‘They are pushing us out’: how El Salvador turned to gang violence laws to seize land from the poor

In El Salvador, emergency laws originally designed to combat gang violence are now being weaponized to evict poor communities from land they were granted after the civil war. Take the case of El Bosque, a farming cooperative near Santa Tecla: residents got an eviction notice in May and responded with a peaceful sit-in. Advocates say this is part of a broader, unsettling trend where the government uses heavy-handed tactics to reclaim land—displacing families who’ve lived there for decades.