El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador Perspectives has moved

2026-03-17T18:14:05.720-05:00

New articles for El Salvador Perspectives will now be found on Substack: Go here and be sure to subscribe to receive each new post.

This site will remain up as the archives of 21 years of documenting life and news in El Salvador.

Nayib Bukele at Shield of the Americas meeting

2026-03-10T20:01:00.004-05:00

Nayib Bukele was one of the Latin American leaders who accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to attend an inaugural meeting of the “Shield of the Americas” at the Trump-owned Doral golf course in Miami. It was a convening of a dozen politically-aligned, conservative led countries in the Americas, saying they would work together to combat drug trafficking.

Trump has had a focus on drug cartels and gangs in Latin America as a justification for many of his actions in the region including the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, blowing boats out of the water off the coast of South America, and closing US borders to asylum seekers.

Trump want his allies in the region to permit the US military, and their own militaries, to act freely in pursuit of those who get labelled narco-terrorists Al Jazeera reported:

But as he signed a declaration to cement that commitment, Trump signalled that it came with the expectation that cartels would not be confronted with law enforcement action, but instead military might.

“ The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our military. So we have to use our military. You have to use your military,” Trump told the audience of Latin American leaders.

“You have some great police, but they threaten your police. They scare your police. You’re going to use your military.”

We haven’t seen any public comments by Bukele regarding the drug-trafficking rationales espoused by Trump, but use of the military for domestic policing is already a hallmark of the Bukele regime. The Salvadoran navy makes regular seizures of drug boats in the Pacific, including a seizure of 6.6 tons of cocaine in February. (The navy does not blow those boats out of the water when making the seizures).

Bukele also had meetings on the sidelines in Florida with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Bukele’s office published on X this highly produced video of his trip to Doral.

The meeting in Florida had also been billed in advance as a meeting to counter China’s influence in the region, which Trump now counts as the zone of influence of the US under his “Donroe Doctrine.” Bukele has spent his time in office navigating between China and the US. China has built some of his showpiece projects such as the new national library, an amusement park and tourism pier, and an under-construction $100 million soccer stadium. On the other hand, Bukele clearly enjoys being the favorite Latin American politician of the MAGA movement around Trump. As described in El Pais English:

Like a chameleon, the president has changed his tune more for convenience than ideology, analysts say. “Bukele, like all Latin American presidents, is trying to navigate difficult times: on the one hand, he needs to maintain trade, political, and security relations with the United States, and on the other, with China, a potential investor,” says Margaret Myers, senior advisor at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank.

The Shield of the Americas is not the only Trump foreign policy initiative supported by El Salvador. The country has also joined Trump’s so-called Board of Peace. Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill was the representative of the country at the inaugural meeting of that body. Beyond membership of the Board, where Trump presides for life, it is not clear what, if anything El Salvador contributes to the entity beyond showing it is a loyal ally of Washington.

An article in the Intercept did highlight how all of the members of the Board of Peace have been singled out in the past for human rights abuses in their country.

The Bukele government also signed a trade deal with the US to remove Trump’s 10% Liberation Day tariffs, in return for giving US companies access to Salvadoran markets including access to critical minerals in the country. Subsequently the US Supreme Court ruled that those Liberation Day tariffs had been illegal, but Trump then slapped new tariffs on the globe.

Recent news

2026-02-14T17:17:00.003-06:00

San Salvador fire

A collection of recent news from El Salvador.

Fire in San Salvador Claims Five Lives in Historic District Blaze (Tico Times, Feb. 14, 2026) -- A major fire in the historic center of San Salvador killed five as it tore through warehouse space, business and residences. The burned-out block is two blocks south of Plaza Libertad, part of the zone gradually being gentrified into a tourist destination by the current government. (More at EDH).

Shakira’s 5-show El Salvador residency fuels Bukele’s push to remake the country’s image (AP, Feb. 13, 2026) -- A five-concert “residency” by singer-songwriter and superstar Shakira in El Salvador’s capital builds on Nayib Bukele ’s years long effort to use events such as surfing competitions and the Miss Universe pageant to mold the Central American country’s international image as a safe tourist destination.

Trump to host Latin American leaders in Miami on March 7 (AFP, Feb. 12, 2026) -- Donald Trump will host Latin American leaders invited from Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras at a summit in Miami later this year, a White House official told AFP. Some of the leaders, like Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei, are firm Trump allies. A report in Argentine media said that the summit would focus on countering China, a major Latin American trading partner. [El Salvador has received large donations from China including the new National Library, a pier in La Libertad, and a $100 million soccer stadium under construction].

Teen boys reunited with their mother 5 months after immigration raid (Syracuse.com Feb. 12, 2026) -- Tow boys were reunited with their mother, who had been seized in an immigration raid at a candy factory, despite having legal persmission to work and a pending asylum case. After a month in detention, she decided to self-deport. Her boys had to decide whether to stay in the US or go to El Salvador to join her.

El Salvador’s attorney general freezes a money‑laundering investigation into Venezuelan oil funds that implicates Nayib Bukele (El Pais, Feb. 9, 2026) -- El Salvador’s attorney general and trusted ally of President Nayib Bukele, Rodolfo Delgado, has frozen a money‑laundering investigation into Alba Petróleos de El Salvador, a company financed with Venezuelan government funds whose operations extend to bank accounts linked to the president. Documents from the Attorney General’s Office show that Bukele received roughly $3.3 million — both personally and through three companies belonging to his family group — originating from Venezuelan oil money.

How “Foreign Agent” Laws Harm Freedom (Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Feb. 13, 2026) -- “Since it came into force in June 2025, El Salvador’s Foreign Agents Law has contributed to a significant crackdown on independent media, forcing a substantial number of journalists and media professionals into exile,” said Dhaniella Falk, IWPR Latin America and the Caribbean program director. “For at least five years, Salvadoran society has faced shrinking access to information and civic oversight amid growing government opacity,” Falk continued. “The Foreign Agents Law arose in this context and has further deepened these restrictions, accelerating the erosion of independent information, civic participation, and human rights defense.”

Stealth Authoritarianism in El Salvador (Democratic Erosion Consortium) -- The path to the present moment in El Salvador.

Bukele and Bitcoin -- How's it going?

2026-02-13T20:49:00.000-06:00

The price of Bitcoin this morning was around $67,250, down 45% from its high above $120,000 in October. This represented a decline of roughly $300 million in the value of the country's Bitcoin reserves in just four months.

In an article titled Fall in bitcoin puts pressure on El Salvador's debt and complicates the relationship with the IMF, Bloomberg suggests that this fall in value of the volatile crypto-currency and the corresponding decline in El Salvador's reserves may be causing international investors to question the country's finances.

When the Bukele government finally reached agreement with the IMF on the terms of the $1.4 billion loan facility in December 2024, the IMF required El Salvador to undo the law which made Bitcoin legal tender in the country, and to sell off the government's Bitcoin wallet "Chivo." The country promised not to increase its exposure to Bitcoin risks.

In a staff statement on December 22, 2025, the IMF reported:

Negotiations for the sale of the government e-wallet Chivo are well advanced, and discussions with regards to the Bitcoin project continue, centered on enhancing transparency, safeguarding public resources, and mitigating risks.

Bukele, however, continues to tout the government purchases of one Bitcoin per day which have continued unabated. Faced with the current market decline in Bitcoin's value, Bukele announced on social media at the end of January that the country was "buying the dip" as it bought both gold and Bitcoin. His government continues to promote Bitcoin through its National Bitcoin Office, by holding conferences and developing courses to teach school students about the crypto asset.

According to Bloomberg, this ongoing emphasis on Bitcoin could put the country on a collision course with the International Monetary Fund, which is in the process of disbursing a $1.4 Billion loan program to the country. Investor concern over challenges with the IMF has resulted in a recent decline in the value of the country's international bonds.

The Bloomberg article suggests that El Salvador may be banking on Bukele's strong relationship with Donald Trump to avoid financial problems in its dealings with the IMF. The US has significant influence in IMF decisions, or Bukele may be counting on the US to provide financing if the IMF pulls its support.

Meanwhile, the InterAmerican Development Bank this week announced a $1.3 billion loan to El Salvador to be used for housing and for tourism infrastructure. Without explanation the government has also delayed in announcing a public pension reform measure related to its growing use of pension system assets to finance its debt.

Prisons and Prayers

2026-02-08T17:31:00.001-06:00

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. Opposition candidates, most notably Claudio Alpízar (Esperanza Nacional), accused Bukele of interference in a neighbor country's elections. They argued the visit was a political stunt designed to validate the security agenda of President Rodrigo Chaves’ handpicked successor, Laura Fernández, who eventually won the election.

National Prayer Breakfast in El Salvador

A few days later on January 19, Bukele was also talking about how El Salvador reduced crime when his government held its first ever National Prayer Breakfast in the old National Palace in central San Salvador. From National Catholic Reporter:

Some Salvadoran Catholic bishops, evangelical clergy and other Christian leaders attended the event, modeled after a similar controversial prayer breakfast in the United States, which touts bipartisanship among Christian politicians. The one in El Salvador was said to be organized by the Próspera Foundation, which has hosted similar events in Guatemala. The investigative digital newspaper Plaza Publica in Guatemala has linked the organization to right-wing Christian groups with ties to the United States that have great political influence in the halls of Washington.

Members of the US Congress, Thomas Suozzi from New York and Lou Correa from California, were in attendance. They offered praise for the Salvadoran leader on what they saw as the country's transformation.

For his part, Bukele said:

"I don't know how to explain it other than it was the hand of God. No one can doubt that," he said. "It's proof that God makes things happen when you ask with faith. There's no other way to explain it." (Watch here).

Visit of President-elect of Chile

Jose Antonio Kast, the right wing president-elect of Chile visited El Salvador January 30. Like Chaves in Costa Rica, Kast wanted to align himself with Bukele's brand of "lock them up" security policy, so he also came to El Salvador to tour CECOT. Kast took the tour of the mega-prison along with his future Minister of Security, to see for himself the cages and the tattooed gang members.

At a press conference with Kast that day, Bukele was asked by a Chilean journalist about human rights concerns in El Salvador's State of Exception. Bukele proceeded to deliver an eight minute diatribe against human rights organizations who he claims never advocated for the victims of gang violence [editor's note -- not true], but only pushed for the human rights of the murderers and rapists in prison:

National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C.

Turning from the subject of prisons back to thanking God, Bukele showed up on February 5 as an invited guest at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Bukele told the assembled politicians and faith leaders, that they should ask God for wisdom, and that only prayer answered by God could explain the "miracle" of the reduction in criminal violence in El Salvador:

As part of Donald Trumps' remarks at the prayer breakfast, he praised Bukele as a "great ally" and then proceeded to tell those assembled, with classic Trump exaggeration, that Bukele builds prisons so big you can't see all the way from one end to the other.

These public appearances of Bukele illustrate a recurrent theme in his discourse. He is completely unapologetic for a harsh regime of mass incarceration, regardless of allegations of human rights abuses and arbitrary detentions of innocents. At the same time, he will wrap himself in the trappings of religion, suggesting that his administration is in line with a divine plan. The earliest example of this was Bukele's incursion into the Legislative Assembly with armed troops in February 2020 to demand the legislature approve a loan to fund his security plan. Taking a seat in front of his allies, Bukele said he was offering a prayer, before getting up, leaving and telling his supporters outside that prayer had led him to give lawmakers another week to accede to his demands.

Today, with a Legislative Assembly that agrees to all his requests instantly, Bukele tells the public his prayers are being answered.

New One-sided US-El Salvador Trade Agreement

2026-02-01T14:54:00.002-06:00

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 manufacturing.

The Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly repealed a historic ban on metallic mining in the country at the end of 2024.

The new agreement has a number of other commitments on El Salvador's side including making it easier for US exporters to sell automotive products, meat and cheese products, pharmaceuticals, and digital services within the country.

In the text of the agreement, I counted 34 times where a paragraph of the agreement had in its opening "El Salvador shall..." In contrast, there were only three such paragraphs which said "The US shall...."

On the side of the US, it agrees to eliminate the 10% tariff (import tax) that US purchasers had to pay on goods imported from El Salvador. Trump imposed the so-called "Liberation Day" tariff on El Salvador and many other countries as a baseline tariff increase. But a case in front of the US Supreme Court may soon declare that tariff illegal, in which case El Salvador, agreed to make concessions which it need not have made to have the tariff removed.

The US was already running a $2.2 billion trade surplus with El Salvador.

On X, Bukele declared on Thursday that this was "the first Reciprocal Trade Agreement in the entire Western Hemisphere", although Guatemala and the US signed a similar agreement the next day. (And isn't it redundant to call an agreement "reciprocal?" First year contract law class teaches you that each side has to promise something or there is no enforceable contract).

We also learned last week that El Salvador has joined Trump's Board of Peace as one of 27 founding members. We have no word yet on whether the country is putting up the $1 billion to have a permanent seat on the Board rather than a three year term.

Salvadorans generally optimistic at beginning of 2026

2026-01-30T16:09:00.002-06:00

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 in the coming year if they could, citing primarily the desire to improve their family's economic situation.

61.6% believe that massive deportations in the US will have a great impact on Salvadoran families.

With their satisfaction with the direction of the country in general, and the reduction in crime in particular, Salvadorans not surprisingly continue to give high marks to president Nayib Bukele. He received the second highest annual grade over his six years in power, 8.39, up from 8.13 the year before, and exceeded only by a grade of 8.54 in 2023. (By comparison, his predecessor Salvador Sanchez Cerén had a grade of 4.57 for 2017).

Immigration arrests of Salvadorans in US up sharply in 2025

2026-01-28T09:04:00.001-06:00

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 deportation flights touched down at El Salvador's international airport during 2025, compared to 119 flights the year before. In 2025, El Salvador was the fourth most common destination for ICE removal flights, after Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

The number of Salvadorans being detained after crossing the southern US border dropped dramatically when Trump took office a year ago, consistent with the pattern of crossings by persons of all nationalities. 3,598 Salvadorans were apprehended by the border patrol in 2025 compared to 42,050 in 2024. (Source: U.S. Customs & Border Patrol) Half of the 2025 apprehensions happened in January before the Trump administration had even taken control.

The reduction in border apprehensions necessarily means that the immigration arrests of Salvadorans in 2025 were largely of persons who had been living in the US for some time rather than persons picked up as they crossed the border.

El Salvador's migration directorate. DGME, has made available its data on returnees for the first three quarters of 2025. DGME reports 9,696 persons returned from the US during those nine months.

Fear of being arrested and deported may be driving Salvadorans to transfer more of their assets back to the country. Remittances dramatically surged in 2025. According to the El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank, remittances for the first 11 months were just over $9 billion, an increase of 18% over the same period the year before.

Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador expires on September 9, 2026. This will place more than 190,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the US since at least 2001 into undocumented status and subject to removal, while also terminating their work authorization documents.

One number which is challenging to estimate is the additional number of persons who have decided to "self-deport" back to El Salvador. Speaking to local community leaders, they affirm that there have been people arriving back in the country because of the fears and challenges surrounding Trump's mass deportation campaign. The improved security situation in many communities around the country may also make the decision to return an easier one for some people.

Can El Salvador produce a judgment against impunity in the El Mozote massacre case?

2026-01-26T11:01:00.002-06:00

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 soldiers who participated in the event, from persons living in the zone at the time, and from expert witnesses. The experts have included forensic anthropologists from Argentina, and Professor Terry Karl who described the military chain of command during public hearings streamed live in April 2021. The accumulated evidence has provided a detailed historical chronology of events resulting in the massacre of a thousand children, women and the elderly.

The prosecution, however, came to a standstill after president Nayib Bukele seized control over the Salvadoran judiciary in 2021, forcing out judges over 60 years old, including the courageous jurist who had been overseeing the case, Judge Jorge Guzman. In December 2024 advocates harshly criticized Guzman's replacement, Judge Mirtala Portillo, for " dilatory judicial criteria that have paralyzed the effective progress of the trial."

Two months ago, the court in San Francisco Gotera finally ordered that the case proceed to the remaining public trial phase against 13 defendants from the former high military command. Among the defendants is Guillermo García, the former Minister of Defense during the bloody civil war. This step forward could mean the end of impunity for those responsible for the massacre, although the defendants have appealed this order, and no start date for a trial is on the calendar. “It is like finding a small light in the midst of so much adversity,” Leonel Tobar, president of the El Mozote Human Rights Promotion Association, told AFP.

Still, one must wonder whether a final judgment can be reached while any of the defendants, who are in their eighties and nineties, are still alive.

Defendants in a 2017 hearing in San Francisco Gotera courtroom

The 92-year old Garcia has already been criminally convicted in El Salvador of one atrocity during the civil war. The US deported Garcia to El Salvador in 2016 to face charges in this country, finding credible evidence of his participation in human rights violations during the war. In June 2025, Garcia, along with two ex-Salvadoran army colonels, was convicted in the 1982 ambush and murder of four Dutch journalists. It is believed he is in custody in a private military hospital.

Still there are deniers of the historical facts of the El Mozote massacre. A report last month by IPS highlighted misinformation circulating in video reports in Salvadoran social media claiming that the massacre did not occur or was greatly exaggerated. The IPS report quotes Ivon Rivera, a media investigator at the UCA, who links these denials to the communication strategy of the Bukele regime to label El Salvador's peace accords a "farce" and events of the civil war part of a cynical pact between the leaders of ARENA and the FMLN and their foreign sponsors.

A new movie, Luciérnagas (Fireflies) en El Mozote, premiered in El Salvador, on December 9 on the 44th anniversary of the massacre. (Movie trailer). More of an action movie than an attempt to provide context and understanding of the massacre, its filming in 2022 was supported by the Bukele government. Read a review of the movie in El Faro here.

Since the time the massacre prosecution was reopened in 2016, human rights lawyers at Cristosal, along with Tutela Legal, have represented the families of the victims during the criminal proceedings. Earlier this month, with the latest development to potentially move the trial to its concluding phase, Cristosal stated:

Today, as the case advances to the plenary phase—in the year marking the 45th anniversary of the massacre—we are at a breaking point in El Salvador’s collective memory. Not only because, for the first time, there is a real possibility of prosecuting those who directed the military operation—the former Minister of Defense Guillermo García and more than a dozen officers from the Atlácatl Battalion—but because this progress refutes decades of state denial, from the concealment of military archives to the obstruction of court-ordered inspections.
Every step this case has taken represents a symbolic, political, and moral defeat for the structures of impunity that tried to erase it.
That is why this moment matters. It matters for the more than 140 victims who died without seeing justice. For the families who are still waiting. For a country that needs to reconnect with the truth that was denied to it. It matters because it reminds us that even in the darkest chapters of Salvadoran history, dignity can open a crack through which light enters.

How Venezuela and Venezuelans have been a thread throughout Nayib Bukele's political career

2026-01-17T14:45:00.001-06:00

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 reserves was one way that the Chavez regime in Venezuela sought to support friendly regimes and political parties. In El Salvador, the recipients of that largesse were tied to the FMLN, and dollars were funneled through a company called ALBA Petroleum with affiliated businesses and shell companies.

Journalistic investigations have revealed a direct financial link between the young Bukele and his circle of advisers and ALBA money:

Among those who received millions of dollars in loans from Alba Petróleos subsidiaries is current President Bukele in 2013, when he was mayor of the town of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Bukele and companies controlled by Bukele and his family received almost $3 million in multiple loans to publicity companies owned by Bukele, from the Alba Petróleos subsidiary Inverval. Bukele has publicly acknowledged he received $1.9 million in loans from Inverval to buy shares in a company called Starlight, the owner of the Canal TVX TV station.

Douglas Farrah, How To Make a Billion Dollars Disappear, 2020 at 14.

ALBA money also funded real estate development in Nuevo Cuscatlan while Bukele was a young mayor there. The firm Inverval made large real estate investments in Nuevo Cuscatlán in the luxurious residential area of Garden Hill bolstering the finances of that municipality. ALBA funds also supported public initiatives of Bukele in the town. Bukele used his apparent success as mayor as a springboard for his winning campaign to be mayor of San Salvador.

In a press conference, Bukele would state "Being sincere, what business wasn't taking money from ALBA during that time?"

For more on the influence of Venezuelan oil money in El Salvador and on Bukele's early career see:

ALBA Petróleos: The Biggest Money Laundering Investigation in the History of El Salvador, Expediente Público, August 2021.
Nayib Bukele received $1.9 million from ALBA Petroleum, RevistaFactum, September 2019.

Even though Bukele was an FMLN party member and the beneficiary of Venezuelan oil money, early in his political trajectory, he began to distance himself from the doctrinaire left. He adopted cyan-blue as the theme color for his "New Ideas" campaign, eschewing the red of the FMLN and Latin American socialism. He portrayed himself as a new breed of politician, not tied to the old guard politics of his predecessors.

As he rose from small town mayor to mayor of San Salvador and then president, Bukele brought with him other members of his circle who had ties to the ALBA money.

The US placed sanctions on Alba Petroleos in March 2019 related to money laundering as part of the larger Venezuelan conglomerate. And just as Nayib Bukele was taking office in June 2019, agents of then-Attorney General Raul Melara raided the offices of Alba Petroleos and 24 front companies in El Salvador to gather evidence in a purported money-laundering investigation. Melara, however, would be fired when Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party took control of the Legislative Assembly in June 2021, and the lawyer for Alba Petroleos, Rodolfo Delgado, installed in his place. The money-laundering investigation evaporated with the change.

Then as Bukele rose to the Salvadoran presidency in 2019, he surrounded himself with Venezuelan advisers linked to the Salvadoran opposition who functioned as a shadow cabinet. More than two dozen Venezuelan consultants to the Salvadoran government worked largely behind the scenes to advise Bukele. According to El Faro, the pyramid of power in El Salvador has Nayib Bukele at the top with his three brothers as his closest advisors, followed by the group of Venezuelans, who then direct the various actual cabinet ministers.

The leader of the Venezuelan shadow cabinet has been identified as Sara Hanna Georges. She was trained as a dentist in Venezuela, and as a young adult she became involved in opposition politics in Venezuela, protesting the government of Hugo Chavez. She became an assistant to opposition political leader Leopoldo Lopez, who was jailed by the Chavez regime.

Another prominent Venezuelan was the political consultant Lester Toledo. Toledo was asked to work on Bukele’s presidential campaign in October 2018 by Nayib Bukele’s brother Karim after Sara Hanna recommended him. Together with other Venezuelans, he was a campaign manager for Bukele’s victory in the 2019 presidential election. Later Toledo involved himself in pandemic food distribution in El Salvador and Bukele's 2024 election campaign for an unconstitutional second term.

Read more about the Venezuelan advisers behind the scenes in El Salvador here.

In January 2019, Bukele tweeted:

Dictators like Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua,

and Juan Orlando in Honduras will never have

any legitimacy, because they hold onto power by force

and do not respect the will of their people. A dictator is a dictator.

Whether from the “right” or the “left.”

On November 2, 2019, Bukele expelled the diplomatic corps of the Maduro regime from El Salvador. Bukele would publicly call Maduro's 2024 re-election fraudulent, a view shared by the majority of the world.

The next time Bukele and Venezuela were linked in the world news came with Donald Trump's expulsion of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador's' Center for Confinement of Terrorism ("CECOT") prison on March 15, 2025. When Bukele traveled to the White House on April 14, 2025 to meet with Donald Trump, Venezuelan Sara Hanna was one of his advisers joining the meeting with Trump.

Although the large majority of the Venezuelans had no criminal records and no links to the Tren de Aragua gang, but were instead persons who had fled from the South American country, they were tortured together in CECOT. Read Venezuelans deported to Bukele’s mega-prison reveal torture and other abuses: ‘They said we would only leave in a black bag’ (El Pais, Nov. 12, 2025); Trump Administration Knew Vast Majority of Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Had Not Been Convicted of U.S. Crimes (ProPublica, May 30, 2025)

Venezuelan families who came to El Salvador to petition for the release of their loved ones, who had committed no crimes in El Salvador, received no relief from El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court.

On April 20, 2025, Bukele tweeted a proposal to Maduro, offering to return the 252 Venezuelans in CECOT to Venezuela if Venezuela would release 252 political prisoners held in the South American country's jails.

On July 18, 2025, Bukele announced that a deal had been struck to return the Venezuelans to their home country, in return for Maduro releasing US citizens held in Venezuelan prisons. The New York Times reported:

Ten Americans and U.S. permanent residents who had been seized by the Venezuelan authorities and held as bargaining chips were freed Friday in exchange for the release of more than 250 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The release of the Americans and permanent residents was described by the State Department, while the release of the Venezuelans was announced by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on X.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the U.S. citizens and permanent residents had been arrested and jailed in Venezuela “without proper due process” and called for the “restoration of democracy in Venezuela.”
The capture and imprisonment of the Americans had been part of the Venezuelan government’s efforts to gain an upper hand in negotiations with the Trump administration, while the detention of the Venezuelans in El Salvador played a high-profile role in President Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants.

For at least some of the Venezuelans, who were asylum seekers in the US seeking protection from the Maduro regime, the forced return to Venezuela was a violation of the international human right of non-refoulement.

The public disdain of the Venezuelan regime for Bukele continued on display. In a speech in July 2025, Jorge Rodríguez, the current president of the Venezuelan National Assembly and brother of acting president Delcy Rodríguez, compared Bukele to Adolf Hitler and Benjamin Netanyahu, decrying the treatment of Venezuelans in El Salvador's prisons.

When the US captured Maduro on January 3, Bukele posted on X a picture of a handcuffed Maduro in US custody to contrast with a 2019 video where Maduro had called Bukele an "imperialist puppet" and declared "Bukele, if you mess with us you will wither away." Bukele also retweeted two posts about the July prisoner swap. Was he signaling that the exchange of imprisoned migrants for political prisoners was part of a larger plan which resulted in Maduro being captured?

In 2026, Bukele's version of populist authoritarianism is on an upward trajectory. In Venezuela, the populist aspect had long since disappeared.

Jesuits of the UCA still have their voice

2025-11-17T08:32:00.000-06:00

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 many voices have been imprisoned or forced into exile by the Bukele regime in the past year, the Jesuits of the UCA continue to speak with faithful consistency about what justice and human rights demand in El Salvador. Although at least 53 Salvadoran journalists have been forced into exile according to Reporters Without Borders, and human rights defenders have been imprisoned, frequent and pointed editorials continue to be aired on YSUCA, the UCA radio station, which provides independent news coverage and interviews of opponents of the government as well.

Groups seeking justice for events in today's El Salvador were drawn to the commemoration of the Jesuit massacre. Families of those whose loved ones have disappeared into the prisons of the State of Exception, denied any contact with the outside world, joined the candle-lit procession. They walked with others in a chain of solidarity going back 36 years and more.

The sermon at the commemoration mass was delivered by the rector of the UCA, Mario Cornejo. He noted the thousands of complaints of human rights violations during the State of Exception received by the UCA's human rights office and repeated the UCA's commitment to stand with the most vulnerable in society:

This year's anniversary came just two months after the unexpected passing of another important Jesuit voice in El Salvador, Father Jose Maria ("Chema") Tojeira. He was a fellow Jesuit of those massacred at the UCA in 1989, and continued in El Salvador until the time of his death as an outspoken voice for social justice and human rights. Among other positions he served as rector of the UCA and later headed the University's human rights office. Throughout the past 36 years he had been the leading spokesperson for the Jesuits' quest for justice in the massacre case, and an end to the near total impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of war crimes during the country's civil war.

The criminal case in a Salvadoran court against those accused of ordering and covering up the massacre is stalled. Although it was reopened a year ago, there has been no movement since. By all appearances, the case had more to do with bringing charges and headlines about Bukele political opponents Alfredo Cristiani and Rodolfo Parker, than the case did with wanting to hold El Salvador's retired military brass accountable for a crime against humanity.

Bukele builds 2 schools per day, but what is taught inside?

2025-11-07T21:31:00.003-06:00

On November 2, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele broadcast an address to the nation to announce that his administration was inaugurating 70 remodeled schools that day. The upgrades to the schools were part of Bukele's "Two Schools Per Day Plan" in which the government says it is commencing the upgrades of two new schools each day, 70 of which have now been finished.

Inauguration of 70 schools

Inauguración de 70 escuelas pic.twitter.com/Lj5sfrUn4C
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) November 3, 2025

The announcement came with the usual production values of a hallmark Bukele presentation -- the delivery of some new infrastructure project or building, and the Salvadoran president receiving a tour and the adulation of the citizens gathered for the event.

[Fact checkers at VozPublica highlighted several misrepresentations in Bukele's presentation regarding the number of schools built by his administration (overstated), the number of schools built by prior governments (understated), and the existence of university scholarships funded by the government (nothing new with Bukele).]

A similar multimedia production was broadcast when Bukele first announced the Two Schools Per Day plan in May 2025, which you can view here, and these school remodeling projects appear to be a focal point for government publicity efforts this year.

This was not the first year in which Bukele has promised to build schools. In 2022, he announced that 5000 schools would be renovated in 5 years. But at the beginning of 2025, only 424 of those schools had been completed.

The new schools are now built under the auspices of the Directorate of Public Works ("DOM") which utilizes prison labor at many of the work sites. There is a website, dosescuelasxdia.com, dedicated to the program with photos of each new school being added to the list.

Schools added Nov. 7 on Two Schools Per Day Website

During the time period while schools are under construction, students and teachers often must improvise under difficult circumstances for education. An article in El Faro from earlier this year titled Schools in Shambles and Tent Classrooms: Public Education in Izalco, described UNICEF tents, churches and private homes being places where teachers were trying to hold classes.

But education is not simply accomplished by having shiny new school buildings. Alexia Ávalos, a Salvadoran academic currently living in Mexico, wrote a piece titled School infrastructure is necessary, but not sufficient in Revista Factum, making the point:

All the “invisible factors” of educational quality—teacher training, pedagogical practices, and a relevant curriculum (unbiased and free of ideology)—continue to be neglected by this administration. The presidential agenda prioritizes what is photogenic and inaugurated; the real critique isn't about a freshly painted wall, a new desk, or the distribution of computers and tablets, but rather about how these things have become a substitute for debating the essential questions: How is teaching being done? What methods are being used? Why is the teaching staff still being neglected?

Ávalos pointed out that on the 2022 edition of the international PISA test, Salvadoran students in public schools unfortunately had some of the lowest levels of achievement worldwide, but students in private schools in El Salvador had some of the best outcomes. For a statistical analysis of education across the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean see El estado de la Educación en América Latina y el Caribe 2023 produced by the InterAmerican Development Bank.

This week, an estimated 78,000 students took the AVANZO test administered by the government, which measures their academic achievement and ability to graduate. The test is given over two days in half day sessions, totally online. Details of the test here. The AVANZO test has been given since 2020 as the government's standardized test for secondary schooling achievement, replacing the prior test known as "PAES."

In 2023, less than 10% of students taking the AVANZO test achieved a grade of "Superior," getting the correct answer on 70 or more of the 120 questions in the test. This was the lowest level of "superior" test results in 10 years. However, 2023 did produce fewer poorly performing students, with the smallest percentage in 10 years of students who only achieved the "basic" level. 11% of test takers performed at this level in 2023. On average in 2023, students answered less than half of the questions correctly.

In short, the Salvadoran public school system has much room for improvement in the educational attainment of the children in its care.

To improve student achievement, the Salvadoran Ministry of Education has announced to teachers a nationwide education modernization through a new format for classes beginning in the 2026 school year. Under the new format, school hours will be standardized across the country, and class lengths increased from 45-55 minutes and minutes for recess shortened. Curriculum will be delivered via digital means over internet-connected screens in classrooms.

On November 5, the Legislative Assembly approved an additional $7 million for technology expenditures for delivering the new education curriculum.

Minister of Education Karla Trigueros

The learning to be delivered in El Salvador's schools might be called in the United States an "anti-woke" curriculum. In an article titled Government bans the words feminism, diversity and concepts such as climate change, journalists at El Faro expose a new internal "style and editing" manual for the Ministry of Education which has the purpose of aligning texts used in El Salvador's public schools with the conservative posture of the Salvadoran government and president Bukele on a range of social issues. No longer in today's El Salvador shall school materials mention feminism, empowerment, gender identity, sexual orientation, inclusivity, diversity or globalism.

This style manual goes along with the directive of the Minister of Education that "inclusive language" which smacked of the "ideology of gender" were prohibited from use in the country's schools. She has also insisted on conservative haircuts and polite demeanors for the country's scholars.

At the same time as the cameras and lights are shining on school remodeling, the overall education budget in the country is being reduced and thousands fewer students are being enrolled in the country's schools.

There is little doubt that renovating schools to make them cleaner, brighter, and inviting can improve student performance. The World Bank published The Impact of School Infrastructure on Learning, a summary of research of the impact of school design on learning, which offered ample evidence of this effect. The design differences and physical appearance of the newly built schools compared with many of the older and poorer schools in rural areas is like night and day.

But El Salvador must also focus on training the thousands of teachers how to use all of the technology investment. Changes to the content of the curriculum appear to point towards favoring particular political ideologies rather than producing independent thinkers. Underlying economic forces which lead to high drop out rates continue to challenge education achievement in the country.

"Two schools per day" is a slogan that puts the focus on the buildings and not what happens inside those buildings.

Where Trump and Bukele intersect

2025-10-22T13:31:00.000-05:00

The March 15, 2025, US deportation flights, which brought hundreds of Venezuelans and a few dozen Salvadorans to El Salvador's CECOT prison, continue to be in the news. The Washington Post disclosed more details about the deal between Washington and Bukele, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio's promise to undo agreements with cooperating witnesses from MS-13 who were ready to testify about bargains between the Salvadoran government and the gang.

Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal (Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2025) -- "in promising to terminate the informant arrangements, current and former Justice Department officials say Rubio threatened to undercut years of work by U.S. law enforcement to apprehend and secure the cooperation of high-ranking members of one of the world’s most deadly gangs."

Rubio's deal had its origins in earlier dealings with El Salvador led by then-ambassador Ron Johnson:

An American Friend: The Trump-Appointed Diplomat Accused of Shielding El Salvador’s President From Law Enforcement (ProPublica, Sept. 30, 2025) -- The many ways that former US Ambassador to El Salvador Ron Johnson has helped out Nayib Bukele.

The planes which carried the Venezuelans also transported two of the MS-13 leaders sought by Bukele as well as Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In addition, there were three dozen other Salvadoran deportees delivered to Bukele's prisons. That group has disappeared into the black hole of Salvadoran prison system and their families have no idea where they are.

Deported by Trump, disappeared in Bukele’s jails (El Pais, Oct. 5, 2025) -- Family members of three Salvadorans who were sent from the United States on the same flights as hundreds of Venezuelans, accused without evidence of being gang members, have gone six months without any information about them
El Salvador Misses Deadline from Inter-American Commission to Find Man Deported to CECOT (El Faro, Oct. 21, 2025) -- Since then, the family has endured a bureaucratic ordeal of requests for information, contradictory answers, and official silence. Neither the United States nor El Salvador have provided any information on Irvin’s whereabouts, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

From survivors of those prisons, there is ongoing testimony of torture, abuse and medical neglect.

From the Bowels of Bukele’s Prisons: Survivors Recount Death, Torture, and Starvation (El Faro, Oct. 15, 2025) -- Over two years, El Faro interviewed 27 people released from these prisons, who were not gang members, and who dared to recount cruelty reminiscent of El Salvador’s clandestine prisons of the 1980s.

Trump may be looking for ways to ship more immigrants to Salvadoran prisons with little due process.

Trump administration designates Barrio 18 gang as foreign terrorist organization (AP, Sep 23, 2025) -- Bukele has long referred to members of the gang as “terrorists” and even built a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center. It was that same lockup where 200 Venezuelan deportees were held earlier this year as part of an agreement with Trump.

Both the Trump administration in Washington and the Bukele regime have been forcing independent journalists out of their countries who have reported on these issues.

Journalist Mario Guevara, Detained While Reporting, Deported to El Salvador (Newsweek, Oct. 4, 2025) -- Journalist Mario Guevara was deported to El Salvador on Friday after more than 100 days in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody following his June arrest while livestreaming a “No Kings” event near Atlanta. The returning journalist gave interviews to La Prensa Grafica and CBS News upon his return to the Central American country.
Journalism association to leave El Salvador over government pressure (AP, Oct. 1, 2025) -- El Salvador’s Journalists Association is moving its legal status out of the country in response to a foreign agents law passed earlier this year that was seen as a way to pressure critical voices in the Central American nation. Founded in 1936, the association said Wednesday that to continue defending journalists’ rights and freedom of the press it would have to move to another country, which it did not name.
He reported on the rise of an autocrat. Then he had to flee his country (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 31, 2025) -- Reporter Nelson Rauda of El Faro writes about going into an exile caused by the threats to journalists in El Salvador.

The exile of journalists from El Salvador comes at a time when political imprisonment of Bukele regime critics is on the rise

Political Imprisonment in El Salvador and the Dismantling of Democracy (WOLA, Oct. 17, 2025) -- Since the implementation of the state of exception in El Salvador in March 2022, thousands of arbitrary detentions have occurred. Among those detained, various reports have identified individuals arrested for exercising their freedom of expression, participating in demonstrations, or openly criticizing the government.

Other headlines from El Salvador:

President Bukele bans inclusive language in El Salvador public schools (UPI, Oct. 7, 2025) -- President Nayib Bukele has ordered a ban on the use of "inclusive language" in all public schools in El Salvador, citing the defense of the Spanish language and the protection of children from "external ideologies."
El Salvador’s president seeks help in caring for country’s thousands of stray dogs and cats (AP, Opt. 17, 2025) “Thousands of dogs and cats live on our streets. We want to change that, but without cruelty. We have the financial resources, but we seek expert partners to make it a model for Latin America,” Bukele wrote on X on Oct. 8. “Who wants to come and help?”
Bukele’s El Salvador is also being built by dispossessing the poorest (El Pais) -- On the outskirts of San Salvador, a real estate company is threatening to evict the residents of the Primero de Diciembre neighborhood. This pattern is playing out across the country amid a rapid wave of land privatization and gentrification.

Too much or too little water

2025-10-01T22:09:00.004-05:00

Several news topics from El Salvador at the end of September involve water.

Major Water Crisis in the Capital

A significant water crisis occurred in September due to a collapse in a 48-inch pipeline belonging to the Northern Zone System, which services large parts of the San Salvador Metropolitan Area (AMSS) and La Libertad. The initial suspension of service occurred on September 16, but the problem was aggravated when the newly repaired pipe collapsed again shortly afterward. This led to a prolonged, multi-day water shortage affecting major zones of the metro area.

On Wednesday, September 17, approximately four hours after the initial repair was reported as complete and the system had begun the slow process of refilling, the catastrophic secondary failure occurred. The high-pressure pipeline collapsed again, and this time it took with it the entire structure which supported it over a ravine outside Apopa. This cascading failure transformed a manageable technical problem into a full-blown infrastructure disaster. The damage was now far more extensive, requiring not just a pipe replacement but a complete structural rebuild. It was not until September 23, a week after the first break, that water service began to be restored.

To address the severe water shortage caused by the collapsed pipeline, the government initiated a contingency plan. This involved deploying over 180 water trucks (pipas) from various state entities. The government contracted and brought in 40 additional water trucks from Guatemala to reinforce the supply efforts. The contingency plan prioritized supplying water to hospitals, schools, and communities identified as highly vulnerable, and the need for such reinforcements continued through the month.

The water woes cost the head of the national water authority (ANDA) his job. President Nayib Bukele promptly fired Jorge Castaneda, who had served for one year, and replaced him with Dagoberto Arévalo, an engineer within ANDA.

Meanwhile, a report from the Ministry of Finance on the execution of the 2025 Public Investment Program revealed that ANDA had only executed 12% of its allocated budget for infrastructure improvements to the water system including projects for the "resilience" of priority systems.

Ongoing Flood and Rain Warnings

While households in greater San Salvador were longing for water to flow through their pipes at the end of the month, on other days the skies opened up with entirely too much water. Throughout September, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) and Protección Civil maintained active alerts and issued repeated warnings concerning heavy rainfall.

On Sunday, September 21, a strong thunderstorm drenched greater San Salvador leading to flooding, street damage, small landslides and some destroyed houses as illustrated in this news coverage.

At the end of the month, the town of San Francisco Gotera experienced significant flooding after the San Franciso River overflowed due to torrential rains, shown in this post on X.

Una noche muy dura para San Francisco Gotera, Morazán.
Las lluvias de esta noche han dejado inundaciones, evacuaciones y pérdidas completas en hogares, debido al desbordamiento del río San Francisco. #Lluvias #Inundaciones #Morazan pic.twitter.com/M2YYlvpbMJ
— Tithy (@Vannesa15_) September 30, 2025

Urban flooding in San Salvador may be getting worse due to ongoing construction and development in the metropolitan area. This article from Inter Press Service, written after similar flooding in August, explains:

With each new construction, the soil absorbs less rainwater, and each storm turns the runoff into a river that reaches the poor neighborhoods of San Salvador, a city of 2.4 million inhabitants, including its metropolitan area, within a total country population of six million.

El Salvador's Largest Lake is covered with aquatic weeds

In other water-related news, El Salvador's largest lake, Lake Suchitlan, looked like this from the air a week ago:

The bright green color comes from "ninfas" or water lettuce which invades and spreads over the surface of the lake, thriving on the polluted runoff which feeds into the lake from the country's contaminated rivers.

This video illustrates well the scope of the problem:

Environmental Advocates and Water Defenders, the Santa Marta 5, are Acquitted Again

A court in El Salvador dismissed for the second time charges against a group of community environmental activists who have come to be known as the Santa Marta 5. The group included leaders in the fight against gold-mining in the country which Nayib Bukele has sought to restart after activist achieved a legal ban on the practice in 2017. The case against the five alleged their connection to a murder more than 40 years ago during El Salvador's civil war, but the prosecution was seen by most as retaliation for their environmental activism.

International allies celebrated the new acquittal.

Spectacle

2025-09-23T09:34:00.001-05:00

One of the defining features of Nayib Bukele's presidency is spectacle. From displays of military hardware to fireworks and choreographed light shows, his government does not miss a chance to put on a show for the Salvadoran public. And these spectacles are never produced just for the audience in attendance. A mini-army of camera people, drone operators, live-streamers and producers choreograph and document every event, and then push it out through every social media channel available.

The refined art of spectacle was on display for El Salvador's Independence Day celebrations on September 15. During the day, the main event was a parade through the streets of San Salvador. In recent years, the Independence Day parade has actually been two parades -- one is a "civic" parade filled with uniformed school children stepping in unison down the streets, marching bands, folk dancers and other displays of civic pride in which the national blue and white colors are everywhere.

But equally large is the military parade. This was a military parade a dictator could love. It was filled with weapon-toting soldiers, displays of military hardware, and flyovers by jets and helicopters.

The spectacle then moved on to the Presidential House. Children dressed in white stood at attention, the First Family of El Salvador came out in front of the assembled guests, and military troops stood at attention as Bukele delivered an address focusing on one of his new themes -- that the education system of the past had failed and that the schools should focus on inculcating the values of Bukele's El Salvador.

The Presidential House event was then broadcast to the nation across all the channels:

Independence Day celebrations ended in the Historic Center of San Salvador. The Chinese-built National Library and the renovated National Palace are favorite backdrops for the government's spectacles. This year's Independence Day light show included both an elaborate drone show as well as fireworks exploding over the center of the city.

The government does not disclose how much all this spectacle costs. News reports over recent years have disclosed some information showing municipalities significantly increasing spending on fireworks and fiestas in such places as San Salvador, La Unión, and Metapan.

Also marching on September 15 were members of MOVIR, a grassroots organization supporting victims of unjust detentions under the State of Exception.

#MOVIR3Años
Este 15 de septiembre 2025 marchamos para expresar nuestra denuncia contra violaciones a derechos humanos y por mantener en prisión a mucha gente con cartas de libertad y con arraigos que comprueban su inocencia

Sin derechos humanos no hay patria pic.twitter.com/v4BhsRf0vQ
— Movimiento de Víctimas del Régimen, El Salvador (@MOVIRSV) September 15, 2025

This September 15, 2025, we march to express our denunciation of human rights violations and the continued imprisonment of many people with letters of freedom and with grounds that prove their innocence. Without human rights, there is no homeland.

Healthcare in El Salvador 2025

2025-09-14T20:22:00.001-05:00

The healthcare delivery system in El Salvador has three tiers, depending on how care is paid for. In the bottom tier is the public hospital system. This system, administered by the Ministry of Health, provides free or very low cost healthcare to Salvadorans of limited means who do not have employment in the formal economy. The middle tier is the social security hospital system (ISSS), which supports care for persons who work in the formal economy and who pay into the system along with their employers to receive healthcare and pension benefits from the government. The third tier is the private healthcare system. This is healthcare provided by private hospitals or doctors in private clinics whose charges are paid by the wealthy who can afford private health insurance.

The country’s national healthcare plan is deemed a national secret and is not available to the public. So we can only look at where the government is operating openly.

Hospital Rosales in San Salvador is the nation's tertiary care public hospital for those who cannot afford a private hospital and do not participate in the social security hospital system. Old and suffering from years of neglect, there has long been a need for a new hospital. Despite the fact that financing for a new public hospital was approved in 2018, before Nayib Bukele took office, work on a new hospital, or even selection of a contractor to build the hospital, only began in 2023.

It may soon be finished. According to an interview given last week by the Minister of Health:

The hospital is almost complete, or its infrastructure is finished, its equipment is already in place, it's already tested, and the medication is entering the delivery sites because the medication is already in the country.

He did not offer a specific date for its opening.

According to independent journalism site VozPublica, some 40 specialists have quit the Hospital Rosales staff in the leadup to the new hospital opening. Issues cited included doctors' transfers to other hospitals during the transition to the new facility and a fear of not being allowed to transfer back, as well as working conditions and compensation.

The process of closing the old Hospital Rosales down as the new hospital nears completion caused chaos outside the hospital last week according to La Prensa Grafica, which described hundreds of persons arriving for outpatient visits being told that their caregivers and hospital equipment had been transferred to other locations. The government was transporting some patients to other locations in its vehicles or giving people phone numbers to call to reschedule appointments at other locations.

President Nayib Bukele has been holding up the new Hospital Rosales as a symbol of promises to modernize and improve healthcare delivery in the country.

A related promise in 2019 by the president was construction of a new public hospital to the north of San Salvador in Nejapa. He did not lay the first stone at the site until June 2023. That hospital is still not open and a report from VozPublica details the significant cost overruns and delays in building of that facility.

According to the Minister of Health, the country now has 500 Intensive Care Unit beds, the vast majority in Hospital El Salvador, the former COVID-19 specialty hospital. That’s half of the 1000 ICU beds which Nayib Bukele claimed Hospital El Salvador would have in a June 2020 tweet. And because the press and independent sources are not allowed into Hospital El Salvador, the claim of 500 ICU beds or the staff for those beds cannot be verified.

The Legislative Assembly recently passed a new National Hospital Network Law. In the name of efficiency and modernization, the law creates a new agency to oversee the operation of hospitals in the country. No longer will hospitals fall under the Ministry of Health; instead, the executive board of the Network will report directly to the Office of the President, who will appoint its members. Assembly leaders denied any plan to combine the social security and public healthcare systems or to privatize healthcare in the country.

One of the ongoing challenges of the two government run healthcare systems, both public and ISSS, has been a shortage of specialists. There are estimates that between 250-300 medical professionals have quit the ISSS since 2023. The shortage of specialists in the ISSS system is leading to long delays in getting appointments for care. There have also been reports of widescale departures of specialists from the public healthcare system.

The government has closed down 50 Family "ECO" clinics across the country. These small primary care clinics were located in rural areas outside of the urban centers and were designed to bring basic primary care to underserved areas of the country. ECOs were an initiative started under the Mauricio Funes administration in 2010 to take a holistic approach to rural healthcare.

These cuts and other pressures in the system seem directly linked to government cutbacks in funding for the healthcare systems. The budget proposed by the Bukele government for 2025 included a $91 million reduction in funding for healthcare. The budget put in place salary freezes, not permitting health system workers to advance on the salary ladder known as the "escalafón." The budget included a hiring freeze and actually cut 3727 positions within government healthcare institutions. According to an analysis of the budget by La Prensa Grafica, the greatest number of cuts involve doctors and nurses.

In addition, the healthcare budget slashed the funding for the public hospitals in the country. The 31 public hospitals in the country saw a budget cut of $54 million, with the country's tertiary care public hospital, Hospital Rosales in San Salvador, seeing a cut of 10% in its funding.

For a personal encounter with the different tiers of the healthcare systems in El Salvador, Sergio Arauz of El Faro published a tragic account of his father’s final years going in and out of public and private hospitals titled Dying in the Hospitals of El Salvador. Arauz wrote, “This is the intimate story of a man condemned to die in pain amid the precariousness of El Salvador's public health system, where recovery depends on the patient's financial means, regardless of whether it's a common illness. It also tells the story of El Salvador Hospital, which operates in obscurity but is a light for anyone who manages to sneak into one of its beds. This is the story of my father's death."

Catching up

2025-09-08T10:13:00.001-05:00

Some of the leading stories from El Salvador over the last month.

The Foreign Agents Law is now in effect. This law requires organizations or individuals to register as "foreign agents" if they receive funds from abroad to finance activities in Salvadoran society. Organizations like human rights groups Cristosal and FESPAD and transparency and good governance group Citizen Action have confirmed receiving the "foreign agent" label. Absent being granted an exemption, all foreign agents must pay a 30% tax on funds received from abroad and must refrain from activities which the government believes disturb the social order. Cristosal has left the country, FESPAD is closing, and Citizen Action says it will attempt to continue operating despite the 30% tax.
Cristosal releases new report on corruption in prison system. Despite being labelled a foreign agent and moving its operations outside of El Salvador, Cristosal is still releasing important reports. In its most recent report titled Corruption Regime The Hidden Business of El Salvador’s Prison System, the group describes widespread corruption within the country's prison system where authorities take advantage of the vulnerability of prisoners and their families to solicit bribes for a family visit or to just to provide information about a prisoner's condition. Meanwhile, more than 100 days have passed since Cristosal advocate Ruth Lopez was arrested by the government and continues to be held in a Salvadoran prison.
The Education Ministry is now led by a military officer. Nayib Bukele appointed Karla Trigueros, a military doctor, to be the new Minister of Education. She immediately issued pronouncements requiring that school principals enforce uniform dress codes and student conduct rules. Haircuts need to conform to new guidelines, and students entering schools must give a courteous greeting to school staff at the entrance. Trigueros, who has no training or background in education, also instituted a system of demerits to be applied through "school courtesy" codes.
The State of Exception continues in force in El Salvador. It is no longer news each month when the Legislative Assembly votes again and again to extend the State of Exception which has been in place since March 2022. At this point, no one should expect the government to go back to providing due process to individuals they arrest. In addition, the Legislative Assembly voted in August to allow prosecutors an extra two years before they must bring persons accused of gang affiliation to trial. This means tens of thousands of those arrested during the State of Exception could languish in Salvadoran prisons for five years without even being convicted, or given a meaningful chance at pretrial release.
From exile, independent journalists at El Faro have published a new monthly edition for September which leads with detailed profiles of all 27 leaders of MS-13 who have been subject to indictments by the US in federal court in the US. What happens to them, and what they could testify to if they ever went to trial in the US, is the subject of geo-politics and deal-making between Trump and Bukele.
Republican US Senator Ted Cruz came to El Salvador, toured the CECOT prison, and lavished praise on Nayib Bukele, calling his actions in citizen security "truly extraordinary" and "amazing." The right-wing Republican indicated that Bukele remains a close ally of the US and Trump and the Salvadoran president's draconian policies should be a model for combatting crime and gangs. Cruz' press briefing
Fr. José María Tojeira, S.J. died suddenly last week. See my post here about this important Jesuit voice from the UCA who brought a human rights focus to current events in El Salvador.

***

Author's note: El Salvador Perspectives has been on a short hiatus as I figure out its role at the start of the third decade of writing about El Salvador. Much has changed from the time when blogs were new and only a few of us were writing about El Salvador. Technology has changed, assumptions about freedom of expression have changed, and alternative quality sources of information in English about El Salvador have emerged, in addition to the availability of accurate automatic translators of what is disseminated online in Spanish.

If you have comments about or suggestions about what you would like to see in the future from El Salvador Perspectives, please leave a comment to the online version of this post. (Comments will be read by me but not be published or made public).

Fr. José María Tojeira, S.J. (1947-2025)

2025-09-05T19:40:00.000-05:00

Sad news from El Salvador with the sudden death yesterday of Jesuit Father Jose Maria ("Chema") Tojeira. He died while on a trip in Guatemala City. Born in Spain, as a young Jesuit Tojeira came to Central America in 1969, first in Honduras, before coming to El Salvador during the civil war. He was a fellow Jesuit of those massacred at the UCA in 1989, and continued in El Salvador until the time of his death as an outspoken voice for social justice and human rights. Among other positions he served as rector of the UCA and later headed the University's human rights office.

“Fr. Chema witnessed to the courageous love illuminated through the Gospel—standing with the vulnerable, searching tirelessly for truth after the murders of the UCA martyrs, and cultivating communities rooted in the love of Christ and the inherent dignity of all,” said Christopher Kerr, executive director of the Ignatian Solidarity Network.

Here is a 2015 video profile of his life's work re-published today by the UCA.

And here he is in the last edition this week of a weekly YouTube video podcast called "The End of the Week" in which he would provide commentary on recent news from El Salvador.

Remittances surge in May

2025-07-04T17:53:00.002-05:00

Family remittances sent to El Salvador set a monthly record in May of almost $900 million. The flow of dollars into El Salvador from those living abroad during the first five months of the year was 16% higher than the same five month period in 2024, a very significant increase according to El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank.

Remittances are already one fourth of El Salvador's economy. The dollars earned abroad, overwhelmingly in the US, have lifted families out of poverty and are one of the chief engines of any economic growth in the country.

Economists interviewed in La Prensa Grafica pointed to Donald Trump's deportation policies as a main driver of the surge in remittances. Families are sending money out of the US into bank accounts in El Salvador out of fear of being deported and losing access to their assets in the US.

"If we look at the behavior of deposits in the financial system, they have grown enormously. The acceleration in remittance sending has occurred since this year, when President Trump took office and began implementing anti-immigration measures." Rommel Rodríguez, Economist

Perhaps another motivator was an anticipation of a tax on remittances in Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill." The version of the budget bill initially passed by the US House of Representatives contained a 3.5% tax on remittances sent by persons who were not US citizens or legal permanent residents. Salvadorans may have been advancing remittance payments prior to any tax coming into effect. In the final bill signed into law by Trump, the tax was reduced to 1%. Even at 1%, that tax will take $85 million out of the Salvadoran economy, if remittances were at the 2024 level of $8.5 billion.

Why this new tax on some of the poorest persons living in the US? The tax itself is part of the anti-immigrant MAGA agenda. The thought of the Republican sponsors is that there will be less incentive for economic migrants to come to the US if they have less after-tax money to send back to families at home.

Somewhat paradoxically, remittances from the US to Mexico actually declined in May by 5% compared to the surge in remittances to El Salvador and other Central American countries.

Trump's immigration policies heighten economic uncertainty from El Salvador. With a massive increase in funds just approved in the US Congress for apprehending and deporting undocumented immigrants, remittance flows may be negatively impacted just as thousands of uprooted deportees arrive back in the country.

News Digest

2025-06-28T11:25:00.004-05:00

Today we have a collection of links from the international press, covering topics from US deportations to E Salvador, to the hotel industry, to the State of Exception and MS-13.

Man wrongfully deported to El Salvador must be returned to US, court rules (The Guardian, June 24, 2025) -- An appeals court has ordered the Trump administration to return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador to the US and to explain how it is complying in a ruling apparently designed to break a pattern of apparent government defiance of judicial orders.

Trump administration says ICE could deport Abrego Garcia to country other than El Salvador if he's released from jail (CBS News, June 26, 2025) -- At a hearing in Maryland federal court on Thursday, Justice Department attorney Jonathan Guynn said that once Abrego Garcia is released from detention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement intends to begin removal proceedings to send him to a "third country," rather than El Salvador.

Kidnapped to Salvadoran Mega-Prison: Andry Hernández Romero’s Family on 100+ Days of Disappearance (Democracy Now, June 27, 2025) -- Over 100 days have passed since the Trump administration’s unprecedented removal of more than 230 immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT. They were removed without any due process in the United States. Democracy Now! spoke with the loved ones of Andry Hernández Romero, a 33-year-old gay makeup artist and asylum seeker who was told he would be sent home to Venezuela, according to his mother. But instead, he was sent to CECOT.

Trump’s migrant deportations to Central America run into legal hurdles (El Pais, June 27, 2025) -- The agreements reached by various Central American countries to receive migrants deported from the United States are running into new legal obstacles. In El Salvador, a letter signed by 12 U.N. experts and made public this week urgently calls on President Nayib Bukele to explain the legal and health status of 238 Venezuelans held since March 15 in his maximum-security prison, CECOT.

Peru is considering sending foreign prisoners to El Salvador (CNN, June 12, 2025) -- Peru is weighing sending what it considers highly dangerous foreign inmates to prisons in El Salvador, the prime minister said on Thursday, potentially following in the footsteps of US deportations of migrants to the Central American nation.

ElSalvador: Police Officers Speak Out About Abuses (Human Rights Watch, June 27, 2025) -- Interviews with police officers and internal police documents reveal abusive practices that have led to arbitrary detention and abuse of power in El Salvador.

El Salvador Police Say Quotas and Rumors Fueled Bukele’s Mass Arrests (NYT, June 27, 2025) -- Nearly a dozen officers from El Salvador’s national police described facing intense pressure to meet arrest quotas, according to a Human Rights Watch report released this week, as well as three officers from that group who spoke directly to The New York Times, and the leader of the country’s main group advocating for police officers.

At least 40 journalists have fled El Salvador, fearing imprisonment (Int’l Consortium of Investigative Journalists, June 25, 2025) -- The country’s press association said reporters have been forced to leave the Central American country amid the government’s crackdown on dissent.

Hyatt Hotels Cuts Hundreds of US Jobs in Favour of Workers in El Salvador Earning $400 a Month and AI (Int’l Business Times, June 27, 2025) -- Hundreds of US-based employees have been laid off by Hyatt Hotels in favor of artificial intelligence and lower-paid overseas workers. Hyatt's front-line call work will now be handled out of El Salvador and the Philippines. Workers in El Salvador are reportedly earning $400 a month for full time work.

Marriott signs City Express deal in El Salvador(Hotel Investment Today, June 25, 2025) -- Marriott International is partnering with a pair of El Salvador-based companies, Corporación Polaris and Cardedeu, to open four City Express by Marriott hotels in El Salvador, marking the brand’s debut in the country.

“Delay, Interfere, Undermine:” How El Salvador’s Government Impeded a U.S. Probe of MS-13 (ProPublica, June 12, 2025) -- New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a U.S. task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle. Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates.

Trump Admin Moves Quietly To Drop Charges Against MS-13 Leaders, Cites Other National Security Priorities (Latin Times, June 26, 2025) -- As he strengthens his relationship with El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, Trump is reportedly willing to drop charges to leaders of one of the most prominent international gangs that hails from the Central American country and has been linked to Bukele.

Bukele Gets Trump to Toss the Work of Vulcan, the Task Force that Pursued MS-13 (El Faro, June 24, 2025) -- The Donald Trump administration intends to secretly drop charges against leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13) accused of acts of terrorism, whom the U.S. president ordered to be prosecuted during his first term, and whose capture was the priority objective of the Joint Task Force Vulcan.

Salvadoran public continues to tell pollsters they approve of Bukele

2025-06-21T15:32:00.002-05:00

Two opinion polls released in June show president Nayib Bukele continuing to receive high approval ratings from large swaths of the Salvadoran public. A poll released by La Prensa Grafica, one of the country's major newspapers, reported that 85.2% of the public approve of Bukele's performance in office after six years in the presidency. A second poll released by the Institute of Public Opinion at the UCA reported that respondents gave him an average grade of 8.15 on a 0-10 scale for his presidency.

Bukele's ratings have ranged between 8.7 and 8.15 in the last 5 years of polls by the UCA.

These latest polls are consistent, and not surprising, in finding that respondents praise the improved public security situation as Bukele's greatest achievement, and point to economic issues as his biggest challenge.

The Legislative Assembly and local municipal governments, however, had approval ratings quite a bit below the ratings of Bukele, despite being controlled almost entirely by his political party.

One result in the IUDOP poll was striking. 58% of respondents said that it was somewhat or very likely that persons would suffer adverse consequences if they expressed criticisms of the government and the president in social or other media. 48.3% said such a person would be detained or jailed.

60% of respondents believe the State of Exception should continue to be in force, while 38% thought it was time to look for other measures.

Trump versus Salvadorans in the US

2025-06-19T21:36:00.001-05:00

Donald Trump has put in place his campaign promise of massive deportation of undocumented persons in the US. Those expulsions included 1600 Salvadorans in the month of May, and that number is on an upward trajectory. The number of Salvadorans living in the US is estimated at 1.4 million. Of these, 741,000 lack legal immigration status in the US according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.

Contrary to narratives coming out of Washington which paint the deportees as gangsters and criminals, several stories of Salvadorans sent back to the country of their birth provide a different reality.

This week Yessenia Ruano and her twin daughters arrived in El Salvador. Yessenia had found herself forced to self deport after living the last 14 years in the US. Her options for relief from the immigration court system had ended. Her young girls are both US citizens.

Yessenia had made a life for herself as a teacher's aide in a public school in the Milwaukee area. She told her story very publicly in the Midwestern city in the hopes of educating the public and perhaps earning a reprieve from immigration authorities. But ICE would soon make her status clear -- she would need to self deport, or face an involuntary removal courtesy of the US government.

She talked about the impact on her children:

Advocates in Milwaukee called for Yessenia to be able to remain:

“Quite frankly, if she doesn’t warrant it, I don’t know who does.” [immigration attorney Mark] Christopher said. Ruano did not have a criminal record. She crossed the southern border in 2011 to escape gang violence after local gang members murdered her brother. Christopher added that “she’s very involved in the community,” as a teacher’s aide for kindergarten teachers, owns her own house and pays taxes into a safety net system she is not eligible to access.

“I am extremely disappointed in ICE’s decision to deny an emergency stay for my constituent Yessenia Ruano,” U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement. “It is outright cruel to force a human trafficking victim to return to the place she was fleeing from.” Ruano was applying for a T-visa, which confers legal status on victims of human trafficking. “T-visas are meant for people like Yessenia, but sadly, she wasn’t even given the chance to have her case heard,” said Moore. “Yessenia is a wonderful person and her and [her] children’s removal from Milwaukee will be a loss to our community.”

Other public officials also called for her to be permitted to stay. The Milwaukee County Board held 14 minutes of silence for Yessenia's 14 years living in the US. But Trump's immigration apparatus was unmoved.

When I spoke to Yessenia as she prepared to board a flight to El Salvador, she was already planning next steps. Fluent in English, she thought perhaps she could find a job teaching that language in a Salvadoran school, while she kept her dreams alive of some day returning to the US.

ICE also cut short the dreams of two Salvadoran teenage boys described in this CBS News story:

Brothers Jose and Josue Trejo Lopez were born in El Salvador, but they hardly know the country and have no family there. Their mother brought them to the U.S. nine years ago in an effort to escape gang violence.

Asylum was repeatedly denied, but during appeals to legalize their status, the brothers went to U.S. schools, earned diplomas and had dreams of careers as mechanics.

Earlier this year, their mother took them to a routine ICE check-in appointment, where the brothers said they were shackled and detained.

Now the boys are back in El Salvador, a country they barely remember, without any support system, after being quickly flown out of the US courtesy of ICE Air.

The most recent statistics from the Salvadoran migration ministry (DGME) document that almost 3800 persons were deported to El Salvador on ICE flights in January through March 2025, compared to 2800 persons during the same time period in 2024. The quantity of persons deported from the US to El Salvador so far in 2025 is comparable to the numbers seen during 2019 during the first Trump administration before the COVID-19 pandemic, but lower than removals during the Obama administration.

According to Tom Cartwright, who tracks deportation flights from the US, seventeen flights landed at El Salvador's international airport with their human cargo during the month of May 2025, carrying an estimated 1600 Salvadorans. This was an increase of 65% over the average number of ICE Air flights touching down in El Salvador in the prior six months.

Deportees in current months are more likely than ever before to be persons who were seized in the interior of the US after living for years or even decades without legal status like Yessenia or the Trejo Lopez brothers.

Another Salvadoran facing deportation after making a life for decades in the US is photo journalist Mario Guevara. CNN tells his story in the article Salvadoran journalist arrested while streaming a ‘No Kings’ protest could face deportation:

A Salvadoran journalist who built a big social media following by documenting immigration raids may be facing deportation.

Mario Guevara, who was arrested during a “No Kings” protest near Atlanta last Saturday, was transferred to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody early Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for ICE in Atlanta confirmed to CNN.

Although a state judge had granted him release without bail, ICE authorities requested that he remain detained due to his immigration status.

Guevara had tens of thousands of followers at his site MG News, where he would live stream immigration raids as they happened in the Atlanta area. Apparently this did not endear him to ICE which issued an immigration detainer to take him into their custody, after a state court decided a journalist should not be jailed while awaiting charges that he had violated police orders while documenting a protest.

Before arriving in the US, Guevara had been a photojournalist for La Prensa Grafica according to that paper:

Guevara fled El Salvador with his family in 2004, claiming he was repeatedly beaten and harassed because of his work as a photojournalist for the newspaper La Prensa Gráfica. They emigrated to Georgia.

For these immigrants, and thousands of others returned to El Salvador by the US, El Salvador's migration ministry describes the following aspects of its Bienvenido a Casa (Welcome Home) program:

During the reception process for returning Salvadorans, the following services are provided: Transportation to transportation terminals for transportation to their places of origin or residence. Medical and psychological care. Refreshments. National and international phone calls. Payment of domestic travel costs. Basic hygiene supplies. Wi-Fi for wireless devices. Other services determined according to the needs of returning Salvadorans.

Traditional news organizations like La Prensa Grafica or El Diario de Hoy regularly cover Trump's implementation of his plans for mass deportation. The Salvadoran government's newspaper, Diario El Salvador, however, does not cover the detention and removal of Salvadorans from the US, apparently as part of that government's close alliance with Trump.

El Salvador is receiving many hundreds of deported persons every month, and there is a substantial pipeline of many thousands more who will probably be deported under Trump's mass deportation regime. This means that El Salvador's economy not only needs to grow to provide jobs for all those who are currently unemployed or underemployed, but also to provide for all the deportees of working age arriving back in the country. In addition, deportees may be in need of protection from the forces that may have caused them to flee, housing, trauma-counselling and more.

It is a substantial burden for a country that has many other challenges to face.

Bukele arrests another of his critics

2025-06-08T21:50:00.006-05:00

Nayib Bukele has just had another of his critics arrested. The government of El Salvador Saturday detained prominent attorney Enrique Anaya. The constitutional lawyer frequently spoke in public and wrote on social media, about the constitution and the rule of law in El Salvador. He has been an outspoken critic of Nayib Bukele's capture of the judicial system in El Salvador and violations of the constitution. Anaya is purportedly being charged with money laundering, and his detention follows closely on the heels of the imprisonment of another prominent legal critic of Bukele, Ruth López.

In the week before his arrest, Anaya had been vocal critic of Bukele. On June 3 Anaya was on Frente a Frente, a television interview show in El Salvador, saying Bukele was a dictator who had removed "the mask," adding "he is what he is."

"Here, whoever speaks, whoever criticizes, whoever does not kneel before the idol, gets imprisoned. Of course, I am afraid," Anaya said.

That fear is well-justified. This past Wednesday Ruth López faced her initial hearing. Despite the fact that there was no reason not to allow her to remain outside prison while the case against her proceeded, a court in Bukele's justice system ordered López to be held in a Salvadoran prison during an initial six month investigative phase in her criminal case.

Anaya was sharply critical of the arrest and treatment of López. Seeing how she was treated when guards brought her to court he tweeted:

The day before his arrest, Anaya shamed the government for applying the measures of the State of Exception to Lopez and other recently arrested activists. He tweeted:

In 2024, Anaya was one of the lawyers who presented a petition to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in El Salvador that it declare Nayib Bukele's candidacy for a second period as president to be unconstitutional since it violated a ban on president's serving successive five year terms.

The Salvadoran Attorney General's office tweeted out this photo of Anaya's arrest with the statement that he would be charged with money laundering in the coming days:

Following Anaya's arrest, the human rights group Cristosal, issued this statement :

Ongoing Detention of Critical Voices: Cristosal Raises Alarm Over the Arrest of Lawyer Enrique Anaya
San Salvador, June 7, 2025. Today, constitutional lawyer Salvador Enrique Anaya Barraza was arrested. His detention occurs amid a growing pattern of criminalization against those who have spoken out about the deterioration of the rule of law in El Salvador.
Recently, Anaya denounced irregularities in the detention of our colleague, lawyer Ruth Lopez, as well as in the judicial decision to hold her in pretrial detention. He publicly highlighted violations of basic rights such as the right to defense, access to information, and due process guarantees. Enrique Anaya has been a key figure in defending democratic institutions and constitutional order. Drawing on his legal expertise, he has filed lawsuits before national and international bodies, challenging laws passed by the current Legislative Assembly and rulings that violate fundamental principles. Through articles, interviews, and public forums, he has been a critical voice against authoritarianism and the concentration of power.
Anaya's arrest cannot be separated from this context of retaliation against those who exercise their right to speak out, criticize, and defend legality based on the Constitution.
We demand that Salvadoran authorities act in accordance with the Constitution and international treaties, and fully guarantee the rights and due process protections of Enrique Anaya. We also alert the international community to this troubling escalation of attacks, arbitrary detentions, and criminalization of critical, independent, and organized voices who continue to defend legality, human rights, and democracy in El Salvador.

As of mid-day on Sunday, June 8, Anaya's lawyer reported to the press that he had been unable to learn where Enrique Anaya was being held, was not able to speak with him, and that Anaya needed to receive medication for a chronic medical condition. He also reported that police had raided four properties owned by Anaya last night without finding any evidence of illegality.

Other things you should be reading:

‘They are pushing us out’: how El Salvador turned to gang violence laws to seize land from the poor (The Guardian)

A lawyer’s prolonged detention shows how El Salvador’s gang emergency extends to common crimes (AP)

‘We are under a dictatorship.’ Six years into his rule, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele tightens his grip (CNN)

‘We know what’s coming: exile or prison’ – El Faro’s Óscar Martínez on surviving Bukele’s crackdown

Jury in El Salvador Convicts 3 Ex-Officers in 1982 Killings of Dutch Journalists (NYT)

Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador are entitled to due process, judge rules (ABC)

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, wrongly deported to El Salvador, is back in the U.S. to face smuggling charges (NPR)

Bukele warns of sinister globalist forces to be fought with new Foreign Agents Law

2025-06-03T21:38:00.001-05:00

On June 1, Nayib Bukele delivered a speech to the nation from the National Theater in San Salvador, on the first anniversary of commencing his unconstitutional second term as president. In a large portion of his address, Bukele described sinister globalist forces who want to thwart his project and return El Salvador to a time of gang-controlled misery.

Early in the speech he stated:

They gave us studies, grand projects on how to save us, but deep down, they never believed it was possible, and that's why their solutions were never designed to work. El Salvador was controlled by people with no intention of helping us. Six years ago, we merely began to reclaim our country. Today, El Salvador no longer belongs to foreign actors or their local puppets. Today, El Salvador belongs to the Salvadoran people.

Bukele declared that he would never give in to calls by human rights organizations or international media to lift the State of Exception:

Me, personally, they have called me a dictator in every media outlet they could and wanted to, from Salvadoran periodicals to the most prestigious international publications. You know what? I don't care if they call me a dictator. I prefer them to call me a dictator than to see Salvadorans killed in the streets. I prefer these moments when I pick up my cell phone and see "dictator, dictator, dictator, dictator" in the news and not see "murder, murder, murder, murder, murder." I prefer them to call me a dictator, but for Salvadorans to finally be able to live in peace.

You can get an English language translation of the text of Bukele's address here.

Against the influence of these outside actors, Bukele celebrated in his speech the passage of a new Foreign Agents Law. This new law was quickly adopted after Bukele shut down with riot police a peaceful march of campesinos approaching the exclusive neighborhood where he has his residence. After the protest, Bukele announced on X:

Yesterday, we witnessed how humble people were manipulated by self-proclaimed leftist groups and globalist NGOs, whose only real objective is to attack the government ...

Therefore, and given the apparent worry of these NGOs, I have decided to send the Foreign Agents Bill to the Legislative Assembly, which will include a 30% tax on all donations these NGOs receive.

El Salvador's Legislative Assembly, where the Nuevas Ideas party holds a 57-3 seat majority, saluted their leader and approved the Foreign Agents Law on May 20. The law was fast-tracked by suspending the rules of the legislature and by-passing any committee process.

The stated purpose of the law is to promote transparency and protect national sovereignty by regulating individuals and entities that receive foreign funding for activities conducted within El Salvador. All who, in the view of a newly-created government registrar ("RAEX"), act in the interest of a foreign entity or receive foreign funding to operate in El Salvador, are required to register under the new law. This explicitly includes non-profit organizations and associations, commonly known as NGOs, but extends to any person or legal entity. The "foreign principals" themselves are also subject to the law's provisions.

Every payment made from abroad to such groups, whether in cash, goods or services, will be subject to a 30 percent excise tax, collected by financial institutions. The final law passed does not specify how the money from the tax will be used.

A copy of the full law is here.

There is little doubt who Bukele wants to target with this law initially. He is aiming at human rights groups like Cristosal which investigate and publish reports and provide legal representation for victims of Bukele's regime and his disregard of constitutional and human rights standards. Bukele is targeting independent journalism sites like El Faro, Revista Factum and GatoEncerrado, which expose corruption and publish investigations of the government's secret pacts with gangs. These NGOs and periodicals receive international funding from donors and grant-makers, who support human rights globally and who believe that having a vigorous free press is important for preserving citizen rights in a country.

The vague and broad definition of a “foreign agent” in the law can cover not only human rights organizations, and independent media outlets, but it can also reach community development associations, religious entities, and international aid agencies. Bukele says that groups that are truly coming into the country to provide humanitarian or other aid will be exempted from the law's financial requirements, but they will not be allowed to engage in political activity, or "disturb the social order." In other words, stay friendly to the Bukele regime if you want to be exempt.

Bukele said in his speech to the nation:

All cooperation that comes for social projects from friendly countries or organizations will be tax-free. But there are foreign organizations that claim to come to help and really come to do politics, to move millions for political campaigns, to operate in the dark without rules, without limits, without paying anything. No one elected them in democratic elections, since we're talking about democracy, not even in second-degree elections, but they feel they have the right to influence the country's decisions with money, with total impunity.
The supposed human rights organizations defend murderers who once massacred our people. The traditional media deploy activists disguised as journalists to spread lies, and they call that freedom of the press. Foreign congressmen come knocking on prison doors demanding we release criminals.

Bukele's justification, centered on national sovereignty, contrasts sharply with the widespread criticism that the law is primarily designed to stifle dissent and exert control over civil society. The broad and vaguely defined terms, such as activities threatening "national security" or "social stability," combined with the substantial 30% tax and the discretionary powers vested in the registrar, provide the government with considerable leverage to target organizations it perceives as critical or problematic. This pattern has been observed in other nations where similar laws have been utilized to curtail civic space.

The law has been met with fierce criticism and labeled as a "gag law" and an "authoritarian tool for censorship" designed to weaken civic space and target government critics. Analysts point at the ambiguous criteria for exclusions and the extensive powers granted to the executive branch through RAEX. Gina Romero, the UN special rapporteur for Freedom of Assembly and of Association, warned:

Labeling those who receive legitimate funding as "foreign agents" stigmatizes, silences, and weakens the country's civic fabric. It is not compatible with a democratic society.
The right to freedom of association includes the right to access national and international resources. This also applies to unregistered organizations.

Civil society organizations and NGOs have expressed grave concerns, estimating that as many as 8,000 NGOs could be adversely affected. Al Jazeera gathered reactions from a variety of critics of the law within El Salvador:

Opposition legislator Claudia Ortiz called the law “an authoritarian tool for censorship“ and said it hands the president excessive levels of control. “It’s obvious that exemptions will only be given to groups that align with the government, while those who expose corruption or abuse will be punished,” she said.

Lawyer Roxana Cardona of the NGO Justicia Social y Controlaría Ciudadana said: “The Foreign Agents Law seeks to suppress organisations that promote civic participation or support marginalised groups the state ignores.”

Eduardo Escobar, director of Acción Ciudadana, added: “This is part of the government’s increasing repression. It affects constitutional rights like freedom of expression and freedom of association.”

Lawyer and analyst Bessy Ríos said: “The goal is to control the funding of civil society, especially organisations critical of the government.”

Four news stories from last week in El Salvador

2025-05-28T21:11:00.000-05:00

I tried but failed to come up with a good thread to weave these stories from the past week together.

Waves. Since last weekend "marea viva" (high tides or king tides) and strong and fast waves have pounded parts of El Salvador's Pacific coast. Beaches in the department of La Libertad, particularly El Majahual, were heavily affected, with waves reportedly reaching heights of two to two and a half meters. The powerful waves led to damage to coastal businesses, with reports of tables and chairs being washed away. Videos shared on social media showed some of the chaos created by the big waves. Around May 25th, at least 50 people sustained injuries at El Majahual due to the strong wave action. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) and Protección Civil issued warnings and advisories, urging the public to exercise caution, and avoid entering the sea during high tides. Access to El Majahual beach was restricted following these incidents.

Schools. President Nayib Bukele announced that his government would be renovating two schools per day. Bukele blames the deplorable infrastructure of many of El Salvador’s 5150 public schools on prior administrations in power, despite the fact that his government has had six years to make any improvements. One might doubt his latest promises since in September 2022, Bukele announced the launch of the "My New School" program which would build 1000 new or remodeled public schools per year. The reality has been far different. According to an investigation by EDH, only 32 of the promised 1000 had been upgraded by August 2023. (Each one with great fanfare and photo ops). In October 2024, a government report stated that between 2020 and 2024, the Government carried out “partial or comprehensive improvements” in 424 schools and formulated designs for the improvement of 158 additional educational centers. Meanwhile the government cut $34.7 million from education in the current budget.

Wages. The government has announced a 12% increase in minimum wages and a 25%increase in the agricultural sector. The new monthly wage levels will be:

The minimum wages were last raised in 2021.

Defenders. Government prosecutors have not come out in public or in court to present the charges against the human rights defenders they have imprisoned. Ten days have passed since prominent human rights and anti-corruption lawyer Ruth Lopez was arrested in the middle of the night. Authorities have not brought her in front of a judge or presented the official charges against her. More than 15 days have passed since the arrest of Alejandro Henríquez, a lawyer for the El Bosque Cooperative, and José Ángel Pérez, president of the community and pastor of the Elim Church. Legal and human rights experts are decrying the delays as violations of due process under Salvadoran law and a type of forced disappearance.