source: New York Times
The tin-and-cardboard tortilla stand run by 54-year-old María Magdalena Velázquez feeds her six grandchildren. Children’s games can be heard in the back room, and she asks the eldest to read out the titles on a bundle of papers. “Here,” the girl says from memory, pointing to one. “It says that if we don’t pay, we have to leave. But where would we go if we have nowhere?” María explains, referring to a document distributed in the community by the Salvadoran company Quebec S.A., which became the new owner of the land in 2023.
In the municipality of Soyapango, hundreds of people fleeing poverty and neglect built tin shacks over a landfill in 2004. They arrived on December 1, and that date gave the community its name: Primero de Diciembre. Today, residents estimate there are about 5,000 people living there. Most survive by street vending, scrap recycling, or begging. Despite the muddy streets, collective work managed to level the ground and lay out the housing plots, as well as bring in public water and electricity.
“How is it possible that, after 20 years living here, someone suddenly shows up claiming ownership? When this was a garbage dump, nothing but ravines everywhere, no one came over,” says 65-year-old Gilberto Rodas, frowning, a fading Christian cross tattooed on his forehead. He and his wife get by on $2 to $3 a day from selling food and cleaning products.
Gilberto Rodas, a resident of the Primero de Diciembre neighborhood.Marta Maroto Novales
In mid-2023, Quebec S.A. presented itself to the community as the owner of the land. A year later, it distributed to every household — no matter how precarious — a lease agreement and a document listing the purchase price of each plot. The rents demanded range from $120 to $300 a month, while buying the land would cost between $25,000 and $30,000, according to the papers now in residents’ hands.
Alongside the real estate company came bank representatives knocking on doors. They offered loans but required documentation — such as deeds or proof of ownership — that the tenants did not have. Nor, residents say, did the company provide any paperwork proving that it actually owns the land.
“Quebec S.A. gives you the opportunity to legalize your plot and obtain property under conditions well suited to your means,” reads a company brochure, which lays out a menu of options: buy outright or on credit, pay rent, or “free the land” — in other words, vacate it. The same document set August 31 as the deadline for eviction of those who had not begun payment procedures. However, according to local media, the Ministry of Housing decided to step in. In an event alongside Quebec S.A., Housing Minister Michelle Sol handed over the first 15 property deeds to residents who had managed to pay the amounts, and announced that various payment options would be offered to help others formalize their situation.
Residents of the Primero de Diciembre neighborhood receive a notice from the real estate company Quebec S.A.Marta Maroto Novales
That has calmed them somewhat. Without resources to hire a lawyer, residents had been piecing together their legal standing through visits to various institutions, where they denounced what they see as a lack of coherence from the company. “They don’t have a single version of events. It’s not clear how much land they bought, we don’t know who the real owner is, and they won’t give us the documents they say they have so that we can apply for a loan,” says Mercedes Alvarado, known as Menchi, a 68-year-old longtime community leader.
“We were afraid it was a scam, but this proves they are the owners,” explains another resident, who prefers not to give his name. “Some of us weren’t granted loans by the social fund, they told us this institution [Quebec S.A.] wasn’t legalized,” he adds.
EL PAÍS sent a request for information to the company but has not received a response. Meanwhile, the community hopes this unexpected move by the government will open the door to dialogue with the authorities and allow poorer residents to “pay little by little.”
Land dispossession as a policy
The Primero de Diciembre case is part of a nationwide pattern of land dispossession. Large-scale real estate and tourism projects — central to President Nayib Bukele’s economic strategy — are driving the forced displacement of Indigenous communities and low-income families.
People who have lived on a piece of land for decades are being displaced “by government entities or business groups that obtained ownership of the land in just the past year through deception of residents and arbitrary and incomplete judicial processes,” explains Ángel Flores, coordinator of the Indigenous Movement for the Articulation of Ancestral Peoples’ Struggles (MILPA).
At the end of 2024, more than 200 families from Condadillo and Flor del Mangle, in southeastern El Salvador, were forced to abandon their homes for the construction of the Pacific Airport, one of the government’s flagship promises, financed in part with international funds. According to MILPA, many residents received nothing and ended up on the streets — even though they were entitled to “fair compensation,” as required by the expropriation law enacted during Bukele’s current constitutional term, denounces.
The privatization of land is not a new problem in El Salvador. For decades, reforms have favored land grabs by large landholders. But now the process is accelerating at breakneck speed. In recent years, the Bukele government has armed itself with a legal framework that allows the dispossession of cooperative lands — such as the aforementioned expropriation law — and revived extractivist policies, as evidenced by the reactivation of previously banned mining operations.
View of the Primero de Diciembre neighborhood in El Salvador.Marta Maroto Novales
State of exception as a tool for land privatization
The strategy of dispossession has been enabled by the state of exception, a measure initially conceived as temporary to end gang violence. Yet after more than three years of successive extensions, it has turned El Salvador into the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 88,000 people behind bars in prisons where torture and even killings are common, according to human rights organizations.
The state of exception has also suspended all constitutional guarantees, according to the MILPA. The group has identified at least 45 communities across the country facing eviction lawsuits — some 11,000 families in total. One example of how the measure is used to silence activists and dissenting voices is the case of the El Bosque Agricultural Cooperative in Santa Tecla. Faced with the threat of eviction of 300 families, a protest in May was violently repressed by police, and community leaders were arbitrarily detained under conditions imposed by the state of exception, according to Salvadoran media.
MILPA has also denounced the detention of up to six artisanal fishers from the community of El Icacal, in the eastern department of La Unión. A month after the arrest of Óscar René Martínez, a founding member of MILPA, the company Desarrollos Turísticos El Pacífico S.A. showed up claiming ownership of the land for the construction of tourist resorts.
The cases follow a clear pattern in which both activists and residents denounce the lack of protection for the country’s most vulnerable populations. “There are men in suits behind all this, that’s why they feel supported,” says Rodas of Quebec S.A., noting that the constant threat of eviction has never truly left Primero de Diciembre.
The community’s elders recount a lifetime of hardship and misery: many were once part of the guerrilla or the Armed Forces, and the lack of institutional support drove them to a landfill as a place to start over. Beginning in 2010, they fell victim to the gangs’ cruelty. “There were deaths every day in this community,” Velázquez says as she sells tortillas. “And today it’s the rich who come to bother us, to take away our peace. Only God can help us
