El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador is in the midst of a years long water crisis, but past governments have been completely incapable of taking the necessary actions to address it.   Now a new party controls the legislative and executive branches of government, and Nuevas Ideas claims it will take positive action where its predecessors have failed.   As journalist Nina Lakhani wrote in The Guardian in 2019: El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America. It also has the region’s lowest water reserves, which are depleting fast thanks to the climate crisis, pollution and unchecked commercial exploitation. The water issues calling out to be addressed in El Salvador are many:    The national water authority ANDA fails in its basic mission to get drinking water to communities, with neighborhoods and entire towns with spotty or no service for weeks or months at a time.   It is a distribution system with tremendous gaps in the quality of service between wealthy and poor areas. The great majo

There has been a huge amount written about El Salvador's adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in the country.  So much so that it makes little sense for me to write another post of my own. Instead, here is an extensive collection of what has been written in English about the new Bitcoin law: What has happened so far: How El Salvador Adopted Bitcoin in Five Hours  (El Faro English) The price that President Bukele is ready to pay to turn El Salvador into a bitcoin nation  (El Pais) What you need to know about El Salvador’s plan to use volcano-powered bitcoin as legal tender  (Washington Post) Why El Salvador sees a future in Bitcoin  (Boston Globe) El Salvador bitcoin transfers soar, but still a fraction of dollar remittances  (Reuters) World Bank rejects El Salvador request for help on bitcoin implementation  (Reuters) El Salvador’s small business owners uncertain about Bitcoin (El Salvador Info) Camarasal Poll Shows Entrepreneurs Are Worried About Bitcoin Law in El Salvador (Bitco

El Salvador is in a race to vaccinate its population in time to avoid another possible wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths.   The country hit an important milestone this week as more than one million people are now fully vaccinated, mostly with two doses of the Chinese Coronavac vaccine.  This milestone was reached at the same time the country is seeing an uptick in cases of COVID-19.  The government confirmed 198 cases of the virus yesterday.  The last time the country saw that many confirmed cases was on February 13 when the country was on a downward trend from its second wave of cases which had peaked in January.  There was also a jump in the number of cases listed as moderate, critical or grave.  One question is whether the variants of the virus detected in various countries worldwide are making their presence known in El Salvador.   With limited gene sequencing of samples, it is difficult to say.   To date, the Ministry of Health has only referred to the presence of a variant

There is a lot of great reporting being done in El Salvador today under very tough circumstances.   Investigative journalists at RevistaFactum, GatoEncerrado, El Faro and other sites continue to dig under the official versions of events broadcast by the Bukele government. These journalists are faced with a government which does its best to hide or obscure unfavorable information and by an army of internet trolls who attack anyone publicizing information which puts the government in a bad light, regardless of the veracity of that news. The situation is severe enough that the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights issued a measure  earlier this year instructing the government of El Salvador to provide protection to journalists at El Faro.  (There is no sign that the government plans to comply).  In recent days and weeks, the attempts to silence adverse publicity took a new turn as the government, and its newly-installed Attorney General, obtained court orders to censor publications emb

President Nayib Bukele's latest surprise for El Salvador is a new currency.  The cryptocurrency Bitcoin will join the US dollar as legal tender in the country.  Soon you may be able to buy pupusas from a digital wallet on your cellphone filled with Bitcoin.    In a video broadcast  to a Bitcoin conference in Miami on Saturday, June 5  President Nayib Bukele announced that El Salvador was going to make Bitcoin legal tender in the Central American county and that El Salvador would use the digital wallet company, Strike, to build the country’s modern financial infrastructure using bitcoin technology. Three days later, Bukele introduced a law in the country's legislature. In a show of its lack of independence from the executive branch of government, the Legislative Assembly passed the bill  with 62 out of 84 votes, a little more than three hours after it was presented to them by Bukele's team. The ramifications of such a changeover were either dismissed or barely questioned in

Last week Nayib Bukele took steps to terminate the agreement between his government and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States ("OAS") under which the OAS sponsors the Commission Against Corruption and Impunity in El Salvador  ("CICIES" for its initials in Spanish).  Creating such a commission was one of the central promises of Bukele's 2019 campaign for the presidency of El Salvador when he told voters "there's enough money when nobody steals."  Today the OAS and others assert that Bukele is kicking CICIES out of the country because the commission spent too much time investigating potential corruption in Bukele's own government, and not enough time pursuing Bukele's political opponents.  Ostensibly, the termination of CICIES under the auspices of the OAS centers around the person of Ernesto Muyshondt, Bukele's successor as mayor of San Salvador from 2018-2021.  Muyshondt was recently defeated in his reelection bid

After two years in office, Nayib Bukele remains a highly popular president with impressive approval ratings.  These are the results of an opinion poll released yesterday by La Prensa Grafica, a periodical which itself is not an ally of the president.  According to the poll, 86.5% approve of Bukele's performance in office, with 63.6% greatly approving: Bukele receives even higher marks, above 90%, for his management of the pandemic, and there is no sign that the May 1 removal of supreme court judges and the attorney general, widely criticized internationally and by constitutional experts, had any negative impact on Bukele's image among his supporters.  Bukele's approval ratings are significantly higher than his previous three predecessors in office at the same point in their presidencies: Equally important, more Salvadorans believe that El Salvador is on the correct course forward than not: Last night Bukele delivered a " Discourse to the Nation " on the