Great balls of fire in San Salvador are ancient tradition

You might have enjoyed our coverage of an amateur bull-fighting festival last week, in which men try their luck against 500-kilogram bulls.

Well, Mexico doesn't have the monopoly on dangerous cultural practices and traditions -- as the video dispatch below from La Prensa Graphico in El Salvador shows.

In the Nejapa municipality of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital, residents celebrate "Bolas de fuego" (Balls of Fire) every August 31st. That involves chucking burning balls at each other in the streets.

According to Wikipedia: "Las Bolas de Fuego has two origins, one is a historical story and the other is a religious tale.

"The historical version of the story is that a volcano erupted and forced the villagers of the old Nejapa village (known as Nixapa) to flee and settle at its current location.

"The religious version is that "San Jeronimo" was fighting the Devil with Balls of fire. No matter what version you believe, the tradition commemorates both stories."

Whether religiously inflamed or not, those who play with fire often end up burned ...

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

An American adventurer's death in El Salvador

Joe Sanderson left his Midwestern hometown in his 20s with a backpack, a notepad and a dream of being a writer, writes The Times' Héctor Tobar.

Starting in the mid-1960s, he crossed the Pacific on a freighter, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and kept going, for two decades in all, traipsing across more than 60 countries. Everywhere he went, he kept a diary and wrote to Mom and Dad back home in Urbana, Ill. ... The diary and the hundreds of missives Sanderson wrote home tell an unlikely American adventure story. They chronicle a peripatetic Midwesterner who joked and charmed his way across five continents, and eventually fought against an army backed by his own government.

Click here to read Tobar's full dispatch on the life and times of Joe Sanderson.

For more on El Salvador, click here.

Image: Joe Sanderson, a native of Urbana, Ill., works in a rebel camp in El Salvador around 1981. Sanderson died in April 1982, one of only two Americans known to have died while in the ranks of that country's leftist guerrilla movement in the 1980s and '90s. Credit: Collection of the Museum of the Word and Image

Los Angeles needs to go global to fight gangs, says Rocky Delgadillo

Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles city attorney, oversees the enforcement of 57 gang injunctions, including ones against the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. In Opinion today, he talks about how combating Los Angeles gangs is not a local challenge, but an international one.

"The two fastest-growing and most powerful gangs in the world are homegrown products of Los Angeles. The Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, and the 18th Street gang, known in Central America as Mara 18, sprang up in Pico-Union and the densely populated neighborhoods around MacArthur Park. But unlike many local street gangs, these two were entrepreneurial: They recruited Central American immigrants across the city and then expanded farther -- throughout Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Conservative estimates put MS-13's ranks at 20,000 and 18th Street's at 30,000 worldwide.

"Stopping street gangs is no longer a local matter -- a point driven home to me during a symposium in El Salvador. During the conference, two points of consensus emerged. First, MS-13 and 18th Street have become an international concern -- indeed, even Interpol is now involved in the fight. Second, past strategies to handle these gangs have failed."

Read the full Opinion piece here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

El Salvador's Monument to Memory and Truth

"It looms solemnly over the shady corner of a city park, an incongruous emblem of pain amid a happy clamor of picnicking families and children chasing scuffed soccer balls," writes the Times' Ken Ellingwood from El Salvador.

"A granite echo of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, the 300-foot-long lead-colored monument serves as a kind of giant gravestone for the civil war that ripped El Salvador apart in the 1980s."

"Engraved with nearly 30,000 names, the Monument to Memory and Truth is a roll of dead and disappeared from the conflict, which ended in 1992. It is incomplete. Officially, the fighting between leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military government killed 75,000 and left thousands more missing. Not all the names of the war's victims were available when the monument project began, so the list is growing."

Read on about the Monument to Memory and Truth in El Salvador here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: Magdalena Mendoza looks for the names of her eight relatives killed and missing during the civil war. Credit: Luis Romero / Associated Press

Oil prices threaten Latin America's economic gains

Are exploding oil prices about to burn Latin America?

With the largest petroleum reserves outside the Middle East, the region has been on a roll in recent years. Record exports of crude and grain fueled economic growth not seen since the 1970s. The region's stock markets roared. Easier credit spawned a consumer class that snapped up homes and cars. About 26 million Latin Americans climbed out of poverty between 2002 and 2006, United Nations figures show.

But, writes The Times' Marla Dickerson, the same forces behind that prosperity are now, paradoxically, creating misery in the midst of bounty. Surging fuel prices have ignited inflation throughout the region, driving up the cost of food, the price of which was already on the upswing thanks in part to ravenous global demand for Latin America's farm products.

Read on about oil prices in Latin America.

-- Deborah Bonello in Los Angeles

Photo: Marvin Hernandez, 12, bathes on the site of a former dump that’s home to nearly 2,000 people in San Salvador. At least 500,000 people in El Salvador and Guatemala fell into poverty last year, the United Nations estimates. Photo credit: Roberto Escobar / EPA.

El Salvador river sweeps bus off bridge, killing 29

Rescue crews recovered 29 bodies Friday from a raging, rain-fed river that swept a bus carrying members of an evangelical church off a bridge in El Salvador's capital, reports the Associated Press.

Crews were still looking for at least one other person believed to have been aboard the bus when it was carried away by the Acelhuate river in southern San Salvador Thursday night, said Raul Murillo, spokesman for the national civil protection service.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: Salvadoran rescue workers recover the body of one of at least 29 30 victims after a bus disaster in San Salvador. Flooding swept the bus off a bridge and into the waters of the Acelhuate River. Credit: Robert Escobar / EPA

El Salvador presidential hopeful visits Los Angeles

In a sign of the political influence of Salvadorans abroad, Mauricio Funes — a 48-year-old television journalist who is a presidential hopeful in El Salvador  — is this week meeting with expatriates in Los  Angeles and will address a conference at UCLA on Friday.

More than 15% of Salvadorans live abroad, mostly in the U.S. (L.A Times source), and a large chunk of those are based in Los Angeles.

"During a stump speech [in El Salvador] Funes attacked as "immoral" a new 4-cent-a-minute tax on international phone calls. The issue is sensitive. More than 800,000 Salvadorans have migrated to the United States but keep ties to family members back home," writes Ken Ellingwood.

Funes is a newcomer to politics but has jolted El Salvador by grabbing a sizable early lead in the presidential race as the candidate of the leftist group that fought a guerrilla war in the country two decades ago.

In visits to the United States in recent months, he has met with officials to assure them that  as president he would retain close relations with the U.S., particularly on issues such as regional drug trafficking and organized crime.