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 El Salvador's Adolfo Pineda National Gymnasium, 300 work tables have been set up to tabulate  results for the election of seats in the Legislative Assembly.  Boxes of ballots from all over the country are brought to the facility, where ballots are reviewed and the results "digitized" to produce election results through a process called the "escrutinio final" or "final scrutiny."     However, election observers, the press, and opposition party representatives have been denouncing a wide variety of anomalies and discrepancies in the process.       Each position in the gym works to tabulate the results from individual votes placed into the ballot box at a "Junta Receptora de Votos" or JRV.   Citizens throughout the country were assigned in groups of 700 for each JRV to cast their votes.   (This does not apply to voting from abroad for the diaspora which was a different process, and for which we do not know how those vote...

On February 4, 2023, Salvadorans thought they knew the rules of the game for the coming national elections on February 4, 2024. After all, the country had a law on the books which stated that changes in the electoral process could not be implemented in the final 12 months before an election. But on March 15, 2023, the Legislative Assembly repealed  this provision in the election law. The repeal effectively allows changes to El Salvador’s electoral process to be made right up until election day. The strongest players in the game, president Nayib Bukele and the legislative deputies of Nuevas Ideas, gave themselves permission to change the rules for their upcoming election races at the last minute. Last night the Legislative Assembly controlled by Nuevas Ideas took advantage of its power to change the rules by adopting major modifications to the election of deputies to the Legislative Assembly, less than seven months before the first ballots are due to be cast. Bukele announced in...

Nayib Bukele gave a speech to the nation of El Salvador tonight on the 4th anniversary of his presidency.   In the speech he proposed a major restructuring of local government and the country's congress. As would be expected, the Salvadoran president began his speech describing the advances his government claims in public security through its war on gangs, contrasting the prior life in neighborhoods controlled by gangs with his description of a current reality where families can walk on streets at night and cross former gang boundaries.    After finishing the war on gangs section of his speech, he turned to three announcements. The first was a proposal to reduce the number of municipalities in the country from 262 to 44.   Existing municipalities would be converted to districts within these new municipalities.  Instead of 262 mayors and municipal councils and associated staff, there would only be 44.   Existing offices providing municipal se...

El Salvador’s government delivered a Christmas gift to participants in its national pension system in the days before the holiday.  A pension reform law was passed on December 22 which increased benefits for persons receiving retirement pensions and made other changes to the financing of those benefits.      El Salvador's government run pension system is an individual account plan which functions by accumulating the contributions made on behalf of the employee, plus the credited interest on the account from the pension fund’s investment earnings.  At retirement age, a retiree’s monthly pension is the accumulated total divided by 260 (20 years at 13 payments per year).  If that calculation is less than the minimum pension ($400 under the new law), the minimum pension is paid. The retirement age for women is 55 and the retirement age for men is 60 years old.  Someone can start receiving a pension once they have reached retirement age and have 25 years o...

May 1 marked the one year anniversary of Nayib Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party taking control of the legislative branch of El Salvador’s government with a super majority, earned by sweeping national elections on February 28, 2021. That date also marked the end of decades of multi-party democracy in El Salvador. Until this past year, no party in the Assembly could pass measures without the support of one or more other parties. In practice, this meant that legislation passed slowly, and frequently as the result of political deal-making. But for the past year, Nuevas Ideas can pass legislation on its own, meaning that what Nayib Bukele wants, Nayib Bukele gets. The very first act of Nuevas Ideas last May 1 was to take control of the judicial branch and the Attorney General’s office. The new Legislative Assembly began by sacking the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador’s Supreme Judicial Court, and replaced them with hand-picked loyal judges. Those new judges wo...

Tonight, with little discussion of whether conditions still merited an emergency decree and whether mistakes or abuses had taken place, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly passed an extension of the "State of Exception" for another period of thirty days.   According to the PNC, more than 16,000 persons alleged to be gang members have been detained during the first four weeks of the State of Exception. Here is a set of articles in the English language press about the past four weeks in El Salvador under the State of Exception.    As El Salvador arrests thousands, families search for the missing  -- Washington Post -- "The other women in line at El Penalito told stories of how their sons were arrested — in raids on their homes, while selling fruit in downtown San Salvador or working on construction sites, while walking home from the bus.  In a country where thousands disappeared during the civil war of the 1980s, and thousands more vanished during a surge in...

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 ...

Saturday, March 26, was one of the bloodiest days in recent memory in El Salvador.   62 homicides were reported just that day, a total never before seen for a single day in this violent country of 6.3 million people.  This came on top of 14 murders the day before.  There were murders committed in 12 of El Salvador's 14 departments.  In contrast, during the entire month of February, there were only 79 murders.  Since 2020, El Salvador had been averaging fewer than 4 homicides per day. There was one message from the weekend's violence:  El Salvador's street gangs maintain the capacity and the numbers to wreak havoc across the country when it suits them.  The relative calm of the past few years meant that the gangs had decided that homicides were not in their interest, whether that decision was the result of negotiating with the government or otherwise, and the relative calm was not the result of Nayib Bukele's militarized "Territorial Control Plan...