Bukele defies criticism by announcing that he will continue to take control of El Salvador's institutions until "everyone leaves."

A protest against the decisions of Nayib Bukele, in San Salvador, on May 3. José Cabezas / Reuters

Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, has not shaken his pulse. To all the national and international critics who accuse him of building a dictatorship and ending the division of powers after his decision to dismiss the attorney general and replace the judges of the Constitutional Court, he has responded with a video of the messianic court accompanied by the phrase "we are building a new story." In it, a

voiceover

celebrates the emergence of a new "truly free and sovereign" country and summarizes its controversial decision as "a turning point between the old and the new."

What Bukele considers "old" are the institutions that he decided to take over on Saturday shortly after his deputies took office, thus aggravating one of the deepest crises in the recent history of the Central American country.

To all the criticisms, Bukele responded by wrapping himself in the banner of the "people" and announced that he would continue with the replacement of officials.

“The people did not send us to negotiate.

They go.

Everyone, ”he wrote this Monday without specifying which officials are still in the crosshairs of parliament, where his party controls 61 of the 84 seats.

Although the published video has served to give arguments to its followers to talk about a new era, it has not managed to stop international pressure and the cataract of criticism from foreign governments, Human Rights organizations, the United Nations (UN) or the Organization of American States (OAS) in the face of what they consider to be a worrying decision that does not meet even the most minimal aesthetic requirements. Not an hour had passed since the deputies of his party, New Ideas, took office on Saturday - the result of the February elections that he won by an overwhelming majority - and the judges who one day stood up to him were already out of office. .

From Brussels, the last to join the criticism, Josep Borrell, in charge of foreign policy of the European Union, said he was "concerned" about the operation of the rule of law and the separation of powers as well as "the legal and physical security of the magistrates ”. From the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris defended the importance of "an independent judiciary for a healthy democracy and a strong economy," she wrote on Twitter.

In the same vein, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, spoke with Bukele to express his "serious concerns" and Juan González, Joe Biden's envoy for Latin America, summed up the sentiment of the international community in four words: it does". The chain of reproaches was joined by the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges, Diego García-Sayán, who condemned Bukele's attempts "to dismantle and weaken judicial independence." From Human Rights Watch or the OAS, Santiago Cantón, head of the delegation that covered El Salvador, criticized Bukele "for continuing to deteriorate the fragile Salvadoran democracy."

To all of them, the telegenic Central American president, responded by compulsively tweeting during the weekend and even engaged in a surreal exchange of reproaches with the opposition leader of Venezuela, Julio Borges, Juan Guaidó's right hand man, who wrote: “There are no dictatorships. right or left: there is a dictatorship. There are no good or bad dictatorships: there is a dictatorship ”, wrote Borges. Bukele did not like the mention, paradoxically advised by publicists close to Guaidó, who responded: “If you want to come to power to leave Maduro's prosecutor and Maduro's court, better tell the people the truth. Tell them that supporting you is the same as supporting Maduro. In El Salvador, it took us 30 years to free ourselves from the regime. We are not going back now ”.

According to Bukele, his government is immersed in what he calls “cleaning the house” and that entailed the removal, with the support of Congress, of a group of Supreme Court judges and the attorney general, setting off alarms about concentration attempts of power. The dismissals are the latest response to a long list of grievances against opposing magistrates and deputies using their absolute majority. Everything indicates that Bukele will continue to apply the roller and in the coming days, the heads of the Office of the Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal and the Court of Accounts will suffer a similar fate.

In February of last year, the Salvadoran president already tried to take over the Legislative Assembly accompanied by the Army when opposition deputies stopped a new loan destined to the fight against gangs. On this occasion the president has taken over the Judicial Branch from the dismantling of the Constitutional Chamber. The Salvadoran system has control and accountability mechanisms and during the two years that Bukele has been in power, it had become an institution that had effectively controlled the excesses of the president during the pandemic and was hateful for the president.

The role of the new attorney general in the Bukele government did not take long to emerge: Rodolfo Delgado questioned the continuity of the work of the OAS Commission against Impunity in El Salvador and announced that he will review the existing agreement with this body, one of the the few organizations that so far work freely and independently in the Bukele era and that had identified 12 cases of possible corruption in their Government.

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