The Other Americans: El Salvador's Power Grab

[Judi Lynn]

Tensions between the United States and the Bukele administration grow as the Salvadoran congress continues to give the country’s president more power.

BY JEFF ABBOTT JUNE 14, 2021 8:44 AM

There is growing tension between the administration of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and the United States following what the Biden Administration and human rights advocates have called a power grab.

Bukele’s newly elected allies in the Salvadoran congress took further steps to concentrate power into the hands of the country’s young president. In the legislative body’s first session on May 1, the newly elected members of Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party voted to remove the five members of the country’s highest court as well as the country’s attorney general.

“It was practically a coup against the democratic institution,” Saul Baños, the director of Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho, tells The Progressive. “There have been a series of acts that we consider to be unconstitutional. Now here in the country there is a consolidation of power that breaks with the democratic and republican regime. As of today, we do not have a check on powers.”

The purge of the justices follows the February 28, 2019, municipal and congressional elections in which President Bukele’s party won by a landslide, gaining fifty-five of the eighty-four seats in the country’s congress. Another allied party, GANA, gained one seat, giving the young president a solid majority in the congress. The traditional left and right parties of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Nationalist Republican Alliance won four and fourteen seats, respectively.

More:
https://progressive.org/latest/el-salvador-power-grab-abbott-210614/