El Faro English translates Central America. Subscribe to our newsletter.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly ratified changes to the 1983 Constitution that upend the Salvadoran political and legal system. The reforms, fast-track approved with 57 of 60 votes without public comment or parliamentary study by President Nayib Bukele’s party and allies, eliminate the requirement that all constitutional reforms be approved by two legislatures, opening the door for express rewrites without consulting any opposition party or the legislative ballot box.
While the new text creates a heightened requirement of three-fourths of the plenary, the ruling party Nuevas Ideas adopted that language well aware that they currently hold 90 percent of seats. They claimed the reform was designed to allow for the elimination of unpopular public debt to political parties; opposition parties were owed public financing even as the 2024 electoral process was certified despite Bukele’s unconstitutional candidacy and procedural irregularities acknowledged by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
In a crowded agenda, the Bukele-controlled Assembly on Wednesday also extended the suspension of due process under the state of exception for the thirty-third time, rewrote municipal and traffic codes, and reformed the 2021 Bitcoin Law removing all language referencing Bitcoin as “currency.”
Yesterday’s reform bypassed constitutional requirements, Supreme Court rulings, and parliamentary procedure. Constitutional experts state that Article 248, which establishes the process to reform the very constitution itself, cannot be amended. The ruling party claims that the change “legitimizes and adds greater rigidity” to the article in question.
In any case, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court had ruled in 2017 that constitutional reforms should be first approved at least six months before the end of a legislative session, following the standard procedure of a first approval by simple majority. The following legislature had to ratify the changes by a two-thirds majority, with windows for public comment and the intervening legislative election as filters.
A far cry from the six-month timetable, this fundamental change to constitutional law was first passed on Apr. 30, 2024, the last day of the outgoing legislature, without room for public comment or parliamentary study — and by approving a fast-track process (dispensa de trámite) sending the bill directly to the floor for a vote at the time of proposal.
“Does the majority not have the right to learn in detail what this constitutional change proposed by Nuevas Ideas would imply?” wrote 18 civil society groups condemning the initiative last May. In an April 26 editorial anticipating this kind of move, Central American University said the reform “would absolutely contradict the spirit of the Constitution and would be the umpteenth signal of the consolidation of an authoritarian, dictatorial regime.”
Upon the first step of the constitutional rewrite last April, around one thousand protestors including human rights defenders, public university students, labor unions, and opposition parties FMLN and Vamos marched in San Salvador, denouncing the reforms, arbitrary arrests and disappearances under the state of exception, and state harassment of grassroots labor and environmental groups. As has happened over the last four years, the National Civil Police stopped, frisked, and registered passengers of buses to the capital.
But this Wednesday, the ratification appeared to fly under the radar in El Salvador in days of protest and broad condemnation of Bukele’s reactivation of metallic mining. “They said they would not change important things in the Constitution,” said Vamos legislator Claudia Ortiz in April. “The electorate has not put this to the test; the reform was made unconstitutionally… We are practically at the whims of a group in power.”
Neither President Nayib Bukele —who won a second term on February 4, 2024, despite the constitutional prohibition of reelection— nor his party members told the public during the 2024 electoral campaign that they would seek these changes. At the time of proposal, Christian Guevara, head of the ruling legislative bloc, lied that “we are not taking anything away from the Constitution.”
But the reform is unsurprising given that, in August 2020, Bukele delegated Vice President Félix Ulloa, by executive decree, to study a constitutional reform — even though the power to do so lies strictly with the legislature.
International diplomatic reactions have yet to come in, and it is probable that any criticism will be served in private. With the Trump White House calling Bukele an “example for the Western Hemisphere”, gone are the days when a top Biden diplomat in San Salvador compared Bukele to Hugo Chávez for seeking reelection.
Total power
Nayib Bukele has cracked open the door to further constitutional changes in El Salvador just as Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo enact a much more radical rewrite of over 90 percent of the Nicaraguan 1986 constitution, including placing the legislative and judicial branches formally under executive control and officializing a family dynasty by placing Murillo as un-elected “co-president” who will retain the presidency should Ortega die first.
When Ortega presented the constitutional changes as a “partial reform” in November, he had already changed Nicaragua’s magna carta 12 times since returning to power in 2007, including to allow for indefinite reelection, which was prohibited at the time he took a second term in 2011. Just last week, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights set regional precedent in ruling that Ortega’s 2011 reelection, facilitated by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, was unconstitutional.
In San Salvador as in Managua, the speed with which a small handful of Bukele-aligned legislators have made key decisions, and often late at night, has only been matched by the legislative irrelevance of the Salvadoran political opposition. In February 2024, Bukele boasted to CPAC of having “pulverized” his opponents; opposition parties currently hold just four elected posts across El Salvador.
In a key example of that irrelevance, on May 1, 2021, during its first session late on a Saturday night, the newly Bukele-controlled Assembly illegally removed the Constitutional Court magistrates in what was widely dubbed a “technical coup d’état”.
“Many [ruling-party legislators] were afraid to attend on May 1, 2021 because, while they didn’t know what would happen, they knew something big was coming,” said Nuevas Ideas defector Wilfredo Flores in an interview last year with El Faro. “Those who now hold high posts in the Assembly received a copy of the reform [that day] only in the Salón Azúl [legislative chamber],” he continued. “That is a practice that has been repeated throughout this entire legislative period [2021-2024].”
Compared to the international outcry in 2021, the silence on Wednesday was particularly deafening. In May 2021 U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris personally expressed her “deep concerns” and the Biden administration claimed to suspend aid to implicated institutions. A debt refinancing deal with the IMF was also derailed, worth $1.3 billion dollars, and now appears to be on the verge of ratification.
Bukele dismissed the attorney general, too. Prosecutors had been investigating a coverup of his gang negotiations for a reduction in homicides, as well as sweeping graft and self-dealing during the pandemic. (Covid-19 expenses, two-thirds of which were under investigation, were declared secret and later included in an amnesty.) Since then, the new magistrates have enthusiastically backed immediate presidential reelection. Bukele’s Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado has squashed high-reaching corruption probes in the Executive Branch.
Bukele’s disdain for the separation of powers was transparent in his first year in office. On Feb. 9, 2020, he stormed the Assembly flanked by soldiers with long weapons and opened a plenary session despite not having the legal authority to do so. The president claimed this incursion was to demand the approval of a security loan without providing requested details to legislative auditors on what the money would be used for.
“It’s clear who is in control here,” he said from the Assembly president’s seat. It was the first time he was rebuked by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, which the next day ruled that the “Armed Forces cannot be employed for political, partisan, or other unconstitutional purposes.”
In the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, he enacted a sweeping lockdown without consulting the Assembly, including forcefully confining quarantine breakers in crowded government facilities, where many died. When the Constitutional Chamber prohibited the measure, on the grounds that the thousands detained in the first months were deprived of due process, Bukele announced he would not uphold their rulings on his own criteria.
Bukele called the magistrates “murderers” and lashed out at critics: “There’s a little group that sips their juice and says, ‘Yeah, Bukele is a dictator!’” he began, typing on an imaginary keyboard. “If I were a real dictator, I would have had all of them shot.”
Five years of absolute concentration of power have followed. After the illegal removals in May 2021 came the Supreme Court’s reversal on reelection and the express removal of a third of all Salvadoran judges, substituted without a known selection process. Now, Bukele will also reform the constitution to his liking, marking a definitive end to the era of democratic checks and balances instituted in the thralls of the Salvadoran civil war.
Additional reporting in May 2024 from José Luis Sanz, Victoria Delgado, and Carlos Barrera. This article first appeared in the January 30, 2025 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
