Ultima noche en El Salvador - "Traigame una cora de sandia"
Today is my last night in El Salvador. This morning I arrived in a small sleepy colonial town called Concepcion de Ataco. The town is on the Ruta de las Flores. As I rode the crowded bus in the morning I remembered something that the guide had mentioned about why the region is called Ruta de las flores... he said that in May the coffee trees bloom and the mountains, which are covered with coffee fincas, are covered in white. Other than that it's pretty much green the rest of the year. Coffee is very important to the economy of the region and most of the old wealth comes  from coffee. Today I went to the church and just to symbolize how important coffee is, there were coffee trees in the courtyard. 


This coffee region is significant to the history of El Salvador because in 1932 a major socialist insurrection of coffee workers, led to the eventual massacre of 30,000 campesinos.  Farabundo Marti was among one of the leaders killed. Today there is a leftist party called Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) and it won the presidential election in 2009. Douglas mentioned that the FMLN is changing things and that education is now free for everyone and that people have more access to healthcare and other basic necessities. Today as I explored Ataco, I began to notice that there were all this blue, red and white flags sticking out of houses. I then noticed that the flags had writing on them: ARENA. ARENA is the rightist party and apparently very popular here. Most people in Juayua also seem to vote for ARENA, which is kind of ironic. As I continued to walk towards the edge of town I began to notice FMLN flags! I also noticed that the houses became more modest. While this region seems more prosperous than others I visited,  it appears to be polarized politically.


Even though Ataco is not a big town it's hard to find things. I had to ask four times before I found a place with pupusas. Tortillas here are made by hand and they are a lot thicker than the Mexican ones. In fact they look like pupusas. There is also, for some weird reason, way too many Mexican Restaurants. I also couldn't find my way to El Mirador de la Cruz, which is basically a monument on the hillside. On the way back of an uphill and tiring search, I came across this elderly men who asked me to get him a quarter worth of water melon from the market.  So I ended up walking back four blocks to get him some sandia...