El Salvador Perspectives

On January 29, 2025, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly passed a resolution extending for the 35th time the State of Exception under which the country's residents have lived since March 27, 2022.  There was no debate.   There was no evidence presented of the emergency circumstances required by the Salvadoran constitution to justify the suspension of rights to due process in the criminal justice system and warrantless interception of communications.   Where would such evidence come from today in the country that Nayib Bukele proclaims the safest in the western hemisphere?    In the almost three years of the State of Exception, the government says it has arrested more than 85,000 persons and put them in the country's prison system, imprisoning 1.8% of the country's population. As of the fall 2024,  12,900 of the country's prison population are women. The online periodical Focos notes that the high level of incarceration does not bother Bukele: Fo...

Source: FlightAware.com After Nayib Bukele offered to receive not just citizens of El Salvador, but persons from other nations expelled from the US by the Donald Trump deportation machine, Salvadorans have wondered what this offer, coupled with Trump's promise of "massive" removals, portends for their country.    A government spokesperson told reporters yesterday that so far El Salvador has yet to see a large increase in deportation flights, and that levels of returnees since Trump took office have been typical of recent time periods. Today another deportation flight arrived at El Salvador's international airport shortly after 10 in the morning.   The flight had left a US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) air removal  staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana  a few hours earlier. Friday's arriving flight from Louisiana, like those from a similar facility in Harlingen, Texas, was not an anomaly.  There were eight deportation flights to ...

Donald Trump's advisor Stephen Miller said a short time ago that president Nayib Bukele was offering the US "tremendous levels of cooperation" on immigration, and now we know what he meant.  During the visit of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador this week, Bukele offered to sign an agreement not only to take back Salvadorans from the US, but also to accept deportees from other nations, and even to imprison US citizen criminals for a fee. From the State Department press statement : Multiple agreements were struck to fight the waves of illegal mass migration currently destabilizing the entire region. President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully. He also promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country. And in an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, Pres...

Measures the Legislative Assembly passed for Nayib Bukele On January 29, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly gave the second vote to adopt  a constitutional amendment to allow the Constitution to be amended in the future by a single supermajority vote by the legislature.  Up until now, amendments had to be approved by two successive legislatures with a national election in between. That requirement gave the public the chance to vote out of office legislators who supported an amendment before they had a chance to give it final approval in the next term.  Since Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party today possesses such a supermajority in the congress, he can now amend the Constitution anytime he wants by submitting it to a single vote in his rubber stamp legislature. For example, those pesky provisions that limit how long a president can serve in office, can be eliminated with a quick vote and no debate. The constitutional amendment passed with no prior announcement that it would be o...

Recent polling by Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador released this week offers insights into two areas -- how Salvadorans view religious faith and how they view Nayib Bukele's recent decision to promote gold mining in El Salvador. Salvadorans continue to be religious by nature and believers in the Christian god: 17.39% of those polled considered themselves "very religious" 78.12% consider themselves believers 2.86% agnostic 1.63% atheist However the make-up of church affiliation continues to evolve, as the Roman Catholic church continues to lose adherents: 47.02% declared belonging to protestant/evangelical churches 36.82% to the Catholic church 12.98% do not belong to any denomination 1.55% are in a non-Christian religion.  Review the full poll results to see a wide variety of polling questions about how religious faith influences beliefs about knowledge, science and morality.  The poll did not, however, test Salvadorans' acceptance of the regular asserti...

Recent year-end polling by the Public Opinion Institute at the University of Central America reveals that the economy is now viewed by the overwhelming majority of Salvadorans as the principal problem confronting their country.  The poll was conducted from December 5-17, 2024 involving more than 1200 persons from every department in the country. According to the poll results released by IUDOP,  76% of Salvadorans now believe the economy is the biggest problem the government must tackle, up from 70% a year ago, and 63% at the end of 2022.   As is true in many places, Salvadorans are focused on inflation, with 54% believing prices have gone up "mucho." How much do you perceive that the cost of living  has increased in El Salvador? In contrast to years before 2020, when crime and insecurity was seen by persons polled as the leading crisis or a major problem in the country, today less than 2% of Salvadorans believe that crime is the principal challenge facing the c...

A recent surge in the price of Bitcoin has increased the value of El Salvador's Bitcoin reserves and led president Nayib Bukele to say "I told you so."  The value of the country's  declared Bitcoin reserves is around $575 million.   At the same time, to obtain a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Bukele is being required to dismantle key parts of his Bitcoin law and cut back on government spending. The price of Bitcoin increased 50% after the election of Donald Trump to all-time highs above $100,000 US.  Since Bitcoin hit $100,00 on December 4, Nayib Bukele has been regularly patting himself on the back on social media:   Despite the surge in the value of Bitcoin as an investment asset held by El Salvador in its reserves. the digital asset never caught on as the form for ordinary daily cash transactions in El Salvador.  One of the major skeptics of the designation of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador, and Bukele's large investm...