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San Salvador's upstart mayor, Nayib Bukele, has promised a new way forward for a city besieged by decades of violence His biggest obstacle, however, may not be the city's gangs, but the city's idea of itself
THOUGH SAN SALVADOR'S MERCADO Central is statistically one of the most dangerous zones of one of the most dangerous cities in the world, an outsider wouldn't know it just by walking through. It is, admittedly, congested, stretching across a few dozen blocks that throb with tens of thousands of vendors, clogging the roads of the Salvadoran capital's heart with makeshift stalls and tables that spill over with anything you could think to buy: stacks of clothes and fruit, underwear, cheap plastic toys, bars of soap, knockoffs of coveted North American brands-Levis, Converse, Adidas, Nike. Women hawk tamales and bags of cut papaya, or ladle steaming coffee into flimsy Styrofoam cups that buckle from the heat. Boys push wheelbarrows of ice water, bananas, and mangos past rows of mannequins modeling cheap leggings for sale. This is one-stop shopping at its most frenetic. Life and commerce thrum. Violence here is largely invisible- until, of course, it isn't.
San Salvador is both the political and homicide capital of El Salvador, a country where, most recently, a plague of murders has surged after the unraveling of a two-year-old gang truce in early 2014. Gangs have been running Mercado Central for years; according to Salvadoran journalist Oscar Martinez, in a 2015 report on the swelling of violence in the city center, they tell vendors "where they will sell, how much they will pay for the space to sell....Sometimes they even tell them who to vote for." Gangs come to the market to recruit kids to join their ranks, or to collect renta-a euphemism for extortion money-from vendors and stores, or to menace and, when they deem it necessary, to kill. All of which has provided justification for San Salvador's young mayor, Nayib Bukele, to attempt to solve the problem of this rag-tag market, in part, by dismantling it.
This is an ambitious project for Bukele, an upstart politician who, at thirty-three, and with just three years of experience in public service, won the most important mayoral seat in the country in 2015. Previous...