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Welcome to El Faro English,
Despite a still raging pandemic, yesterday a new migrant caravan from Honduras crossed into Guatemala. Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei has ordered a “state of prevention” in departments bordering Honduras, and declared that the migrants will be detained and deported. Emigration continues from the region whose systemic problems of corruption, poverty, and violence remain intractable, and which now faces a new economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.
Because of expenses associated with the pandemic, El Salvador’s economy fell 19.2 percent during the first quarter of 2020. Still, Nayib Bukele’s government proposed a 2021 budget of nearly $7.5 billion, which would require a new $1.3 billion dollar loan. The measure, which the government claimed is necessary to finance the annual budget that covers education, health, and security, among other expenses, is already being reviewed by El Salvador’s National Assembly. Critics are pointing out, however, that the budget reduces funds for oversight agencies such as the Ombudsman for the Defense of Human Rights, the Court of Accounts, and the Institute for Access to Public Information. On one hand, you have a president who has refused to offer detailed accounts of how the $3 billion in emergency funds have been spent. On the other, there is a Salvadoran assembly ruled by political parties that will likely not agree to further indebtment without a clear explanation of the budget or transparency over funds spent during the pandemic.
And… the infighting has already begun, with the budget already becoming a new institutional crisis ahead of the February 2021 congressional elections. El Salvador’s Treasury challenged the Assembly and the Supreme Court by withholding salaries for the legislative body, a measure that, in the opinion of Congressional President Mario Ponce, constitutes a crime. On Sept. 30, when the President introduced the budget, workers protested outside of Treasury Secretary Alejandro Zelaya’s offices, claiming that they hadn’t received the past month’s paycheck. In response to the picketers, Zelaya said that those paychecks wouldn’t be sent unless the Assembly approves the Executive’s plan for new loans. In response, Ponce requested that the Attorney General’s office take action, and they have since opened an investigation into the Executive and the Treasury.
Targeting Journalists
In another standoff, on Tuesday, 600 journalists and scholars from 47 countries condemned Nayib Bukele’s government’s attacks on the free press in El Salvador. In a letter addressed to the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the hundreds of signatories demanded that Bukele stop harassing members of the Salvadoran media and asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to "publicly and formally announce" that "it will be closely observing the conditions of the press in El Salvador." The Governing Council of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation sent the letter five days after Bukele claimed, on national television, that the Ministry of Finance was trying to build a tax evasion and money laundering case against El Faro.
Among the signatories of the letter are figures such as panameño singer-songwriter Rubén Blades, nicaragüense poet Gioconda Belli, and mexicano actor Diego Luna, as well as journalists and writers of the stature of Juan Villoro, Leila Guerriero, Jon Lee Anderson, among many others. Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, who also signed the letter, asked Edison Lanza about it on her talk show broadcast on September 29. Lanza said the “alarms have gone off” and that it is clear that Bukele’s intention is to “directly suppress any dissident voices, any journalistic and independent voice that might reveal his power. Chavez, Correa, Maduro and Ortega have the same style. It is alarming that, in this case, [Bukele] is moving faster.”
On September 29, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize Jury also “strongly” condemned "the escalation of attacks, threats and intimidation by the government of El Salvador and its followers against El Faro,” classifying as "alarming" what happened during Bukele’s television screed.
Further down the isthmus, the Nicaraguan Platform of NGO Networks, made up of more than 100 non-governmental organizations, called on Nicaraguan citizens and the international community to reject the proposed Foreign Agents Regulation Law, introduced by deputies from Daniel Ortega’s party at the National Assembly, as our colleagues at Confidencial report. The law, the NGOs argued, is designed as another weapon of the police state against civil society that would “subjugate us as Nicaraguan citizens under suspicion of working as ‘foreign agents’ with the supposed purpose of ‘putting the security of our country at risk.’” According to the organizations, “the bill is not supported by any study or risk analysis. It requires any person who receives money from abroad, be they a natural or legal person, to register with the Interior Ministry, and undergo financial monitoring by the Financial Analysis Unit. This reaffirms the police state the Ortega-Murillo regime wants to continue consolidating.” Hemos de recordar que hace sólo x semanas, Ortega embargó a través del ministerio de Hacienda el canal 12, uno de los únicos dos canales de televisión que en el país no son controlados por el gobierno.
And in Honduras, independent journalist, Luis Almendares, was attacked on Sunday by two unidentified men on a motorcycle who fatally shot him while he was recording a video in Comayagua, Honduras, according to local authorities and international organizations. Human rights organizations have said Almendarest had filed at least 10 complaints for receiving threats before. Almendares was taken to a hospital after the attack, but succumbed to his injuries early Monday. With Almendares death, 85 journalists, communications specialists, and media owners have been assassinated in Honduras since 2001. According to Amanda Ponce, director of the Committee for Freedom of Expression, impunity remains unchallenged in 90 % of those 85 cases. The College of Journalists has condemned the crime against Almendares and demanded security forces a thorough investigation to identify the perpetrators.
Back in El Salvador, as the long slog towards justice in the El Mozote Massacre continues — read our extensive coverage in our recent special newsletter, Breadcrumbs of Justice — we are sharing a review of Salvadoran-American journalist and writer Roberto Lovato’s new memoir Unforgetting. The book, published earlier this month, traces Lovato’s youth and early adulthood as the son of Salvadoran immigrants during El Salvador’s civil war era and his experiences as a journalist covering the contemporary gang crisis. Touching on themes of memory and erasure, El Faro English’s own Mariana Alfaro sees Lovato’s memoir a welcome and honest Salvadoran perspective in the American literature canon.
A Crisis of Disappearance
Our feature story in this week’s newsletter touches on the crisis of disappearance of young girls in El Salvador. 10,144 women have been reported missing in El Salvador in the last eight years. “Teen girls, who make up nearly forty percent of these cases, face the highest risk of disappearance,” El Faro’s Gabriela Cáceres and Valeria Guzmán report. “When families and friends of the missing seek answers, they face government authorities who cannot say whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Police, prosecutors, judges, and experts all point to the reality they know best: in gang territory, women are in constant danger.” Cáceres and Guzmán report on the 2012 disappearance of Alison Renderos, which became the first case of a girl’s disappearance that sparked nationwide alarm. Still, the state failed to respond. “She was accused of having ties to a rival gang, but her original sin was something that she had no ability to control: her childhood connections to the young pandilleros from her neighborhood,” Cáceres and Guzmán write.
In the second story on violence against women and the LGBTQ community, El Faro’s María Luz Nochez writes about Camila, a trans woman and sex worker murdered by three police officers in what activists said was a hate crime. While the judge failed to acknowledge that Camila’s death was caused by transphobia, he did sentence the three men accused to 20 years of prison, a precedential decision the LGBTQ community in El Salvador has celebrated as a step in the right direction. But for Camila’s loved ones, the ruling still brings little closure. Camila’s friend, Virginia, also a sex worker, is now trying to win an asylum application. “She fears that she will become another statistic and that her name will join those of her murdered friends,” Nochez writes.
Last, we’re sharing a link to Carlos Dada’s article published in the London Review of Books about a Cameroonian man who fled death threats and rising sectarian violence in his home country. In his long search for safety, hoping to find asylum in the United States, Mexican authorities were not only an obstacle to his freedom, but an instigator in his untimely death at sea. “In 2018 the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was preaching solidarity with Central Americans and freely handing out work permits allowing free movement,” Dada writes. “Now, however, the same government has turned Mexico’s southern border into a forward position of Trump’s wall and charged its new National Guard with stopping migrants.”
Thanks again for reading El Faro English. Stay tuned by following our Twitter account and have a great weekend.
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