News stories by Edgardo Ayala, page 16

Decades of government neglect, a corruption-racked penitentiary system and a growing wave of violent crime have combined to move El Salvador's prisons even further away from their stated purpose of rehabilitation while strengthening their role as veritable schools of crime.

Adverse climatic conditions and weather-related disasters are damaging crops in El Salvador and neighbouring countries in Central America, aggravating the food vulnerability that the region already faces.

As the 35th anniversary of Salvadoran poet and revolutionary Roque Dalton’s death approaches, his sons allege that two of his killers are currently working for the governments of El Salvador and Mexico, respectively, and have demanded their dismissal.

Guatemala and El Salvador have a terrible record in terms of compliance with the recommendations and sentences handed down by the inter-American human rights bodies on cases involving appalling abuses like forced disappearance, torture and massacres committed during the armed conflicts in the two Central American countries.

Human rights defenders and analysts in El Salvador suspect that death squads were responsible for two highly coordinated attacks in which 12 young men were killed this month.

Environmental activists in El Salvador allege that managers of a gold mine owned by a Canadian corporation are implicated in the murders of three anti-mining activists.

Thousands of pages of declassified U.S. documents shedding light on the 1989 murders of six prominent Jesuit clerics, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter in El Salvador could give a new twist to the case that opened in the Spanish courts in January.

José, a 46-year-old street vendor in the Salvadoran capital, says he is happy that the leftist government of Mauricio Funes decided to put more army troops on the streets to help fight the soaring levels of crime.

Cruz Ayala, 55, weeps inconsolably over the bodies of his 71-year-old mother, Catalina, and his 15-year-old niece Carolina outside of a chapel in the town of Verapaz in the central Salvadoran province of San Vicente.

Spatula in hand, forensic scientist Israel Ticas carefully excavates a decomposed human foot protruding from a shallow grave in rough terrain in the mountains of Las Crucitas, close to Ciudad Arce in the west-central Salvadoran province of La Libertad.