El Salvador Perspectives

On June 1, Nayib Bukele delivered a speech to the nation from the National Theater in San Salvador, on the first anniversary of commencing his unconstitutional second term as president.  In a large portion of his address, Bukele described sinister globalist forces who want to thwart his project and return El Salvador to a time of gang-controlled misery.    Early in the speech he stated: They gave us studies, grand projects on how to save us, but deep down, they never believed it was possible, and that's why their solutions were never designed to work. El Salvador was controlled by people with no intention of helping us. Six years ago, we merely began to reclaim our country. Today, El Salvador no longer belongs to foreign actors or their local puppets. Today, El Salvador belongs to the Salvadoran people. Bukele declared that he would never give in to calls by human rights organizations or international media to lift the State of Exception:   Me, personally, they...

From his campaign for president until today, the most frequent target of social media attacks and diatribes by Nayib Bukele has been the independent press in the country, especially when they are in the middle of revealing uncomfortable truths about his administration.   That strategy, of denigrating the press as "fake news" which is "biased" and "part of the opposition", has appeared to work.   Bukele's popularity remains sky high with a public unwilling to hear any criticism of their "cool dictator." Despite this, the journalism being produced by investigative journalists in El Salvador in recent years has actually been getting stronger.   As a student of the Salvadoran press for more than 20 years, I feel comfortable saying that the reporting now may be the best it has ever been, with reporters for multiple online media sites showing significant courage and fortitude knowing that all power in the country rests in the hands of those they ar...

One central feature of the presidency of Nayib Bukele is an attempt to set and control the narrative regarding the performance of his government.  This has taken the form of limiting transparency and access to public information, and it has also taken the form of attempting to stifle independent voices in the press who present information which puts the government in a bad light.  In other words, Bukele and his allies have sought to "chill" the exercise of freedom of the press in the country.      The most recent example is a newly passed law which threatens prison sentences of up to 15 years for persons disseminating messages emanating from the gangs. One provision of the law criminalizes gang tagging walls and buildings with gang symbols.   But journalists are pointing to a second section  in the law which places a muzzle on reporting on the gangs: The new measure states that any “radio, television, written or digital media” that “reproduce or ...

Some entity within El Salvador, using software provided solely to national governments, infected and spied on the cellphones of journalists and civil society activists within El Salvador, while those journalists and activists were reporting on and criticizing the actions of the Bukele regime in El Salvador.  The greatest number of phones infected belonged to the prominent and award-winning investigative news site El Faro, which has broken a number of stories about corruption in the Bukele regime and its negotiations with leaders of the country's criminal gangs.  At this point, all indications point to the Bukele regime as the sponsor of the espionage.        On Wednesday, the results of expert digital forensic analysis of the phones of journalists was released.  Suspicious that their phones had been compromised , El Faro went to Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity lab at the University of Toronto, for a digital forensics analysis on all the iPhones in El...

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...

This post attempts to tie together the threads of many developments in the recent news from El Salvador. United States Charge d-affaires, Jean Manes, is leaving El Salvador with a  parting blast  at the Bukele government.  After Bukele's May 1 sacking of supreme court magistrates and the attorney general, the Biden administration sent Manes, who had previously been Ambassador to El Salvador from 2016 to 2019, to deal with the challenging relationship between the countries.  (As of today, Biden still has not named a new ambassador to El Salvador).  On a  morning interview show , Manes spoke of paid media attacks orchestrated by the government against the Embassy, herself, and Joe Biden.   Today the US Statement Department said that Bukele government had  rejected a path  towards a productive bilateral relationship.   Manes' criticism included the proposed Foreign Agents Law in El Salvador. The march towards approval of that mea...

How do you maintain your image as the most popular president doing the coolest things in the world? For Nayib Bukele, that means having a public relations media machine which knows all the tricks in the book. Today I present a case study of one instance earlier this year, where public opinion polling of dubious quality was broadcast far and wide as "real news." On October 4, 2021, news pieces began circulating which announced that the Salvadoran diaspora in the US overwhelmingly supported the re-election of Nayib Bukele as president.  The poll was authored by the Center of Investigations Social and Economic Studies of Central America (CIESCA) and found that 99% of those polled favored a second term for Bukele and 96% agreed that Bitcoin would improve El Salvador's economy.  Soon the results had been shared broadly. The full document can be found here .         A poll which was dubious on its face. The CIESCA poll results, presented in a meeting room...

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...

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...