For this project I tried to show the relationship between the United States and El Salvador, and the impact of the Salvadoran Civil War. I did this by examining migration patterns from El Salvador, and US arms deals with El Salvador. The data visualizations are going to be paired with a story about unforgetting family history for a first generation person in the US, in order to re-contextualize contemporary global relations.
The first visualization shows migrant flow data sourced originally from the United Nations that was processed by Guy Abel. The data shows migrant flows over a 5-year period. Through the use of a Alluvial diagram, Salvadoran migration is compared to that of other Central American nations over time.
Despite El Salvador being geographically the smallest country in Central America, it has experienced some of the highest emmigration. Like most countries in the region, the majority of Salvadorans have immigrated to the United States.
According to the Migration Policy Institute “The nearly 1.4 million immigrants from El Salvador, representing one-fifth of its population, account for the second-largest Latin American group in the United States, after Mexicans.”
I then used the same data to map Salvadoran migration over time using a connections globe. The animation visualizes the large contingent of continuous migration of Salvadorans to the United States.
El Salvador experienced a brutal Civil War from 1979 to 1992, during which migration increased drastically. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 gave 146,000 Salvadorans legal status in the United States, which was only about 3% of all Salvadoran asylumn applications. At the time President Regan deemed Salvadorans as “economic immigrants” rather than political asylumn seekers.
This is in part due to the US involvement in the war by supporting and training the right-wing military dictatorship. During the Civil War the US increased its arms deals with El Salvador. In the height of the war, the US supplied the most arms with about $59 million worth of arms in 1984. This was just two years before the IRCA was passed.
This information is displayed in the final visualization which uses data collected from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database. It is important to note that these are not exact numbers, but rather trend-indicator value (TIV) calculations that estimate the costs of a variety of “arms” from small weapons to aircrafts.
In 1991 a coalition of religious and political organizations filed a lawsuit against the Immigration and Naturalization Services, charging them of discriminatory practices against Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylumn seekers. American Baptist Churches v Thornburgh ruled in favor of the asylumn seekers, expanding the application approval rates by 25%. Additionally temporary protected status (TPS) was established in the Immigration Act of 1990, and expanded in 2001 after the earchquake in El Salvador. All these may account for the boom in Salvadoran migration to the US in the 1990s.