The following is a transcript of episode 28 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
EL BOSQUE: Friends, we are here. The Military Police and the Police Unit for Maintaining Order have arrived to violate the families of the El Bosque cooperative. We leave evidence that the police of Nayib Bukele represses the people who peacefully demonstrate.
GRESSIER, HOST: Late Monday night, members of the El Bosque community, a group fighting off eviction from their homes in El Salvador, traveled to de-facto president Nayib Bukele’s personal residence to call on him to stop the removals. He responded by sending out the Military Police and National Civil Police to dispel the cooperative, and one of their legal advisors was arrested, in the newest escalation of repression against public demonstrations in El Salvador.
After the Military Police beat back the crowd at his residence, Bukele responded Tuesday evening by asserting that the El Bosque community had been shuttled to his home to destabilize his government. “We understand the difficult situation of these 300 families and are willing to find a real solution,” he claimed, while also accusing them of “making the most noise” while unjustly financing their land with others’ taxes.
He sidestepped the fact that the Salvadoran Police had arrested environmentalist Alejandro Henríquez of the Forum for Water, an attorney for El Bosque. Amnesty International issued an alert on Tuesday afternoon. In a statement denouncing the arrest, Amnesty wrote that “the state repressed them, for the first time, using the Military Police — a force without powers to engage in tasks of public order and security.”
In the early afternoon, 18 Salvadoran civil society organizations also condemned the repression against El Bosque. This is the second time that activists accompanying communities fighting eviction are arrested under the state of exception: As we reported in episode 19, Fidel Zavala, spokesperson for the Unit for the Defense of Community and Human Rights in El Salvador, or UNIDEHC, was arrested in February. Zavala, who had been imprisoned for 13 months, had filed a criminal complaint against the director of prisons for crimes including torture.
This week, the denunciations against the El Bosque case gave way, in the evening on Tuesday, to Bukele turning his ire to whom he accused of being the real culprits. “Yesterday we were witnesses to how humble people were manipulated by self-proclaimed leftist groups and globalist NGOs, whose only real objective is to attack the government,” he wrote.
Bukele then announced that he would send to the legislature, which he controls, a Foreign Agents Law to tax all donations received by private NGOs at 30 percent.
In reality, the Foreign Agents Law is old news in El Salvador. Bukele’s legislators first proposed such a bill in 2021, to “guarantee transparency” and “preserve social and political stability,” but with a higher proposed taxation, at 40 percent. His legislative operatives stated that “those journalists’ juicy salaries are over.”
The 2021 bill, which was never passed, barred NGOs from activities “for political or other purposes, with the intent of altering the public order or jeopardizing national security or the social or political stability of the country.” Bukele lobbyist in Washington Damian Merlo lied that the initiative was no different from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which does not impose taxation on donations, in the United States.
Two months earlier, in September 2021, on the 200th anniversary of Central American independence, Bukele had accused the Biden administration and international community of financing protests against his government. When Donald Trump was elected, Bukele openly courted the suspension of U.S. aid to civil society groups.
In neighboring Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s attacks against international funding to NGOs paved the way for the mass cancellation and confiscation of the properties of thousands of organizations since the 2018 protests, known as the “Sandinista guillotine”. Time will tell whether Bukele, taking another page from his neighbor, is sharpening one of his own.
A Brighter Beacon
On Thursday, El Faro’s 27th anniversary, we launched Central America Monthly, a digital magazine where we will seek deeper, sharper answers to pressing questions in our region.
First up in the inaugural issue is a judicial chronicle from Guatemala on the trial against Benedicto Lucas García, a once-iconic military leader in the Cold War counterinsurgency, on charges of genocide against the Maya Ixil people.
For 13 months, we attended hearings and pored over hundreds of pages of judicial records, declassified U.S. intelligence and diplomatic cables, and witness testimony. We traveled to the Ixil region in the highlands of Quiché to hear the accounts of survivors of the Guatemalan Army’s Operation Sweep in early 1982. The result is a chronicle in the tradition of our long-form reportage of Central America.
We also re-upped our exclusive video interview on gang leaders’ decade-long relationship with Bukele — the publication of which, two weeks ago, set off a firestorm of government retaliation in El Salvador. On May 5, El Faro denounced that the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office had begun to prepare arrest warrants for at least seven staff members of El Faro.
This is El Faro digital content editor Nelson Rauda on Democracy Now, talking about the impact of the video in El Salvador:
RAUDA: A lot of the speakers for the government have accused us of collaborating with the gangs, when it’s so blatantly obvious that we wouldn’t have been able to interview Charli if they wouldn’t have released him. He was in jail, he was already arrested. And the fact that we interviewed him is living proof that Bukele dealt with the gangs. And this goes so much against the narrative that he is this protector of the Salvadoran people, because he has been making secret dealings, behind their back, and we’re just putting that to light.
GRESSIER: Also in this first issue of Central America Monthly, you can find a piece by premier Central American poet and Nicaraguan exile Gioconda Belli, an essay by Guatemalan historian José Cal on the CIA’s covert book-burning campaign after the 1954 coup against Jacobo Árbenz, and a chronicle from 2013, by Salvadoran journalist Daniel Valencia, on the corruption, murder, and political jockeying within the Honduran National Police.
Especially timely, we suspect, given the electoral process unfolding this year under a state of exception in the two largest cities in Honduras. And the reports that, as we reported in episode five, police crimes are reigning under the Honduran state of exception, a not-so-subtle regionalization of the model decreed in March 2022 by Nayib Bukele.
Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn and additional reporting from Ramiro Guevara. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.