March 11, 2013

Pedro de Alvarado "named the district for El Salvador ('The Savior') and was appointed its first governor..."

"... a position he held until his death in 1541. The area was under the authority of a short-lived Audiencia of Panama from 1538 to 1543, when most of Central America was placed under a new Audiencia of Guatemala.... In 1786, the Republic of El Salvador, which previously had been broken up into many corregimientos, was transformed into an intendancy, as part of the Bourbon Reforms..."

In El Salvador, today's "History of" country.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 8:29 PM
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4 comments:

edutcher said...

Pedro Alvarado was one of Cortez' lieutenants and a big man with a flaming red beard and a temper to match.

PS So that's what corregidor means. Thank you, Madame, this project is enlightening.

3/11/13, 9:00 PM
Anonymous said...

Don't get excited. This photo purports to show a snowfall near the 9,000-foot summit of Cerro El Pital, the highest mountain in El Salvador, but it's actually hail. Given its latitude, the peak would have to be at least a couple thousand feet higher for there to be a chance of actual snow.

Peter

3/11/13, 9:24 PM
Michael said...

No Caribbean coast and no legacy of slavery. Until recently blacks were discouraged from visiting the country or living there.

The current government is leftish, the first since the end of the war and a good omen for true democracy. Gang activity and drugs are, alas, undermining progress. I have been there many times and like the people quite a lot.

3/12/13, 8:03 AM
Mitch H. said...

As usual with these little countries, the question is "why does this sovereign state exist?" This History Of article doesn't make a good argument in favor of existence, merely wafting a vague hand in the direction of "it was historically an intendancy". The territory was inhabited, pre-Cortes, by three distinct and unrelated indigenous cultures, the Nahua of Mexico proper, the Mayans of Central America, and an obscure group called the Lenca, who seem to have occupied a sliver of territory in El Salvador and Hondouras between the two larger cultures.

So, El Salvador is an ethnic strike-zone. It has a lack of land lines of communication, which is how it mostly stayed out of the hands of the various Mexican empires. Central America in general has had a history of centrifugal separatism rather then multi-cultural union or empire.

Looks like El Salvador has been an agricultural monoculture, oriented largely towards sea-borne export, making it a natural candidate to become a neo-colonial satellite of one thassolocracy or another, but I don't see any such suggestion. At least, not anything as extreme as how Guatemala became basically a subsidiary of Big Banana in the Fifties.

3/12/13, 9:25 AM

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