El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador is a little more than eight months away from presidential elections.   Its enormously popular president Nayib Bukele is running for reelection in 2024 despite  multiple provisions  in the country's constitution that prohibit the immediate reelection of a president to a second term.  Up to now, one major question has been, would any party put up a candidate to compete against Bukele?  It appears today that a broad coalition of civil society groups are pushing a unity ticket to compete, and seek to make alliance with opposition political parties.     El Faro published on Tuesday an article by journalist Gabriel Labrador titled  Partidos opositores y sociedad civil a punto de concretar candidatura presidencial única.   ( Opposition parties and civil society about to finalize a single presidential candidacy ).  A shorter English version was published today under the title  Civil Society Leads Push for Unified Oppo...

El Salvador is less than a year from national elections. On February 4, 2024 the country will elect its president and all the deputies in the Legislative Assembly. That election will be followed a month later on March 3 with municipal elections and for delegates to the Central American parliament.  Since the president has a 5 year term and the rest of elected officials have 3 year terms, the conjunction of all officials being elected in the same year happens only once every 15 years. Opinion polling shows very strong support for the re-election of Nayib Bukele as president, despite the fact that legal experts state that re-election of the president is expressly prohibited by the  Constitution  of El Salvador.  However, the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador’s supreme court, put into office when Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party summarily deposed the sitting magistrates in 2021, ruled that, clear language or not, the president may be re-elected. ...

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...

Salvadorans go to the polls on Sunday, February 28 to elect legislators and mayors nationwide. But one name looms over all others, and he is not even on the ballot. Nayib Bukele, the highly popular president of El Salvador, has made it clear that he wants a clean sweep of El Salvador's legislature and to have his party members installed instead. That just may happen, and a populist president may be able to go forward in his presidency with few restraints on what he wants to do. Since taking office on June 1, 2019, Nayib Bukele has governed without members of his newly formed party, Nuevas Ideas, in the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly. Instead, he has battled with a congress dominated by opposition political parties which he has continually labelled as “the same ones as always,” “ thieves” and “those corrupt ones.” Those current members of the legislature were elected in 2018 when Bukele was not on any ballot and his Nuevas Ideas party did not yet exist. Bukele had pr...

Following the deadly attack on a truck carrying FMLN supporters leaving an election rally on Sunday night, the situation is only slightly clearer.    Responses to the event have been along three lines:   Condemnations of the murders and demands for a transparent investigation. Concerns that this event does not signal a return to times of political violence which have marked El Salvador's past. Denunciations of the style of discourse of president Nayib Bukele and his allies, especially as represented by Bukele's tweet in the moments after the attack which insinuated that the deaths were a self-attack by the FMLN on its own to generate sympathy for the party and criticism of his government. What we know at this point is that two people died in the attack: Juan de Dios Tejada y Gloria Rogel del Cid, both FMLN members, and at least three more were wounded.  There are three captured suspects who are all connected to El Salvador's Ministry of Health.  One of the...

Political violence erupted in El Salvador tonight in a manner not seen in decades.    As the FMLN was concluding a rally in San Salvador to kick off the campaign for its mayoral candidate Rogelio Canales, a suspect pulled up in a blue car and began shooting.   Two people were killed and five wounded in the shooting which occurred in the charged atmosphere leading up to El Salvador's national elections four weeks from today.  As of late Sunday, three suspects had reportedly been arrested . Images circulated on twitter of the blood spattered bed of a truck which had been participating transporting rally participants. It's lamentable that in our country, one more time, we kill each other over political differences.  All ought to be responsible with their words and actions.   Democracy, earned after shedding so much blood of our sisters and brothers, can't give way to hate.   -- Miguel Pereira, FMLN mayor of San Miguel   Many were outra...

In the current confrontation between the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and the country's Legislative Assembly, I have shared much of the criticism directed at the president.  That criticism involves his unilateral decision to convene the congress and his subsequent entrance into the chambers of the Legislative Assembly accompanied by troops in full tactical gear and sharpshooters on rooftops.   But the critiques of these actions, which reveal an authoritarian streak in Bukele, do not mean the Legislative Assembly gets a free pass.  In fact, that branch of government has a record of not addressing pressing needs of El Salvador. There are 84 deputies in the Legislative Assembly who serve three year terms.  The two post-war dominant parties,  ARENA on the right and the FMLN on the left, hold 37 and 23 seats respectively.  Bukele ran for president on the ticket of the right wing GANA party in a marriage of convenience, and that party holds 1...

This week in El Salvador, more than 400 members of MS-13 are defendants in a criminal trial.  The gang members were captured in country-wide raids called "Operation Cuscatlán" which targeted the gang's finances and money-making activities. From the  AP : El Salvador on Tuesday began a mass trial of over 400 alleged gang members, including 17 purported leaders of the feared transnational crime group Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.  Sixteen suspects were in court while the rest watched via video conference from prisons. Nearly 100 defense lawyers are on the case, which could last until November given the volume of witnesses and evidence. One of the witnesses in the Operation Cuscatlán trial is a high ranking MS leader who reached a deal with prosecutors for his testimony.   Using the pseudonym Noé, this witness testified not only about the criminal activities of his gang, but also about the deals politicians made with the gangs. Noé  testified that MS-1...

There were elections being held in Central America on Sunday.   In Guatemala and El Salvador, past charges against candidates linked to corruption or human rights abuses did not seem to matter. In Guatemala, voters cast their ballots in the first round of presidential elections on Sunday.   The two candidates garnering the most votes and who will compete in the second round are former first lady of Guatemala Sandra Torres and former prison chief Alejandro Giammattei.   Neither candidate has a spotless record.  Torres has been under investigation in the past for campaign finance impropriety.   Giammattei was arrested and charged with crimes relating to killings of prison inmates by security forces while he was in charge of the prison system.  Also on Sunday, party members of the FMLN in El Salvador participated in internal elections for new party leadership.   The old party leadership stepped aside following the left wing p...

Today is the final day of ten years of the left-wing FMLN in the presidency of El Salvador.   And so we take a look back at the legacy of the governments of the party formed by former guerrilla forces turned politicians after the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords. Unfortunately for the FMLN, the two presidents elected under the party’s banner end up dragging down its legacy.  Mauricio Funes enjoyed high popularity ratings and swept the party into the presidency for the first time in 2009.  Yet now Funes sits in exile in Nicaragua, with orders for his capture on corruption charges outstanding, and with investigative journalists detailing how he lived a luxury lifestyle fueled by public dollars in a secret account of the presidency.  Salvador Sánchez Cerén has not had charges of corruption leveled against him, but that might be the most positive thing one can say about his presidency.  As a leader, he has inspired no one and been largely absent from an...