El Salvador Perspectives

 This is a story about how the Bukele government polishes its image through branding and social media.   What appears as a news story about the success of the government in handling the pandemic, is actually just a paid advertisement with material from a branding consultant used by this media-conscious administration. On November 28, Nayib Bukele tweeted: " The county in the region which best dealt with the pandemic " This presidential tweet links to an apparent news article with no by-line which appeared on the website of " Infobae ," an Argentine media company.  The article opens: Reopening to tourism: how El Salvador is preparing, the country that best dealt with the pandemic in the region: The Central American country achieved a world seal as a safe destination in the new normal. In addition, the City Nation Place forum evaluated it as the country with the best attention to the pandemic in Latin America Bukele also featured this article on his Facebook page , g

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is extraordinarily popular according to all recent public opinion polling.  In fact, in poll results published in July 2020, the Mexican Mitofsky polling firm shows Bukele having the highest approval rating among world heads of state , with an approval rating of 84%. (This is not the first time a Salvadoran president has led the world in Mitofsky poll approval ratings, Mauricio Funes also enjoyed an 84% approval rating and now is is a fugitive from corruption charges living in Nicaragua).  Nothing in the news seems to pull Bukele's ratings lower.     A May 2020 poll  by La Prensa Grafica showed Bukele with an approval rating among Salvadorans of 92.5%. A public opinion poll  from the University of Central America on the one year anniversary of Bukele's presidency gave him ratings of 7.7 out of 10 in general and with regards to his handling of the pandemic.   In that same UCA poll, 65.7% of respondents believed Bukele was doing a good

Investigators from the office of the Attorney General of El Salvador ("FGR" for its initials in Spanish) raided the offices of various government ministries between November 9 and 12 to gather documents and computer files. The investigators held a judicial order in an investigation of possible corruption in pandemic-related contracting by the government.   The transactions in question total as much as $155 million according to reporting by RevistaFactum .    Reportedly two thirds of the contracts used to purchase medical supplies during the pandemic are under investigation. While the Ministry of Health was the primary focus, investigators also showed up at the Ministry of the Treasury, the Ministry of Agriculture and the water authority ANDA, as well as several businesses tied to government officials or their families.  Among the questioned contracts are ones purchasing $12.6 million in PPE at inflated prices from a Spanish auto parts distributor which had no background

  Today, November 16, 2020, marks the 31st anniversary of the massacre by Salvadoran troops of six Jesuit priests, a female co-worker and her daughter during El Salvador's civil war.   With the global pandemic still being felt in El Salvador, the annual commemoration was necessarily different.   The University of Central America ("UCA") has been required to conduct all classes online since March, along with all other education institutions in the country, and its campus is closed.   Instead, the anniversary was marked with an online vigil on Facebook and YouTube which you can watch here . The past year has been full of developments, positive and negative, for the search for justice for the atrocity.  That search is now in its fourth decade. The positive development was the judgment of guilt and the sentence to 133 years in prison for former Salvadoran colonel Inocente Orlando Montano rendered by a court in Spain.  The court took jurisdiction of the case under principles

On November 3, El Salvador's environmental ministry ("MARN" for its initials in Spanish) gave the green light to a commercial/residential mega-development on the outskirts of San Salvador. The development is called "Valle El Ángel," a project of real estate developer Urbánica . The owners of Urbánica are the ultra-wealthy Dueñas family in El Salvador, and their proposed urbanization development of 8000 houses, shopping centers, churches and more would threaten the available water resources in the capital region, according to environmental and community groups. Most of the land, located along the Pan-American highway, is currently used to grow sugar cane. See photos here . On hearing the news, Carlos Flores, one of the leaders of groups opposing the project, decried the failure of MARN to address environmental concerns which had been raised.   Earlier this year, MARN had acknowledged questions about the hydrology impact of the development, but there has bee

Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the US presidential election, signaling a potential change in the US policy towards Central America under Donald Trump which focused solely on blocking immigration.  According to surveys , Salvadoran US citizens gave a share of their votes to Biden (74%) greater than any other national group within the broader category of Latinx voters in the country. President Nayib Bukele sent a letter congratulating Biden on his election: Biden will take over from Trump, who in 2018 called El Salvador a “ shithole country ”  Despite that comment, Nayib Bukele famously stated after meeting with Trump on the sidelines of a UN meeting that Trump was ”nice and cool.”  Bukele met several times with Homeland Security officials from the US and his government was seen as one of Trump's closest allies in Latin America. With Trump, the relationship with the US rested on a basic proposition – in return for help on reducing the flow of migrants towards the US sou