El Salvador Perspectives

Counting votes in Antiguo Cuscatlán In yesterday's election of mayors, Nuevas Ideas appears to have captured 28 municipal governments out of 44 in the newly-gerrymandered maps. (Two of those in coalition with CD).   This total probably came as a surprise to many, in light of Nuevas Ideas dominating showing in last month's presidential and Legislative Assembly elections.  With 78% of the vote nationally counted as of 7:30 Monday morning,  other parties in the lead to win municipalities included GANA(6), PDC (4), PCN (3), Fuerza Solidaria (1), ARENA (1) and a coalition of PDC/PCN (1).  The FMLN was left out of control of any municipality for the first time since it became a political party at the end of the civil war in 1992. Turnout at the polls was low . Perhaps the reason was that people felt disconnected from the new mega-municipalities.  Or these elections may have had less energy without the charismatic energy of Nayib Bukele.  Bukele did not use ...

On Sunday March 3, Salvadorans will go to the polls for the second set of national elections in a month.   In these elections, Salvadorans will elect their mayors and will elect deputies of the Central American Parliament.  (PARLACEN). Three years ago Salvadorans elected mayors in 262 different municipalities.  However, in a measure passed 8 months ago, the Legislative Assembly consolidated those 262 municipalities into only 44 municipalities at the directive of Nayib Bukele.  The old municipalities are now "districts" within the 44 new mega-municipalities which have memorable names like San Salvador East and La Libertad South.   The new municipalities and the districts which make them up are shown at this link .   This reduction in the number of local government bodies was gerrymandering on a dramatic scale.   One analyst portrayed the impact of the change using results from the last elections in 2021. Using the votes cast for may...

 In 2019, after he was elected president in El Salvador for the first time, Nayib Bukele made his first public appearance not in El Salvador, but at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.   On Thursday, Bukele made a return trip to speak to conservatives in Washington, this time as a featured speaker at CPAC , the Conservative Political Action Conference.  The conference is attended by pundits, activists and politicians from the Trump wing (which is almost the entirety) of the Republican party. The BBC summarized some of Bukele's remarks: Mr. Bukele told the conference that the next US president must have the will and courage to do "whatever it takes" to overcome the "dark forces" that he said were trying to control the US. He received loud applause for when he attacked institutions including what he called "corrupt judges" and fake news in both his country and the US. He also repeatedly cast an undefined group of "g...

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...

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...

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has become the Latin American leader most lauded by the far right in the United States. The millennial president, who once labelled Donald Trump “nice and cool” after meeting with Trump on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly meeting, is now being held up by the far right as a model for what strong national leader should be.    Among the conservatives,  one group of Bukele fans are libertarian in their leanings – these are the supporters who enthusiastically promote Bitcoin.  They support Bitcoin for providing a currency system which is free of government control and not dependent on the actions of multinational financial institutions. When Bukele tweets “We will stand for freedom… bitcoin is FU money” these libertarian Bitcoiners stand up and cheer.  More recently, a different swarm of conservative pundits has come out in praise of Bukele after his recent videos of the transfer of the first prisoners into the new ...

In recent months, several annual surveys of the strength of democratic institutions around the world have been published.  I collect several of them below. El Salvador is shown to be losing ground as a democracy in all of these studies, as the researchers find a trend toward authoritarianism under Nayib Bukele. Freedom House In its annual reports, Freedom Houses uses a methodology evaluating 25 indicators of political and civil rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In its 2023 report , Freedom House gave El Salvador a grade of 56/100 on its freedom status, classifying the country as "partly free.”  The country has lost ground for the past decade in Freedom House surveys, declining from a score of 77 to 56 during the past 10 years.  In this year’s report Nayib Bukele was highlighted with other leaders showing authoritarian tendencies: “After assuming office through elections, these leaders rejected the established democratic process and ...

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...

It was a proceeding not seen in El Salvador for twenty years. Government officials from the Bukele administration were required to come before the full Legislative Assembly to answer questions for three days from the assembled deputies in a process called interpelación . The officials were the Minister of Health, Dr. Ana Orellana Bendek, and the president of the ANDA water authority, Fréderick Benítez, and they were being questioned about a water crisis earlier this year when the water from the Las Pavas water purification plant was a dirty brown color with a bad odor. The politicians in the Legislative Assembly, of course, were not just trying to learn what happened, but to score points against the Bukele administration. What we did learn: 1) You should probably never drink the water from the ANDA water system 2) The health risk of the water during the January water crisis was not significantly worse than normal, despite the bad color and odor. 3) The bad color and odo...