El Salvador Perspectives

Over the last month, Nayib Bukele has been attributing public security in El Salvador to either mass incarceration or a miracle from God for those who pray. Presidential Visit to Costa Rica Bukele traveled to Alajuela, Costa Rica, on January 14 to join President Rodrigo Chaves for the groundbreaking for a new prison.  The month before, in December 2025, Chaves had visited the CECOT prison in El Salvador to see Bukele's most famous incarceration site. Bukele laid the first stone in the groundbreaking ceremony for Costa Rica's new "Centro de Alta Contención del Crimen Organizado" (CACCO), a maximum-security prison. Bukele has said that El Salvador sent the CECOT  architectural plans to Chaves so the new prison could use them as a model. In remarks at the groundbreaking for CACCO, Bukele told those assembled that the only way to resolve a nation's crime problem was through the use of force.   The trip came three weeks before presidential elections in Costa Rica....

Last week El Salvador and the US signed a new trade agreement .   El Salvador agreed to a number of measures designed to make it easier for US producers to get their goods into the Central American country in return for removing the 10% tariff Trump imposed in the spring of last year. One provision involved opening up access to minerals in El Salvador to the US according to  Reuters : The United States and El Salvador signed an agreement on Thursday aimed at encouraging investment in the exploration and export of critical minerals, which U.S. President Donald Trump has described as essential to economic and national security. The deal signed in Washington would allow U.S. companies to operate across the critical-minerals supply chain in El Salvador.... Bukele has highlighted the presence in El Salvador of minerals such as rhenium and silicon, recently added to an expanded U.S. list of critical minerals that guides Washington's priorities for clean energy, defense and manu...

The Institute of Public Opinion at the UCA has released its annual public opinion poll regarding Salvadorans' views of the current reality in their country.  In short, they continue to be optimistic, and give the credit to Nayib Bukele. 61% believe the country is better than it was the year before. 41.8% believe their families' economic situation will improve in 2026, while only 13% believe it will deteriorate. 70.3% said "hope" when asked whether they have hope or fear for the future of the country. 31% say their families' economic situation has improved while only 13.5% say it worsened. 62.7%  believe that public security is the best thing which is occurring in El Salvador right now. 81.7% believe that crime was reduced in the past year. The economy is the one area where Salvadorans find reasons for concern. 44.9%  say that the economy is the major problem facing the country. 63.8%  believe the cost of living has gone up. 20.4% would want to leave the country i...

Data from the US and Salvadoran governments show the impact which the mass deportation regime and anti-migrant rhetoric of Donald Trump is having on Salvadorans living in the US.   Many more people are being arrested in the interior of the US so they can be deported to El Salvador, while there was a dramatic drop in the number of Salvadorans caught crossing the southern US border.  Official statistics from ICE show that immigration arrests of Salvadorans in the US increased sharply in 2025 after Donald Trump took office.  Data produced to the Deportation Data Project from Freedom of Information Act requests record 10,698 arrests of Salvadorans from January 1 through October 15, 2025, in comparison to 4,967 arrests the year before.  This represented a more than 100% increase in 10 1/2 months compared to the full year 2024 arrest figures. Deportation flights to El Salvador have likewise surged.  According to the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First, 175...

There is possible movement towards resolution of the case of the 1981 El Mozote Massacre. A judge has ordered the case into its final phase against the military commanders who led during some of the bloodiest years of El Salvador's civil war. The El Mozote massacre took place on December 10-11, 1981. All but one of the civilians taking refuge in the small village of El Mozote and in surrounding settlements, close to 1000 children, women, and men, were brutally killed by the Salvadoran army. Most of the dead were children, women and the elderly. Of the documented victims, 553, or 57%, were under 18 years of age and 477 were 12 and under. It is a tragedy the world must never forget. The case to hold military leaders responsible for the massacre was reopened in 2016 after the country's Supreme Judicial Court set aside a 1993 amnesty law.  From 2019-2021 a court in the rural town of San Francisco Gotera received extensive exhibits, evidence and testimony including from soldier...

The military incursion by the United State on January 3, to arrest Venezuela's dictator-president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, sent ripples throughout Latin America. From El Salvador, president Nayib Bukele backed the capture by US troops.   Venezuela and Venezuelans have been a thread running throughout Bukele's political career.  His start in politics was partly fueled with oil dollars from the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Today, as he celebrates Maduro's capture, Bukele runs El Salvador surrounded by political advisers tied to Venezuelan opposition figures and opens his prisons to Venezuelans deported by Donald Trump.      When Nayib Bukele commenced his political career, he was a young, promising politician in the FMLN.  The left-wing FMLN, the former armed guerilla movement turned political party, was a loyal part of the Latin American left led by Cuba and Venezuela.     Sending subsidized petroleum and money earned from its oil re...

Sunday, November 16, marked the 36th anniversary of the Jesuit massacre at the University of Central America José Simeón Cañas  in El Salvador (the "UCA").   On that date in 1989 during El Salvador's bloody civil war, soldiers from an elite Salvadoran army battalion assassinated six Jesuit priests and a female co-worker and her daughter on the campus of the UCA.  It was a murderous attack on voices which had consistently denounced human rights abuses and and sought peace and justice for the oppressed millions of El Salvador.  This year's anniversary comes in the midst of the 4th year of the State of Exception in El Salvador in which tens of thousands have been imprisoned for years in hellish prisons without trial and without guarantees of due process.  Allegations of torture, which echo back to the bloody decades of the 70s and 80s, are being made again by victims and their families. The military roams anew the streets of the country.   Although ...