Jose Cabezas via Creative Commons
A protester holds a sign that reads "Bukele Oppressor."
El Salvador’s congress has approved a thirty-day state of emergency that suspends key constitutional rights. President Nayib Bukele requested the declaration after the gang-related killings of more than sixty people in one day.
Human rights advocates fear the measure will lead to abuses and contribute to a growing authoritarianism in the Central American country.
“This State of Emergency is very worrying,” Leonor Arteaga, the executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., tells The Progressive. “[This is] very arbitrary, highly militarized, and very dangerous.”
“Even though President Bukele denies it, he is actually following the same script as other authoritarian presidents.”
Beginning on March 27, the military and police began setting up checkpoints and performing sweeps in cities and across rural communities. Security forces are utilizing a violent “heavy hand”—mano dura in Spanish—against those accused of being gang members. Meanwhile, President Bukele has taken to social media to justify these actions, labeling gang members as terrorists and suggesting that human rights defenders are on the side of the killers.
Nearly 6,000 people were arrested under the state of emergency within the first week.
The declaration has also brought changes to the country’s judicial code, allowing children as young as twelve to be tried as adults and increasing prison terms for gang members accused of being terrorists.
“There is a criminalization of being young [in El Salvador] and for living in areas of social exclusion or poverty,” Sonia Rubio, a lawyer and human rights defender with the Due Process of Law Foundation in El Salvador, tells The Progressive.
The recent violence comes two years after secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, commonly known as MS-13.
The secret meetings were exposed in 2020 by the independent Salvadoran media outlet El Faro. The journal’s reporting showed that the meetings had occurred ahead of the 2021 election to decrease the number of homicides in exchange for increased privileges for gang members in prison. Bukele’s party ended up winning a majority in the 2021 elections for legislative assembly seats.
The Bukele administration has denied these accusations, and attempted to discredit El Faro since the stories were published. The publication’s staff were targets of an elaborate surveillance operation allegedly conducted by the Salvadoran government using software purchased from an Israeli company.
Since taking office in 2019, the forty-year-old president has moved to consolidate power around himself and his party. In March 2020, he used the country’s armed forces to intimidate congress into approving a loan to combat crime. Shortly after, the country’s supreme court ruled he could run for a second term. The court had been stacked by Bukele after he dismissed five sitting judges.
A recent survey by the Jesuit-run Central American University found that nearly 50 percent of El Salvador’s population would approve of an authoritarian government in some circumstances. In the same survey, researchers found that more than 75 percent believe leaders should govern with a heavy hand; 65 percent believe that “threats” to society ought to be eliminated.
“Even though President Bukele denies it, he is actually following the same script as other authoritarian presidents,” Arteaga says. “He has an intolerance of international scrutiny, and he has a very dangerous narrative that human rights do not matter and that human rights are obstacles to the security of the population.”
While neighboring Honduras appears to be entering a hopeful period for democratic renewal after twelve years of rule by the far-right National Party, there is a worrying rise of authoritarian tendencies and an eroding of democratic institutions across the rest of Central America.
The Guatemalan administration of Alejandro Giammattei has taken increasingly troublesome actions, with independent judges and anti-corruption prosecutors being forced to flee the country while other anti-corruption prosecutors have faced criminal prosecution. Journalists have also faced harassment after identifying instances of corruption.
In 2021, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court permitted a law that allows the Ministry of the Interior to shut down non-governmental organizations. Human rights defenders worry that the ministry could close organizations critical to the state and tamp down on civil society spaces that are vital to the preservation of free speech and expression in Guatemala.
Several human rights organizations have raised concerns with the law.
“We have been pointing out for many years that, in Guatemala, authoritarianism is being established,” Claudia Samayoa, the director of the Guatemalan human rights organization UDEFEGUA, tells The Progressive. “This vision is of having total control of the state.”
A similar dynamic is playing out in Nicaragua, which has seen the slow concentration of power around former revolutionary leader President Daniel Ortega, one of the members of the Sandinista directorate which ran the country following the 1979 overthrow of the dictator Anastasio Somoza. In 1990, Orgtega lost in a democratic election that was manipulated by the United States. The Sandinista party regained the presidency in elections held in 2006.
In January 2022, Ortega was inaugurated to his third consecutive term as president of the country following two earlier terms from 1985-1990. His re-election in 2021 was marked by the widespread persecution of dissent and the arrest of opposition candidates who now face long prison terms for opposing the administration.
The Ortega administration has taken steps to arbitrarily silence all of the budding dictatorship’s critics. Protests that erupted in April 2018 demanding the resignation of Ortega and his wife Rosario Murrillo, who became vice president in 2017, were met by repression from state forces and vigilantes.
Nicaragua also approved a law that permits the government to shut down non-governmental organizations. In mid-March, the Ortega administration ordered the closing of more than thirty NGOs, including the renowned Centro Humboldt. The organization had worked with Indigenous environmental activists in defending land rights and denouncing the planned construction of Ortega’s ill-fated canal.
The Ortega administration has systematically targeted critical voices, including international representatives, such as a member of the Red Cross and the Vatican ambassador, who had spoken out against human rights violations or given support to opposition members.
Meanwhile, these moves come at the same time as a series of high-profile resignations from the Ortega administration. Nicaragua’s representative to the Organization of the American States recently resigned in a public video in which he decried Ortega’s turn toward authoritarianism. Paul Reichler, who has provided legal counsel to Ortega for decades, also resigned.
“It is inconceivable to me that Daniel Ortega, whom I proudly served, would have destroyed the democracy that he was instrumental in building,” Reichler wrote in his letter of resignation, “and established a new dictatorship, not unlike the one he was instrumental in defeating.”