El Salvador Perspectives

The government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador does not like public scrutiny.  Since Bukele took office in 2019, access to government and public information has been sharply curtailed , and the dictates of the country's open records law largely ignored.  In particular, information about public spending is frequently hidden from public view.   Bukele also likes to tout the country as a technological innovator. It is clear, however, that the government has not always implemented sufficient cyber-security safeguards to prevent hackers from accessing data on government servers, and as a result the data that the government tries to hide is getting released anyways. Most recently, the "hacktivist" group calling itself " CiberInteligenciaSV " released payroll data leaked from the Salvadoran social security institute for 970,000 Salvadorans including government officials and virtually everyone else who has a job in the formal economy.  The data includes names, salaries,

Alejandro Muyshondt Days after publicly denouncing a Nuevas Ideas legislator for corruption, Nayib Bukele's national security advisor, Alejandro Muyshondt, was arrested in August 2023 and accused of being a spy for former president in exile Mauricio Funes. Muyshondt disappeared into the incarceration system of the State of Exception, and six months later he was dead. His case is one that leaves more questions than answers, and the government of Bukele is remaining silent on the matter. Alejandro Muyshondt served as a national security advisor to Bukele starting at the beginning of Bukele's presidency in June 2019. Muyshondt had previously served as an advisor to Bukele from 2017 to 2019 while Bukele was mayor of San Salvador, and they were reportedly childhood friends. According to Muyshondt's  curriculum vitae on the Transparency Portal of the Salvadoran government, he graduated from the University of Angers in France with a degree in criminology in 2003, and in 2008 foun

  Today the InterAmerican Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) issued a 354 page report titled The State of Exception and Human Rights in El Salvador . The press release which accompanied the report highlights the major recommendations of the report: In the report, the IACHR underscores that inter-American standards stipulate that a state of emergency is an exceptional measure that must be necessary, appropriate, and proportionate to the emergency context. It also warns that certain judicial guarantees cannot be suspended under any circumstances and stresses that the duration of the state of emergency should be strictly limited to the period of the emergency. The IACHR calls on the Salvadoran State to make crosscutting efforts to prevent violence, mitigate the risks and damages to vulnerable groups, and restore the social fabric. It has also noted the statistics provided by the State on improvements to citizen security. These appear to demonstrate that the country has moved beyond the s

With the US presidential election a little more than nine weeks away, El Salvador is watching closely. President Nayib Bukele has his closest ties to members of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, but Trump is a fickle friend. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is likely to continue current US policy which now presents a friendly face to El Salvador and no longer denounces Bukele's trampling over principles of rule of law and judicial independence.  Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, and several high level officials came to El Salvador to meet with Bukele’s government. Trump was happy because of Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with Trump administration’s efforts to control migration. Bukele cooperated despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status and calling El Salvador a “s

Two long articles about Nayib Bukele's rule in El Salvador appeared today in the US press.  Bukele is on the current cover of TIME magazine, with the caption  "The Strongman -- How El Salvador President Nayib Bukele became the world's most popular authoritarian."  Bukele revels in this kind of spotlight (it dominates his Twitter feed right now) but he has not mentioned the opinion piece in the New York Times titled The High Cost of Safety in El Salvador , perhaps because it does not have a single image of the "coolest dictator/philosopher king" The TIME interview represents Bukele's first interview with an international media journalist in three years. In recent times he is more likely to give an interview to a YouTube influencer or to Tucker Carlson.    The TIME article, written by Vera Bergengruen, is titled  How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador  and explores in depth the remarkable changes, for good and bad, in El Salvador.  She

Anti-mining activist press conference in July Environmental activists in El Salvador continue to be on alert for the possible resumption of gold mining activity in the country. Although the country was the first in the world to ban metallic mining within its borders in 2017, anti-mining advocates worry that preparations are being made in the current government to lift that prohibition. One signal of the possible resumption of mining activity was the October 2022 creation of the General Directorate of Energy, Hydrocarbons and Mines within the ministries of the Salvadoran government.  More concerns were raised when it was learned that El Salvador had become a member of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) , a global association of countries coming together on mining issues.  Joining the forum seemed a strange choice for a country which was the first in the world to ban all metallic mining operations. Then in 2023, the government al

Last week the human rights group Cristosal released a 126 page report titled El silencio no es opción (Silence is not an option) which reviews torture, deaths, and the absence of justice under the ongoing State of Exception in El Salvador.  During the first two years of the State of Exception 79,211 persons were arrested, including 12,704 in the second year as the pace of detentions slowed down.  The new report from Cristosal is an important, and damning, account of what the Bukele government has been willing to do in its war on gangs. Cristosal based its findings on a study of 3,643 complaints Cristosal received since the beginning of the State of Exception; hundreds of interviews including testimonies of members of the police and armed forces regarding arbitrary detentions; analysis of the legal cases of 1,178 people detained and prosecuted under the exception regime; a sample set of the 7,742 women detained by the emergency regime; and investigation of 261 deaths of adults and four