It's, obviously, not the same, a debt in your own currency that in a currency that you don't control.
A country that is taking debt in a currency that they don't control is, almost always, searching for trouble.
Every country is different. But would we, in the particular case of El Salvador, be better if we operated in another currency?
- The USD is the currency of our main trade partner and the currency of the 30% of Salvadorans that live in the US. Our remittances don't incurre in expensive foreign exchange.
- Less Foreign Exchange risk, compared to what Colombians, Chileans, Argentina or Mexicans experience.
- We also have lower interest rates than many bigger Latin American economies.
- Most Latin American currencies have been devalued in the past years. With few exceptions like the Guatemalan Quetzal. I've heard about the Cuban Peso Convertible and the Panama Balboa too but those are pegged to the dollar anyways. Or French Guyana and some Caribbean islands which use the Euro perhaps.