Can soccer help El Salvador turn from terror to trust?

There are two soccer fields just 10 minutes apart on foot in this small community east of San Salvador.

One sits in the “upper” part of town, the other in the “lower.” And for more than a decade, neighbors from one side would not dare cross into the other – not for school, not to visit family or friends, and certainly not to kick a soccer ball.

Yet today it is these two pitches – as sloping, ragged, and dusty as both might be – that the community is banking on to help forge trust and unity after being divided by gang control, threats, and extortion.

El Salvador was riven by brutal violence at the hands of gangs until President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019 pledging a hard-line approach to crime. In the past five years, homicide rates have plummeted, and citizens are opening their doors to a new sense of security and freedom.

But as residents here know well, rebuilding trust takes much more than a fall in crime statistics. So it was a love of soccer that neighbors leaned into in a novel, if still nascent, attempt to reconnect in shared public space: tournaments to bring the lower and upper parts together.

“Thank God the gangs are gone,” says Miguel Angel Segovia, whose daughter Katherine was raped and decapitated by gang members here when she was just 15 years old. And even though the soccer competitions faced a setback this winter, he’s behind the attempt to use sport as a way to transcend lingering mistrust. “It’s really important that people get involved,” he says.

The trauma and violence that so many have lived in El Salvador “has caused the social fabric to break down,” says Verónica Reyna, director of human rights at the nongovernmental organization Servicio Social Pasionista. The gang violence made “people very individualistic. They focus on the survival of themselves or their family,” she says. “We don’t have practice working together.”

In Reparto las Cañas they are trying – at least on the soccer field.

Whitney Eulich

Miguel Angel Segovia (left), who lost his 15-year-old daughter to the brutal gang violence that controlled this small community for more than a decade, poses with his father, Carlos.

A tentative peace

This quiet commuter town of one-story brick homes painted in a rainbow palette was until very recently split along M and N streets. Warring gangs would keep watch from rooftops, sometimes shooting indiscriminately, wielding such control that even blood relatives divided by the barrier wouldn’t acknowledge one another on the street or while riding the same bus home from work. Katherine’s attackers showed up at her funeral to express their condolences, says her father, highlighting the impunity and cynicism that flourished under gang control.  

In March 2022, Mr. Bukele’s government launched a “state of exception,” arresting and imprisoning suspected criminals en masse. More than 75,000 people have been put behind bars.

The crackdown has been criticized as anti-democratic. But Mr. Bukele remains wildly popular, recently winning a second presidential term, because finally, Salvadorans say, they are living in peace. In Las Cañas, residents say it’s as if the intimidation that kept them apart for years seemingly disappeared overnight.

But the absence of violence against one another didn’t translate into confidence in one another – and that’s how soccer came to be seen as a community solution.

Following the government’s crackdown, primary school students from the lower part of town slowly started attending the public school in the upper area, almost tripling the student body year on year, says Principal Daniel Diaz Guzmán.

Aside from walking kids to school, however, most adults would stick to their sides. Mr. Diaz remembers walking in to a parent meeting last year to find the adults self-segregated into groups from above and below. But after school, the kids would linger – playing pick-up soccer – sparking an idea for a soccer tournament and a future for this town. “It’s our responsibility to lead our young people toward hope, a better reality. We can’t do that relying on fear,” Mr. Diaz says.

Last year a group formed – with equal representation from upper and lower – that imagined several teams from each side traveling to the upper and the lower parts of the neighborhood to play, drawing family members and friends into formerly no-go areas to cheer.

And it worked. The first tournament, Unifying Las Cañas, which ran from March to July in 2023, was an overwhelming success. Douglas Flores, who goes by the nickname Chucho, grew up in the upper part. The more than 10 years he was cut off from his friends and family in the lower section were full of “overwhelming anxiety,” he says. “It was just horrible, horrible what we suffered.”

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Douglas Flores, known locally as Chucho, found soccer opened doors to reintegrate his long-divided neighborhood. He was one of only a handful of residents from the upper part of town to participate in this year's tournament, Jan. 21, 2024.

“But I come and play soccer because ... I have friends here [in the lower section] who I never thought I’d get to see again in my life,” he says. “Now, through sport, soccer, the tournaments,” incredibly, we’re together again, Chucho says.

“The vision was always to unite, because with the [gangs], we’d always been divided” says Pedro Rojas, a member of the organizing committee from the lower part of town.

A setback

On a recent Sunday afternoon, scores of residents gather around the lower soccer field for the community’s second annual tournament, headlined as “Las Cañas Free From Violence.” Neighbors, young and old, eat shaved ice while corridos blast from a tent of spectators.

Despite the festive atmosphere, a shadow lingers over this year’s tournament: While some players from the upper zone participated, no full teams did. Suspicions by some in the lower area that some organizers and players in the upper had retained gang affiliations led to a police investigation, sapping the incipient reserves of trust between both sides built up over the past year.

Beatriz Mejía Restrepo, executive director of Grupo Internacional de Paz, a Colombia-based NGO focused on international development and peace, isn’t surprised. Sport can be helpful in the peace-building process, but communities require state support and outside investment, to combat unemployment and poverty, and mediation. “Collective decisions, empathy, assertive communication, conflict resolution. As a medium, sport can sharpen a lot of these skills,” she says. “But what happens when players take off their jerseys?”

The Salvadoran government has paid lip service to using soccer for rebuilding trust, setting up a program to try to tackle issues of community building. But it has yet to launch, and the government declined to make officials available for interview.

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Trophies crowd the announcer's table on the final day of the Las Cañas Free From Violence soccer tournament, organized to build trust in a community divided by gangs for more than a decade.

Community leaders are steadfast in their vision to continue. Already they are trying to organize another communitywide tournament this spring, says César Bonifacio, a member of the tournament planning committee. He played alongside Chucho in the late January tournament for one of the few teams with members from the upper part of Las Cañas. “The vision for community integration is still there,” he says.

Up the steep main road, men, families, and young people gather on the upper soccer field at dusk on a recent evening. Jorge Calles stands near the far edge of the dusty hilltop field with a group of older residents, looking down across the lower part of town.

Before the gangs and the violence, these men recall how united their community once was. “We used to share our lives, crisscross the neighborhood with friends in all corners,” says Mr. Calles. Like so many here, he looks to soccer as the key to bringing everyone back together, dreaming up ways to improve the field, perhaps by adding fencing and providing balls and other equipment.

“It’s going to be a process,” he says, “to get to a point where we stop thinking in terms of upper and lower.”