Obama’s visit to El Salvador

As many of you are probably aware, President Obama is currently in the middle of a rare five-day trip to Latin America with stops in Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. There's been a great deal of discussion about why Obama chose these three countries, while excluding others, like Argentina.

El Salvador, for its part, is an interesting itinerary choice. It's the smallest of the three countries comprising the troubled "Northern Triangle" of Central America, along with Guatemala and Honduras. What the three nations have in common, beyond geographical proximity, is rampant violence, much of it connected to the drug trade. But with Guatemala's upcoming election, Obama wouldn't want to be seen as a meddler, and with Honduras' recent coup, the perceived message of a visit there would be messy as well.

So El Salvador it is, a tiny country not far away that many of us know very little about. But an estimated 700 Salvadorans flee their country every day, many of them winding up in the U.S. Now is as good a time as any to plug my friend Jamie Moffett's documentary, Return to El Salvador. It's narrated by Martin Sheen (a decidedly less crazy Sheen) and has been endorsed by Nobel Peace Prize-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others. The documentary takes a look at the history of El Salvador, and particularly its civil war, and how these events are shaping modern realities in El Salvador and in our own backyard.

I interviewed Jamie about the project last summer, and today he called to let me know the film is currently screening in El Salvador (were President Obama to squeeze a screening into his schedule, I'm sure he'd get a better understanding of the country). But luckily for the rest of us, the film has also been added to Hulu and is now among the top ten documentaries featured there. I encourage you to check it out, but to whet your appetite, the trailer is below.

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