Mural artists in El Salvador paint over bullet holes to give a troubled neighbourhood hope

From the window of her tin-sided shop outside El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, Esmeralda Quintanilla watches artists get to work on walls pockmarked by bullet holes from the country’s civil war and gang conflict.

Armed with brushes, paint and spray cans, muralists and graffiti artists have already covered the walls of several of the 40 five-storey units in a housing complex in Zacamil, a neighbourhood in the city’s Mejicanos district.

“With the murals, everything looks really nice,” says Quintanilla, a 55-year-old seamstress who has lived in the neighbourhood nearly half her life.

“You start to see all this and it gives the place a different image. I feel really happy, proud,” she adds.

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