The country is made up of 262 municipalities which are divided into 14 departments.A 2004 study sponsored by the World Bank found that although half of the Salvadoran population living in rural areas is poor, Salvadoran indigenous groups constitute the poorest segments.

El Salvador was ruled by a series of military dictatorships from 1931 to 1979. The Pipil are found mostly in the western and central part of the country while the Lenca are found mainly in the Eastern part of the Lempa River. The Mestizo ethnic group in El Salvador are the largest in the country, accounting for 86.3% of the total population in El Salvador.

This latest deployment will mark El Salvador's first participation in the NATO mission to Afghanistan.The recent 2009 elections resulted in the election of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party over the ARENA party that had been in power since 1992. Updated September 2017. Up until 1990, the foreign born from El Salvador ranked behind most foreign-born groups in terms of size (see Table 1). Remittances account for twenty percent of El Salvador's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which makes the economic ties with the United States even more important. Salvadoran immigrants are densely concentrated in a few cities, and they have a strong infrastructure in refugee organizations. The main purposes of the Directorate are to develop and implement policy that guarantees the collective rights of indigenous peoples, protects their traditional knowledge, and achieves the development of their identity. With 94% of its population considered to be mestizo, El Salvador ranks as having the highest percentage of "multi-racial" population in the Americas. El Salvador is a close country to the US. )Salvadoran boy in La Unión, El SalvadorSalvadoran girls during the civil warCarlos Calleja is a Salvadoran politicianOut of the 6,408,111 people in El Salvador, 86.3% are mestizo, 12.7% are of full European descent, 1% indigenous, 0.8% black, and 0.64% other.Young Salvadoran man playing a guitardefinition: age 15 and over can read and write (2016 est. Prior to 2007, the government did not include a category for indigenous peoples in the census.Sign up to Minority rights Group International’s newsletter to stay up to date with the latest news and publications.Land ownership plays a big role in the equation, with the majority of indigenous residents lacking secure land tenure. The shift from ARENA to FMLN does symbolize the growing disenchantment of the Salvadoran population with Washington foreign policy.While the most ideologically committed of the Salvadoran refugees settled in Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Australia, or Canada, those who settled in the United States focused on survival and building a community.