Chalatenango, El Salvador

[1] On May 31, 1522, the first of the Spanish, under the leadership of Captain Pedro de Alvarado, disembarked on the Isla Meanguera, located in the Gulf of Fonseca.

[1] In June 1524 Captain Alvarado began a war of conquest against the indigenous people of Cuzcatlán (land of precious things).

He claimed that the area was “very hot and healthy.” In 1770, according to Archbishop don Pedro Cortes de Larraz, Chalatenango was the capital of the large villages of Arcatao, Concepción Quezaltepeque and Techonchogo (today San Miguel de Mercedes), plus 56 haciendas and prosperous valleys and other small villages.

On February 16, 1831, in the State of San Salvador, the title of “villa” was conferred to Chalatenango, in recognition of the important services given by this area in the process of independence and the armed struggles of 1827 and 1829 that ended in the reestablishment of constitutional order in Central America (Plan Estratégico de Desarrollo Municipal de Chalatenango).

[5] The government responded with violence, and the death squads were formed, which eventually tortured and killed thousands of people.

[6] More political instability, and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, sparked the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Today ARENA describes itself as a party in whose “forming principals express that a democratic and representational system, which guarantees the freedom of action and the consequences of individual peaceful goals, are the quickest and stablest path to achieve integral development of the nation”.

[10] The FMLN “has begun to take steps…to act as a consequence of the historically created challenges, in order to make the party an organization of ‘social fighters…’and ‘to unify more’ the struggle for power.

In fact, the entire department of Chalatenango was one of the biggest producers of indigo, as demonstrated by the large number of former manufacturing plants found throughout the municipality.

Other traditional crops that are important to local diets are corn, beans, sorghum (maicillo), native squash, rice, and vegetables.

In summer of 2009, Chalatenango FC were suddenly closed down after selling their place in the Premier Division (LMF) to Municipal Limeño, a team from eastern El Salvador.

In 2010, the team applied to change its name from Nejapa to Alacranes del Norte (Northern Scorpions), but they have yet to receive official clearance to do this.

NOTE: Unless otherwise cited, all information extracted from Martínez Alas et al. "Diagnostico Cultural Municipio de Chalatenango, 2005."