El Salvador one step away from a failed state

Between the violence of the gangs and the authoritarianism of the President, El Salvador seems to be one step away from becoming a failed state writes analyst Rodrigo Noriega in La Prensa

After at least 87 murders between last Friday the 25th and Sunday the 27th of March, and with the suspension of constitutional guarantees for 30 extendable days, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is facing the worst crisis of his mandate, with the only advantage that in his country the political opposition is already invisible.

The wave of murders that terrified El Salvador began with the actions of contract killers in urban and rural areas of the country, on Friday the 25. Unlike other occasions, the wave of murders was aimed at killing farmers, masons, students, office workers, bakers, and even civil police.

These victims had in common that they lacked a police record or known connection to crime. According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the message was very direct against the Bukele government.

Broken truce
Jeannette Aguilar, an expert on security issues, told La Prensa Gráfica, that the initiatives of the Bukele government had not worked. Other specialists interviewed by the local media agreed that the truce between the Salvadoran government and the gangs had been broken.

On Sunday, March 27, the Legislative Assembly overwhelmingly approved, with the votes of President Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party and almost all of the small Salvadoran opposition, a legislative decree to suspend four constitutional guarantees: freedom of association, the right to defense, the prohibition to intervene in the mail and telecommunications, and the limitation of administrative arrests to 72 hours, allowing them to be extended up to 15 days.

As a reaction to what was decided by the Legislative Assembly, and to deal with the more than 1,400 arrests made, on Monday, March 28, the Salvadoran Supreme Court of Justice appointed 10 judges to deal with the cases of the new detainees.

This set of actions and the authoritarianism with which President Bukele responded to the situation led the international community to harshly criticize these actions. The former executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Paulo Abrao wrote on his social networks: “Criminal populism: Illegalities to confront illegalities. Barbaries to face barbarities. Final Result: + cycle of violence for all”.

President Bukele responded on his own social networks: “You at the OAS and the IACHR were the ones who sponsored the ‘Truce’ that only strengthened the gangs and allowed them to accumulate resources, money, weapons and allowed to train in the army firing ranges to kill Salvadorans. Take your pestilence from our country.” The president’s statement blamed the international community for an essential component of his own government strategy: the secret negotiation with the gangs.

In December 2021, the US Treasury Department sanctioned two high-ranking officials of the Bukele government for their negotiations with the criminal organizations that have plagued El Salvador.

Little Angels
On the battlefield of Salvadoran social networks, it seems that at least President Bukele is winning. One of his most-read comments, according to Salvadoran media, was: “TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: We have 70,000 gang members still on the streets. Come get them, take them back to their countries, get them out of this ‘dictatorial and authoritarian persecution’. You can help these little angels, do not allow us to continue violating your rights.

In another thread of trills, the president explained to the gangs: “We have 16,000 homeboys [gang members] in our power, apart from the thousand arrested these days […] We seized everything from them, even their sleeping mats, we also rationed their food and now they will no longer see the sun”.

In the whole of February  El Salvador, a country of 6.5 million inhabitants, registered 79 murders. While in a single weekend,  in March 87 homicides were confirmed. This was not the first wave of assassinations in the Bukele government. On a weekend in November 2021, 46 were recorded in 3 days. While in April 2020 a wave of dozens of deaths also occurred.

According to analysts interviewed by  Salvadoran media, all the waves coincide with ruptures in the truce between the government and the gangs, usually caused by pressure from the gangs to obtain prison benefits in their judicial processes.

On the  portal insightcrime.org, the Analyst Tiziano Breda, from the International Crisis Group, explained: “The gangs use their ability to alter the rates of violence to pressure the government to meet certain demands.”

Other analysts quoted by the portal point out that the peculiarity of this case is that last weekend’s massacre may have been the result of a movement of “low-level” gang members, who demand that the benefits granted to the gangs by the prison system and the Salvadoran courts are not only for high-ranking gang members but also for street soldiers.

Incomplete task
The Salvadoran media reports that since 2012 secret negotiations have been taking place between the different governments in power and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio 18. This was the result of a decade of “Mano Dura” and “Super Mano Dura” policies. ”, which pitted the Salvadoran police against the maras, militarized the fight against organized crime, and filled Salvadoran prisons with gang members with no future. In 2009, El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world: 71.16 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.

For practical purposes, President Bukele has control of all public powers. With the justification of the wave of deaths, the Salvadoran people have given their vote of confidence to the president’s populism and punitiveness. The political opposition ceased to exist after three mediocre governments mired in corruption cases leaving high rates of violence. Bukele’s main electoral promise was to end the violence.

Bukele’s arrival in power in 2019 represented a mixture of hope and political fantasy about the rescue of the State and Salvadoran development. Some analysts pointed out that Bukele’s emblematic “Territorial Control Plan”, intended to take territorial control from the gangs, were words left in the wind.

A part of the nations of Latin America is in the condition of “captured states”. These are countries in which a segment of the business elite, along with a political caste and organized crime networks, control important public institutions and decide the fate of state action on strategic issues. From there to the “Status Failed” condition there is only one step. That is the battle that El Salvador is currently experiencing and it is the disease that Panama must avoid by cleaning up the judicial system, improving the presence of the State throughout the country’s territory and fighting impunity at all levels.