El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador has a new president today. Nayib Bukele was sworn in as president in a ceremony in front of the historic National Palace in Plaza Gerardo Barrios in the center of San Salvador. It was a site picked by Bukele, both for the historic significance of the plaza bordered by the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral, but also because the renovation of this plaza and surrounding blocks was one of the prime achievements during his time as mayor of San Salvador. Bukele also wanted this outdoor venue, instead of an indoor venue like the capital’s convention center (CIFCO) where prior ceremonies have been held, so that as many of his adoring followers as possible could attend. And Bukele’s supporters showed up in force to celebrate the inauguration of a president they see as a break from the corrupt politicians of the major political parties of the past. The public areas of the plaza, spilling into surrounding streets, were filled with Salvadorans wearing the light ...

El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported that voter turnout for the February 3 presidential election was quite low.   The TSE reported that only 51.9% of eligible voters turned out to vote.   This is the number which is being widely reported and which is being viewed as a level of voter disenchantment with politics in El Salvador.   But I don't think that number is accurate and the actual turnout is better. The TSE calculates voter turnout by using the number of eligible voters on the election registry -- 5,268,411 and the number of votes cast on February 3 -- 2,733,178.  Of that number of 5,262,463 are citizens which the TSE believes live in the country of El Salvador, while the remainder were the 5948 Salvadorans living abroad who managed to get on the mailing list for an absentee ballot.  But I believe the number of voters on the registry is significantly overstated.     The best source for data on the curr...

The political party which had its origins in the guerrilla forces which fought in El Salvador's civil war may have little future in the Central American country. In 1980, five guerrilla military forces came together to form the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.   The FMLN would fight a twelve year civil war against a Salvadoran military backed by the US government, ultimately resolving the dispute with peace accords signed in 1992 in Chapultepec, Mexico. With the Peace Accords, the FMLN laid down its arms and converted to the political party of the socialist left in El Salvador.  Guerrilla comandantes became politicians, mayors and legislators.   The FMLN as political party would be one of the two major political forces in El Salvador for the next 27 years, along with ARENA, the right wing party founded by major Roberto D'Aubuisson.   In 2009 and 2014, the FMLN would capture the presidency of the country. Yet the election ...

The polls were right all along.    Nayib Bukele, the young businessman turned politician whose favorite communication medium is Facebook Live, won the presidency of El Salvador on Sunday with a 23 percentage point lead over his next closest rival, Carlos Calleja of ARENA.   There will be no second round election. There were many things which supporters of the two major parties had been saying to dispel the notion that those polls were accurate.   They claimed Bukele's supporters were all young people and that young people don't vote.   They claimed Bukele's supporters were urban hipsters, but he could not have support out in the rest of the country outside San Salvador.   They claimed that Bukele was not doing all the traditional things to win a Salvadoran election. But "they" on the right and the left were wrong.   Bukele rode a massive wave of Salvadoran discontentment with the existing political establishment.  ...

All the presidential candidates had events this weekend to mark the close of their election campaigns.  Carlos Calleja, the candidate from ARENA, held a series of 15 rallies around the country in three days.   On Sunday the FMLN brought in the party faithful on buses from every corner of the country to a rally filling one of the major boulevards of San Salvador for blocks.   Nayib Bukele, the candidate for GANA/Nuevas Ideas, held a campaign rally Saturday night in front of the old National Palace.    The location was in the midst of one of Bukele's accomplishments as mayor of San Salvador -- the renovation of the historic center of San Salvador. The hatred of El Salvador's largest newspaper La Prensa Grafica for Bukele was on full display in its Monday edition.   The paper covered  the campaign closing events of ARENA and the FMLN with multiple page spreads.   The paper even covered the closing event of the tiny VAMOS party i...

It has been an unusual few weeks heading towards the presidential election campaign in El Salvador. As mentioned previously , leader in the polls Nayib Bukele boycotted a debate sponsored by the association of Salvadoran broadcasters saying that he was going to have a major presentation on Facebook Live instead, emphasis on "live."   But we now know that the presentation was not live .   Instead, Bukele had rented an auditorium and recorded his presentation the day before.   Moreover, the owner of the auditorium claimed it had been rented by Bukele's campaign under false pretenses, because the owner had been told that the auditorium was being used for a private training event, not a major political spectacle. In his "live" presentation, Bukele presented his plan of government, now available at PlanCuscatlan.com.    But when people studied the more than 1000 pages in the plan, they found sections which had been plagiarized from other sources , ...

This article originally appeared on the website of InsightCrime under the title  El Salvador Homicides Thrust MS13 Back Into Official Discourse . Written by Héctor Silva Ávalos El Salvador ended 2018 on a good note, according to official homicide statistics, but a recent uptick in homicides has thrust the MS13 back into the national conversation. Government officials in El Salvador announced that last year ended with a 15 percent reduction in homicides compared to 2017. The murder rate dropped from 60 per 100,000 citizens in 2017 to 51, much lower than in 2015 and 2016 when violence between gangs and security forces made it one of the most violent countries in Latin America. That said, a recent uptick in homicides, although not overly significant in terms of statistics, has again sounded the alarms on the capacity of the MS13 — and the country’s gangs in general — to challenge the state’s authority with bloodshed. With a presidential election set for February 3, concerns have s...

El Salvador is a country with a population professing to hold religious faith, 80% of them Christian. In that context, political candidates face questions about their own faith, and their campaigns seek the support of religious groups.    That has certainly been the case in this presidential election. Nayib Bukele has probably been required to speak the most about religion, because his father was Imam to the country's small Islamic community.   Although his family's roots are in Palestine, his father actually converted to Islam in El Salvador.  Nayib's mother is Roman Catholic.  Bukele asserts that he is a believer in Jesus Christ, but does not belong to any specific religious denomination. Bukele has been the subject of a smear campaign seeking to label him as an adherent to Islam and anti-Christian.  Readers in the US will recognize similarities to the campaigns to label Barack Obama a Muslim.  Someone calling themselves "Christians Unit...

How are the candidates for president of El Salvador presenting themselves in television advertising?   Here is a sample:

Sunday night in El Salvador there was a national televised debate among the candidates for president in El Salvador, sponsored by the Salvadoran association of broadcasters.    All the candidates were there except for the candidate who leads by a wide margin in all the public opinion polls.   Despite having earlier agreed to participate in the debate, Nayib Bukele instead went to his preferred medium, Facebook Live, for a two hour presentation of his plan of government.    This was the second scheduled debate in a row in which Bukele has refused to participate.   Bukele also refused to participate in a debate sponsored by the University of El Salvador.   His running mate, Felix Ulloa, failed to appear for a vice presidential debate a week earlier. With as much as a 20 point margin in the polls, Bukele probably figured he had nothing to gain by showing up at debates where he knew that all three other candidates would be aiming at bringi...

In the last few years, El Salvador has made progress in transparency regarding political donations.  This progress resulted from rulings of the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court requiring that political parties reveal their donors or face being disqualified for naming candidates in elections.   (This was one of the reasons the country's political parties detested the most recent group of magistrates in the Constitutional Chamber). The Finance Ministry of El Salvador finally published data in early 2018 with donor lists as filed with the government.  The champion for transparency in the government has been the Secretary of Participation, Transparency and Anti-corruption (SPTA), Marcos Rodríguez.   Under his direction, the SPTA took that data, analyzed it and made it accessible in a report of donors and their money flowing to Salvadoran political parties from 2006-2018. It is probably not a surprise that the conservative ARE...

Political ad spending for the upcoming presidential election in El Salvador is being tracked by Citizen Action and its Center for Monitoring of Transparency and Democracy .   Citizen Action is a Salvadoran NGO focused on good government and transparency.       The Center for Monitoring is tracking all of the advertisements appearing in newspapers, on radio and TV, and on outdoor billboards.    According to reports from Citizen Action today , the total spending from October through December has been $19.2 million: Through December, the leader in overall ad spending has been Nayib Bukele and GANA with $7.1 million spent through November.  Following him is Carlos Calleja and ARENA with $6.6 million and then Hugo Martinez for the FMLN with $5.4 million. In calculating the totals for the FMLN, the monitors have chosen to include certain advertising by the government as advertising for the FMLN. Although these ads do not mention the...

An article last week on the website of America's Quarterly asked  Will El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele Be the Next Social Media President? .   If you are wondering what a "social media president" would mean for El Salvador, join the crowd.   As the AQ article points out, Nayib Bukele is all about branding: “Bukele is a social media strategist,” said Ivón Rivera, a communications professor at the Universidad Centroamericana whose research focuses on social media and fake news. “He has positioned himself as a brand, his political speech is outright marketing, and he presents himself as someone ‘cool’, to appeal to young people.”  Journalists have expressed worry about this approach, since Bukele avoids press conferences and interviews. The candidate instead goes straight to his followers via Facebook live, eliminating opportunities to be questioned.  Despite his history with the FMLN, analysts insist on describing Bukele as an “outsider” because he d...

The National Republican Alliance ("ARENA" for its initials in Spanish) is the major right wing political party in El Salvador.   Its candidates won the presidency in El Salvador in 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004 before losing to the left wing FMLN party in 2009.  The party currently has the largest number of deputies in the National Assembly.  For the 2019 presidential elections, ARENA has nominated Carlos Calleja as its candidate for president. Roberto D'Aubuisson ARENA's founder, ex-major Roberto D'Aubuisson, is venerated by the party.   So much so that when you visit the ARENA official party website, clicking a link for "ARENA History" delivers you to a page titled " History of Major Roberto D'Aubuisson ".   His image adorns the party headquarters.  The party and D'Aubuisson are inextricably linked. But D'Aubuisson was the author of numerous high crimes and atrocities. Multiple investigations by international bodies identified...

A weather system related to the tropical weather patterns which produced hurricane Michael in the Caribbean has been generating heavy rains and flooding in El Salvador.  A "zone of intertropical convergence" has been over the country since Friday drawing moisture and storms off of the Pacific Ocean, according the the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources .   The greatest impacts are being felt along the coast and in the eastern regions of the country. The government ordered all schools in the country closed on Monday and Tuesday as a precaution because of the danger of flooding and landslides.   At least four people have died, 14 are wounded and 700 people have sought protection in shelters. The Litoral highway which runs along El Salvador's Pacific coast was largely impassable because of mudslides and fallen trees. Meanwhile, El Salvador's presidential candidates and their parties made sure to show up in affected zones giving aid and looking ...

CID-Gallup released the results of recent polling of Salvadorans concerning their preferences for president. In the poll of 1205 adults, Nayib Bukele on the GANA ticket was the preferred choice for president of 45% of those polled, well ahead of Carlos Calleja of ARENA with 20%, and Hugo Martinez of the FMLN with only 7%.     27% of voters were still undecided. Bukele's results have increased four percentage points since the last Gallup poll in May 2018, while the other two major candidates have remained flat. 70% of voters say they are likely to vote on election day, February 3, 2019. One of the most interesting results of the poll was the question "what is the principal problem of the country?"  30% answered unemployment, 25% answered corruption in government and politicians, and only 19% answered lack of citizen security/crime.    In recent years, with high rates of homicide and extortion by the country's street gangs, crime had usually been the n...

Citizens of El Salvador who live outside of the country are eligible to vote in the upcoming 2019 presidential elections.   Yet as of the September 6 deadline, only about 1% of the eligible voters (3541)  outside of the country had taken the steps to sign up to vote in 2019. The essential requirement for voting is that a Salvadoran citizen must have an unexpired national identity card (DUI) with their current address outside of El Salvador.   For each election, they must register online to vote in order to have a ballot sent to them.  It is not clear why so few have registered to get a ballot.  Perhaps they simply don't see how the election will impact their lives, especially those living in the anti-immigrant atmosphere generated by Donald Trump in the US.  There have also been some  reports of difficulties in using the online site of the Salvadoran election tribunal where voters register.  With these low registration figures and...

Former president of El Salvador Antonio ("Tony") Saca was sentenced today to 10 years in prison for corruption pursuant to a plea deal with the country's attorney general.  Saca governed the country from 2004-2009 after being elected on the ARENA party ticket and also made an unsuccessful bid for another term as president in 2014.  Today's sentence did not come as a surprise.   Saca had already confessed and provided the details of the corruption scheme.   The plead deal and confession allowed Attorney General Douglas Melendez to secure a conviction, something he has had a difficult time doing in high profile cases in the past two years. The conviction of Saca comes at a bad time for ARENA leading up to the presidential elections.   Saca's confessions include descriptions of how some of the embezzled funds were used to advance ARENA political campaigns.  (In the same way, Saca's presidential bid had been aided by part of $10 million...

Every election season in El Salvador I have to laugh.   The country's electoral code prohibits campaigning too far in advance of the election date.  Candidates cannot campaign more than four months before the presidential election, and no more than two months before the election of legislative deputies and mayors.  But this has never stopped anyone as far as I can tell. For the upcoming presidential elections on February 3, 2019, campaigning should not start until the first week of October.   But here is ARENA candidate Carlos Calleja this week: From Tasajera Island we come to San Bartolo, Ilopongo.  People are fed up with division, populism and corruption.  I can offer you my experience as a generator of jobs, so that this country will truly change. And here is FMLN candidate Hugo Martinez: With joy and with the strength of our people, we're confident of an FMLN victory in 2019.   We're continuing our mobilizatio...