Salvadoran democracy has been mortally wounded since President Nayib Bukele announced on Thursday night that he will stand again in the 2024 elections, which will allow him to remain in power until 2029. Although the Constitution clearly prohibits re-election, Bukele, 41, only needed to “discuss the issue with his wife” to make a decision that blows up the country’s current legal structure, announced on the national network during the Independence Day celebrations.
The news was celebrated by the guests at the presidential house as if it were a goal in the last minute of a football game: with their ministers standing up waving their arms, raising their thumbs and smiling at the cameras with shouts of “re-election”. , re-election”.
Accompanied by his wife and in front of a painting of Monsignor Arnulfo Romero, the holy martyr assassinated by the military in 1980, the millennial president’s announcement that he made bitcoin the official currency was the end point of a long list of maneuvers aimed at screwing him to power. . On the one hand, to tear down the legal framework and, on the other, to increase his popularity among Salvadorans, which today exceeds 80%, the highest in the continent according to different surveys.
Initially it was not easy for him: the Salvadoran Constitution approved in 1983 and modified in 1992 after the civil war is designed to prevent dictatorships and the rise of caciques. For this reason, it prohibits immediate re-election in three different articles. Article 154 states that “the presidential period will be five years without the person exercising the Presidency being able to continue in office for one more day.” Article 248 prohibits modifications to the “alternation in the exercise of the presidency of the Republic” and 88 clarifies that “the principle of alternation is essential for the maintenance of the form of government (…) and the violation of this rule requires to the insurrection”.
None of this has stopped Bukele who, since coming to power in 2019, has been blowing up all the counterweights that kept him from his goal. Grown after the overwhelming victory of February 2021 that gave him total control of the Assembly, in May of that same year he replaced the Attorney General, although his term of government was still in force, and forced the judges of the constitutional chamber of the Court Supreme to accept their own resignation, which they signed coerced by policemen sent to the door of their homes. When he filled the Justice Department with like-minded puppets, they endorsed his re-election in September with the argument that to prevent it would be to take away the rights of the population. “Tying the will of the people to a text that responded to the needs, contexts or circumstances of 20, 30 or 40 years ago is no longer an interpretation of rights, but an excessive restriction disguised as legality,” said the new Court.
To achieve popular support, Nayib Bukele, who has defined himself as “the most cool of the world”, announced a war without quarter against the violent gangs, after the pact that until then maintained his Government with the maras was broken. In March he declared a state of exception that allows him to govern from then on with special powers for as long as he considers, since the deputies of his party approve over and over again without any debate each extension that he requests.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
In his announcement on Thursday, Bukele insisted on the idea that only with him has true freedom come to the country by ending the gangs thanks to a strong-arm strategy that has sent more than 80,000 people to jail in a few months. many of them for the mere fact of having tattoos or looking badly at a police officer on the street. The consequence is that today El Salvador, which has almost 6.5 million inhabitants, is the country in the world with the highest number of prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. “We charted our own destiny and did not obey international dictates,” the president said in Thursday’s speech. “El Salvador is now making its own decisions. That has been made clear to everyone.”
“Why can’t we copy countries where things are going well?” he said, after reading the 39 developed countries that have re-election in their constitution. “Re-elections are prohibited in third world countries. What a coincidence,” said Bukele, “people should have the right to reject or approve the course it follows. Why rule out the road if it’s working?” he emphasized. A court of deputies, ministers and authorities applauded each sentence.
The prohibition of re-election is part of the Constitution of most Latin American countries, and is especially important in a region that has suffered decades of military dictatorships. In El Salvador, it is a mandate that appeared for the first time in 1841 and was included in the current one of 1983. In front of the tsunami Bukele there is hardly anyone left. The press is beaten day in and day out; many judges, prosecutors and human rights organizations are in exile and the political opposition has neither names nor candidates to confront them. The international community, mainly the United States, the only country capable of making the president reconsider, was severely beaten during his announcement as part of a supposed plot to annihilate Salvadoran sovereignty. Last year, the United States condemned Bukele’s maneuvering and the acting US ambassador compared him to Hugo Chávez.
Follow all the international information in Facebook Y Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
#Bukele #consummates #assault #power #Salvador