The last message that Nayib Bukele sent to Bertha María Deleón said: “I will never forgive you for this.” The one who had been his lawyer for four years couldn't help but laugh. She says she seemed like a childish threat to him. It was February 2020, the president had entered the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador with the military, a body that he did not control at the time and did not want to approve a loan for security tasks. Before giving any other blow he began to pray. It was that image that Deleón shared on her Twitter account, with the message that it was a “tantrum” from the president. He wrote to her to delete her post and she refused. He blocked her from social networks and right after her the lawyer began to receive massive and coordinated digital attacks, they followed her with motorcycles, a drone watched her in the garden of her house, they opened her car. The last thing was exile. Deleón has lived in Mexico City for three years, after finding out that they were going to arrest her: “I never realized how much her level of retaliation could escalate.” Far from her country, she says, she does what she always did: continue expressing even what the president does not want to hear.
Nayib Bukele is running this Sunday for a re-election that is prohibited by the Constitution of El Salvador, with polls that give him up to 80% voting intention. The current president, who has put an end to the gangs that terrorized the country for years, has not done any campaign action, but his voice does sound on the radio and television asking for the vote for the deputies of his party, Nuevas Ideas. After sweeping the 2021 legislative elections, Bukele dismissed judges and magistrates to install trusted figures and control the Constitutional Court and the Prosecutor's Office. He now aspires to make any opposition disappear.
In the face of the concentration of power, the voices of resistance. “The most numerous and clear,” says electoral expert Ruth Eleonora López, “are those of women.” They are the ones who suffer the greatest economic burden, those who search for their missing and detained people, who see how the budget to combat gender violence sinks and how the pro-government deputies change their biography on social networks from feminist to mother and wife. “Bukele is a messianic figure, a patriarchal leader, a father president who watches over us and who presents himself as anointed by God,” summarizes human rights activist Celia Medrano, “he is a highly conservative man with a very clear tendency to manipulate the religion towards the message that women have to be at home.” They face the authoritarian voice and punishment, the dominant tone and the baton of command. They, turned into an adversary. “Our role is to combat that narrative.”
Claudia Ortiz runs to the small space that her party, Vamos, has rented inside a sunny house in San Salvador. The deputy has represented a different position from the ruling party for the last three years and she seeks to be elected for another three years on Sunday. The options are few. Until now the Assembly had 84 members and only 20 belonged to other parties, but last year the Government approved an electoral reform that reduces the number of deputies for these elections to 60. The Executive claims that it is to save, but the numbers indicate that the budget only goes from 56 to 55 million dollars. Ruth López explains that it is one more maneuver by the president to monopolize power. Increasingly, being the discordant hand in El Salvador has a price.
On January 24, during a legislative discussion, Ernesto Castro, president of the Assembly and one of Bukele's key men, made clear what it means to have power. “I don't agree with anything you say,” he told Congresswoman Claudia Ortiz, just before turning off her microphone so she couldn't answer. “It was an act of political violence, but it also served to make explicit what this legislature has been, a legislature where power is expressed in the most brutal way: 'We are not going to allow you to work or represent anyone because the only ones “We are the ones who can represent the people and you are an accident,” says the representative.
The gallows of social networks
Bukele is a tweeting president. From the beginning of his government he wanted to demonstrate that he could govern from his mobile phone. From X's account of him he praises and punishes, claims and rewards. Behind the president's distribution are the others. A study that the Nuestro Tiempo party presented to the Electoral Tribunal showed that opposition policies are receiving almost 300 attacks daily on social networks. “Poor asshole, we're going overboard with the Constitution, look for someone to catch you better.” “Sit down lady and shut up.” “Old”. “They are dead”. These are some of the messages that Celia Medrano, human rights defender and candidate for vice president with Nuestro Tiempo, compiled to urge the court to defend elections free of gender violence. She does not want, she tells this newspaper, for politics to be only for “brave women.” “What we see in the future is a subjugated country, where women will be in an increasingly restricted situation and the only women who will be able to exercise politics are those who are aligned with the president's thoughts,” says Medrano.
But it's not just the policies. “There is no woman in El Salvador, a lawyer, a defender of human rights, who studies corruption issues… who has not been a victim of very strong attacks from the Government and its networks, which are coordinated from the highest hierarchy,” he points out. Ruth López, who is head of anti-corruption for the Cristosal organization, “has been configured as a discrediting mechanism.”
The economist Tatiana Marroquín published a video on Tiktok about the increase in the price of the basic basket in El Salvador, because food inflation has reached 16%, and the response is an insult to her physique. Her program The economy is feminine, where he explains that extreme povert
y in the country has gone from 4% to 8% during the Bukele Government or that if from 2006 to 2019 about 400 million of the pension reserve were used per year, in 2023 1,000 were used, it has also had consequences: “They put Pegasus on my cell phone. You focus on discussing technical things and what you receive are violent and massive attacks. It does end up making you take a couple of steps back.”
It is not wrong to recognize fear, says journalist Clanci Rosa. “In this Government we have reduced activism considerably, not because we do not want to do it, but because the Government has set up an apparatus of repression that generates fear. The emergency regime is so ambiguous that it is scary that in a protest you could end up imprisoned,” says the founder of the feminist magazine The compass, “It is almost a crime to defend rights.” Since the emergency regime came into force 22 months ago, more than 76,000 people have been detained, without a court order, without the possibility of a lawyer, without communication with their family, without investigation. The Legal Aid association has presented more than 5,000 habeas corpus to request the release of prisoners without any ties to gangs, has documented 224 deaths inside prisons. Those mothers, sisters and wives of detainees who have become, without seeking it, in opposition to the president.
“As feminists we recognize that our agenda advances in a democratic context. Before, democracy was not complete, but there was a margin. Now our possibilities are closing, the fight is getting complicated,” says Clanci Rosa. That doesn't discourage them. This is how Celia Medrano summarizes it: “For women in the Bukele Government there are three options: you submit, you leave or you resist. We have chosen to resist.”
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