Nov
Politics
$250,000 to advertise the Defense Minister
EL DIARIO DE HOY reports:
From September 24 to 30 of this year, the Ministry of National Defense (MDN) spent just over $ 249,000 to buy advertising space on various Salvadoran TV channels.
Between October 6 and 7, COMPRASAL (the electronic public procurement system) published a list of 15 purchases of air time that Ministry made.
The information on each contract is so scarce that the nature of those contracts is unknown. They did not publish important documents such as terms of reference or the contracts between the institution and the companies.
On the COMPRASAL site there is only a general description of the process, the amounts and the companies awarded with these contracts.
On October 7, El Diario de Hoy asked the version of the Ministry of Defense, through the Directorate of Communications and Protocols. However, the head of that office said that a letter should be sent to the minister and that depending on his schedule, he would determine whether to grant an interview or appoint someone else.
Forty days after the letter was sent, no response had been obtained.
These contracts would have been awarded a few days after the Legislative Assembly recommended the destitution of Minister René Francis Merino Monroy, after the legislators questioned him for the participation of the army during the invasion of the Assembly, on February 9, alongside the National Civil Police (PNC) and President Nayib Bukele.
That same week in which the spots began to be transmitted, the Defense Ministry had denied access to the premises of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the investigating judge Jorge Guzmán and experts who would verify the existence of military files related to the El Mozote Massacre.
On Monday, September 21, the date for which the inspection of the military installations was scheduled, a colonel stationed at one of the entrances to the facilities, denied access to the lawyer and the experts, despite the fact that President Nayib Bukele , Commander General of the Armed Forces, had promised months before, to open the military archives to learn the truth about human rights violations committed during the armed conflict.
The amounts of each purchase make it possible to verify with which companies contracts were granted more frequently. For example, the company Indesi, S.A. de C.V. (Grupo Megavisión) was paid a total of $53,110 for broadcasting the spots.
To Channel 12, Defense paid the sum of 40,960 dollars; to Channel 2, $47,019.30; to Channel 6, $34,645.80 and to Channel 4, $28,656.
Those were the largest amount, out of the total of $249,174.40, according to the information available in Comprasal.
Read the entire article (in Spanish) here.
