By Manuel Pérez Rocha L. on June 3, 2024
Bukele begins his 2nd term on June 2. photo: Víctor Peña – El Faro
Last February, Nayib Bukele won the presidential elections in El Salvador by a wide margin; his party, Nuevas Ideas, also won 54 of the 60 seats in the Legislative Assembly, and the vast majority of the mayoralties. His power is now almost absolute. However, the elections were marred by a large number of irregularities – documented by the OAS (https://tinyurl. com/8rz3t6y7) – damaging his international reputation.
On June 1, Bukele began his second five-year term. He is, today, probably the most popular president in Latin America due to the enormous quelling of gang violence in the country. But the fact that he has broken the Salvadoran constitution to allow himself a second term, the large number of human rights violations perpetrated in the context of the state of emergency, lack of transparency, is leading to increasing international questioning. The Canadian government, for example, refrained from congratulating him after the elections and his government is unable to attract the foreign investment it craves.
The number of people detained under Bukele’s state of emergency, since March 2022, hovers around 80,000. Estimates of how many innocent people have been detained range from 30 to 70 percent. This includes dozens of union and civil organization leaders, among them the five environmentalists and water defenders from Santa Marta, in the department of Cabañas. Organizations from many countries have dedicated the last 17 months to an international campaign, under the enthusiastic and expert leadership of John Cavanagh, of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author with Robin Broad of In Defense of Water (Editorial Grano de Sal) to get the charges dropped.
At a press conference of social and civil organizations on May 30, Ivania Cruz, of Unidehc, which is part of the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, said that “there is a deterioration of the rule of law and of the country’s institutionality and the repression of the most vulnerable sectors of the population is increasing through unjust arrests and the elimination of all guarantees for all citizens”.
Roberto Zapata, from the organization Amate, denounced that Bukele is part of the ultraconservative wave -including Argentina, Peru and Ecuador- against human rights and guilty of serious setbacks for the rights of LGBT people, such as the elimination of health services and the direction of sexual diversity. He mentioned that there are 132 registered cases of actions against LGBT people and recalled that Bukele spoke out against “gender ideology”, considering it “contrary to nature (https://tinyurl. com/2p8pb8nj)”. Salomón Alfaro, of the Movement of Dismissed Workers, said that he is one of the 21 thousand workers dismissed from public institutions, without any procedure as dictated by law; “this government wants to control everyone, disappearing institutions and union structures; so far 22 unions have been eliminated”, he informed.
Tutela Legal, an organization of human rights lawyers, continues to be extremely busy helping to defend innocent people and civil society leaders. International organizations have worked with them on an amicus brief for the five water defenders, to be submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
For its part, the Association for Economic and Social Development of Santa Marta (ADES) continues to lead the defense of the five water defenders. ADES and many international organizations have documented the Bukele government’s attacks to overturn the country’s hard-won mining ban in 2017 (see report “State of Disappointment” (https://tinyurl.com/3zdw5acu).
Vidalina Morales, leader of ADES, expressed at the press conference her concern about the possible reopening of mining in El Salvador and the growing interest in the mineral thorium, in addition to gold, of course. He denounces how the criminalization of struggles against extractivist projects has become evident, as a desperate response to the failure of projects such as bitcoin or Surf City (https://tinyurl.com/22vr7rmb). Bukele, he says, “sells the country to the highest bidder and will do with it whatever he wants”. In May, Bukele’s government initiated the trial against the five water defenders of Santa Marta, in which there is no proof that they committed any murder during the time of the civil war, in addition to the existence of the Peace Accords co-sponsored by Mexico (see “Mexico must help defend the peace accords in El Salvador”, La Jornada, 3/13/23). Through international solidarity, representatives from embassies of Canada, France, the United Kingdom and representatives of the European Union attended the first hearing of the trial, warning the Salvadoran government that the world is watching.
We have tried to inform other governments, such as Mexico and the United States, about the general crisis of human rights and democracy in El Salvador. Organizations in El Salvador are concerned about the possibility of an even wider spate of arrests of civil society leaders during Bukele’s second term, and hope that international solidarity and our work with other governments will help curb their outrages. As Alexis Stoumbelis of the International Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (Cispes) said, “thanks to the work of journalists and human rights organizations the world is aware of Bukele’s violations under his exceptional regime”. How long will governments such as those of Mexico and the United States continue to turn a blind eye to five more years in power of the self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world (sic)”?
Manuel Pérez Rocha L. is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies and associate of the Transnational Institute www.tni.org
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English