A year after the big earthquake, much of San Salvador still looks like a disaster. Flashy stores are juxtaposed with heaps of rubble, garbage, damaged buildings, crowded streets, and the many people trying to sell something, anything, to make a living.

Graffiti abounds, most of it against President Duarte, the government, and the American presence, and signed with an organization’s initials.

The government responds with stencilled efforts to associate “Duarte” with “peace”; it also has billboards and the press at its disposal.

I saw my first (and only) Central American dead body in San Salvador. A man in his thirties had been neatly shot in front of a church on a main thoroughfare. A small crowd was being kept back by a couple of police officers and a TV crew, while the fresh blood of the dead man trickled down the sidewalk and pooled in the cracks.

At the center of San Salvador stands the Cathedral, a massive stone structure facing a large square where vendors sell iced drinks and sandwiches and evangelicals preach. Inside, as he was saying Mass, Archbishop Oscar Romero was gunned to death in 1980. Already a heroic figure to those struggling for social justice in Latin America, Romero became a martyr, and judging from his tomb in a wing of the Cathedral, is well on his way to becoming a saint. Covering the tomb are dozens of marble plaques proclaiming, “Thanks to Oscar Romero for miracle granted,” one from as far away as Oklahoma.

From the center of town I walked west, past a park with a bandshell in which a young man was preaching himself hoarse to an assorted group who perhaps thought they’d get their souls saved over lunch. I continued through an upscale residential district and past a dance school. At the next intersection, on the far corner and down a ten-foot bank, stretched rows and rows of new and uniformly built corrugated zinc constructions which seemed to be inhabited. I scrambled down the hill to talk to a group of teenagers about these houses.

“Houses? More like ovens!” one exclaimed in disgust.

As a building material, corrugated zinc is easy to erect, but under the sun the interior gets very hot. These buildings were provided by a Spanish relief agency as temporary housing for victims of last year’s earthquake. They have shared side walls and no windows. The “streets” dividing the rows are narrow paths with open drains. Each of the hundreds of 3m x 4m spaces houses a family. A few have living room sets, fridges and a colour TV; most are more basically equipped with hammocks and rough furniture. Outhouses, bathhouses and water taps are communal. Not all the units have been built or inhabited; their distribution has fallen into the same pattern of corruption that permeates the society.

In general, money donated to the government for the earthquake relief has not been reaching the poor; those who are benefiting are the relatively well-off.

I spent only about a week in El Salvador (and some of that at a beach). My only contact turned out to be a wrong number. I had much less background knowledge about the country than I had about Guatemala; I hadn’t expected to go there at all.

Furthermore, almost every person with whom I had a serious conversation asked me what I knew about immigration to Canada. Many had relatives or friends living there. It’s not just because of the war; the country is overpopulated. A lot of people I talked to on the street didn’t have much hope for the future and would have gladly left for greener pastures.