El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's government has locked up 5 community organizers and environmental activists from the rural community of Santa Marta, alleging their participation in a decades old crime during El Salvador's civil war.   But the circumstances surrounding the case suggest to many that the real motivation for their detention is to weaken resistance to metallic mining in the country and make possible the lifting of a mining prohibition. The actions of the country's Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, illustrate how the State of Exception with its suspension of judicial guarantees of due process is being used, not just to fight gangs, but to intimidate human rights defenders, including environmental activists. His actions show that the hard won victory to ban extractive metallic mining in the country may be under threat.  Nina Lakhani in the  Guardian  reported the arrests of the five community leaders:  Five prominent environmental defenders who played a crucial ro...

In recent days, El Salvador's Attorney General, has decided to prosecute two Salvadorans for what they published on Twitter.  While Nayib Bukele has often said that his government does not lock up protesters or critics, that might appear to be changing. The first of these persons is  a tech worker named Luis Alexander Rivas, who had been tweeting under the anonymous Twitter account @_elcomisionado_ .  Rivas has used that Twitter account, where he has 8400 followers, to be a vitriolic critic of the Nuevas Ideas-controlled government.  Rivas was initially arrested on August 21, shortly after he published a tweet with a photo criticizing the use of public funds in a deployment of public security forces at the beach providing security for the president's brother Karim Bukele and his family. It certainly wasn't the first time that Rivas had tweeted critiques of the president's family. His tweets have often been directed at first lady Gabriela Bukele as well.  ...

The man who was formerly El Salvador's lead anti-corruption prosecutor has told Reuters his team had proof that officials in the Bukele government had negotiated with gang leaders in prison to lower the homicide rate and to guarantee support for the president's political party, Nuevas Ideas, in the February 2021 elections.  But the investigation was quashed after Nuevas Ideas took control of El Salvador's congress.    From the Reuters story  by Sarah Kinosian today: German Arriaza, who headed an anti-corruption unit within the attorney general's office, said his team compiled documentary and photographic evidence that Bukele's government struck a deal with the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs in 2019 to reduce murder rates and help the ruling New Ideas party win legislative elections in February. Arriaza's comments mark the first time a former Salvadoran official has publicly accused the Bukele government of making a deal with the gangs, which have p...

According to new reporting, Rodolfo Delgado, the Attorney General put in place when the current Bukele-controlled congress deposed the old Attorney General on May 1, was an employee of Alba Petróleos in 2019. As described in the  article at Infobae.com by journalist  Hector Silva Avalos , Delgado was paid more than $46,000 by Alba, a company which is part of Venezuelan state oil conglomerate PDVSA being investigated for money laundering by the US and by El Salvador (at least until the prior Attorney General was fired). For years, there have been calls for investigations of Alba. Alba, which is closely linked to the left wing FMLN party, has been tied to laundering millions of dollars coming out of Venezuela.  From InsightCrime : Since Alba Petróleos was founded, it has been under the control of José Luis Merino, known as "Ramiro Vásquez", a former FMLN guerrilla captain, who later became a federal deputy and government official.  Over the past decade, Merino ha...

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...

A week ago, the legislative super-majority held by the president’s Nuevas Ideas party and its allies removed from office top magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the attorney general.  This post gathers some of the coverage of those events and the international reaction in the English language press. The events of last Saturday are broadly described as a consolidation of power by Nayib Bukele over the judicial branch resulting in the elimination of check and balances and breaching the separation of powers. Bukele's Legislative Assembly Ousts Supreme Court Magistrates and Attorney General (El Faro, May 2, 2021) A presidential power grab: El Salvador’s parliament sacks the country’s top judges (The Economist, May 6, 2021)   El Salvador's parliament removes checks and balances on President Bukele's powers (Eddie Galdamez in Global Voices, May 5, 2021) Many voices expressed concern that El Salvador was seeing an autocrat consolidate power. This Is How a Re...

El Salvador is now facing a decision which every country afflicted with the coronavirus pandemic must make.   How long should stringent measures locking down the economy and restricting human mobility last and how should the economy be safely restarted?   There is no universal game plan or solution to this.   What worked in China or New Zealand may not work or may not be possible in Texas or Latin America or Africa.  The current progress of the COVID-19 disease in El Salvador strongly suggests that the present moment is not the time to let up on quarantine measures.   On Thursday May 14, the government had its highest single day death toll as it reported three deaths from COVID-19 bringing the national total to 23.   Confirmed cases of COVID-19 increased by 98, the second highest single day toll.  The government went from reporting 21 people hospitalized to 127 persons hospitalized in only 5 days. Here is my tracking cha...

During the presidential election campaign of Nayib Bukele, the fight against corruption was one of his major themes.    He used the slogan "there is enough money when nobody steals," and promised the creation of a Commission against Corruption and Impunity in El Salvador ("CICIES" for its initials in Spanish).   The acronym CICIES was intentionally similar to CICIG, the anti-corruption commission in Guatemala backed by the United Nations which exposed and prosecuted corruption of powerful leaders in the country. Seven months into the Bukele presidency, there is an entity called CICIES, and we are able to better understand what this organization will do and what will be its limitations.  CICIES is the creation of agreements executed between the Organization of American States (OAS) and El Salvador.  A key document was signed in December between the OAS and the office of attorney general (FGR) Raúl Melara, to describe the role of CICIES along with ...

Last week, El Salvador's governmental Advocate for the Defense of Human Rights  (Procuradora Para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, "PDDH"), Raquel Caballero de Guevara, issued a damning report concerning overwhelming evidence of extrajudicial executions by El Salvador's National Civilian Police (PNC).    The report, which covered the period 2014-2018, examined 48 "emblematic" cases of extrajudicial killings in which security forces executed 116 people. The report systematically gathered investigative materials on all the cases examined and was able to identify several patterns.  Most often this type of killing happened in rural areas of the country.   The victims were almost all male, between the ages of 15 and 24, but some were as young as 13 and 14.  More than 60% of the cases came from 2015-16, when the country's overall homicide rate was the highest in the world.  Although police reports claimed that more than 90% of those killed w...

Corruption was on voters' minds in El Salvador when they rejected the traditional political parties  in El Salvador and elected Nayib Bukele president, whose campaign included the slogan "there's enough money when nobody steals."  Voters responded favorably to Bukele's calls to throw out thieves in government despite the fact that Bukele chose to run on the ticket of the GANA party, one of whose founders was Tony Saca, the former president who is now in prison for corruption, a party led by Guillermo Gallegos who also has a cloud of corruption allegations hanging over him. There is much work to be done to reduce endemic corruption in El Salvador.  Here are some of the more recent developments (mostly setbacks) in El Salvador's battle with corrupt officials. Supreme Judicial Court lets off dozens of possibly corrupt officials El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court decided to close without action 79 cases of potential corruption by public officials, inc...