June 5, 2023
photo: Marvin Recinos/ AFP.
Last June 1, Nayib Bukele forgot to render accounts in the space provided for the President of the Republic to render accounts to the Legislative branch and the nation. Instead, he came to the Blue Room to order his deputies to approve a plan to reduce municipalities and seats; and announced the beginning of a war against corruption, similar -he said- to the one he unleashed against gangs. That night, he announced it himself, the prosecutor’s office was raiding houses and land allegedly owned by former president Alfredo Cristiani.
The three announcements are emblematic of a president who is advancing towards a dictatorship, running over everything in his path. There will be an opportunity in the near future to dedicate this space to the first two points. Today our editorial will deal with the third point, his “war against corruption”.
Since the years when Alfredo Cristiani was president of El Salvador, civil society organizations have been demanding transparency, accountability and, above all, a strong comptroller’s office to punish corruption. Suspicions about bank privatization, the use of secret funds and state contracts tarnished his administration.
This newspaper, which was born when the president was Armando Calderón Sol, has demanded from its origins effective investigations and, like almost all the media in the country, has published an enormous amount of reports that evidence corruption in the administrations of the previous administrations and those of Francisco Flores, Antonio Saca, Mauricio Funes, Salvador Sánchez Cerén and Nayib Bukele.
Then, and now also, it is necessary to fully determine responsibilities and to do the right thing with those officials who committed acts of corruption. Unfortunately, this is not possible under Nayib Bukele’s presidency.
Fighting corruption requires judicial independence, institutionality and rule of law. And that no longer exists in El Salvador.
The fact that the prosecutor schedules just at the time of the presidential announcement the raid of properties of a political enemy and that Bukele himself announces those raids is unequivocal evidence, in case it was still missing, of the null independence of the prosecutor Rodolfo Delgado. A prosecutor imposed by Bukele’s legislative bench in its first plenary session, surprisingly and without discussions, in the same way they imposed that same night five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber.
This is one of the problems of one person controlling the entire State: with one hand he can accuse and condemn whomever he wants, and with that same hand guarantee impunity and protection to his associates and accomplices. Justice, in authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, is replaced by the will of the tyrant.
The guilt or innocence of a citizen, whoever he may be, does not depend on what a president says. What does depend on him today is the sentence.
Prosecutor Delgado raided and seized assets, presumably owned by Cristiani, before even trying the affected party. Cristiani was sentenced last June 1 in a presidential speech, not in a due trial, and therefore Salvadorans will no longer be able to know if he really committed acts of corruption, because he will not be judged with the independence and guarantees that this requires. Bukele has turned him into a political persecuted.
Just as today his word is enough to judge and condemn opponents, it has been enough to protect his officials and not to account for the destination of billions of dollars. Dozens of concrete acts of corruption in this government have been documented and published by several media. The list of officials involved is very long and none of them have even been investigated by this prosecutor. From Bukele’s chief of staff to his chief jailer, to his head of the bench, his minister of health, his president of the Assembly, his ex-minister of agriculture, and the list goes on and on.
On the contrary, his deputies have approved laws to guarantee impunity for officials involved in purchases during the pandemic, through a legislative package known as the Alabí Law in allusion to the Minister of Health, Francisco Alabí – one of the most accused of corruption – and has declared in reserve practically all public expenditures.
The shielding also includes taking money from the pension funds and declaring in reserve all information related to the payment of this debt. Of the pensions of all workers.
They have put the president of ANDA to stumblingly invent desalination plants to cover up the corruption of the director of prisons, Osiris Luna, the same one who sold the food packages bought by the government to attend to the pandemic.
If we suspected, and in many cases proved, corruption in previous governments, the major thefts pale compared to what this government has hidden in its first four years. There are approximately four billion dollars whose destinations are unknown, not including the origins or destination of the funds to buy bitcoins and the same bitcoins that Bukele, according to a tweet of his, bought from his phone. In addition, with the reforms to the laws on state purchases made by the ruling party’s bench in January of this year, Bukele can allocate more than 1.5 billion dollars in contracts and purchases without having to go through control processes.
None of the many corrupt people Bukele has surrounded himself with and who applaud his regime will fall into this “war against corruption”, because Bukele is their protector and therefore their accomplice. That is why he needed to impose his prosecutor and control the judges; that is why his prosecutor dismantled the unit that investigated corruption (and that had found irregularities in 70 percent of the purchases of medical supplies during the pandemic). That is why he expelled the CICIES as soon as it took its first timid steps, which were enough to find irregularities in his government.
What Bukele has called a war against corruption is an electoral discourse and a tool to persecute opponents. A propaganda planned by his Venezuelan advisors, those opportunists who left Caracas fleeing a dictatorship to move to El Salvador to help in the construction of another one that does welcome them. They are the architects of the Manichean discourse: if a war against corruption is declared, anyone who questions it becomes an enemy or a defender of the corrupt. It is an old and immoral trick, but effective.
“We are only accountable to Salvadorans – Bukele said in the Assembly – that is why we have been able to make the decisions that had to be made, we are not accountable to the international community”. Once again, he lied. Bukele has not been accountable to Salvadorans.
Source: El Faro, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US