El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's police and security forces were burying eight of their own this week. The director of the National Civilian Police, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, and seven other members of the police and armed forces were killed last Sunday night when the helicopter they were flying in crashed in eastern El Salvador. They died along with a fugitive banker wanted in a corruption case who was being returned to face justice in El Salvador. From the Associated Press report  of the event: El Salvador’s military says the national police director, other high-ranking police officials and a fugitive banker were among nine people killed in a military helicopter crash in a rural part of the country. The cause of the crash on Sunday night is under investigation. It occurred after the banker, Manuel Coto, was captured in Honduras over the weekend and handed over to Salvadoran authorities at the border. Coto, the former manager of the COSAVI savings and loan cooperative, had been the subject of an Int

The government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador does not like public scrutiny.  Since Bukele took office in 2019, access to government and public information has been sharply curtailed , and the dictates of the country's open records law largely ignored.  In particular, information about public spending is frequently hidden from public view.   Bukele also likes to tout the country as a technological innovator. It is clear, however, that the government has not always implemented sufficient cyber-security safeguards to prevent hackers from accessing data on government servers, and as a result the data that the government tries to hide is getting released anyways. Most recently, the "hacktivist" group calling itself " CiberInteligenciaSV " released payroll data leaked from the Salvadoran social security institute for 970,000 Salvadorans including government officials and virtually everyone else who has a job in the formal economy.  The data includes names, salaries,

Alejandro Muyshondt Days after publicly denouncing a Nuevas Ideas legislator for corruption, Nayib Bukele's national security advisor, Alejandro Muyshondt, was arrested in August 2023 and accused of being a spy for former president in exile Mauricio Funes. Muyshondt disappeared into the incarceration system of the State of Exception, and six months later he was dead. His case is one that leaves more questions than answers, and the government of Bukele is remaining silent on the matter. Alejandro Muyshondt served as a national security advisor to Bukele starting at the beginning of Bukele's presidency in June 2019. Muyshondt had previously served as an advisor to Bukele from 2017 to 2019 while Bukele was mayor of San Salvador, and they were reportedly childhood friends. According to Muyshondt's  curriculum vitae on the Transparency Portal of the Salvadoran government, he graduated from the University of Angers in France with a degree in criminology in 2003, and in 2008 foun

  Today the InterAmerican Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) issued a 354 page report titled The State of Exception and Human Rights in El Salvador . The press release which accompanied the report highlights the major recommendations of the report: In the report, the IACHR underscores that inter-American standards stipulate that a state of emergency is an exceptional measure that must be necessary, appropriate, and proportionate to the emergency context. It also warns that certain judicial guarantees cannot be suspended under any circumstances and stresses that the duration of the state of emergency should be strictly limited to the period of the emergency. The IACHR calls on the Salvadoran State to make crosscutting efforts to prevent violence, mitigate the risks and damages to vulnerable groups, and restore the social fabric. It has also noted the statistics provided by the State on improvements to citizen security. These appear to demonstrate that the country has moved beyond the s