San Salvador

It cost thousands of lives, but was it really a case where no one saw it coming? [suspenseful music]

I first went to El Salvador during my PhD research, and it was a hugely rural country outside of San Salvador, but it's so green as well.

Fionntán O'Hara is the voice you're listening to, and aside from having the most excellent Irish name in history, uh, he's from the London School of Economics.

Now, if that seems like a weird place to go to ask somebody about a football war, just stay with me, okay? So this is our second installment in our miniseries, This Stupid War, and so much of this particular war hinges on, yes, that World Cup qualifier way back in 1969, and it's between the, the Central American countries Honduras and El Salvador.

At a distance from the railway train, one could count several of them, some in mild eruption.

For miles we rode through a congealed river of metal, a great stream that traced its way downward through the green of Mount San Salvador, a tumbled river of black rock that had hardened into fantastic shapes while still foaming and boiling.

But already it had decomposed in places, and islands of green jungle were appearing along its surface.

Salvador, like Guatemala, is mainly a coffee country.

Thus, the critic becomes susceptible to military discipline and ventures no further criticism.

Four.

A few hours of leisurely travel brought me to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

It was a warm, sunny capital, only a trifle over 2,000 feet in altitude, extremely low for a Central American city.

It had the highest murder...

At one point, uh, San Salvador had the, was the murder capital of the world.

It now has the lowest m- uh, murder rate in the Western Hemisphere.

'Cause he just chucked everyone in jail, right?

Mm-hmm.

But at the moment, he is fundamentally changing that country.

When you go to San Salvador, it looks different.

You go down to the beaches.

And there was something that he said that I was like, this kid is better than me.

right he ends up saying you know uh so my parents are pastors and they do this and he was telling me a lot about that i was like oh what a cool story and he goes and recently and at the time he was i want to say he was 26 years old 27 and he goes i just got married and god's recently put it in my heart to go start a church in san salvador el salvador and i said where is that? And he goes, well, that's in El Salvador.

It's a capital city.

Both of my parents are from El Salvador.

And at some point I'd love to do it, but in order to get there, I need a job and I need an income and I need to, you know, in order to kind of help me kind of fund the way.

And I remember hanging up with this kid and my wife's like, well, how'd it go? And I was like, well, he doesn't know anything about insurance, you know, so not necessarily the guy that you would typically hire, I said, but he's got a really cool story.

He wants to plant a church in San Salvador.

And he was telling me all about El Salvador and that they're one of the only Latin American countries that's on the U.S. dollar and how Americanized they are and how, you know, you can get great talent over there, you know, for a fraction of the cost.

Last one? Yep.

When Columbus landed on a Caribbean island in the Bahamas in 1492, what did he name the island? San Cristobal, San Andres, or San Salvador? I'll go San Salvador.

Em, you've got to go to one of the other ones.

Say the other two again.

San Andres or San Cristobal? San

Cristobal.

It is San Salvador.

Good