El Salvador. Ahead of the presidential election in early 2009, El Salvador’s bleak past became an issue again in the fall. The presidential candidate for the Left Opposition Alliance FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), Mauricio Funes, is believed to want to tear down the amnesty that still protects militants who committed human rights crimes during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. The issue has become hot since two human rights organizations have gone to Spanish court to have El Salvador’s former president Alfredo Cristiani face trial for the murders of, among other, six Jesuit priests at the Central American University of San Salvador in 1989.
- ABBREVIATIONFINDER: Click to see the meanings of 2-letter acronym and abbreviation of SV in general and in geography as El Salvador in particular.
|Land area||21,041 km²|
|Population density (per km²）||308|
|Income per capita||$ 8,000|
|Currency||US dollar (Colon expiring)|
|ISO 3166 code||SV|
|Time zone UTC||– 6|
|Geographic coordinates||13 50 N, 88 55 W.|
The FMLN’s Mauricio Funes had a reassuring lead in all opinion polls during the year and thus may be the first from the former guerrilla organization to become El Salvador’s president. However, within the FMLN he was not uncontroversial, partly because he wanted to keep the US dollar as official means of payment in El Salvador. In March, it became clear that Rodrigo Avila, former chief of the Civil Police, will be the government alliance of ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalistas) candidate in the presidential election. His candidacy is considered to reflect the increased turmoil in El Salvador for security and crime issues.
According to Countryaah reports, the population of El Salvador in 2008 was 6,183,764, ranking number 109 in the world. The population growth rate was 0.430% yearly, and the population density was 298.4496 people per km2.