Despite celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Peace Accords, El Salvador is living through the most violent period of its 196 year history as currently one of the most dangerous countries outside of an active war zone. Much of the unrest is due to gang violence, as well as ongoing poverty, inequalities and lack of employment all of which have contributed to high levels of internal and external migration.
The current population has all lived through upheaval: various Military Dictatorships (1931–1979), 12 year Civil War that saw over 75,000 killed and nearly half the country’s displaced due to the violence and poverty (1980-1992), Hurricane Mitch with a 200 death count and greater than 30,000 homeless (1998), two major earthquakes that destroyed approximately 20% of the housing nationwide (January and February 2001) followed by a severe drought the same year which destroyed 80% of the crops which spurned internal migration, and the current period of violence which puts estimates of those killed at greater than the numbers from the civil war (1996 – ongoing).
El Salvador is extreme but not unique in Latin America in the rise of violence that it has experienced. Especially in urban areas, violence has become increasingly common. Evidence from Latin America has shown the problem to be much more complex than simply the experience of poverty, rather indicating that where inequality and exclusion, associated with unequal distribution of economic, political, and social resources in urban contexts, intersect with poverty to precipitate violence.
In this presentation the experience of a systematic approach to early childhood intervention involving stakeholders from high level government decision makers, technical and academic experts, site supervisors, direct caregivers and families in context of high levels of violence will be discussed.
