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Judi Lynn

(160,211 posts)
Thu Feb 12, 2015, 08:03 PM Feb 2015

Rural Towns in El Salvador Join “War Tourism” Trend

Rural Towns in El Salvador Join “War Tourism” Trend
By Edgardo Ayala


[font size=1]
Florentino Menjívar (left), his wife María Dolores Gómez, and Víctor Manuel Escalante at the foot of a mural showing
prominent figures from El Salvador’s civil war, in Dimas Rodríguez, a settlement of former insurgents in the town of El
Paisnal, which is tapping into “guerrilla tourism”.

Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
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EL PAISNAL, El Salvador , Feb 10 2015 (IPS) - The memory of a priest killed shortly before civil war broke out in El Salvador is so alive in this small town that it is now the main attraction in a community tourist initiative aimed at providing employment and injecting money into the local economy.

The Historical Memory Tourist Route is the name of the project in Paisnal, 36 km north of San Salvador. The initiative revolves around Rutilio Grande, a locally born Jesuit priest who was killed by government forces in March 1977, before the start of the 1980-1992 civil war.

“Father Rutilio taught people about liberation and commitment to the needy, and that’s why they killed him,” said 62-year-old María Dolores Gómez who, before she joined the guerrillas in 1980, was a catechist and met the priest. Now she forms part of the El Paisnal Municipal Tourism Committee. The tourism project, whose first stage begins in March, is part of a growing trend in this formerly war-torn Central American country to draw visitors interested in the political and historical context of the armed conflict and the prewar period. And in the case of this town in particular, in the life of the famous Jesuit priest.

Rutilio Grande was the first priest killed in El Salvador in the context of the 12-year civil war, which left over 70,000 people – mainly civilians – dead and 8,000 disappeared before the 1992 peace agreement put an end to it. After decades of electoral fraud by the military and the local elites, opponents of the system took up arms and formed insurgent groups to push the military regimes out of power and usher in socialism.

Grande, accompanied by Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16, was driving near the town of El Paisnal on Mar. 12, 1977 when the three of them came under machine gun fire and were killed. They are buried in the village churchyard, which is already a pilgrimage spot for visitors from within and outside the country and will be an obligatory stop on the new tourist route. Historians and theologians say that after Grande’s murder, the conservative views of the archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, radically changed in favour of the poor.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/02/rural-towns-in-el-salvador-join-war-tourism-trend/

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