El Salvador Perspectives

The arrest of a prominent anti-corruption lawyer in El Salvador is highlighting the increased willingness of Nayib Bukele's government to arrest and imprison critics of the regime’s practices. Late Sunday night authorities arrested Salvadoran lawyer Ruth López at her home.  She is the head of the Anti-corruption and Justice unit at Cristosal, the most prominent Salvadoran human rights organization.  Both López and Cristosal have been outspoken critics of the Bukele government for its human rights record and patterns of corruption. The seizure of López comes at a moment when the Bukele regime is taking increasingly hard-line measures against its critics. Other activists and human rights defenders have also been imprisoned this year when they have been defending populations impacted by Salvadoran government policies.  López's is the highest profile arrest yet.  It illustrates that Bukele now feels he can take such actions with impunity. The arrest occurred in ...

I wrote a few weeks ago about the arrest and death in prison of Nayib Bukele's National Security Adviser, Alejandro Muyshondt.  New journalistic investigations have revealed secret recordings of conversations Muyshondt made on his phone of meetings with high officials in the Bukele government. Among the officials are the current president of the Legislative Assembly Ernesto Castro, who was Bukele's private secretary and close adviser at the time the recordings were made, and Xavier Zablah, the president's cousin and head of the Nuevas Ideas party.   The recordings show that president Nayib Bukele's closest advisors instigated illicit spying on journalists and were aware of corrupt actors in the government and did nothing.  Investigative journalist Héctor Silva Ávalos disclosed the existence of the recordings in new publications this week. Among the disclosures in the recordings -- Castro and Muyshondt put in place a plan to spy on journalists and politicians and to...

The government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador does not like public scrutiny.  Since Bukele took office in 2019, access to government and public information has been sharply curtailed , and the dictates of the country's open records law largely ignored.  In particular, information about public spending is frequently hidden from public view.   Bukele also likes to tout the country as a technological innovator. It is clear, however, that the government has not always implemented sufficient cyber-security safeguards to prevent hackers from accessing data on government servers, and as a result the data that the government tries to hide is getting released anyways. Most recently, the "hacktivist" group calling itself " CiberInteligenciaSV " released payroll data leaked from the Salvadoran social security institute for 970,000 Salvadorans including government officials and virtually everyone else who has a job in the formal economy.  The data includes names, salaries, ...

Alejandro Muyshondt Days after publicly denouncing a Nuevas Ideas legislator for corruption, Nayib Bukele's national security advisor, Alejandro Muyshondt, was arrested in August 2023 and accused of being a spy for former president in exile Mauricio Funes. Muyshondt disappeared into the incarceration system of the State of Exception, and six months later he was dead. His case is one that leaves more questions than answers, and the government of Bukele is remaining silent on the matter. Alejandro Muyshondt served as a national security advisor to Bukele starting at the beginning of Bukele's presidency in June 2019. Muyshondt had previously served as an advisor to Bukele from 2017 to 2019 while Bukele was mayor of San Salvador, and they were reportedly childhood friends. According to Muyshondt's  curriculum vitae on the Transparency Portal of the Salvadoran government, he graduated from the University of Angers in France with a degree in criminology in 2003, and in 2008 foun...

In the five years in which Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador, there has been a dramatic shift in the availability of public information for citizens to hold their leaders accountable.  El Salvador has a government which vigorously defends its control of the narrative of what is happening in the country, and that includes restricting access to any information which might shed a different light on that narrative.   Transparency International has written: Access to information acts are grounded in the recognition that information in the control of public authorities is a valuable public resource and that public access to such information promotes greater transparency and accountability of those public authorities, and that this information is essential to the democratic process. The purpose of these acts, also known as access to information laws, is to make a government more open and accountable to its people. In transitional democracies, laws that give effect to t...

Here are a collection of bits and pieces from the news in El Salvador during the past month when we were on break.  1.  Cargo ferry service begins. Commercial cargo ferry service arrived between Costa Rica and El Salvador on Thursday, August 10.  The Blue Wave Harmony ferry is able to carry 100 tractor trailer trucks for the 430 mile voyage through the Pacific from one country to the other in less than 24 hours.  There will be two trips per week.   The first trip was not without problems, needing almost 28 hours to complete the journey and being unable to unload trucks on arrival in Costa Rica when it was low tide. The business case for the ferry rests in being able to ship good between the two countries while bypassing border crossings with Honduras and Nicaragua.  Commerce with Nicaragua under the dictatorial Ortega government has become increasingly subject to uncertainty. 2.   A crypto safe haven. El Salvador is becoming a haven for cry...

In recent months, several annual surveys of the strength of democratic institutions around the world have been published.  I collect several of them below. El Salvador is shown to be losing ground as a democracy in all of these studies, as the researchers find a trend toward authoritarianism under Nayib Bukele. Freedom House In its annual reports, Freedom Houses uses a methodology evaluating 25 indicators of political and civil rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In its 2023 report , Freedom House gave El Salvador a grade of 56/100 on its freedom status, classifying the country as "partly free.”  The country has lost ground for the past decade in Freedom House surveys, declining from a score of 77 to 56 during the past 10 years.  In this year’s report Nayib Bukele was highlighted with other leaders showing authoritarian tendencies: “After assuming office through elections, these leaders rejected the established democratic process and ...

The Bukele regime in El Salvador has taken another swipe at its critics this week as the Salvadoran president proposed in the Legislative Assembly a new " Foreign Agents Law ".   Critics say that law is intended to stifle the voices of organizations who point out the authoritarian drift of Bukele's administration and to cut off the ability of the international community to meaningfully support those organizations.    The law has two key components. One part requires the registration of persons and entities who are directly or indirectly funded, or at the direction of, foreign interests.  The second component is a 40% tax on foreign donations to such persons and entities.  Failure to register or to comply with any provision of the Foreign Agents Law can result in cancellation of the legal status of an organization and a fine of up to $10,000.   Excluded are activities characterized as humanitarian, health, religious, academic, scientific ...

The last few days have seen the battle between Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele and the independent press in his country escalate even further. The current round began with publication of an important story by digital media site GatoEncerrado about the ruling by El Salvador's Constitutional Chamber which opened the possibility for presidents including Nayib Bukele to be immediately reelected for a second term.  That decision, which altered prior precedent and the recognized interpretation of the Salvadoran constitution has been widely criticized.   In its reporting, Gato revealed that, after the decision was signed but before it had been disclosed to the public, the office of the president was informed of the decision.  The legal assistant to the president, Javier Argueta , contacted the magistrates of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) and asked for a meeting. The TSE is the body which oversees Salvadoran elections and decides who can run for office. Argueta co...