The two established parties still dominated the single-chamber Assembly. He eventually forced its closure, confirmed by OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro in early June 2021: a presidential campaign promise he no longer saw the need to keep.Ī populist’s disdain for checks and balancesĪfter winning the presidency in 2019, Bukele only commanded a minority of legislative votes. It seemed designed to foster corruption and prevent those involved being prosecuted.īukele continued to pressure the CICIES to investigate his political opponents while increasingly and publicly criticising it. The law was applied retroactively since the start of the pandemic. Just four days later, the ruling party passed a new law allowing all national health institutions to do direct procurement, bypassing normal procedures. The Attorney General was replaced with a former government advisor. On 1 May, the first day of the new Legislative Assembly, the ruling party voted to dismiss the Attorney General, alongside the five Constitutional Court judges. From November 2020, these led to major investigations by the Attorney General’s Office.Īfter winning a legislative supermajority, President Bukele felt secure in taking the next step: he got rid of all those annoying checks and balances that might limit corruption and provide accountability. In less than two years, the CICIES submitted 12 notices to the Attorney General’s Office to investigate the use of funds earmarked for dealing with the pandemic. Civil society and independent media repeatedly denounced the president for violating his anti-corruption promises. Since the beginning, however, Bukele’s administration was involved in corruption scandals, including over suspected irregular purchases made with emergency funds during the COVID-19 pandemic. The International Commission against Impunity in El Salvador ( CICIES) was created in September 2019, three months after Bukele took office, through an agreement between the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Salvadoran government. While all candidates talked of tackling corruption, Bukele’s appeal resonated the most: he was the only one who openly supported the establishment of an internationally backed anti-corruption body, similar to the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala. Three former presidents – two from ARENA and one from the FMLN – had been accused of massive embezzlement of public funds. In the 2019 presidential election, Bukele campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, distancing himself from both major parties, which were widely viewed as aloof, unresponsive and, above all, deeply corrupt. While anti-corruption promises have helped candidates win elections, they have rarely led to any significant action, and corruption has continued to spread unchecked. Between then, these two had dominated Salvadoran politics since the 1992 peace agreement put an end to a 12-year civil war.Ĭorruption has been the nail in the coffin of several recent Central American governments. He proposed to bring change that the two major mainstream parties – the FMLN and right-wing ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) – could not deliver. On the campaign trail in 2019 Bukele offered a promise that resonated with people fed up with systemic corruption and persistent inequality: ‘Money stretches out when no one steals’. In 2018 he joined the centre-right Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA), an ideological leap that revealed his political pragmatism. Bukele was the former mayor of the capital, San Salvador, and a former member of the leftist party, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), from which he was expelled after an alleged incident of sexist violence against an employee, which he denies happened. In 2019, the then-37-year-old former businessman had exploited his image as a newcomer to win, although he did have a political history, and far from an unblemished one. Further, according to LAPOP’s Americas Barometer survey, between 20 the percentage of Salvadorans who would justify an executive coup had doubled.Įnter Nayib Bukele, catapulted to the presidency two years earlier with 53 per cent of the vote, who went into the election with high public support and used it to win a supermajority, then set about dismantling checks on his power. Sixty-six per cent also agreed with the president controlling the media, ‘if need arises’ – the highest percentage in the region. Asked by the Latinobarómetro survey, 63 per cent of Salvadorans said they would be okay with a non-democratic government if it solved the country’s problems – the second-highest proportion in Latin America. In the run-up to the February 2021 legislative election, respect for democracy appeared to be on the wane in El Salvador.
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