Overall Chronology

El Salvador , one of the smallest countries in Central America , is an unlikely home for what has become the third largest Palestinian diaspora in Latin America , after Chile and neighboring Honduras . But it is precisely the opportunities afforded by a yet undiversified economy that drew the newcomers from Bethlehem , starting in 1880. In comparison to larger countries—Argentina , Brazil , Colombia , and Mexico —where Lebanese and Syrian migrants had settled, El Salvador did not have an already established Arab merchant class, nor did it have much commercial industry at all. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, El Salvador had a semi-feudal plantation economy dominated by agricultural exports concentrated in the hands of a tiny landholding elite known as las catorce , a reference to the fourteen families that owned the lion’s share of the country’s arable land. El Salvador’s Palestinians faced little competition in establishing themselves in the commercial retail sector, catering to an urbanizing population, and building wealth that has translated into political power at the highest levels, including two presidents of Palestinian origin thus far.

Palestinian Immigration to El Salvador

The majority of Palestinians who migrated to El Salvador in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were Christians from Bethlehem and the surrounding villages of Beit Jala and Beit Sahur , many of whom had been craftsmen who sold souvenirs made of olivewood or mother of pearl to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. Their education in Bethlehem’s missionary schools and their interaction with foreign visitors had made many multilingual, which along with their craftmaking skills enabled them to adapt to selling religious handicrafts to the local Catholic population They made their livings as merchants: first as ambulatory vendors, later as retail store and factory owners. Thus, the Palestinian diaspora of El Salvador (and of Latin America as a whole) can be described more specifically as a Bethlehem diaspora. Today, the number of Bethlehemites in El Salvador is about four times the size of the population in Bethlehem (roughly 100,000 vs. 25,000).

The migration wave began under the Ottoman Empire , in the 1880s, earning the new migrants the inaccurate moniker turcos, or Turks – an ironic pejorative given that those migrants were Arabs fleeing Ottoman (and by extension Turkish) oppression. Emigration followed under the Young Turks regime and peaked in 1910, following the application of a military conscription law on non-Muslims, which motivated many Christian families to send military-age children to the Americas to avoid forced service and continued for similar reasons under World War I .

Most of those early migrants had not intended to settle in El Salvador. They had bought tickets to the United States , with Latin America being a point of transit, but upon arriving at a South American or Caribbean port (such as Colombia, Cuba , the Dominican Republic , or Haiti ), they were told they had reached their final destination and forced to disembark. Some reached El Salvador as an accidental consequence of migration laws elsewhere in the Americas. Prior to the US Civil War , immigration to the United States was largely unregulated. But after 1876, restrictions on immigration to the US – first for Chinese and later other foreign nationals – coincided with relatively open immigration laws in Honduras. Although aimed at encouraging migration from Europe and the United States, these reforms established Honduras – and by extension Central America – as a top destination for Palestinian migration. Migrants settled on the Atlantic coast and concentrated in San Pedro Sula ; some moved on to El Salvador. Honduras’s liberal immigration laws later grew more restrictive as a result of nativist backlash against the new migrants, which pushed more Palestinians from Honduras to El Salvador.

In El Salvador, the new arrivals acquired a (mostly negative) reputation for business acumen, sparking xenophobia and demand from the creole business community to restrict their migration. In 1921, El Salvador declared both Arabs and Chinese to be “pernicious” races. The Great Depression of 1929 deepened nativist antipathy toward immigrant-owned businesses and immigrant workers competing over scarce jobs. In 1933, the dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez – who in the previous year had carried out a genocidal campaign against a rural uprising made up of indigenous landless farmers, killing tens of thousands – formally barred all Africans and Asians from migrating to the country, naming specifically “new immigrants from Arabia , Lebanon , Syria , Palestine, or Turkey , generally known by the name turcos.” El Salvador’s law formally put an end to new migration from Palestine and reflected similar nationality-based restrictions elsewhere in the hemisphere.

Developments in Palestine further restricted movement, even before the founding of the State of Israel. Under Ottoman rule, circular migration between Palestine and the Americas had been common. Under the British Mandate, the new authorities created a formal Palestinian nationality in 1925, placing new visa restrictions on emigrants. Many Palestinians in the Americas were unable to obtain the documentation required to establish nationality or legal residency and became stateless. And in 1948, Israel’s founding ended legal Palestinian nationality and thus gave finality to the one-way nature of Palestinian emigration. The dream of many emigrants, to work to save money and retire in Palestine, was no longer possible. The loss of an option to return, as well as anti-Arab discrimination in their adopted countries, incentivized Palestinians to assimilate into their new surroundings. They gradually married outside of the community, spoke Spanish exclusively, and hispanicized their names.

Notable families settled primarily in the capital, San Salvador , and Sonsonate , as well as San Miguel , Santa Ana , La Unión , and Usulutan . Prominent names include the Bahaia, Barake, Bukele, Dabdoub, Gadala, Hanania, Hándal, Hasbún, Hirezi, Jacir, Kattan, Kury, Nasser, Saade, Saca, Safie, Salume, Samour, Sedán, Simán, Suadi, and Zablah families. They came to establish themselves first in retail clothing, and later in the banking, construction, furniture, groceries, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and tobacco industries; in the twenty-first century, some entered advertising and public relations. Early start-ups were aided by Palestinian business associations and access to low interest loans from within the community. Palestinian migrants did not compete with the established business oligarchy, which was concentrated exclusively in agribusiness; they had neither the means nor the desire to purchase large tracts of land for cultivation. Instead, they entered other sectors such as retail commerce and banking left open to newcomers by the fourteen families.

Participation in Salvadoran Politics

Politically, the Palestinian community has a reputation for being conservative. This reflects its continued uniform concentration in the business sector. In comparison to Chile, where Palestinian business owners leveraged their commercial success into careers in other fields including law, medicine, media, and academia, El Salvador’s more limited educational system made the preferred career path of Palestinian families to maintain the family business.

This right-leaning political skew is not uniform, however. A few better known Palestinian Salvadorans on the left include Schafik Hándal , the military commander of the leftist guerrilla movement, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) (that will become a legal political party in 1992), as well as rebel-turned education minister, Hato Hasbún , and Héctor Samour , a dean of the Central American University and close collaborator with Archbishop Oscar Romero , whose assassination in 1980 by right-wing paramilitaries formally started the civil war.

In El Salvador, the Cold War turned hot in the 1980s, and the United States provided support for the Salvadoran government in a counterinsurgency campaign against rebels led by Hándal. The association of Palestinian nationalism with domestic leftist movements such as Hándal’s FMLN (and beyond El Salvador, with the governments of Nicaragua and Cuba) put a chill on Palestinian nationalism in the business community and gave the PLO few inroads into El Salvador.

Two presidents of the right, Tony Saca and Nayib Bukele , and the head of the country’s chief business association, Javier Siman , are of Palestinian origin. The 2004 election which brought the first Palestinian Salvadoran to the presidency, Tony Saca, was notable in that both of the major party candidates, Saca and Hándal, were Palestinian.

President Nayib Bukele (elected in 2019) embodies the reputation of the community in some ways and contradicts it in others. The grandson of Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem and Jerusalem who migrated as Ottoman nationals in the early twentieth century, he pursued elected office after a business career which he inherited from his father, the late Armando Bukele Kattán . Bukele Kattán was a successful entrepreneur who first studied industrial chemistry and went on to found businesses in the pharmaceutical industry, later textiles and media. He was also unique in terms of his religion and politics. He was one of the few Muslims in the Palestinian community and El Salvador as a whole, who founded four mosques (the first at the end of the civil war in 1992) and served as imam of the Salvadoran Islamic Community. And in contrast to the political profile of the community as a whole, he leaned to the left and was a major donor to the left-wing FMLN, with which his son was originally affiliated.

Bukele did not feel his Palestinian identity hampered his political career, at one point telling a reporter “It doesn’t bother me if they call me a turco, although I know some continue to use that word in a pejorative manner.” His opponents unsuccessfully attempted to use it as a campaign issue. He had been photographed praying at a mosque in Mexico City , leading to “secret Muslim” rumors about the candidate, which Bukele, who alternatively professes himself to be Catholic or agnostic, denied, emphasizing that his father had converted to Islam as an adult. A smear campaign by his rival to the right, purporting to expose Bukele’s secret faith, took on comical proportions, including a doctored photograph depicting the candidate in what campaign propaganda described as “Muslim clothing.” The photo turned out to be of Bukele at a costume party, dressed as a Jedi Knight from Star Wars.

Bukele’s political career reflects the diaspora community’s ambivalence toward Palestinian nationalism. In addition to distancing himself from his father’s religion and political leanings, as mayor of San Salvador, he visited Jerusalem as an invitee to the International Mayor’s Conference , which was seen in the Palestinian press as an effort to delegitimize the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. He prayed at the Western Wall , visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum , and emphasized the Sephardic Jewish roots of his wife at a meeting with his Israeli counterpart. He did not make a similar visit to a counterpart in the West Bank , though he hosted the mayor of Bethlehem in a friendly visit to San Salvador, to much less fanfare. As president, Bukele allied more firmly with Israel; in a tweet, he expressed his horror at the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, citing his Palestinian identity in doing so. Uniquely among Latin America leaders, Bukele has enjoyed warm relations with US President Donald Trump . But he is not unique in his close ties with Israel, a relationship maintained by all Salvadoran presidents, which serves the purposes of maintaining the favor of the United States and courting the country’s fast-growing evangelical Christian electorate, which today is roughly equal in size with the Catholic population.

Bukele, as well as Saca, Hándal, Siman, and others, have shown that Palestinian identity is no barrier to entry into the highest ranks of politics in a country with a once famously exclusive oligarchy. This achievement of individual Palestinians, however, does not translate into greater salience for Palestinian issues in the political sphere. Whereas the economic and political success of the Palestinian community of El Salvador is uniquely impressive, this success has also proven to be effectively isolated from questions of nationalism, homeland politics, or foreign relations at all. In comparison to Chile, where support for Palestinian statehood is bipartisan and mainstream, extending well beyond the Palestinian diaspora, El Salvador has an especially close relationship with Israel. These ties were cemented in the country’s 1980 – 1992 civil war, when 83 percent of the government’s arms imports came from Israel. El Salvador was the only country (along with Costa Rica ) to relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 1984 (which it had vacated in 1980 following the international response to the Knesset 's enactment of the Basic Law on Jerusalem). It was also the last country to move its embassy back to Tel Aviv in 2006, during Saca’s presidency, before the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem in late 2017.

Cultural Expressions and Popular Support

The history of anti-turco discrimination led earlier generations to downplay their Palestinian and Arab identities, which has only recently found more public expression, largely limited to culture and food. Numerous restaurants in the capital sell kebabs and baklava, typically advertised as comida arabe, and organize an Arab Gastronomy Festival. The Salvadoran Palestinian Association organizes this and other such community events. The Club Árabe Salvadoreño was founded in the 1940s in the wealthiest neighborhood of the capital as a sports club (primarily basketball) and an alternative to El Salvador’s private clubs, which at the time refused membership or admission to those of Arab descent. In 2024, a new private museum, the Palestinian Museum of El Salvador , opened at the Club Árabe, following eight years of planning by the Salvadoran Palestinian Association. The collection includes displays of Palestinian clothing, a model living room, an antique rug, musical instruments from the region (the oud and riq), textiles and olivewood handicrafts, a coffee set, a shesh besh (backgammon) board, and both Christian and Muslim religious artifacts, as well as an exhibition about the Nakba . Many were donated by the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem, whose director shares a family name with former Salvadoran president Antonio Saca.

Some public displays of Palestinian nationalism exist, including two plazas in the capital San Salvador: one, Plaza Palestina , which provoked criticism for featuring a map of the pre-1948 British Mandate; and a second, which led to Israel withdrawing its ambassador to El Salvador in protest of it being designated Yasir Arafat Park and featuring a bust of the PLO leader nearby. More recently, a Committee of Solidarity for Palestine in El Salvador was established and presided over by Suhair Barake Bandak , one of the few prominent post-1948 Palestinian migrants, who arrived from Bethlehem through an arranged marriage with another prominent Palestinian Salvadoran family, the Suadis, from Sonsonate. The 2023 Gaza War sparked small pro-Palestinian public demonstrations, which mixed political, cultural, and religious expressions; at one, held on Good Friday in 2024, demonstrators in the capital’s Historic Center marched under the banner “Jesús nació en Palestina” (Jesus was born in Palestine) and displayed a large rug with Jesus on the cross. The opening of a Palestinian Embassy in El Salvador in 2018 has given some institutional support for political organizing. Nevertheless, most expressions of Palestinian identity in El Salvador remain depoliticized and limited to the cultural sphere, something noted by the mayor of Bethlehem, Vera Baboun , who during her visit to El Salvador in 2017, criticized the community in an interview with the news site El Faro, saying “the Palestinian diaspora can do much more for Palestine.”