This investigation, run by El Faro in March 2020, has now been translated following a public inquiry this month on these events from the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to former Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson, who has been nominated to lead the Embassy in Mexico.
On Tuesday, February 11, 2020, two days had gone by since President Nayib Bukele and the Salvadoran Armed Forces had entered the Legislative Assembly. The scandal was on the front page of dozens of international news outlets as the government worked to pick up the pieces. At 6:30 in the afternoon, in the events room of Casa Presidencial, three trusted officials of Nayib Bukele sought to calm the international diplomatic corps in a meeting without the press. Carolina Recinos, head of the Cabinet; Ernesto Castro, private secretary to the president; and Alexandra Hill, foreign minister, gave their version of events to some 60 diplomats, including ambassadors and representatives of multilaterals such as the United Nations and World Bank. But the story the government told was full of lies, and most of those present did not believe it. The guests, when it came time for questions, made this clear.
El Faro published a recording of that meeting. In the first two comments, the tone was diplomatic. The European Union ambassador, Andreu Bassols, asked whether the Executive would abide by the order of the Constitutional Court to desist in the attempt to force an extraordinary legislative session to approve a loan of $109 million dollars that, according to the government’s version, had triggered the crisis. The Chilean ambassador, Renato Sepúlveda Nebel, spoke of seeing things in a positive light and moving “forward”. After responses from Recinos and Castro, almost an hour into the meeting, the Japanese ambassador, Kazuyoshi Higuchi, changed tone:
“Good evening, I don't know if I can explain well in Spanish…” he began. “We are very interested in improving the country’s image, in order to increase cooperation, to bring in more investment, to improve public safety, and so on and so forth. Losing a good image is easy, but recovering it takes longer. That’s why the incident in the Assembly affected almost all the diplomats and it was bad for the image, but recovering the country's image takes a long time. I hope you don’t repeat it next time, I don't know... tomorrow, Saturday, or Sunday, don't do it again... You’ll lose more confidence with the diplomats.”
After Higuchi, several others made officials aware of the mistake Bukele had made. But that is the tail end of a story that began in the weeks leading up to the president’s storming of the Salón Azul. Through interviews with government, legislative, police, military, and diplomatic sources, El Faro has reconstructed the sequence of events that led to February 9, 2020, and the immediate repercussions it had.
The story that the government told, and which was even published in op-eds signed by President Nayib Bukele in the U.S. press, is false in many details. In fact, it has been false from the start: the storming of the Assembly did not happen mainly because of a security loan. Sources in the Executive admit that it was part of a marketing strategy that got out of hand.
Weeks prior: an image problem
The Bukele administration is skilled at managing the media agenda and trends on social networks. His is a government concerned with marketing, with promoting issues that protect its good name, as explained by an official from the extended government cabinet who spoke to El Faro after the events of Sunday, February 9.
However, during the first week of January 2020, a problem arose that the administration was slow to grasp: a water supply crisis in the San Salvador Metropolitan Area. “What happened on February 9 in the Assembly is closely related to the water problem,” explained this official.
In the first week of January 2020, social network users began to complain about the lack of water, while others reported that the water coming out of their taps had a bad taste and smell. The government qualified the problem: the president of the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewers (ANDA), Frederick Benítez, asserted that there was a decrease in service due to maintenance work on the Las Pavas water treatment plant.
The explanation did not rein in the complaints. Another week passed and, far from running out, the crisis took on new dimensions. On January 15, ANDA explained that the problem was due to a proliferation of algae in the Lempa River. The algae, they said, had leaked into Las Pavas, the plant that supplies water to 1.2 million users in Greater San Salvador. Three days later, on January 18, the president of ANDA and the Minister of Health, Ana Orellana, insisted that the water was fit for human consumption: “You have to boil the water,” said the minister. “We should drink boiled or filtered water. That’s what we recommend, but the water is drinkable; I have drunk it and there have been no problems.”
Despite declaring the water safe to drink, the government deployed a contingency plan to bring water tanks and bottled water to the affected areas and pumped social media with photographs and videos of its efforts. A flood of tweets showed officials making unnecessary human chains to pass bottles of water, unloaded or loaded onto trucks, from hand to hand.
On Tuesday, January 21, the government entered its third week with the crisis eating away at its communications strategy. That night, during a press conference, surrounded by his cabinet, Bukele scolded his officials and, for the first time in seven months of government, apologized for the initial misinformation: “I apologize for what was said, but I think it responds to the way it has always been thought... That should not be the case in this government, and the officials have already been reprimanded. I think they did not do it with bad intentions.”
At the same conference, Bukele reminded his cabinet of the importance of social media in his administration: “Let's never again say there is no problem when people are saying there is a problem. Yesterday I said to the Minister of Governance, Mario [Durán]: when there are complaints on social media, take them as input.”
That night, Bukele said that the algae problem had been overcome. He promised the modernization of Las Pavas and the construction of another treatment plant, but neither the apologies nor the promises contained the crisis. And there was more to come.
During the last days of January and the first days of February, three other issues were added to the tense national agenda: the request for a preliminary impeachment hearing against Arena deputy Norman Quijano for negotiating with gangs; the revelation that a security company had paid for Vice Minister of Security Osiris Luna to travel to Mexico; and the decision of Arena, the FMLN, and the PDC to withdraw their support for the government’s request to negotiate an international loan of $109 million to finance the third stage of the security policy called the “Territorial Control Plan”.
El Faro spoke to three government sources: two from the extended cabinet and a third from Casa Presidencial with access to privileged meetings and information. The three sources explained that Bukele’s popularity is one of the pillars that sustains the Executive’s projects. “He, with his image, is always a boon,” said one official from the extended cabinet. The sources also explained that the current government sees politics as a perpetual conflict. “The key is to choose the conflict and always win it,” explained one of the sources. Seen in this light, with the water issue, the government had spent several weeks not choosing the conflict — and losing it.
On January 27, Bukele found an opportunity to push the water crisis onto the backburner. That day, the Attorney General’s Office filed a motion for impeachment against Quijano, the former president of the Assembly and former Arena presidential candidate. The president wanted to turn the tables: “Arena and the FMLN are not trash, they are worse than that. They negotiated [with gangs] with the blood of our people. Damn them a thousand times,” he wrote on February 1 on Twitter.
On the same day, former president Mauricio Funes, a fugitive from justice in Nicaragua, leaked a document on Twitter revealing who paid for Vice Minister Luna’s private plane ride. Two days later, the Mexican company Grupo SeguriTech Integral Security confirmed to El Faro that it had paid for Luna’s trip to Mexico, something that the government had kept secret since November 2019, when photos of Luna and his assistant inside a jet were posted on social media.
The opposition took advantage of the two flanks to hit the government. On February 3, the opposition parties agreed to question the president of ANDA and the minister of health about the water crisis. Two days later, on Wednesday the 5th, Arena deputies refused to vote for a $109 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), with which Bukele wants to finance part of his security plan. The legislators alleged a lack of transparency in the loan. Part of the funds were for the purchase of security cameras, one of the products sold by the company that invited Luna to Mexico.
Bukele needed to make his move. “Measurements of people’s reaction to certain issues had been taken,” one government official explained to El Faro. “Two in particular were of concern: the Osiris issue and the water issue. The Osiris issue did not have an impact; it did not affect the measurements, but the water issue did. It was red. Like an alert. These weekly measurements are taken on social media, depending on how people react to certain government issues.”
Bukele wanted to change the subject again: to choose the conflict.
The government’s official version is that on February 9 it called an extraordinary meeting of the deputies to discuss an issue of national interest: funding for public security. The official from the extended cabinet confirms that the legislative summons was in response to a marketing problem, and the water crisis in particular. “A month before, they had this card: The Legislative Assembly is the most hated. In the polls it comes out as the worst evaluated and people even pay to go and insult the deputies,” says the source. “So what you do is find a cause; you choose who to generate the conflict with, and make the other side [the Assembly] give in to pressure.” That is to say that the storming of the Legislative Assembly on February 9, 2020 arose from the need to create a distraction and to find the president an adversary with a vocation for losing.
Thursday: “Cancel trips. You have to be there on Sunday”
On Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, the members of the extended cabinet arrived at Casa Presidencial at around 9:30 in the morning. A meeting of the Council of Ministers was just finishing. Among the twenty-or-so officials were legal secretary Conan Castro, private secretary Ernesto Castro, and chief of staff Carolina Recinos. “By mid-morning they were still getting the signatures of some ministers, but at that moment we didn't know what they had agreed,” says a source from the extended cabinet. It was a couple of hours before the Salvadoran public learned about point four that President Bukele had introduced to the Council of Ministers’ agenda.
That same day, at 2:45 in the afternoon, the deputies received notice from Casa Presidencial: “In compliance with the instruction received from the Council of Ministers of the Executive Branch, I hereby inform you of the Agreement adopted by said Council, through which it makes use of the power conferred by Article 167, paragraph 7, of the Constitution,” reads the document that Conan Castro sent to Assembly President Mario Ponce. Article 167 of the Constitution empowers the Council of Ministers to summon deputies to an extraordinary session “on matters of national interest.” The president had found his new conflict: He would force the deputies to put the authorization for the negotiation of the $109 million loan to a vote on Sunday the 9th.
By the end of Thursday afternoon, the Council of Ministers’ announcement had spread like wildfire in the WhatsApp groups of government officials. The news came in the form of an order: “Yes, on Thursday the message came down that we had to go and support him on Sunday,” said the official from the extended cabinet. A second source from the extended cabinet says that, on Thursday night, Casa Presidencial reported in the same way the suspension of meetings abroad. The indication was that everyone should show up to support the president on Sunday at 3 p.m. in front of the Legislative Assembly, regardless of other commitments. At least in private, the government showed no hesitation or possibility that negotiations with the deputies would alter the appointment; the decision had been made.
Among the meetings that were scheduled abroad was a working session in Guatemala. It was suspended. The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry confirmed to El Faro that Salvadoran representatives of the Autonomous Executive Port Commission (CEPA), the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Governance were to meet with their Guatemalan counterparts to work on an integration agreement that President Bukele and the new president of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammatei, signed in San Salvador on Jan. 27, 2020. After signing, the vice-presidencies of both countries had agreed to meet on Friday, February 7. “I can confirm that it was suspended. I couldn’t tell you when it will resume because this is a matter that the institutions involved are working on bilaterally,” the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry officially replied on March 4.
The first announcement of the extraordinary session was made by Bukele that night, at around 7 p.m., next to U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson, on the heels of the announcement of a work visa agreement. Bukele chose that very moment to reveal his decision to the country.
At 8:26 on the evening of the 6th, Bukele wrote on Twitter: “The deputies of the @AsambleaSV will meet this Sunday at 3 p.m. to vote on funding for #Phase3 of the #PlanControlTerritorial. This was decided by the Council of Ministers.” One of the two officials from the expanded cabinet who spoke to El Faro described the Council of Ministers as a group of obedient officials, reverent toward the figure of President Bukele, incapable of contradicting him. “I can assure you that it was not the Council of Ministers that called the [extraordinary] session,” said the source, making it clear that the order came directly from the president.
Friday and Saturday: withdrawal of security details
Contrary to the fears expressed by some legislators, none of their bodyguards were asked to help locate the legislator they were guarding, nor were they told of the possibility that their bosses would be forcibly taken to the Legislative Assembly on Sunday, February 9. What did happen was an unusual mass meeting of bodyguards that left a large number of El Salvador’s legislators without security for more than 12 hours. The government has said that it was a routine act, but the version of those involved refutes this: They were withdrawn from their duties as a means of putting pressure on the deputies.
On Friday, February 7, after six in the evening, the police sergeant who coordinates the security of the parliamentarians began to call and write to each of the deputies’ bodyguards to notify them that from that moment on their duties were suspended until further notice.
Throughout that day, Bukele posted 12 messages on his Twitter account, all of them reminding the deputies that they had to show up for the extraordinary session on Sunday, calling on people to turn up as a means of putting pressure on the deputies and reminding them that the security loan was for the welfare of the police and soldiers.
In the message sent by the sergeant, they were all ordered to report, if possible that same day, to what was once the base of the now-defunct Police Reaction Group (GRP), in the San Francisco neighborhood of San Salvador. It took the sergeant and his team several hours to notify the 336 bodyguards of the incumbent deputies and the 168 of the alternates. Several were picked up in police vehicles at the end of that Friday, at the homes of the legislators they were supposed to protect. Some security personnel were notified after midnight.
In the same vein as the fact that the event on Sunday had been decided upon since at least Thursday, the action of the Police was to leave all the deputies of the Legislative Assembly unprotected on the eve of February 9. That Friday night, none of the bodyguards were clear whether the decision would last all weekend, all week, or even if it would be permanent.
These security elements —known as PPI— are not police officers. With very few exceptions, they do not have badges or uniforms. They are usually chosen by the deputies and registered as supernumerary agents in the police force. However, it is the PNC that pays their salary and provides them with weapons and ammunition, and they are hierarchically subordinate to the Important Persons Protection Unit, commanded by Inspector Magín Iván Alarcón.
El Faro spoke with eleven of the agents in charge of security for various legislative factions, including the bodyguards of deputies close to President Bukele. The common denominator in their stories is the atmosphere of improvisation and uncertainty that prevailed during those hours.
“Look, there weren’t enough cots at night. Several slept on the bare floor and the next day there was a big mess with the weapons,” says one of them. The facilities are not equipped to receive so many personnel all at once and offer them decent conditions during the night. Nor is it big enough for everyone to be in formation the next day.
All the officers - both those who arrived on Friday night and those who showed up on Saturday morning - had to hand in their pistols and place them in a warehouse, which some described as a “dump”. No one was in charge of identifying the weapons or sorting them. Nothing was explained to anyone until the morning of the following day.
Most of the officers arrived at the base during the morning of Saturday the 8th. The atmosphere of confusion was compounded by the arrival of two police buses, which fanned the flames of speculation: a rumor spread among the barracked officers that they would be transferred to another location to prevent them from talking to the press.
Commissioner Alarcón finally addressed them.
Most of those interviewed mentioned that the police chief was clear and to the point: From the outset he told them that the orders came “from above” and that it was a measure to put pressure on the deputies to approve the loan that the president was requesting. “In any case, they didn’t need to tell us; it was clear what the purpose of that meeting was. They wanted to scare the deputies,” one of them clarified.
All agreed that Alarcón was very emphatic and repetitive in telling them that they owed their loyalty to the Police and that it was not the Legislative Assembly that paid their salaries, but the PNC. “He repeated several times that we should be on the side of the police and that the loan that the deputies didn’t want to approve was for our benefit,” recalls a veteran PPI agent.
The police officers’ account differs from the explanations offered by both Commissioner Alarcón and the police chief himself, who described what happened as a routine act.
“I don’t remember saying that. I don’t remember talking politics. Maybe it was because some of them asked me. Remember that many of them are relatives of the deputies and that’s why they have to be on their side,” Alarcón asserted. While he also claimed that it was a routine encounter, he admitted that it had never happened before, at least not under his command.
The police officers with whom El Faro spoke —some with more than a decade on the job— said that nothing like this had ever happened before.
The director of the police, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, also denied that it was a measure related to the events of February 9: “What happened was that administrative activities coincided, where some members were called in to give some administrative guidance.”
According to the officers’ account, not only was there no new administrative guidance, but they also denied that only “some members” were summoned: All 504 parliamentary security officers were called up. Not all of them attended, some because they live outside of the capital and others because, in the absence of an official notification, they decided to rebel. Others because the deputies expressly asked them not to. According to Commissioner Alarcón, although all were called, only 40 percent of the officers showed up.
Around midday, after a strange meeting in which they received no new instructions, the officers were sent back to their duties. No one ever explained the presence of the buses, and some took up to three hours to recover their service weapons, due to the chaos that ensued when they tried to identify the weapon assigned to each agent.
The next day, President Bukele took advantage of what had happened, mocking the deputies in front of a crowd: “The deputies were left without security for 12 hours, 12 hours! And they are still raising hell: They called the OAS, the U.N., the international community, the European Union, the Fellowship of the Ring, the Jedi Council. They called everyone to say: ‘Oh! They took away our security.’ 12 hours without security and they were shitting themselves.”
Sunday: the attorney general and the ambassador
Sunday, February 9, began with the government’s last chance to defuse the afternoon gathering, to avoid the image of the president praying surrounded by soldiers and sitting in the chair of the president of the Legislative Assembly.
That morning, at the initiative of the ambassadors of the European Union, there was a meeting at the residence of the E.U. ambassador, Andreu Bassols. Chancellor Hill was summoned there. Ronald Johnson, the U.S. ambassador, joined the meeting.
“We said we were concerned. We asked if it was possible to avoid what was coming. That would be best. And that we were willing to support the following week to reach agreements on the security loan. All the ambassadors present shared the same concern, that it had to be stopped,” said one of the diplomats who was at the meeting. El Faro confirmed the meeting with two of the attendees.
That the government did not address the concerns of the ambassadors of the European Union and the United States is obvious. However, even that same afternoon, when the cameras were filming as much as they could of the unprecedented event taking place in the Assembly, there were scenes that did not make the news.
At 3:50 in the afternoon of February 9, ten minutes before soldiers and police officers stormed the Salón Azul, Police Chief Mauricio Arriaza Chicas was standing next to the chamber, near the offices of the PCN deputies. The official made a call: “They are going to open the door of the security commission room of the Assembly. It will not be the police or the FAES. But once they open it, the president has given us several instructions,” he said, clearly taken aback. When his communications manager, Marisol Doratt, realized that the press was witnessing the call, she stood in front of the director to prevent any more photographs from being taken.
That Sunday, Attorney General Raúl Melara received a call from Bukele’s team. He then spoke on the phone with the president. Melara confirmed these conversations to El Faro, without specifying the exact time they took place. “I'm going to withhold the content of the conversation,” he said.
At 4:40 p.m., Bukele entered the Assembly. He put his hands over his face to pray and moved with small spasms as he was surrounded by uniformed police and military personnel with long weapons, members of the Special Military Security Brigade. He appeared to pray and then left the chamber without saying a word to the deputies. Arriaza Chicas was the one who spoke to them. When the soldiers and police left the Blue Room, the police director went to the vicinity of the Cuscatlán Room and, away from the press, spoke to PCN legislator Raúl Beltrán Bonilla. The director, visibly embarrassed, thanked him for seeing him. El Faro witnessed this scene. “By the grace of God, this difficult situation is over. I want to thank you. The truth is that the situation has been a bit complicated,” the PNC director told the deputy. He then repeated the gesture with Francis Zablah and Guillermo Gallegos, of GANA.
Zablah jokingly replied that everything was fine: “Don’t tell me what to do anymore,” he warned him with a laugh. Arriaza Chicas later met Gallegos near the Plaza of the Flags, outside the precinct. “I didn’t see any problem with the Army and the Police being here. They always come, it’s just that people never see them,” Gallegos said. They were soon joined by another man in uniform. This policeman told Arriaza Chicas that he had witnessed a call between Gallegos and Attorney General Melara. “I already told you that I was with him [Gallegos] when the prosecutor spoke to him, and everything was calm, right?” he said, seeking confirmation from the deputy. In response, Gallegos confirmed the information provided by the police officer to a distressed Arriaza Chicas. Minutes later, when El Faro asked Gallegos about the content of the call he had had with Melara, he categorically denied it. He smiled, said goodbye and left.
Melara accepted that he called Gallegos before the event began, concerned because he had read on social media about the intentions of the Armed Forces and the Police to force the doors of the Salón Azul. “I understood that Deputy Gallegos was the highest-ranking member and he was going to be at that meeting. He told me no: that at that moment they were waiting for the Assembly employee, who was going with the key, since there was a protocol, even for receiving the President of the Republic, when he entered,” Melara said. The prosecutor ended the afternoon of Sunday, February 9, with a call from Johnson, the U.S. ambassador. “We didn’t go into details. We just talked about what had happened and that was it.”
Ambassador Johnson was active all day. His day began with a meeting with the foreign minister and other ambassadors, and continued with that call to the prosecutor, but did not end there. An employee of Casa Presidencial with access to meetings and privileged information told El Faro that after leaving the stage, around 6 p.m., President Bukele went to Casa Presidencial, where he met with his trusted officials. Later that night, the private secretary to the presidency, Ernesto Castro, called a private meeting at a house in the Las Piletas residential area.
The meeting was a kind of crisis committee to discuss measures to be taken in the face of growing concern from the international community. Images of an Assembly militarized by President Bukele were already traveling the world. “Many were baffled, the tarimazo [taking the stage] ended as no one expected. I think some [officials] still haven’t understood the seriousness of what happened that day,” the source said. According to this executive branch employee, the meeting was attended by the private secretary Castro, legal secretary Conan Castro, chief of staff Carolina Recinos, GANA deputy Guillermo Gallegos, and, joining later, Ambassador Johnson.
El Faro wrote to the press department of the U.S. Embassy. The Embassy confirmed Johnson’s presence that night at Las Piletas, but provided no further details. This was the response:
“Ambassador Johnson accepted a personal invitation from President Bukele to meet with him and the First Lady on the evening of February 9. He had only brief contact with anyone else who was there. He did not participate in, attend, or witness any official meeting or committee of the Government of El Salvador that evening. We reiterate that neither Ambassador Johnson nor any Embassy official had prior knowledge of what was to happen on February 9. Ambassador Johnson’s consistent message in the run-up to and after the events of that day was to urge de-escalation of the conflict and the initiation of a good-faith dialogue to find a democratically acceptable solution to the impasse. The United States maintains this position to date and urges all parties to the conflict to respect constitutional limits, promote transparency, and do everything in their power to work toward continuing the positive trends in the area of security in El Salvador.”
El Faro asked under what circumstances President Bukele invited Johnson to Las Piletas that night, and not to his own home. There was no further response from the Embassy. Johnson said nothing until Monday, when he tweeted that he disapproved of the presence of the military inside the Assembly. And that, then yes, he recognized the calls for prudence that had resonated in the previous days.
Monday: “the government’s most difficult day”
If on Sunday the 9th the government had already held a crisis meeting of officials close to the president, on Monday the 10th the feeling of uncertainty spread throughout the entire apparatus.
One of the officials from the extended cabinet who spoke to El Faro describes Monday, February 10, as a day of anxiety in Casa Presidencial and across the government in general. The official explains that since the administration came to power there had been an order for all the offices of the Executive to be active on social media every day. As he explained, “the big things” are announced by the ministers or the president, but the “day-to-day things are released by everyone.” The idea is to have a lot of message traffic always, and from all possible angles.
“That morning, nobody dared to publish anything. People were paralyzed early in the morning. This definitely hit us hard. On Monday, we were wondering what to do. Should we call people together? How could we calm things down? It was the government’s most difficult day. We didn't measure that [the negative reaction from many sectors]. That Monday, the people in the government cloistered themselves,” the source explained.
International discontent had already begun to be felt on Sunday the 9th. “There are those who, since Sunday afternoon, after the event, began to receive calls from international organizations, saying that they did not like what they had seen,” said the official. And that would not be the worst day for international diplomacy.
Tuesday: the diplomats’ reprimand
By the time Ambassador Higuchi of Japan chimed in, the meeting had been going on for 52 minutes. Foreign Minister Hill had already introduced chief of cabinet Recinos and Secretary Castro. They had both given their version of events and responded to the first two comments.
In their introduction, Recinos and Castro sold a story in which they had gone to great lengths to negotiate with the deputies. “Almost 48 hours straight to reach agreements,” said Recinos, referring to the two meetings she had with legislators on Friday the 7th and Saturday the 8th. Recinos never mentioned that since Thursday the 6th there had been an order for government officials to attend the demonstration on Sunday the 9th.
At the end of her first comments, Recinos described the situation on Sunday the 9th as such: “The president, at that moment, was caught between a hurt, radical opposition, an angry public that demanded he make a decision, and an intelligentsia that, suddenly, at one in the afternoon, all came out to give their opinion at once. And he, well… he sided with the institutions and calmed the situation.”
Recinos never mentioned that the president himself had called on the people to come out to protest on multiple occasions, that in some places buses belonging to the ruling Nuevas Ideas party were even used to mobilize people. In Recinos’ account, the people came out spontaneously, fed up with the deputies’ refusal to act. Neither she nor Castro mentioned the president’s prayer, in which, according to Bukele himself speaking from the stage that day, God asked him, in a Salón Azul full of military personnel, for “patience”.
One of the people who were inside the room on Tuesday the 11th told El Faro that the feeling among their colleagues in the international community was that they were being “taken for fools”. “Many people felt insulted, and some even exchanged memes of the situation in private chats. At times, when they made claims like that the president had come to calm things down, you could hear a few chuckles. And you saw faces of surprise, of disbelief,” said this source.
Many of the ambassadors present at the meeting, according to two diplomats who spoke to El Faro, believed that on Sunday the 9th the president’s intention was to dissolve parliament, and that he stopped when he sensed the international community’s disapproval and saw the number of people who had turned out was not large enough. Around 5,000 people arrived on Sunday. “The presentation on Tuesday the 11th left a bad taste in the mouths of many ambassadors. We didn’t like Carolina Recinos’ claim that it was the people who had revolted,” one of the ambassadors who was at the meeting told El Faro.
Keeping to diplomatic form, much of this was said at the meeting on Tuesday the 11th. After Higuchi, Private Secretary Castro responded. First he offered the closest thing to an admission of error in the entire meeting. At the end came excuses:
“Personally, if I could have a time machine and go back to Saturday, I could probably do something, but unfortunately that’s no longer possible. I agree with what you said... We can't repeat this, and now we have no choice. Because here, as you say, if something happened one day, what’s done is done... But now we have to work from now on: first, as you said very well, not to repeat some things that in the end remained in perception. They were dealt with in a political way... Look, ambassador, I don’t want to justify myself or anything... There was nothing then. Nothing was broken, the Legislative Assembly was opened by the deputies, to the point that when the president entered, there were deputies sitting in their seats... There was no act of violence. If anything was lost... we will recover it.”
The Spanish ambassador, Federico Torres Muro, spoke next. He said that it was not the time to look for those responsible, but all “on the basis of being aware that what happened should not have happened”. “The image, as the Japanese ambassador said, was not good; that is to say, it was bad. Why would we say one thing instead of another? And this affects the good image of El Salvador and the good image of the government, and it also affects us, the friendly countries that are working with a democratically elected government,” he said. Muro applauded the willingness to engage in dialogue and closed with a piece of advice that the Bukele government rarely applies: “The political actor with the most strength probably has to make more of an effort than the political actor with the least strength... It is likely that you, as the executive branch, will have to make a little more of an effort than the other side.”
“We totally agree,” Recinos replied. “We know that the muscle of the government is much stronger and that it is we who have to give way mainly, and that is what we are doing... You can support us in getting that message across, because it comes from the heart. We have no intention of complicating the country any more.”
The British ambassador, David Lelliott, added that what really worried him were the voices that, after Sunday’s events, were still calling for a popular insurrection. “Inside [the government] there are voices that carry a lot of weight, and they are calling for that,” Lelliott said.
Recinos assured him that they were working to quell the unrest, and then made a request of the British ambassador: “I know that you have communication with people that we do not communicate with: some newspaper columnists who have always been against us, and who at the moment are also adding their bit of fuel to the fire... So, with all due respect, I want to ask you to also help us by talking to them. The country needs to turn off all the conflict valves. Well, I'm going to mention a very specific name. There's a columnist called Paolo (Lüers). I know that some of you know each other and can talk to him…”
The French ambassador, François Bonet, reminded them that for the conflict to cease, “something is important: respect.”
Castro replied with what was the least diplomatic response from government officials: “You have all been disrespectful. You said to me, and you said this, and you disrespected me... And while we continue with these meetings, tomorrow you will be with the FMLN, and on Friday you will be invited to another one, but what about the people in La Campanera? What about our officers and our children and the Salvadorans and the Las Palmas communities back here? Do you think people are paying attention to our meetings and our discussions? People want solutions; they don't want their families killed or their businesses extorted. We mustn’t lose sight of the point, either.” In the end, Castro proposed a meeting with all the political parties and ambassadors the following Friday, February 14.
Recinos seconded the proposal for a meeting: “It takes two to tango. We are not here asking you with a tank of gasoline in our hands. [As for reducing the conflict] I think the president would agree, because although he is an intense man, he is not an irrational person, either.”
The tone of the meeting changed again toward friendlier diplomacy when the U.S. ambassador intervened. Johnson limited himself to thanking them for the space for dialogue and saying: “I don't want to talk about yesterday, I want to talk about tomorrow. Thank you.”
The last criticism heard in that room, after an hour and 15 minutes of the meeting, came from the apostolic nuncio, Santo Gangemi. The Vatican’s representative in the country initially followed the conciliatory tone proposed by Johnson and called for “turning the page”, but he also offered another message between lines: “What happened was an image that happened in the world, and that has not been well accepted, well received. We could say that it was, quote unquote, a mess-up, that can happen to anyone.”
Secretary Castro ended by saying that at that moment he was reading on his phone the news that the Attorney General’s Office would investigate the events of February 9. “Then something else will come out, and something else, and the problem will continue,” he complained.
The meeting proposed for Friday, February 14 did not take place. The conflict following the meeting on Tuesday the 11th, at least on social media, continued. At 7:36 on Wednesday night, Bukele posted a press release issued by the Attorney General’s Office stating that it would investigate what happened in the Legislative Assembly on Sunday. Bukele wrote: “Tell @FGR_SV (the Attorney General’s Office account) that, when they have already solved all the homicides and extortions in our country, in their free time they will do this.”
Ensuing weeks: official double-speak
A month after Bukele's entry into the Legislative Assembly with the military, the waters seem to be calming down for the government. The Finance Committee has given a favorable opinion for the plenary to approve the $109 million loan, and only the FMLN has withheld its votes. Attorney General Melara has said that the deputies interviewed in his investigation have assured him that they found nothing abnormal in what happened on February 9.
Little else has changed. Bukele has maintained his confrontational tone online and in public appearances. One of the ambassadors present on February 11 said they had noticed the double-speak: If at that meeting Recinos and Castro asked for help to reduce the conflict, President Bukele’s messages on social media fueled precisely that. “We noticed it, and it makes several of us doubt Bukele’s real will,” said the diplomat. If Bukele maintains his popularity in the country, outside of El Salvador’s borders everything points to the fact that, as the Japanese ambassador said, it will take longer to recover the lost image.
The FMLN intends to keep alive as long as possible the memory of what happened that Sunday in the Salón Azul. In fact, an ambassador present at an FMLN meeting with the diplomats on Wednesday, February 12, said that the party’s deputies explained that sooner or later they would vote for the loan, but that they would continue to demand accountability for Bukele’s storming of the legislative chamber. “The FMLN seemed to have finally found a cause,” said the ambassador.
El Faro asked one of the members of the extended cabinet, after the events of Sunday the 9th, what Bukele’s new objective would be to divert attention from an issue as uncomfortable as the taking of the Assembly. The official replied without thinking: “Always the same: the deputies. Damage control is not complicated, it is treatable... We have to wait for the opposition to trip over itself... The people always pay to go and insult the deputies.”
On February 16, the official sent an El Faro journalist a link: a tweet from the president of Arena, Gustavo López Davidson, the day before. The source wrote: “It’s important that you hear what Arena is telling itself: For 38 years we have continued to believe in family, in the fact that we are a republican country, in the independence of powers. We made the FMLN see reason, and we will do the same with this government. Democracy yes, self-coup no!” Below, a 45-second video in which the late leader and founder of Arena, Roberto d’Aubuisson, talks about democracy. D’Aubuisson was one of the assassins of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero in March 1980, and the founder of death squads that disappeared and tortured dozens of people during the civil war.
Two days after publishing his message, on February 17, López Davidson resigned from the Arena leadership. The Bukele government official accompanied the link with a brief message: “I told you so.”
*With information from Valeria Guzmán, Gabriela Cáceres, Nelson Rauda, Roxana Lazo, Daniel Reyes, and Sergio Arauz.
