Maura Has Stopped Eating Once a Day

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Maura Dolores Fernández has stopped eating every day in order to guarantee that her four children will. The beans, tortillas, and eggs that she provides them are, for now, a gift from her parents-in-law. She eats less because she earns no more than 20 dollars a month. Her household’s crisis is difficult to define: They eat when they can, and what they can, but often eat nothing at all.

Maura is 35 years old and, from time to time, washes others’ clothing in the municipality of Tacuba, Ahuachapán. With that money she pays for little things: a bit of sugar, coffee, oil, or perhaps detergent, tomatoes, or potatoes. “Only if I have enough do I buy rice,” she says. “Remember that ten dollars hardly purchase anything. Today rice costs $0.60 a pound,” she laments. She moved to the municipality to get married, but most of her family is in Cuscatlán, and the five hours of distance between them prevent them from visiting or her from making the trip to them. There is no money for such things.

 

Her house is in a canton called El Jícaro, where for years residents lived under the rule of the Cobras Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13. The gang controlled various cantons in this area of western El Salvador, just a few miles from the Guatemalan border. That control is still visible on electrical posts around the town, whether along the main street or on any of its side streets. Despite the fact that gang presence has been reduced under the state of exception, to the point that anyone can pass through communities like this one, the misery of Maura’s family has increased, just like that of the 210,556 people who fell below the poverty line from 2020 to 2023, pushing the total of Salvadorans living on the brink of famine to almost one million.

At school, Maura’s children, who are 12, nine, and seven years old, receive one guaranteed meal. She keeps her youngest daughter, three, with her unless she is washing clothes, in which case her in-laws help watch her.

 

 

To sum up her plight, Maura explains that, after washing all week, she managed to buy four eggs that she must ration among five mouths. Her income plummeted in late 2022 when her husband was detained under the state of exception, as he traveled to work at a car wash in San Salvador. He had earned $150 a month, which he gave almost entirely to Maura.

When her husband was an active-duty soldier in 2021, he was arrested in his barracks and accused of having illicit ties to gangs. He was imprisoned for a year, until he was granted conditional freedom in early 2022. “Then the state of exception came and he couldn’t get his letter of freedom quickly enough,” says Maura. They captured him citing the same proof with which they had arrested him the year prior.

Maura has received no news of her husband. She has no money to travel to San Salvador, to Mariona Prison, or to file paperwork with the Public Defender’s Office to learn more about his case, let alone to send him a package with food and hygiene products. She muffles her sobs behind her daughter, who she carries like a protective shield against her chest, as she explains she does not have enough to feed even her children. She has already stopped eating once a day.