El Salvador Perspectives

Today the world is paying attention to Nayib Bukele, the president-jailer who cut a deal with the US to imprison persons the US sought to deport.  Now the world may learn more of Bukele's back story since  the journalists at El Faro have released video interviews of two leaders of the 18 Revolucionarios gang, one of three gangs which long controlled neighborhoods throughout El Salvador.  They describe how Bukele's team has made deals with gang leaders throughout the Salvadoran president's political career, up to the rupture with the gangs marked by Bukele's imposition of the State of Exception in El Salvador. The interviews were conducted by Oscar and Carlos Martinez, journalist brothers who have been reporting on the gangs and their dealings with politicians and government officials for more than a decade.  They published the interviews in a series of long video segments here . One of the two gang members is Carlos Cartagena López, aka "Charli de IVU", a lead...

Throughout his presidency, Nayib Bukele has craved the media spotlight and has wanted to be portrayed as one of the world's visionary leaders.  He has found that images of cruelty to persons alleged to be gang members get him publicity around the world, and lots of it. In April 2020 , the global media shared images of half-naked prisoners stacked together like sardines in the very early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Bukele vowed revenge for a surge in homicides. The media spotlight would turn back to El Salvador in 2022 to report on the State of Exception and squadrons of heavily armed police and military seizing tens of thousands of persons of the streets with little regard to the innocent persons among them. In 2023 to much fanfare, Bukele announced that he was opening the largest prison in the world. The Center for Confinement of Terrorists or "CECOT" would hold the worst of the worst so they could never terrorize El Salvador again he told his country, and the glo...

The government in El Salvador is trying to address years of lackluster macroeconomic performance.  Despite all the publicity surrounding tourism growth and Bitcoin initiatives, figures released by El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank show that annual  economic growth in El Salvador for 2024  was a very modest 2.6%. Recently Salvador president Nayib Bukele posted on X a plan to infuse liquidity into the Salvadoran economy by advancing payments to medium, small and micro businesses and by paying down government debt held by Salvadoran banks. The funds come from the recently approved loan facility of the International Monetary Fund.   It is hoped that this will kickstart economic activity at the local level. Fitch Ratings described the level to which public debt has climbed during the Bukele administration: El Salvador’s public debt, which we estimate at 87.6% of GDP in 2024, is well above the ratings peer median (2024: 50.3%) and is a key sovereign rating weakness...

Izalco prison Last month human rights groups released important reports documenting human rights abuses suffered under the State of Exception and within the country's prisons.  El Salvador is now in its fourth year under the "emergency" measures which define the new normal in the county. Six Salvadoran human rights organizations released a report titled   3 Years of the State of Exception: Systematic Torture in the Prisons of El Salvador .  The report comprehensively gathers data about the 85,000 persons captured during the State of Exception.  Their study makes the important point that more than 100,000 persons are held in old prisons in a system designed to hold 28,000 persons, while the CECOT mega-prison purportedly has a capacity of 40,000 but only holds 14,000 (including 255 delivered into the prison by the United States).  The report gathers descriptions of the poor conditions and abuses inside those overcrowded prisons from more than 30 persons who w...

The former bishop of the Salvadoran Lutheran Church, Medardo Ernesto Gomez Soto died on Thursday, March 27 at the age of 79. He was the first bishop of the Lutheran church in El Salvador, after being consecrated in 1986 during the midst of El Salvador's civil war, and served as bishop until two months ago. Bishop Gomez died after a prolonged period of illness. I had the privilege to know Bishop Gomez for almost 24 years. He was a steadfast voice for social justice in El Salvador. His church serves the poorest communities in the country, and his work was rooted in Latin American liberation theology which he expanded and adapted as a "theology of life." During the civil war, he was abducted and tortured by death squads, and on the same day the Jesuits were massacred in 1989, Bishop Gomez narrowly escaped when troops arrived at his church with orders to capture him. For his work during this time, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The following quotes give a small t...

  March 27 is the three-year anniversary of the State of Exception in El Salvador. This suspension of constitutional due process protections as part of a war on gangs was adopted by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly in the midst of a bloody weekend in March 2022 in which gangs murdered at least 87 people around the country. Under the State of Exception, security forces of the police and military can arrest anyone without a warrant or without having observed them committing a crime, can hold them for 15 days before appearing before a judge and without telling them the charges, and can freely intercept communications without a judicial order. Those detained receive initial hearings, before masked judges, in groups that often number in the hundreds, where the charges are simply gang affiliation. Judges routinely order defendants into El Salvador's hellishly overcrowded prisons without bail, to await for their next preliminary hearing which could come in six months.  Even peop...

There are many developments regarding the US removal of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador where they were imprisoned in Nayib Bukele's CECOT mega-prison.  Here is a summary with links to news articles: The US government admits that many of them had no criminal records. ( ABC ) A US photo journalist was at the airport and later at the prison to see the arrival of the Venezuelan prisoners and published photos of how they were handled. ( Time ) CBS News obtained a leaked copy of a list of the names of all the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there.  ( CBS ) Venezuelan families shared the stories of their loved ones who had actually fled from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua, rebutting any suggestion they were part of a criminal gang. ( Beyond the Border ) ( NPR ) ( BBC ). At least two of them were refugees who arrived in the US after extensive vetting by the government and refugee organizations. ( Miami Herald ) Eight women on the flight were not allowed to disembark a...