he was killed, Aquilino Mendoza was returning from town after negotiating the use of some plots of land for the year’s planting. He was walking down the road that leads to El Jícaro, Tacuba —a territory that, up until then, had been under the control of MS-13— when he came across a group of men with guns in their hands. They had just murdered a young man, and their faces were uncovered. Aquilino knew them, and they knew him. After exchanging a few words, the men shot Aquilino and left his body lying in the dirt, according to Celia’s neighbors. After her husband’s death, Celia’s brothers began helping her with a little money every month, but in August 2022, they were both detained under the state of exception. Celia’s already precarious situation was thus compounded by both the criminal actions of the gangs and the repressive policies of the state. Sitting at the table next to Celia is her 13-year-old son Ronald, who has been suffering from headaches, fever, and vomiting for three days, but has not been able to see a doctor. In their home, they eat when they have food, and never more than two meals a day: mostly corn, some beans when someone gives them some as a gift, or when Celia manages to sell her vegetable pastries or finds some work at a farm. She doesn’t remember the last time she ate meat.
Julissa Martínez is 19 years old and lives in El Rescate, a community in the municipality of Berlín. She is in her first year of architecture school in the nearby city of San Miguel, thanks to the support she receives from an uncle and the money she earns working odd jobs, like mourning at funerals, a service offered by some low-cost mortuaries to add drama to the rituals. At home, her mother, Wendy, and her husband have to make do with what they have. For the time being, this has meant reducing the number of meals they eat per day to two. Her mother says that if she has to give up another meal so that she can see her daughter become an architect, she will. They make a living picking izote flowers and selling them at a market in Berlín, or from the occasional earnings their father brings in working on farms. Together, they earn between $30 and $60 a month, and use this income, in addition to what they can grow in their home garden, to feed the family. Julia says that the fruit they collect, like mangoes and bananas, also help to alleviate their hunger. They have chickens, but do not eat the meat, preferring instead to have a few eggs from time to time. Meat and dairy products have not been part of their diet for several months.
Nueva Esperanza is one of the few low-income communities left in the heart of the capital city’s upscale Escalón neighborhood. There, a few blocks from the World Trade Center San Salvador, dozens of families live cramped together in small houses. One of them is the Ábrego family. A few months ago, the family’s head of household, Cecilia, had one of her sons taken by the state of exception, despite the family having been the victim of gangs; two of Cecilia’s other sons were forced to flee to the United States due to gang violence. She now spends her days collecting and selling plastic bottles to buy food packages and basic necessities to deliver to the prison where her son is being held. At home, the family is forced to skip meals, or to eat only rice and tortillas. Meat is never an option. At noon, when the tortillas arrive, Ricardo Alexánder Ábrego, 16, counts them, rationing them to last at least two days.
Nora Elizabeth Méndez lives in a home built of sticks, tin sheeting and bamboo in the community of Matazano, which sits along the road that leads to the municipality of San Antonio del Mosco, in the department of Morazán. Nora’s pantry contains only a little bit of sugar, some sweet bread, a few rolls of toilet paper, and some corn cobs hanging from the ceiling. Nora stays at home all day, taking care of her two-year-old daughter, Anelís, while her husband leaves early each morning to plant and harvest food from the fields.
Maura Dolores holds her three-year-old daughter, Deysi Nohemy López, in their home in the small community of El Jícaro Centro, in Tacuba, Ahuachapán. In Maura’s pantry, there are a couple of cardboard boxes and a plastic container with a few packets of instant coffee, some rice, soap, bouillon cubes, and menstrual pads. Since her husband’s arrest under the state of exception, Maura and her four children have had to skip one meal a day. When they do eat, they have to ration what little they have, for example, by dividing four eggs between five people over the course of a week.
