El Salvador Perspectives

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

Flooding in Olocuilta July 9 El Salvador Perspectives has been on vacation for the past month.  Here is a short summary of some of the major stories during that time. Flooding rains which impacted much of the country continue. Days of flooding rain began in mid-June over El Salvador and other parts of Central America as tropical weather systems impacted the region.  In El Salvador, at least 19 people died in floods, mudslides and other calamities due to the rain between June 14 and 19 with thousands forced to evacuate to government run shelters.  After that first week of flooding in mid-June, the country continued to be buffeted by more storms and rains.  Saturated soils meant that rainfall runoff quickly overran river banks or prompted trees to fall over.   The storms have continued in early July.   As of July 8, there were 8 government run shelters open housing 196 people.  A child drowned in flood waters over the weekend.  Beyond the damages to homes and infrastructure, many sma

Nayib Bukele threw himself a coronation on Saturday. His swearing in for an unconstitutional second term in office was not a celebration of democracy, but the celebration of an unquestioned ruler. One of the hallmarks of Nayib Bukele's rapid rise to exercise unchecked power in El Salvador is his understanding of image.  All of the symbolism of the day was about the power and authority of El Salvador's strongman. There was the honor guard in military dress uniforms, wearing capes while holding automatic weapons. Bukele wore a high-collared jacket with gold braid on the cuffs and collar.  The National Palace had a rapid makeover, replacing artwork and precious century-old tilework with marble and gold paint and red carpets, attempting to summon images of European halls of power, but coming closer to Donald Trump's club at Mar-a-Lago.   Bukele received an artillery gun salute and emerged from the National Palace to receive the tributes from the country's armed forces and p

Nayib Bukele completes his first five years as president of El Salvador having fully earned the label as a "populist autocrat." Populist , because he has gained power by developing enormous popularity in the Salvadoran public through an extraordinary propaganda and public image machine, and autocrat because he and his party Nuevas Ideas have accumulated the total power to govern in the country after having eliminated each and every institution which might provide checks or limits on Bukele's power. The tactics Bukele used are a true  dictator's playbook . Undermine the press Bukele started early to eliminate checks and balances by seeking to undermine the role of the press as a watchdog in a democratic society. Before he even took office as president, he was telling the public that impartial journalism does not exist : @NayibBukele Tweet April 20, 2019 That those of the media who presented themselves as "independent" are going out now with a clear and t

In the five years in which Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador, there has been a dramatic shift in the availability of public information for citizens to hold their leaders accountable.  El Salvador has a government which vigorously defends its control of the narrative of what is happening in the country, and that includes restricting access to any information which might shed a different light on that narrative.   Transparency International has written: Access to information acts are grounded in the recognition that information in the control of public authorities is a valuable public resource and that public access to such information promotes greater transparency and accountability of those public authorities, and that this information is essential to the democratic process. The purpose of these acts, also known as access to information laws, is to make a government more open and accountable to its people. In transitional democracies, laws that give effect to the right

17 inhabitants of Espiritu Santo Island, held in prisons under the State of Exception, awaiting trials in the distant future and without any contact with the outside world.   Two years ago this week, when El Salvador's State of Exception had been in effect for two months, I wrote a post titled " Free the Boatmen ."    It was a story about five boat operators and artesanal fishermen from Espiritu Santo Island along El Salvador's southeast Pacific coast, who had been arbitrarily arrested under the State of Exception. In the next year, twenty more members of this close-knit community would also be arrested and taken away in four additional operations through April 2023. They were captured although everyone affirms that this island and its close-knit community have never harbored gang members or experienced gang-related crime.  Theirs is a story of the practice of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment which has characterized so much of the State of Exception in El Salvador. 

Hospital Rosales construction site in April The public relations machine of the government of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele thrives on touting major development and infrastructure projects. From time to time, we need to check in on how these projects are actually faring. Here is their status as he concludes five years in office. The Chinese projects . The major projects which are the farthest along are those which the Salvadoran government has not had to raise the money for because they are donations by the Chinese government. These were gifts announced by Bukele after his 2019 visit to Beijing. National Library . The new national library in the heart of the historic center of San Salvador was completed at the end of 2023. Read about my tour of the library here . Water purification and extraction from Ilopango . An announcement was made in November 2022, that the project to purify water from lake Ilopango will take the form of eight deep wells, pumping from underground sourc