EL SALVADOR: Bukele’s security plan in the spotlight
Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report, produced since 1967. The full report can be accessed here: Latin American Weekly Report - 20 April 2023
“The achievements of El Salvador are unprecedented in the modern history of humanity,” President Nayib Bukele tweeted on 13 April.?Three days later, he took to Twitter again to challenge “the international community” to come up with “a single security plan, anywhere in the world, with better results”.?This after once again reporting zero homicides in El Salvador for the day.
Only 1% of respondents consider violence and crime to be the main problem in El Salvador, according to the findings of a CID Gallup poll published at the end of last month, which also showed President Bukele enjoyed an approval rating of some 90%. These two figures are remarkable in a country where violent crime was rampant, homicides commonplace, and political polarisation so entrenched between the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN), to which Bukele once belonged, and the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena). Transcending the political divide, Bukele has swept all of that aside, while using a sweeping congressional majority to dispense with the checks and balances that could constrain him, dismissing independent judges, stacking the courts, and co-opting state institutions.
This dominance has allowed Bukele to implement a state of emergency, which has been extended for 30 days on 13 occasions since 27 March 2022, to quell gang violence. Under the draconian strictures imposed since then, at least 65,000 people have been detained, with some estimates running to over 100,000, some 2% of the adult population of El Salvador. Those arrested have no right to legal defence or right to be informed of the reasons behind their detention, while the secrecy and inviolability of all manner of correspondence has been suspended. The arrests are often based on “crude profiling of physical appearance or social background”, according to a press briefing by the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Marta Hurtado, on 28 March, on the anniversary of the introduction of the state of emergency.
Bukele frequently takes to Twitter to report zero daily murders. He also routinely snipes at cavilling critics that question the means to this end. On 6 April the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) urged the government “to respect human rights when adopting measures to prevent, control, and respond to crime, and when investigating, prosecuting, and sanctioning criminal activities”. It acknowledged “an unprecedented reduction in crime in recent months” but warned that “the suspension of rights and guarantees [enshrined in the constitution] is an inappropriate mechanism for containing common crime, especially when applied indefinitely”, and that even under emergency circumstances “governments do not have absolute power to establish restrictive measures”.
An annual report by the Observatorio Universitario de Derechos Humanos (OUDH) of the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) released this week denounced “serious setbacks in human rights” in El Salvador. In an interview on Argentina’s Cadena 3 radio station on 13 April, Noah Bullock, the director of Cristosal, the human rights NGO conceived in 2000 by El Salvador’s Anglican Episcopal Church, expressed concern about “the deterioration of democracy” under Bukele, arguing that the state of emergency is one of “the preferred methods of authoritarian governments to concentrate power in their hands, normalise abuses, and perpetuate themselves in power”.
Bukele’s sky-high approval ratings suggest that, for the moment, most of the public is unperturbed about this, but that will eventually change, by which time it could be very difficult to hold him to account. In a sign of the Bukele administration’s stranglehold on all state institutions, for instance, just this week the administrative disputes chamber of the supreme court (CSJ) dismissed a suit brought against the government accountability office, Corte de Cuentas, for refusing to investigate the possible use of state funds to purchase the Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli cyberarms firm NSO Group.??
Cristosal brought the case in July 2022, accusing the Corte de Cuentas of dereliction of duty for refusing to examine the budgets of the relevant public security and state intelligence agencies. Cristosal accused the CSJ’s administrative disputes chamber of neglecting to apply the constitution and promoting impunity, setting a precedent where there are no consequences for questionable decisions and “deepening in this way the serious situation of abuse of power and opaqueness in the country”. The chamber was guilty, Cristosal argued, of leaving “past and future victims of spying without protection, conspiring against freedom of information, expression, and dissemination of ideas, fundamental rights that the state of El Salvador is committed to protect”.
Cristosal appealed to the Corte de Cuentas to investigate the matter after an investigation was published in January 2022 by Citizen Lab, which focuses on cybersecurity at the University of Toronto, and the US-based digital civil rights NGO Access Now, suggesting that the press and all government critics were under sustained assault in El Salvador. The investigation found conclusive evidence that 35 journalists and civil society activists had been targeted over a 16-month period to December 2021 by the Pegasus spyware. Of these, 22 were staff at El Salvador’s online investigative publication?El Faro, which has published rigorous investigations into corruption in the Bukele administration, and its alleged negotiations with the country’s gangs.
On 1 April?El Faro?uprooted to Costa Rica, registering under the non-profit?Fundación Periódica?in San José. It claimed to have little choice, citing the “dismantling of democracy, the lack of checks and balances on the exercise of power of a small group of people, the attacks against press freedom, and the shuttering of all transparency and accountability mechanisms…while considerable public resources are allotted to disseminating propaganda and disinformation”.
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‘PCT: Extraction’
The Movimiento de Víctimas del Régimen (Movir), which describes itself as a social organisation of relatives of people unjustly arrested in El Salvador, reported the death of a man, Denis Alexander, “arbitrarily arrested”, in custody in the giant prison of Izalco on 15 April. The NGO Cristosal claims at least 132 people have died in similar circumstances since the state of emergency was introduced. A day earlier, on 14 April, the government news service?Noticiero El Salvador?announced the launch of a new video game in which President Bukele chases gang members. The video game, which has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, is known as ‘PCT: Extraction’ in reference to the government’s territorial control plan to crack down on mara gangs.
Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report, produced since 1967. The full report can be accessed here: Latin American Weekly Report - 20 April 2023
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