After its 1994 genocide, Rwanda is enjoying something of a tourist boom these days: The country welcomed 39,000 visitors in 2007, up from fewer than 2,000 seven years ago. I visited Rwanda in June 2007 and saw firsthand how tourism dollars are trickling down to the locals, boosting the standard of living and helping to alleviate poverty. My Rwandan guide, Fred Budaramani, told me that business has been so good that he was able to save enough money to leave the big safari company he had been working for, buy a jeep, and start his own operation (gorillaselect.com)—which should allow him to earn about 60 percent more a year. Josh Ruxin, a Columbia University assistant professor of public health who runs health-care and economic-stimulus programs in Rwanda, says that the benefits of tourism extend even to those who are not directly involved. "Where there are tourists, governments are more careful and responsive on many fronts, from maintenance of security, both for tourists and for citizens, to improved infrastructure, including roads, electricity, and water supply," Ruxin says. Of the $42.3 million spent by tourists in Rwanda last year, five percent is earmarked for local communities to fund primary schools, hospitals, and water tanks, as well as income-generating programs such as mushroom farms and souvenir shops.

Meanwhile, foreign investment in tourism is rising, bringing in almost half of the $496 million recorded by the Rwanda Investment and Export Promotion Agency in 2007, and more than 252,000 Rwandans are directly employed in tourism as park rangers, guides, waiters, and hotel employees, while countless others benefit indirectly.

In El Salvador, the number of annual visitors has tripled to nearly 1.6 million over the past ten years. But critics say that the country is too focused on attracting business travelers and developing big projects—including the 552-room Pacific Coast hotel, opened by the Colombian company Decameron in 2006—and not focused enough on bringing in leisure travelers and promoting regions and towns. Even so, Decameron has created 700 jobs directly and 1,200 indirectly, according to the tourism ministry, and tourism countrywide is sparking a new breed of entrepreneur.

On a mule-back tour of the Guazapa volcano, led by two personable ex-guerrillas—the gentle Orlando Barrera and La Casona's gnomelike Maiti—I see foxholes, trenches, bomb craters, bullet-scarred trees, and graves marked with crosses. My guides show me large pits where government soldiers, trained and equipped by the United States, ordered civilians to line up so that their bodies would fall neatly when they were executed. Barrera tells me that the money from their fledgling tour business—$15 per person for the mule rides, for example—is shared by about 350 nearby residents who received the land through the 1992 peace treaty.

In the village of El Mozote, in the mountainous northeast Morazán region, ex-guerrilla Benito Chicas and his ten-year-old daughter, Karina, lead me through moving memorials to the 1,000-odd men, women, and children exterminated in a 1981 massacre here. One of the testimonials is a wall bearing the names of the 146 children murdered at a local church. Myron Fehr, a traveler from Portland, Oregon, who is staying at the Perkin Lenca Mountain Hotel in Morazán, tells me that the U.S. government's role in funding the civil war here makes him "very angry." But in three trips to El Salvador over two years, he has never encountered anti-American sentiment—and he has seen many improvements.