The scandalous pillaging of the state by the administration of President Nayib Bukele is matched only by the impunity that officials enjoy.
In 2021, the Court of Accounts questioned former Agriculture Minister Pablo Anliker on the whereabouts of $133 million dollars in pandemic-relief funds that the government doled out in dubious contracts. Among the beneficiaries are a shell company from Sinaloa, categorized as a money launderer by Mexican authorities; a Panamanian also accused of fraud; an accounting firm run by current Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro; and a host of others for which there is not the slightest documentation.
Anliker paid these companies millions of dollars for products that never reached El Salvador, or for services that were never provided. According to the Court of Accounts’ audit, under his stewardship the Ministry of Agriculture even paid out over two million dollars for a business to package food bundles, a task that was actually carried out by members of the Salvadoran Armed Forces. Grand total: $133 million in unjustified spending. (An amount higher than the budget of $114 million dollars allocated to the University of El Salvador for 2025, and more than double the amount earmarked for the construction and remodeling project of the medical complex of Rosales Hospital, which will cost $61 million dollars.)
Almost four years after the Court’s objections, we still know nothing of what became of that money. But we do know all of the steps taken by the Bukele family and their accomplices to keep the secret.
When he was still minister, Anliker made one excuse after another to prevent auditors, for more than half a year, from accessing pandemic purchase records: he even claimed that ministry staff had become sick with Covid-19 and could therefore not receive them. (The Court of Accounts also sought to inspect the Treasury Ministry, but police officers prevented them from entering the premises.)
It was not until almost a year later that the Court of Accounts presented the findings of its audit. Despite all the obstacles, they found irregularities in the $133 million dollars, equating to just over half of the emergency funds allotted to Agriculture.
Anliker resigned just weeks before U.S. authorities sanctioned him for corruption, but he continued to enjoy the protection of President Bukele, who named him Vice Minister of Agriculture — a cabinet post that also enjoys immunity. But he was also forced to leave that position, most likely because the Attorney General’s Office —prior to being taken over by Bukele in May 2021— was already investigating the pillaging at Agriculture and other corruption scandals involving officials close to the president.
A draft sentence by the Court of Accounts, newly controlled by Bukele, took the side of impunity, reducing the amount owed to $60 million, exonerating Anliker, and placing the blame at the feet of his subordinates, the administrators of the contracts — despite the fact that they did not actively participate in the selection of contractors nor sign off on the payments.
These are not the only funds free from accountability. During the pandemic, the Assembly authorized the government to emit $3,000 million in debt on top of loans acquired for more than $600 million. All of this only for pandemic spending.
The Assembly at that point was not yet controlled by Bukele, though he had threatened to dissolve it on Feb. 9, 2021, surrounded by soldiers. At the start of the pandemic, legislators created the Committee for the Emergency and Economic Recovery Fund, designed to administer the Covid-19 resources. The Bukele administration refused to provide information to the committee and forced them to resign. That is how El Salvador lost another check on unfettered executive spending of such sums of money.
Four years later, we Salvadorans still have no official information on how the funds were used, which businesses were contracted for which services, and how the firms were selected. On the rare occasions that they faced the press, officials said that the Salvadoran people knew how they were used, because they received baskets of food and saw the construction and outfitting of hospitals. What little we know is owed to journalistic investigations.
In 2020, months before the February 2021 legislative election, Central Reserve Bank President Nicolás Martínez denounced his unjustified firing after he refused to obey an order from Casa Presidencial that prohibited public officials from appearing before the Assembly to testify on pandemic spending.
At the beginning of the pandemic, then-Treasury Minister Nelson Fuentes resigned from his post, arguing that the institution had become an organ of political persecution and dismissals occurred to prevent employees from discovering anomalies in the use of resources for the emergency.
If in El Salvador the handling of the pandemic has enjoyed total impunity, it has not gone unnoticed abroad. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Bukele’s chief of staff, Carolina Recinos, under the Magnitsky Act, accusing her of being “the head of a multi-million dollar corruption plot in multiple ministries” that granted inflated contracts to relatives of public officials.
The Attorney General’s Office was hot on the trail of this scheme. In November 2020, four anti-corruption prosecutors reported that they were investigating 17 cases of corruption for contracts made during the pandemic, including several of Health Minister Francisco Alabí. The cases, they said, were also investigated by the Commission against Impunity in El Salvador (CICIES).
Nuevas Ideas had barely obtained a supermajority in the legislative elections of 2021 when Bukele and his deputies dismissed the prosecutor investigating them and dismantled the anti-corruption special unit. They expelled the CICIES, which had advanced in its own investigations into corruption in the government.
The Court of Accounts was already playing for time in its casework under the presidency of Roberto Anzora, but the ruling party substituted him for Roxana Seledonia Soriano, an attorney from the Public Information Access Institute, where she had worked to neutralize the office and shutter the very access to public information. Soriano, who had run as a precandidate for the Assembly under the slogan “Attorney Legislators for Nayib”, found little success in her search for the lost funds. Last September she was sworn in as president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
Further extending the cloak of impunity, pro-Bukele legislators approved a bill, nicknamed the Alabí Law after the minister of health, to retroactively exempt from criminal responsibility all officials and healthcare workers for acts related to the pandemic response.
Since then, no mechanism has existed in El Salvador to ensure government accountability. We do not yet know how the hundreds of millions of dollars from the Public Health Emergency Fund were used, nor those dedicated to the state of exception. Meanwhile, the Bukele-controlled legislature continues to waive parliamentary procedure in fast-tracking changes to the national budget. Among them is a measure approved just days ago that will grant the Presidency an $8 million-dollar expansion to the $111 million that it already received this year. We have no idea on how the Bukele family will spend that money.
On November 12, the legislature authorized the issuance of $1 billion in bonds to buy back debt. According to the Treasury Ministry itself, the government only repurchased $243 million. They will now look to incorporate into this year’s budget the remaining $757 million, issued on a 30-year horizon and with 9.65 percent interest. The government has not said how the borrowed money will be used. But, like the money that disappeared from Anliker’s budget, and the debt that the government took on during the pandemic, we Salvadorans will foot the bill.
