SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Eulalia García was stunned when she opened an envelope to find an invitation from none other than the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. It promised a bus would take her family the following day to receive a surprise Christmas gift.
Garcia had survived a mudslide that killed four in her extended family and destroyed their humble home on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano. “It will be a good way to end the year after all we’ve been through,” Garcia told her husband, Ramon Sanchez.
A neighbor in Los Angelitos, Inés Flamenco, was so grateful for her invitation that she spent three days’ earnings on a gift for the president — a bouquet of red, white and pink roses that would turn into a beautiful photo opportunity for Bukele.
“I wanted to tell him how happy I was,” she recalled.
But the Christmas joy would be short-lived. Flamenco and many other guests of the president would soon discover their gifts came with a steep price tag.
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This story is part of a series, After the Deluge, produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, one of the worst ever for Central America, wiped out homes and crops and displaced more than half a million people. Honduras and Guatemala were hardest hit by back-to-back hurricanes, and their governments’ failure to respond fueled soaring migration to the United States.
Even where one government in the region did act, its response was marred by politics, disrespect for the rule of law and a tendency to embrace simple answers to complicated problems.
In El Salvador, a populist president saw opportunity where tragedy struck. After the tropical storm in October, Bukele moved quickly to demonstrate that he could deliver to hundreds of families from Los Angelitos and another community, Nueva Israel, with a program that surely would be appreciated by his countrymen.
There was a problem, though. Bukele forgot to ask the people what they needed to recover. While some appreciated his help, others said they were left out and still others criticized his program, saying it was typical of the way the president governs — using public funds for political propaganda.
“He acts fast. He does not consult, does not plan and does not listen to anyone,” said Francisco Altschul, a former ambassador of El Salvador to the United States.
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On the night of Oct. 29, it rained so hard on the tin roof of their house that Ramon Sanchez fell into a hypnotic “sleep of death,” as he called it.
Heaps of broken trees and rocky soil created a dam high on the volcano during the torrent. The accumulation of groundwater throughout the winter, plus days of pounding rain, caused the dam to break and the landslide that devoured Los Angelitos.
Around 10:40 that night, Sánchez was awakened by what felt like an explosion. “A rock had hit a…
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