El Salvador

El Salvador, officially the Republic of El Salvador, is a sovereign nation in Central America on the Pacific coast bordered by Guatemala and Honduras, with San Salvador as its capital and largest municipality and a population estimated at about 6 million as of 2024. The territory was inhabited by Mesoamerican civilizations including the Olmecs, Maya and later Cuzcatlecs before the Spanish Empire conquered it in 1524 and incorporated it into the Viceroyalty of New Spain under the Captaincy General of Guatemala. El Salvador became independent from Spain in 1821, was briefly annexed by the First Mexican Empire, joined the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823, and established full sovereignty as an independent republic upon that federation's 1841 dissolution; the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries brought prolonged instability, frequent coups and authoritarian regimes, culminating in the Salvadoran Civil War of 1979 to 1992 between the government and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, ended by the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords that established a multiparty constitutional republic. The conflict and its economic aftermath drove mass emigration, chiefly to the United States, with nearly one million citizens migrating between 1980 and 2008; the economy shifted historically from cacao and indigo to coffee, which once generated about 90 percent of export revenue, before twentieth century diversification into manufacturing and trade, and in 2001 the country replaced its colon currency with the United States dollar.