The country of the permanent state of emergency – Belén Fernández

On March 26, El Salvador recorded 62 murders, the highest number of deaths in a day since the bloody civil war ended in 1992. The cause of the wave of murders was attributed to the conflict between the two gangs fighting each other. the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18.

At the end of the day, President Nayib Bukele wrote a post on Twitter – his favorite platform for official communications – in which he invited Salvadoran parliamentarians to approve the “state of emergency”. The deputies diligently carried out the request at dawn on March 27.

Scheduled for thirty days with the possibility of an extension, the state of emergency entails the formal suspension of any residual civil liberty in a country where the president calls himself the “coolest dictator” in the world and sports a baseball cap with the visor backwards. The new status removes the right to association and legal defense, bringing the permissible detention period from 72 hours to 15 days and allowing the government to read private correspondence without needing a court order. On the other hand, for some time now the authorities have not carried out espionage activities without asking permission from a court.

In a worrying flurry of events, El Salvador’s parliament passed a law on April 5 to “punish anyone who shares gang information with a sentence of up to 15 years in prison,” the New York Times wrote. According to opponents, the new law is “so vague that anyone could be arrested on suspicion of writing or talking about gangs. In this way, journalists find themselves in the crosshairs ”.

Presidential crusade
Bukele presented the latest crackdown on rights as a necessary and noble component of his #GuerraContraPandillas, the battle against gangs that regularly serves as a distraction to distract attention from the country’s other crises, starting with erosion. rights. In his Twitter crusade, Bukele attacked international human rights organizations that dared to criticize the Salvadoran authorities’ behavior and insinuated that “the international community” is complicit in “terrorism” because he expressed his concern over the treatment reserved for individuals suspected of being part of criminal gangs.

On March 31, Bukele wrote again on Twitter, explaining that by March 27 the food rations in the country’s prisons had been reduced and that sixteen thousand inmates “had not left their cells or seen the light of the sun”. He added that three thousand other alleged criminals had been arrested. “We won’t stop,” he said she. “The space in prisons will be less and less and we will have to further ration the food”. Not exactly “cool” behavior.

Among other things, the Bukele administration has collaborated several times with the “terrorists”, as confirmed by investigations by the Salvadoran newspaper El Faro and the US Treasury Department. The New York Times stresses that according to the US treasury, the Salvadoran government has “granted the gangs financial incentives and preferential treatment for prison leaders, starting with access to cell phones and prostitutes”. In exchange, the authorities would have obtained from the criminals a commitment to reduce the number of murders and to favor the candidates of Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas. As if the megalomaniac right-wing machinations were truly a “new idea”, in El Salvador as in any other country.

Evidently an accusation of this magnitude by the United States is no small matter, also because it comes from the superpower that in the twelve years of the Salvadoran civil war has constantly supported the massacres carried out by the forces of the right. During the war 75,000 people were killed and an unknown number of Salvadorans fled to Los Angeles, California, in a hostile environment that favored the birth of Salvadoran gangs.

When the civil war officially ended, US authorities began deporting gang members (who had radicalized in prison) to El Salvador. In the Central American country, the subsequent proliferation of criminal organizations highlighted the reality of a society devastated by neoliberal policies, while the various governments that succeeded one another showed that they were more interested in exploiting the threat of gangs than in solving the problems of an impoverished population. In other words, the state of emergency has been in place for decades.

Today, thirty years after the end of the civil war, the confrontation is more violent than ever. Meanwhile, Bukele continues to foster socio-economic injustice by trying to turn the country into a corrupt dystopia designed to attract foreign investors (as evidenced by the choice to focus on cryptocurrencies). According to the president’s narrative, the murder rate had remained relatively low (as of 2019) not due to the deal with Ms-13 and Barrio 18 but thanks to his “plan for territorial control”, the details of which are conveniently kept. secrets and which in practice constitutes the militarized pillar of the #GuerraContraPandillas.

The brightest Salvadoran commentators think the sudden spike in late March murders is the result of a setback in the negotiation between the government and the gangs, which may have prompted criminal organizations to once again impose their power in a country that it has long been at the top of the world murder chart. Speaking of the will to assert one’s power, it is worth remembering that the Bukele Territorial Control Plan was enforced through questionable tactics, such as sending heavily armed soldiers and police officers into the Salvadoran parliament and threatens to dissolve the legislative assembly if the deputies did not allocate the funds required by the plan.

All of this was happening in February 2020, a month before the covid-19 pandemic offered Bukele the opportunity to introduce a state of emergency for the first time, with a lockdown particularly rigid that has left many people already in great difficulty in a condition of extreme poverty. After a spike in killings, in April 2020, the president posted a “decree” on Twitter authorizing the army and police to kill alleged gang members “to defend the lives of Salvadorans.” At least a bizarre claim, considering that Bukele himself starved and punished the population in every way.

In any case, the response to the pandemic was an extraordinary success, as confirmed by a Bloomberg article published in May 2020: “The police have been given ample liberties. Officers enter the house without a warrant and arrest people suspected of violating the quarantine. A woman who went shopping for Mother’s Day was mistaken by the security forces for a gang member, and was killed. ”

A year later, in May 2021, Bukele ordered the dismissal of five supreme court judges and the minister of justice. Evidently the president is not joking at all when he calls himself a “dictator”.

Today, judging by Bukele’s activity on Twitter, it seems that Salvadoran security forces have once again received the green light to attack alleged gang members without limit, assuming they ever needed them. In 2018, CNN had told the story of the “elite paramilitary police officers” accused of carrying out illegal executions with the support (surprise!) Of the United States.

On March 27, 2022, the day the state of emergency went into effect, Bukele announced on Twitter that various daily activities in some neighborhoods would be temporarily suspended, but promised that in most of the country religious ceremonies, sporting events, shopping and educational activities would not have undergone any alteration, “except for the exponents of the gangs and for people considered suspicious”. A clear warning for anyone wanting to go out shopping for Mother’s Day.

While complaining on Twitter that no other country “wants to help us in the war against gangs,” Bukele has garnered the support of figures like Mexican billionaire Bitcoin fanatic and one of the richest men on the planet, who on Twitter he praised the state of emergency wanted by the president of El Salvador: “This is what it means to have balls”.

After the Oscars ceremony, the Salvadoran head of state bothered to tweet: “Salvadoran soldier> Will Smith”, possibly referring to the military’s abilities when it comes to indulging in moralistic violence in an attempt to prove that “they have the balls. “.

This is life in the coolest dictatorship on the planet: a permanent state of emergency, in every sense.

(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)