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On March 24, on the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, social movements marched to the Supreme Court in San Salvador carrying a banner of the iconic San Salvador archbishop and human rights defender. With 60,000 signatures, they filed a lawsuit arguing that the December reactivation of metals mining is unconstitutional. These added to the 150,000 presented by Catholic bishops on March 18, calling on the Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly to repeal the law.
Condemnations of mining are cutting across Christian theological lines. A letter by the Episcopal Conference calls the signatures “the voice of the people who are clamouring for the repeal of the Mining Law, as it is highly damaging to human life and the environment.” Evangelical pastor Mario Vega told El Faro English of his “Christian responsibility to speak out against it for theological, ethical and social reasons.”
“In 2017, we also participated in the collection of a little over 100,000 signatures,” Vega contextualizes. “With that, we achieved the ban on metal mining.” This time around, more signatures were gathered under a state of exception suspending due process rights, in which a majority of Salvadorans express fear of stating political opinions in public and police stop and frisk bus passengers when expecting protests in San Salvador.
The petitions are an explicit rebuke of Nayib Bukele’s November 28 announcement on X that El Salvador would move to reverse the ban, on the claim that “God placed a giant treasure underneath our feet: El Salvador potentially has the gold deposits of greatest density per square kilometer in the world.”
Moreover, this criticism of a major Bukele policy is a sharp turn for the Catholic church in San Salvador. Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, in that role since 2006, gave his blessing at Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration in June 2024, having called reelection “a request that the people have repeatedly made.” State media was quick to highlight when he said in September 2022, six months into the suspension of constitutional guarantees, that Salvadorans “now see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Archbishop Escobar Alas has a complicated record on human rights. In September 2013, he closed the Legal Aid Office founded by Romero, leaving cases such as the El Mozote massacre and an archive of more than 50,000 complaints without legal assistance. In January 2021, Escobar Alas at first refused to allow a judicial inspection of the archdiocese’s archives relating to the El Mozote trial held that April, including significant documentary evidence. Three days later, he backpedaled and said he would not stand in the way.
The Catholic Church’s reactivation as a critical voice comes at a delicate time for civil society groups criminalized in El Salvador. Noah Bullock, director of Anglican-founded human rights organization Cristosal, says that, on the issue of mining, “the church is being consistent in analyzing and reaching the same conclusion as the population: Mining puts life at risk in a country with a water crisis.”
Bukele reserved criticism until recently. On February 2, he mocked the church’s stance: “Such a grand effort to stop mining from the biggest holders of gold in the world,” he wrote.
He then put his own spin on the mediation of Catholic clergy between the gangs and Mauricio Funes administration (2009-2014) during a ceasefire brokered in 2012 for a reduction in homicides: “They never said anything when [the gangs] killed 30 Salvadorans a day,” he lied. “They gave their ‘blessing’ to negotiate with them.”
Bukele, who negotiated with gangs as San Salvador mayor and later as president, still denies that his own government brokered a deal with MS-13 and 18th Street between 2019 and 2022 for reduced homicides and electoral support — and tried to hide the evidence.
“When the archbishop differs in his opinion, they attack him, labeling him as opposition,” says Bullock, who was illegally surveilled using Pegasus and heads an organization which has accused the Salvadoran state of possible crimes against humanity under the state of exception. “This is evidence that in El Salvador there is no freedom of thought or expression, and that is a symptom of a closing of civic space in general.”
Evangelical heavyweights, meanwhile, are divided. Whereas Vega has openly criticized reelection and arbitrary arrests, prominent Evangelical leader “Toby Junior” López Bertrand is the de-facto president’s open supporter, echoing his security rhetoric: “We have gotten to the point that we are safer in El Salvador than in France,” claimed Toby Jr. last year. Asked on the radio about the recent signature-gathering, he danced around the question.
“Community organizations, NGOs, unions, cooperatives, and churches feel pressure and face the decision to remain in silence and avoid the consequences of speaking out or taking risks,” concludes Bullock.
To a lesser extent than in Nicaragua, the Jesuit-run Central American University (UCA) in El Salvador has been a target of attacks from Bukele. In February 2022, the Bukele-controlled legislature summoned UCA rector Andreu Oliva before a “Special Committee for Façade NGOs,” supposedly to investigate millions of dollars embezzled under past governments.
The UCA mounted a live fact-check. “I never approached any authority [of different governments] to arrange allotments for the university, because these never existed,” Oliva responded. “STOP THE DISINFORMATION,” added the university in capital letters.
Nicaragua: scorched earth
”I always believed in my freedom,” said Nicaraguan Bishop Rolando Álvarez, a former political prisoner stripped of his citizenship, last month in the Vatican, in his first interview outside Nicaragua. “I do not feel exiled, but rather liberated, and in the diaspora.”
Álvarez, a mediator of peace talks between the Ortega-Murillo regime and dissidents in 2018, was arrested in 2022 on charges of treason and spreading fake news to “destabilize the country.” He refused to be expelled on a plane with 222 other political prisoners in February 2023, and was next sentenced to 26 years in prison and imprisoned until his expulsion to the Vatican in January 2024 alongside 18 other priests.
Nowhere in Central America is freedom of religion tighter than in Nicaragua, where, ironically, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo two decades ago rebranded as Christian. A recently decreed new constitution installing them as “co-presidents”, erasing the separation of powers, and formalizing single-party rule, also orders the religious to remain “free from foreign control.”
Murillo, whose communiqués include phrases such as “Light and truth”, accused exiled bishop Rolando Álvarez and other clergy of being pedophiles. She has also called them “agents of the devil.” After her now-exiled daughter Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo denounced Daniel Ortega in 1998 for child abuse and rape, Murillo took her husband’s side.
Dozens of Nicaraguan clergy like Álvarez have been imprisoned or exiled, with at least 27 priests arbitrarily arrested between last October to January, per the U.N. Human Rights Council. Others have been forced to send photographs and weekly plans to police officers, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide. Mass is under state surveillance.
A de-facto ban on processions under a 2018 prohibition of unauthorized gatherings led to the April 2023 arrest of journalist Víctor Ticay for covering the procession known as Señor de La Reseña, in Nandaime. He was expelled to Guatemala in September 2024 with 134 other ex-political prisoners. Episcopal Conference President Enrique Herrera in November was banished from Nicaragua after criticizing municipal noise during services.
Among the 135 who landed in Guatemala were 11 pastors from the Mountain Gateway church. Imprisoned on charges of money laundering and fraud, their families received no news of the missionaries from their arrest in December 2023 until their expulsion. Jehovah’s Witnesses have also been barred from hosting communal bible studies.
Central American University’s facilities in Nicaragua were confiscated in August 2023, including the archive of the Institute of History of Nicaragua and Central America, containing tens of thousands of documents. The regime similarly shuttered over two-dozen schools, including the Nicaraguan Evangelical University. The UCA and its leaders were accused of being “a center of terrorism.”
Last August, in an interview with Confidencial on the first anniversary of the illegal confiscation of the UCA, Father José María Tojeira, Jesuit spokesperson in Nicaragua and former UCA rector in El Salvador, said his main hope for the recovery of the university was through a “change of regime”. By then, 2,000 Nicaraguan university students had applied to continue their Jesuit studies in Guatemala or El Salvador.
In its place, Ortega and Murillo erected the state-controlled Casimiro Sotelo National University. Its first rector, Alejandro Genet, sanctioned by the Biden administration for enforcing Sandinista party activity for employees and students, lasted 15 months before his dismissal at the end of November 2024, as the university struggled to retain students.
Ernesto Medina, former rector of the American University (UAM) and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), told Confidencial: ”They underestimated the youth [of the UCA], thinking that the students would continue going, that it was only a change of name. But they didn't show up.”
It appears that the “Sandinista guillotine”, the regime’s policy of annulling thousands of critical civil society organizations, is not as mighty at keeping classrooms full.
This article first appeared in the April 3 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
