Every dry season, the family of Santos Díaz and 18 others who make up the community of El Rescate must ration their drinking and cooking water. In the wet season, they collect rainwater in tanks used a century ago to store coffee and water for agricultural use.
Getting to El Rescate takes 45 minutes by off-road vehicle from Berlín, North Usulután. Depending on the time of year, the road is a combination of stone and mud or a blanket of dust and stones. In El Salvador, the dry season lasts from November through April, with temperatures spiking the last two months.
From a distance, El Rescate looks like a model with little houses embedded in the mountain. There, amid the ruins of an old coffee plantation, families settled after the Salvadoran civil war. They survive on agricultural work and fruit-picking. When rainwater is scarce, the families of El Rescate, mainly women and children, walk for at least an hour, along forest paths, to reach a place known as El Río, where they meet with women from their neighboring community, San Lorenzo, to wash clothes and fetch drinking water.
A scientific report by the Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) revealed that El Salvador has the lowest annual water availability per person in Central America. Two-thirds of households obtaining water from remote or precarious sources are in rural areas like El Rescate. According to the report, seven out of ten women in El Salvador participate on a daily basis in activities related to the use and supply of water, such as collecting water, washing dishes, clothes, watering plants, bathing children and people with illnesses or permanent disabilities, cooking, and cleaning the house. Among men, only three out of ten are involved in these activities, both in urban and rural areas. In rural areas, women like those in San Lorenzo or El Rescate must spend between one and five hours a day collecting water.
According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), North Usulután is the municipality with the highest percentage of monetary poverty in El Salvador. That means more than 54,000 people whose income is not enough to cover the basic shopping basket. In the rural communities of Berlín, some families limit their food shopping in order to buy water. Here, a quarter of the inhabitants live without electricity or access to drinking water.
In San Lorenzo, what they call a river is not really a river: It is a stream where water filters down from the mountains of Berlín — an oasis also for the families of El Rescate. There, dozens of women walk for around thirty minutes if they leave from nearby, or up to two hours if they come from other settlements. The walks take them between ravines. Some walk while carrying their babies; others are accompanied by their nephews and nieces because the men are engaged in agricultural work. What the men can earn working the land does not exceed 100 dollars a month; in El Salvador, the basic rural basket of goods costs almost 200 dollars.
In December, the Nayib Bukele-controlled legislature passed a law to reactivate metals mining, which had been prohibited since 2017. With the return of mining expected to affect El Salvador’s already stretched potable water supply, residents of the communities of Berlín are turning to their faith, hoping for rain.
The municipality of Berlín’s profile rose in 2021, after the government of Nayib Bukele announced the creation of a bitcoin “mining” project on the premises of the Berlín geothermal plant. Berlín is one of the nine districts that make up North Usulután, which in turn is one of the 14 municipalities in the country with the highest percentage of multidimensional poverty: 38 percent of its population has difficulties accessing education, healthcare, housing, basic services, and food security. Berlín is also part of the region with the highest percentage of monetary poverty in the country, with 49 percent unable to afford the basic basket of goods, according to the 2024 UNDP Socioeconomic Map.
The Berlín geothermal power plant began operations in 1992 and provides 12.3 percent of the energy for all of El Salvador. The plant is in North Usulután where, according to the UNDP, some 25,000 people live without access to electricity. After driving along mud and dirt roads, you come to communities that have to make do with a donated solar panel, as is the case of the El Rescate community, some 45 minutes from the plant. In other cases, people use gas bottles and a strip of cloth for light at night.
Four kilometers from the center of Berlín, in the middle of forests and old coffee plantations, is the community of El Rescate, made up of a dozen and a half families who subsist on farming and gathering izote flowers and wild fruits that do not need care. Residents settled here after the 1992 peace accords. They arrived from areas surrounding Berlín and Alegría to this territory, which had been controlled by the guerrillas during the civil war. According to Santos, the local leader, the area was declared uninhabitable after the earthquakes of 2001.
Jéssica Quijano, 20, lives in the community of San Lorenzo, in the canton of the same name. Since finishing high school, she has devoted herself exclusively to domestic work due to a lack of resources to continue her education. Every day, after walking for hours to a tank located in rough terrain in her district, she collects water to wash with and bring home. The scientific report by the UCA states that seven out of ten women in El Salvador participate on a daily basis in activities related to the use and supply of water. Among men, only three out of ten are involved in these activities, both in urban and rural areas.
The only sign that the state was ever present in El Rescate are the walls of a school abandoned in the first decade of the 21st century. The children have to walk up to two hours to get to Berlín to study. During the pandemic they did not receive the aid packages that the government distributed in other parts of the country. Community leaders say that municipal and central governments only show up during election season to ask for votes. Lately, due to the state of exception, the state’s presence has been limited to the military, who at one point wanted to take over the community center. But they refused. “Here we live in oblivion. Only when they want a vote does the government come near here,” said community leader Wendy Martínez.
Erick Martínez, 16, and his sister Nallely, 11, sit on the remains of the walls of a coffee plantation in El Rescate, trying to capture internet signal to do their homework. Every week, their father pays $1.25 so that the children can connect, or at least the possibility of catching a signal when possible. To get to school, they rise at 4:00 in the morning, Monday to Friday, for a journey of almost three hours to the center of Berlín.
To get water, María Aguilar, 45, walks every day between ravines and slopes alongside her five-year-old nephew. She is in charge of the housework, which includes supplying water for consumption and cleaning. She lives with the rest of her family in San Lorenzo, on the outskirts of Berlín. “Imagine that here a man who works in the fields earns $60 a month and, if you want to have water from the pipe every day, it’s at least a $20-a-week investment. The men would work to buy water alone,” says María, climbing uphill with a water jar on her back.
The tanks where coffee used to be stored now contain rainwater collected by residents of El Rescate. According to community leaders, the water in the tanks causes itchy skin, but it is the only source they have nearby. A map from UCA researchers shows that El Salvador, with 2,800 cubic meters per person per year, is the Central American country with the least amount of water available for each citizen.
More than ten years ago, an NGO donated a water treatment plant to El Rescate. Before they had the plant, diarrhea was more common, as they had to drink rainwater or from the nearest rivers. The plant, which purifies the water retained in ponds, has not been a total solution to the community’s lack of water; in the summer, water is rationed to seven jugs every three days, per family, to meet the basic needs of each household.
The women of San Lorenzo must get their water from El Río, which in turn serves the people of El Rescate, who come from a greater distance. The women come to wash clothes and even to bathe their children, due to the lack of water in their homes. El Río is a spring that flows down from the Berlín mountains. To get to the site, residents walk between ravines and slippery rocks. Accidents are not uncommon.
At 85 years old, Abraham Rivas struggles to remember how many years he worked on coffee plantations in the mountains of Berlín. Coffee was the agricultural product that for decades gave them the little they had to survive. Now, far from the surrounding communities, he lives with his wife Julia Portillo, 87, on what is left of a plantation. They survive on the charity of community leaders from San Lorenzo, the nearest settlement, who bring them food and water. “I still have the strength to walk to Berlín, but it takes me all day to get there and back. I can’t walk with a jug of water in those ravines anymore,” says Abraham.
The 2001 earthquakes damaged one of the water tanks in El Rescate. It can no longer reach full capacity. Water from the tanks is processed at the plant operated by Santos, the community leader. Every week, volunteers are asked to help maintain the pump and carry out minor repairs to the tanks and pipes. The purified water is suitable for drinking and cooking; for all other activities, families must travel to El Río and carry water back.
Given the state’s inaction to provide basic services, communities of Berlín embrace their faith to endure the precariousness. In the house of Isidro Benítez, every time they clean some beans or corn, they place containers of grain on an altar with Monsignor Óscar Romero in the center. They ask that at least they not lack rainwater, and that they be able to harvest.
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