El Salvador Perspectives

Nayib Bukele completes his first five years as president of El Salvador having fully earned the label as a "populist autocrat." Populist , because he has gained power by developing enormous popularity in the Salvadoran public through an extraordinary propaganda and public image machine, and autocrat because he and his party Nuevas Ideas have accumulated the total power to govern in the country after having eliminated each and every institution which might provide checks or limits on Bukele's power. The tactics Bukele used are a true  dictator's playbook . Undermine the press Bukele started early to eliminate checks and balances by seeking to undermine the role of the press as a watchdog in a democratic society. Before he even took office as president, he was telling the public that impartial journalism does not exist : @NayibBukele Tweet April 20, 2019 That those of the media who presented themselves as "independent" are going out now with a clear and t...

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...

The Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal recently released a report detailing how the Salvadoran government under president Nayib Bukele has increasingly denied citizen requests for information about the dealings of their government.  This has occurred despite a strong law which requires such transparency. The new report is titled Report on the status of transparency: The establishment of opacity Here are the report's conclusions: In the time since the implementation of the Law of Access to Public Information, this is the worst moment in terms of respect for the Right of Access to Public Information in El Salvador. Without an active controlling entity, the violation of this right will increasingly intensify, which will result in the disrespect of other rights, since the [Right of Access] is the one that opens the doors for the guarantee of others. Knowing that there will be no consequences, because the [Institute for Access to Public Information] remains inoperative, gove...

Historically, local political campaigns in El Salvador have had a very predictable course. Whenever there are municipal elections, suddenly local projects in communities get developed with municipal funds.  A street may be repaired, a park refurbished, or trash receptacles installed, usually with a sign posted reminding voters who is currently the mayor of the town.  Now, much more of that spending in El Salvador will be concentrated in the national government controlled by the Bukele regime.  A new law slashes revenue sharing with towns and cities and replaces those funds with delivery of public works projects. In past years, 10% of the revenue collected by the national government would be distributed to local municipalities for their use through a fund known as FODES. In November the Legislative Assembly reduced FODES revenue sharing  by 85% to just 1.5% of revenue, and instead local municipalities will receive public works projects, under control of a Directorate ...

Preliminary results from Sunday's national elections in El Salvador show that president Nayib Bukele has consolidated power as his Nuevas Ideas party took commanding control of the country's legislature.   The party appears certain to have achieved the 2/3rds majority necessary not only to pass laws, but to appoint the next attorney general and members of the supreme court.   It was a decisive rebuke to the older parties, ARENA and FMLN, which had governed the country for decades. TSE graph of preliminary results as of 6:30 Monday morning      The preliminary election results posted by El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal can be viewed here . Nuevas Ideas and Bukele swept the Legislative Assembly elections for three main reasons. First, the president has successfully promoted a vision of El Salvador as a leading country in the region with a bright future. Second, the attacks on the incumbent parties in power ring true with the population....

Today is the anniversary of what has come to be known in El Salvador as simply "9F."    On this day one year ago, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, summoned his supporters to the outside of the Legislative Assembly building in a dispute with his opponents in the congress over a loan approval. Police and military were deployed throughout the capital city.  Then Bukele marched into the chambers of the legislature accompanied by heavily armed soldiers and took the seat belonging to the president of the Legislative Assembly. Photo from ElSalvdor.com / EDH Critics of Bukele see this event as a prime indicator of authoritarian tendencies in the popular president.  On display was his willingness to disregard constitutional norms and the separation of powers.   Also evident were armed forces and national police who understood their loyalties as running directly to the president. As the events of that day unfolded, I wrote these two posts: Nayib Bukele's power play...

In 2018, Nayib Bukele tweeted out a link to an article in The Economist which labeled him "El Salvador's Rising Political Star."   Bukele has not, however, been retweeting this week's articles from The Economist , or several other articles in the international press: My tweet is your command: Nayib Bukele may want to become Latin America’s first millennial dictator , The Economist .  "[I]n his 11 months as president he has done more to wreck El Salvador's democracy than to reform it. In February he entered the Legislative Assembly with soldiers to bully it into financing his crime-fighting program. With the outbreak of covid-19 his contempt for democratic norms has only grown. Mr. Bukele may be on course to become Latin America's first millennial dictator." Nayib Bukele’s power grab in El Salvador , The Economis t.  "Mr. Bukele's pre-pandemic ambitions are slipping away. A five-year plan drafted by consultants 'fell apart' says...

Thursday El Salvador's Legislative Assembly voted to override a veto from president Nayib Bukele and approved a measure expanding the ability of Salvadoran citizens living outside of the country to vote.  Previously Salvadorans in the diaspora could only vote in presidential elections.   Now they will be able to vote for deputies in the Legislative Assembly and members of municipal government as well. The expansion of the vote was necessary to comply with a prior ruling of the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court. The idea that a Salvadoran citizen living in Toronto, Canada for the past thirty years should be able to vote for the mayor of the town of Suchitoto and legislative deputies from the department of Cuscatlán, is not immediately obvious. Yet if that Salvadoran residing in Canada shows she has ties to Suchitoto, that is now her right. The new law requires Salvadorans to enroll to vote in a municipality by showing that they have...

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...

For many years I have followed the public opinion polls conducted by the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP) at the University of Central America.   The polls touch many aspects of how Salvadorans feel about their country, its leaders, and its institutions.   Throughout almost all of that time, Salvadorans have not felt good about the direction their country was headed, except during brief honeymoon periods following the elections of Tony Saca (ARENA) and Mauricio Funes (FMLN)(Saca has now been convicted of, and Funes accused, of looting millions from the country). The most recent IUDOP polling results  show a dramatic turnaround in those sentiments.  In 2017 , 48.7% of Salvadorans believed conditions in the country were worsening and only 7.6% believed they were getting better. Entering 2020, however, 65.9% of Salvadorans believe the country is improving and only 5.4% believe things are getting worse. One part of this change in attitude ...

The citizens of El Salvador do not think highly of their country's democracy.   In fact, a majority feel there would be no difference under a regime which was not democratic. These are the results of the most recent polling by Latino Barometro which regularly polls the citizens of Latin American countries on their views of government and the economy.   Salvadorans trail all the rest of Latin America in their lack of support for democracy as a form of government. Only 28% of Salvadorans said that democracy was preferable to all other types of government: El Salvador had the highest percentage of people who  felt a democratic or a non-democratic regime would not make a difference: After Venezuela and Nicaragua, El Salvador had the next highest percentage of people who said their country was not a democracy: Ant not surprisingly, El Salvador had a very low number of people indicating they were satisfied with democracy: These statistic...

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...