San Jose Ojos de Agua, El Salvador

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 (Embajada).

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

By law, on February 18, 1841, the populations of Las Vueltas, Ojos de Agua and La Ceiba formed one electoral area.

The army responded by killing 30,000 people, including the leader of the rebellion, Farabundo Martí, in a bloody act that was later referred to as La Matanza (The Massacre) (Lonely Planet).

The government responded with violence, and the Death Squads were formed, which eventually tortured and killed thousands of people (Foley 2006).

More political instability and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 sparked the beginning of the Civil War (Lonely Planet).

According to the inhabitants, the municipality Ojos de Agua is named after the abundance of water sources in the area.

Los Sitios was so named because people used to stay there (“sitiaban”--“they surrounded”) temporarily while taking care of their animals in the area.

There are two main political parties in El Salvador, whose roots lie in the Civil War (Foley 2006, Stahler-Sholk 1994).

The Frente Farabundo Marti para La Liberacion Nacional (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front—FMLN) the socialist party, is the direct descendant of the guerrilla troops that fought against the Salvadoran government, and was legally constituted as a political party on September 1, 1992 (Stahler-Sholk 1994:3).

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” (ARENA 2007).

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 (Comisión Nacional de Educación Política 2002).

The mayor of Ojos de Agua is Prof. José Raúl Chinchilla Mejía, of the ARENA party.

There is a lot of Protestant activity in the country, and El Salvador has one of the highest rates of Protestantism in Latin America (Soltero y Saravia 2003:1).