El Salvador

Daniel Trujillo
Redacción Diario Co Latino

El Salvador, which elected its first leftwing Government last year, is committed to achieving the MDGs. To do so, the new Government must prioritize reducing poverty and extreme poverty, reforming the health system in order to make it accessible to the entire population, developing prevention policies for natural disasters, and advancing towards gender equality. If El Salvador wishes to attain the MDGs by 2015, it is imperative to make efforts to combat the vulnerability of a large part of its population, without neglecting violence and criminality.

In this edition of Spotlight On… we will travel to Central America, where the national Social Watch coalition in El Salvador has succeeded in monitoring economic, social and gender rights in the country from diverse perspectives.

It has been15 years since the Beijing Conference and Salvadoran women have made little progress. The achievements gained thus far are owed to the determination of the feminist and women’s movement as well as the political will of some women in the political parties.
Two decades of neoliberal economic policies have left the country in an extremely vulnerable situation in the face of the global economic crisis. Deteriorating social, economic, political and environmental conditions, social and labour market exclusion, falling remittances and rising prices of basic goods are just some of the devastating effects. Although part of the problem has been the high degree of dependency on the United States, political changes in both countries could make this very dependency conducive to finding a way out.


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