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Until recently, most North Americans thought of Central America as the land of bananas and exotic vacations. Today, government, media, and public concern are focused on the region's instability and the United States' role in it. This “crisis” in Central America has generated a barrage of publications. Perhaps an appropriate title for this article would have been “Central America: Crisis in the Library.” The growing number of publications on Central America is matched by growing demand for them in both public and academic libraries. This bibliography will help librarians build an adequate and balanced collection on Central America without having to locate and examine each book.

Enterprises in developed and developing world environments often begin life in the informal sector operating outside the purview of government oversight. Sectoral firm change, however, from the informal to the formal sector is not well studied. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following research question: “What firm-level markers help explain the movement of firms from the informal to the formal sector?”

Data from 719 urban formal enterprises included in the 2016 El Salvador Enterprise Survey undertaken by the World Bank forms the basis of the empirical analyses. The survey questionnaire comprehensively encompasses business practices and performance and the overall business environment.

Multivariate results reveal location, firm maturity, problems with land acquisition, a line of credit or active business loan, extortion by street gangs and practices of informal competitors increase the odds of informal firms becoming formal enterprises. Lessening the odds of once informal firms moving to the formal sector include the lack of access to public utilities, visitation by tax officials, formation as a corporation, bank accounts, number of employees and time spent focused upon government regulations.

Contextualized within the national setting of El Salvador, the integration of informal enterprises into the formal economy and related public policy implications of informal firm regularization are discussed.

Las empresas de países desarrollados y en desarrollo a menudo comienzan su vida en el sector informal y que opera fuera del ámbito de la supervisión gubernamental. Sin embargo, el cambio de empresas sectoriales, desde el sector informal al formal, no está bien estudiado. Este artículo busca responder la siguiente pregunta de investigación: “¿Qué marcadores de nivel de empresa ayudan a explicar el movimiento de las empresas del sector informal al formal?”

Los datos de 719 empresas formales urbanas incluidas en la encuesta de empresas de El Salvador de 2016 realizada por el Banco Mundial constituyen la base de los análisis empíricos. El cuestionario de la encuesta abarca de manera integral las prácticas y el rendimiento empresarial y el entorno empresarial general.

Los resultados multivariables revelan la ubicación, la madurez de la empresa, los problemas con la adquisición de tierras, una línea de crédito o un préstamo comercial activo, la extorsión por parte de pandillas callejeras y las prácticas de competidores informales aumentan las probabilidades de que las empresas informales se conviertan en empresas formales. Disminuir las probabilidades de que una vez las firmas informales se muden al sector formal incluyen la falta de acceso a los servicios públicos, las visitas de los funcionarios tributarios, la formación como corporación, las cuentas bancarias, el número de empleados y el tiempo dedicado a las regulaciones gubernamentales.

En el contexto nacional de El Salvador, se analiza la integración de empresas informales en la economía formal y se discuten las implicaciones de las políticas públicas relacionadas con la regularización de empresas informales.

El Salvador’s youth have faced a climate of violence for decades. Schools have been identified as the most cost-effective ways to help students develop the life skills they need to prevent violence. This study examined the potential role of a physical education (PE) program taught by some of the first Salvadoran teachers to be trained to foster life skills through PE within schools.

Fourteen schools that had hired a PE teacher trained in life skills-based PE volunteered to participate in the study. Semi-structured interviews with the school director, PE teacher, and a focus group of students at each school were conducted.

Interviews were content analyzed and potential themes were initially placed into one of three life skills categories using a deductive analysis based upon the World Health Organization’s (WHO) (2002) three categories of life skills: (i) Coping and Self-Management; (ii) Communication and Interpersonal; (iii) Decision Making/Problem Solving. Then, using an inductive analysis, various themes within each life skills category were identified. The findings revealed that participants in the study identified the role that PE provides in developing life skills in each of the three categories and many identified the importance of these life skills to prevent violence both in and out of schools.

Findings from this study highlight the important role that schools play in the development of life skills and the prevention of youth violence. PE in particular offers a promising approach due to its applied nature and opportunity for students to learn through doing and the application of life skills in a safe manner. The findings also support the importance of trained PE teachers to deliver such programs.

Central America has and continues to be a region with high levels of youth violence. Given that PE is a mandatory school subject in Salvadoran schools (and in other Central American countries), shifting the focus toward a life skills-based approach to PE offers educators an opportunity to address the country’s number one public health concern which is youth violence. To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind in El Salvador to explore the role of PE as it relates to youth violence and can help in future curricular revisions in schools and the development of degree programs at local universities.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the myriad social forces in El Salvador make it difficult for LGBTQ+ to publicly declare their sexual orientation or name their perpetrators and hence to use the #MeToo hashtag as a leadership strategy of their movement.

A qualitative research design was used that included interviews and focus group discussions with LGBTQ+ leaders of organizations and government officials. A descriptive/interpretive approach was used to understand their experiences of being LGBTQ+, leadership approach to gain their rights and knowledge of #MeToo.

Although the movement has contributed to the public dialog about sexual misconduct, it has not had an impact on the “coming out” of LGBTQ+ on Twitter, public exposure of offenders, improved treatment of LGBTQ+ or significant changes in employment law for LGBTQ+ Salvadorans. Rather than the celebrity-led #MeToo movement, a continuation of the more grassroots approach that Salvadoran LGBTIQ+ leaders use may more successfully achieve their protection and rights.

Further research should be completed regarding the impact of leadership on changing the social imaginary and the leadership approach most appropriate for this impact.

The study provides a case to further explore the leadership's role in changing the social imaginary.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to illustrate that #MeToo cannot be successful in all cultural contexts or with all LGBTQ+ communities and that grassroots approaches may be more appropriate in countries such as El Salvador.

The article focuses on varying protest intensities of social movement activists in an authoritarian political environment. Drawing on a sample of participants in El Salvador's El movimiento popular, the paper examines how structural location in the resistance movement's multi-sectoral organizational infrastructure shapes the level of participation. Those motivated by state repression and maintaining multiple or cross-sectoral organizational ties exhibited higher levels of protest participation. The findings suggest that more attention be given to how the multi-sectoral network structure of opposition coalitions induces micro-mobilization processes of individual participation in high-risk collective action.

Purpose – This study identifies the multiple contributions of the Salvadoran women's movement in sustaining mass mobilization under the threat of public health care privatization.

Methodology/approach – A case study methodological approach shows how the emergence of an autonomous women's movement in El Salvador in the late 1980s and early 1990s “spilled over” (Meyer & Whittier, 1994) to assist in the maintenance of the health care campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Findings – We observed three arenas in which the women's movement played pivotal roles in the anti-health care privatization struggle: (1) women-based organizations; (2) leadership positions within larger coalitions brokering the participation of diverse social sectors; and (3) key advocacy roles inside the state. These three contributions of the women's movement increased the overall level of mobilization and success against health care privatization.

Research limitations – The study centered on one major group of health care consumers. The role of other civic organizations should be examined in future research.

Originality/value of chapter – The study demonstrates that in the era of globalization, women's movements form a critical part of the social movement sector facilitating the construction of large coalitions protecting consumers from neoliberal restructuring in areas such as public health care.