El Salvador Perspectives

This article first appeared on the website of InsightCrime with the title  El Salvador Police Convictions Fall Short in Curbing Abuses Written by Victoria Dittmar By sentencing four police officers involved in extrajudicial executions, authorities in El Salvador may be sending a message about their willingness to address internationally scrutinized police violence, but the root causes of the problem continue unabated. On June 22, El Salvador’s Attorney General announced that four members of the National Civil Police (Policía Nacional Civil – PNC) were sentenced to 60 years in prison for aggravated homicide. The convictions were for crimes that occurred on February 13, 2017, in the town of San Pedro Masahuat, in the department of La Paz. Two civilians died in what the police had described as a chase and confrontation with gang members. However, the court concluded that the confrontation never happened, and that the narrative was used to cover up extrajudicial killings. The At...

The next three weeks will see El Salvador's National Assembly make very important choices of magistrates for the country's highest court. The Washington Office on Latin America explained what is at stake : In July 2018, four out of the five magistrates who sit on the Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador’s Supreme Court will have finished serving their five-year terms. The Constitutional Chamber is charged with ruling on matters related to constitutional law, including conflicts between the executive and legislative branches, and thus is a key institution for protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms of Salvadorans. There is no doubt that the selection of the new magistrates by El Salvador’s Congress will have long-term ramifications for the country’s ongoing struggle to improve rule of law.  While the magistrates who make up the current Constitutional Chamber have generated controversy with some of their decisions, they are widely viewed as having defended due proce...

The furor over the Trump administration's policies of family separation at the US border generated many stories about Salvadorans separated from their children and the conditions in El Salvador which prompt many to flee towards the north.   Here is a listing of some of those stories from the past 10 days: ‘Don’t rip us apart’: Father deported to El Salvador without his 6-year-old daughter El Salvador demands U.S. return child taken from deported father 'All I hear is my daughter, crying': a Salvadoran father's plight after separation at border From El Salvador to the US: handcuffed at the border, separated for months Girl fleeing violence in El Salvador was separated from family. Now she's in Tampa Detainee from El Salvador tells of separation from 8-year-old son: 'Don't leave me, Mom' This father from El Salvador caught at border is thankful to be reunited with son Immigrants fleeing gangs prefer taking chance for US asylum 'We do this fo...

News coverage of family/child separation at the US border has dominated headlines in the US and El Salvador for the past two weeks.   In such coverage, the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America -- Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are usually lumped together as the home countries of the great majority of these migrants.    What you will not learn from that coverage is that migration from El Salvador has dropped significantly, while migration from both Honduras and Guatemala has increased significantly in the past year.    Migration as measured by detentions by US authorities at the border has decreased at a rate of almost 50% for Salvadorans from last year while border crossing by Guatemalans and Hondurans has increased 80% and 46% respectively : These figures come form the US Customs and Border Patrol .    The statistics are compiled on the basis of a US government fiscal year (FY) which runs from October 1 to September 30....

El Salvador's most popular politician , Nayib Bukele, has found his path to be on the 2019 presidential ballot in El Salvador.   Bukele has announced that his (not yet officially recognized) political party Nuevas Ideas has made an alliance with the party  Cambio Democrático  (CD) -- Democratic Change.  That alliance will allow him to be on the presidential ballot endorsed by CD even if his opponents had blocked Nuevas Ideas from contending in the election. Nuevas Ideas had a real obstacle in its path to getting Bukele on the ballot.   The electoral process established by the Law of Political Parties and administered by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal ("TSE") required that political parties establish a process for internal elections to choose a presidential nominee by April 6, 2018.   Nuevas Ideas could not meet this date because it has not yet been officially recognized as a political party.   Although Nuevas Ideas did establis...

It has been almost two years since El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court overturned the 1993 amnesty law which had prevented prosecution of crimes committed during the country's civil war.  This week the Constitutional Chamber of the court has summoned branches of the Salvadoran government to report on how they have been pursuing justice for crimes against humanity committed during El Salvador's civil conflict.  This follows a similar hearing in July 2017 , where the branches displayed little progress in working on transitional justice. The attorney general's office (FGR) is responsible for investigating and putting cases together for crimes against humanity.   The FGR indicated to the court that that office is currently investigating 160 such cases from the conflict years. Among those cases already open are the cases of the forced disappearance of the Serrano Cruz sisters and the massacres at El Mozote, Tecoluca, and El Calabozo.  The FGR indicated that it...

On June 20, World Refugee Day, El Salvador must deal with a reality of hundreds of thousands of internal refugees displaced by violence.   The following article was originally published by the human rights organization Cristosal . The IDMC Releases 2018 Global Report on Internal Displacement Despite its relatively tiny size, El Salvador ranked tenth globally with 296,000 new displacements caused by conflict in 2017. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), a global leader in analyzing displacement data, has released the 2018 Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) . El Salvador ranked tenth worldwide for new displacements caused by conflict, with 296,000. This number represents 65% of all new displacements caused by conflict in the Americas. This is an increase from the IDMC's 2016 estimate of new displacements caused by conflict in El Salvador, which was 222,000. "We saw an increase in our own data as well," says Rina Montti, Coordinator of...