El Salvador Perspectives

Nayib Bukele has just had another of his critics arrested.  The government of El Salvador Saturday detained prominent attorney Enrique Anaya.  The constitutional lawyer frequently spoke in public and wrote on social media, about the constitution and the rule of law in El Salvador.  He has been an outspoken critic of Nayib Bukele's capture of the judicial system in El Salvador and violations of the constitution. Anaya is purportedly being charged with money laundering, and his detention follows closely on the heels of the imprisonment of another prominent legal critic of Bukele, Ruth López . In the week before his arrest, Anaya had been vocal critic of Bukele.  On June 3 Anaya was on  Frente a Frente , a television interview show  in El Salvador, saying Bukele was a dictator who had removed "the mask," adding "he is what he is." "Here, whoever speaks, whoever criticizes, whoever does not kneel before the idol, gets imprisoned. Of course, I am afrai...

Measures the Legislative Assembly passed for Nayib Bukele On January 29, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly gave the second vote to adopt  a constitutional amendment to allow the Constitution to be amended in the future by a single supermajority vote by the legislature.  Up until now, amendments had to be approved by two successive legislatures with a national election in between. That requirement gave the public the chance to vote out of office legislators who supported an amendment before they had a chance to give it final approval in the next term.  Since Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party today possesses such a supermajority in the congress, he can now amend the Constitution anytime he wants by submitting it to a single vote in his rubber stamp legislature. For example, those pesky provisions that limit how long a president can serve in office, can be eliminated with a quick vote and no debate. The constitutional amendment passed with no prior announcement that it would be o...

  El Salvador is at the end of its first three years with  a Legislative Assembly controlled by Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas (NI) party.  These were three years which had a dramatic impact on Salvadoran democracy.  Here are some of the major steps of the NI-controlled Assembly: 1. Deposed the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Judicial Court .  On its first day in power, May 1, 2021, the NI-controlled Assembly removed all of the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber, the country's highest judicial authority. It removed the magistrates all at once, without giving them notice or the opportunity to be heard.  2.  Appointed new friendly judges to the Constitutional Chamber.    On the same night it purged the Chamber, the Assembly elected a new slate of judges completely ignoring the process in the constitution for appointing new judges. 3.  Deposed the attorney general .   Still on the same night that the Asse...

Monument to Peace on highway south of San Salvador January 16 marks the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords which ended El Salvador's  12 year long bloody civil war.   There is no official celebration of the end of that conflict by the government of Nayib Bukele, the country's president who labels the accords "a farce." Here is what I wrote on the 2021 anniversary of the Accords: So why is Bukele attacking the Peace Accords?   To celebrate the Peace Accords and the reforms they instituted would be to celebrate many of the norms which Bukele has begun to trample.   He cares little for the institutions of constitutional democracy.   The separation of powers checks him from acting freely.   He attacks those who would champion human rights.   While the Peace Accords intended to remove the military from domestic affairs, Bukele sends the military out into the country with ever more frequency to perform all sor...

Saturday, March 26, was one of the bloodiest days in recent memory in El Salvador.   62 homicides were reported just that day, a total never before seen for a single day in this violent country of 6.3 million people.  This came on top of 14 murders the day before.  There were murders committed in 12 of El Salvador's 14 departments.  In contrast, during the entire month of February, there were only 79 murders.  Since 2020, El Salvador had been averaging fewer than 4 homicides per day. There was one message from the weekend's violence:  El Salvador's street gangs maintain the capacity and the numbers to wreak havoc across the country when it suits them.  The relative calm of the past few years meant that the gangs had decided that homicides were not in their interest, whether that decision was the result of negotiating with the government or otherwise, and the relative calm was not the result of Nayib Bukele's militarized "Territorial Control Plan...

Sunday January 16 marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of Peace Accords which ended El Salvador's 12 year bloody civil war.  In the country there will again be no government sponsored celebration of the anniversary following the wishes of president Nayib Bukele who at the end of 2020 labelled the Accords a "farce."   This week the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly  voted  to eliminate the 1992 law which established January 16 as a day of celebration of peace and the Accords and voted to commemorate instead the victims of the armed conflict. On the 25th anniversary of the Peace Accords in 2017, a  Monument to Peace and Reconciliation  was erected on the western side of the capitol city.  The monument includes figures of a government and guerrilla soldier walking arm in arm with doves of peace overhead overseen by a figure of an earth mother goddess.  Today the Bukele government is in the process of  dismantling  it. Opponents to N...

 El Salvador is currently in the midst of an ongoing conflict which will determine if the judicial branch in the country has any remaining ability to check abuses of power by the executive or legislative branches. On August 31, the Legislative Assembly adopted a measure from President Bukele to purge a significant part of the country's judges from their posts.  The changes require judges and prosecutors to retire once they turn 60 or have 30 years of service, which would remove more than 200 judges (one-third of all judges) and dozens of prosecutors.   Then the Supreme Judicial Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, filled with Nuevas Ideas appointees and allies, will be able to replace the judges with ones whom they approve.  The law also allows for re-assigning judges across the country. That law could go into effect today, September 25.  A court in San Miguel, however, has issued an order staying the law for now.  The order requires the ...

Today was an Independence Day in El Salvador quite unlike any in recent memory.  It is the Bicentennial of the independence of El Salvador and the rest of Central America from Spain, and is occurring in the midst of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of   civic parades  with school marching bands and military units, thousands of Salvadorans took to the streets in a series of marches protesting government policies. In 2019, on the last Independence Day celebration before the COVID-19 pandemic, president Bukele hosted a large military parade , including a mock "anti-terrorist" operation against gang members.  The pandemic greatly limited any public gatherings in 2020.  This year, however, with parades and civic events still largely restricted to mitigate pandemic illness, civil society groups, healthcare worker unions, student groups, social movements all called for combined protest marches in the capital city of San Salvador.   T...

El Salvador has been receiving a great deal of coverage in English language press in recent weeks. Here's a collection touching on Salvadoran democracy, Bitcoin, Bukele and TPS. “El Salvador isn’t a democracy anymore”  (El Faro, Sep. 8, 2021) -- Interview with Santiago Cantón, former executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.   Is El Salvador’s President Trying to Shut Down a Hearing on the Infamous El Mozote Massacre? (The New Yorker, Sep 9, 2021) -- the law terminating careers of judges over 60 years of age and its impact on the historic trial of the worst single massacre in Latin America history. Gift for El Salvador mudslide victims comes at steep price  (AP, Sep. 3, 2021) -- Nayib Bukele delivered small modern houses to the victims of a mudslide, but never asked if that's what they wanted. El Salvador's bitcoin digital wallet beset by technical glitches  (Reuters, Sep. 10, 2021) -- four days after the launch of the Chivo App, man...

My most recent post described the newly-released draft of a proposed overhaul to the constitution of El Salvador prepared by the so-called Ad Hoc Group led by Vice President Felix Ulloa .   In that post I highlighted a variety of proposals in the area of individual human rights which made progressive changes in the list of protected interests, from LGBTQ rights to the human right to water, which are absent in the current 1983 constitution. But this list of rights can only be meaningful and enforceable if there is a true separation of powers with independent institutions and, especially, a strong and independent judiciary.   Since Nayib Bukele’s ascension into the presidency, however, there has been a continual assault on the judicial system and the independence of those other branches of the government which could act as a check on a president’s powers. So when a commission backed by Nayib Bukele proposes an extensive revision of El Salvador's constitution, serious ...

For months now, a special committee in El Salvador led by vice president Felix Ulloa has been working on drafting a set of reforms to the country's constitution.   The meetings have been held behind closed doors, and although some details had been leaking out, much was unknown about what would be proposed.  The completed draft of the proposed reforms to the constitution are now public.  The changes are sweeping, with revisions, deletions or replacements of some 215 articles of the 274-article constitution.   While there is much to study in the proposal, and I do not purport to have had the chance to review the document fully, at this point I can say that many changes are remarkably progressive.   If the proposal were to be adopted and the courts and government were to fully implement and respect the rights created by this document, it would be a positive step forward for the country. (That's a big "if"). (For those wishing to study the proposed re...