El Salvador doubling down on the army

El Faro recently published a report on the investigation the deposed General Attorney was conducting on several officials, including Osiris Luna, for the conversations he facilitated among gang leaders inside maximum security prisons. President Bukele once again reacted via Twitter in a dismissive way, but amid the backlash on social media, he decided to focus on something else: drafting more youth for the army.

 

 

 

The president’s choice of words has not gone unnoticed. Diario Co-Latino has published some reactions to it:

 

In the Legislative Assembly, the deputy of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), Marleni Funes, hopes that when he says “internal enemies” he refers to “fighting the crime that exists in El Salvador. I would not expect him to be talking about his opponents, since they are not only politicians, they are everyone who thinks differently, journalists, universities, among others”, she stated.

Funes added that increasing the number of soldiers in an army is normal in other countries, military service can even be mandatory, but in El Salvador this is received with caution because one of the agreements when peace accords were signed in 1992 was “not to increase the number of military personnel so drastically, it was even reduced”, she added.

She also said that this issue in El Salvador is viewed with a little concern due to the experience that has been had with the instrumentalization of the Armed Forces. “That is why some sectors are afraid of how the army could be used again”.

 

 

Similar is the opinion of deputy Johnny Wright Sol, from Nuestro Tiempo, who said that increasing the elements of the FAES (army) “is contradictory and an incongruity, given that since the Peace Accords the role of the Armed Forces within the democratic scheme has been reduced. ”.

He did not think it was correct to talk about “internal enemies”. “It seems to me that talking about internal enemies in the current political context is also worrying and we do not share this decision for the Salvadoran youth”, he stressed.

While Reynaldo Cardoza, of the PCN, an ally of the Government, considered that Bukele is not referring to the opposition when talking about “internal enemies”.

“I think that to attack an internal enemy of the opposition, 10 or 20 policemen can be used, but I think that thinking that way is wrong,” Cardoza said.

And he added that the word “external” can refer to the fact that El Salvador must take care of “the sovereignty of the country and” external can be any country that wants to hurt us”.

He pointed out that, with this increase to the army, “they are generating employment, because each soldier who joins the Armed Forces gets an incoming. He is generating employment for 20 thousand young people”.

 

 

It is just another day in El Salvador, where everyday something new happens and creates more uncertainty, something that is not changing anytime soon when Bitcoin is about to become legal tender and the Salvadoran Supreme court (controlled by the State) recently ruled not to extradite two MS leaders to the United States.