El Salvador Perspectives

The adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador has not created a financial bonanza for El Salvador.  Instead, El Salvador's Bitcoin trading, led by its Bitcoin-cyber bro president, has accumulated $18 million USD  in unrealized losses, and the country's credit rating on world financial markets has fallen through the floor.  The International Monetary Fund urges Bukele to reverse course, and the likelihood of needed loan funding from the IMF seems ever more remote. All of this has produced an abundance of negative commentary in the world press.   Today, only the Bitcoin maximalists seem to be unreserved fans of Bukele's Bitcoin gambit.   Here is a collection of recent articles: Nayib Bukele trades bitcoin naked. El Salvador is paying the price  (Wash. Post, Jan. 26) El Salvador was the first country to adopt Bitcoin. It might be the first to go broke, too  (Miami Herald, Jan. 26)  Bitcoin Trades Add to El Salvador’s Sovereign Risk...

Historically, local political campaigns in El Salvador have had a very predictable course. Whenever there are municipal elections, suddenly local projects in communities get developed with municipal funds.  A street may be repaired, a park refurbished, or trash receptacles installed, usually with a sign posted reminding voters who is currently the mayor of the town.  Now, much more of that spending in El Salvador will be concentrated in the national government controlled by the Bukele regime.  A new law slashes revenue sharing with towns and cities and replaces those funds with delivery of public works projects. In past years, 10% of the revenue collected by the national government would be distributed to local municipalities for their use through a fund known as FODES. In November the Legislative Assembly reduced FODES revenue sharing  by 85% to just 1.5% of revenue, and instead local municipalities will receive public works projects, under control of a Directorate ...

Ninety years ago yesterday on January 22, 1932, mass executions of indigenous campesinos in El Salvador began after a failed uprising.  The military government in El Salvador headed by General Maximillian Hernandez massacred twenty thousand or more in an event which is known in Salvadoran history simply as “ La Matanza ” – The Massacre. Yesterday was also the day that the Roman Catholic church chose to celebrate the beatification of four of its martyrs, a formal step on the process of being declared saints of the Catholic church.  The four included Jesuit priest RutilioGrande, and two of his lay parishioners – 17 year old Nelson Lemus and the campesino Manuel Solorzano. These three were gunned down by the Salvadoran military as Grande drove towards El Paisnal to preside over a mass.   The fourth martyr beatified yesterday was Friar Cosme Spessotto , a parish priest from Italy, murdered in San Juan Nonualco, in similar fashion in 1980.  I don’t know if the chur...

On January 22, Father Cosme Spessotto, will be beatified by the Roman Catholic church in San Salvador along with the martyred Rutilio Grande.  Father Cosme, a Franciscan missionary priest from Italy. was killed on June 14, 1980 while preparing to say mass in the church where he served in the town of San Juan Nonualco.   I must confess that before the news that Spessotto would be beatified along with Grande this weekend, I knew nothing about this religious man who was one of the victims of El Salvador's conflict years.   His murder at the altar of his church came less than three months after the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero, at a time when the death squads of El Salvador were running rampant.     From Spessotto's  Wikipedia biography : Spessotto did not speak any Spanish when he arrived in El Salvador and so had to learn the language in order to speak and connect with the locals. After three years, he was assigned to serve as the p...

On Saturday, January 22, martyred Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande will be beatified in a ceremony in San Salvador.  Grande was a Jesuit priest working with poor campesinos in the countryside near El Paisnal, El Salvador. On March 12, 1977, while driving on the road between El Paisnal and Aguilares, assassins from Salvadoran security forces killed Father Grande, as well as two of his campesino parishioners, Manuel Solorzano, 72, and Nelson Rutilio Lemus, 16. Rutilio Grande was a friend of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and this killing is said to have been one of the key events leading Romero to align his ministry with the cause of the poor and oppressed in El Salvador. On Saturday, Rutilio Grande will follow Oscar Romero towards recognition as a Roman Catholic saint in the beatification ceremony in San Salvador.   Along with Grande, Solorzano and Lemus will be beatified, as well as Cosma Spessotto, an Italian priest murdered in El Salvador in 1980 while saying mass.  (More ab...

Sunday January 16 marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of Peace Accords which ended El Salvador's 12 year bloody civil war.  In the country there will again be no government sponsored celebration of the anniversary following the wishes of president Nayib Bukele who at the end of 2020 labelled the Accords a "farce."   This week the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly  voted  to eliminate the 1992 law which established January 16 as a day of celebration of peace and the Accords and voted to commemorate instead the victims of the armed conflict. On the 25th anniversary of the Peace Accords in 2017, a  Monument to Peace and Reconciliation  was erected on the western side of the capitol city.  The monument includes figures of a government and guerrilla soldier walking arm in arm with doves of peace overhead overseen by a figure of an earth mother goddess.  Today the Bukele government is in the process of  dismantling  it. Opponents to N...

Some entity within El Salvador, using software provided solely to national governments, infected and spied on the cellphones of journalists and civil society activists within El Salvador, while those journalists and activists were reporting on and criticizing the actions of the Bukele regime in El Salvador.  The greatest number of phones infected belonged to the prominent and award-winning investigative news site El Faro, which has broken a number of stories about corruption in the Bukele regime and its negotiations with leaders of the country's criminal gangs.  At this point, all indications point to the Bukele regime as the sponsor of the espionage.        On Wednesday, the results of expert digital forensic analysis of the phones of journalists was released.  Suspicious that their phones had been compromised , El Faro went to Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity lab at the University of Toronto, for a digital forensics analysis on all the iPhones in El...

What does justice  look like?   The 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador along with a female co-worker and her teenage daughter still raises questions in El Salvador about how justice for such a horrific crime is achieved. From the time of that crime until today, the UCA has insisted that justice for this massacre by troops of the Salvadoran military must be achieved within the Salvadoran judicial system following legal norms of due process and judicial independence.  And in the 32 years since, that has yet to be achieved. It was not achieved in the 1991 proceeding which only convicted two soldiers.  It was not achieved when the Legislative Assembly passed a broad Amnesty Law in 1993 which remained in effect until 2016.  It was not achieved when El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court blocked extradition of defendants to a court in Spain which was willing to render justice in the case.  It was not a...