April 2, 2021: Bukele and Norma Torres Clash Days Before White House Visit to El Salvador

“You should use part of the check you get from your financiers to buy yourself new glasses,” the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, wrote on Twitter to Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA) on Wednesday night. The mud was flung after Torres’s comment, also on Twitter, about a disturbing video of two young children dropped by an adult from the top of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. 

“This is a huge shame for the governments of #Guatemala #Honduras #ElSalvador. Your people deserve governments really committed to combating corruption and the narcos,” Torres wrote. 

The children who were hefted over the wall, and landed hard on U.S. soil, are apparently from Ecuador, not El Salvador — perhaps a mistake or a misread from Torres, but one which prompted Bukele to swiftly fire back. Bukele’s insult doesn’t specify the “financiers”, but he has previously claimed that Democratic members of Congress were in the pocket of George Soros and, in recent weeks, has taken to sparring with U.S. policymakers online on immigration-related policy.

After Bukele’s response, the conversation further devolved, Torres retorting that migrant deaths are the result of “narcissistic dictators like you,” and Bukele appealing to Latino voters in her California district. “DON’T VOTE for @NormaJTorres. She doesn’t work for you, but rather to keep our countries underdeveloped,” he wrote, in a tweet liked by Salvadoran ambassador Milena Mayorga.

The spat between Torres and Bukele will likely be part of the conversation during the visit of White House advisor Juan S. González and recently named Special Envoy for the Northern Triangle, Ricardo Zúñiga, to the region next week. The Pacaya volcano erupting smoke and lava set back their planned trip to Guatemala ten days ago, but according to sources in Washington, they have rescheduled for next Monday. Their new itinerary includes El Salvador.

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke this Tuesday with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, the first Central American president to speak directly with the White House since the Biden administration came into office. Guatemala stands to be the preferred ally in the region for the Biden Administration, especially given its willingness to engage in hardline anti-immigration measures. This week, the Guatemalan military cracked down on yet another migrant caravan originating in Honduras.

The U.S. State Department also sees Giammattei’s administration as the most politically receptive to its agenda, and tried to influence the election of judges to the country’s Constitutional Court, the country’s top constitutional authority, which remains embroiled in crisis as Congress has attempted to appoint favorable judges, some of them sullied with recent corruption charges.

On this topic, we’re sharing today a column by Álvaro Montenegro that reflects on President Giammattei’s naming of Leyla Lemus, his current Chief of Staff, as a magistrate to the Constitutional Court. “There is a significant risk that the new court, loyal to the corrupt, will undo more than a decade of transformative work to advance the cause of justice in Guatemala,” Montenegro writes. He notes the close connection between the state, organized crime, and traditional business interests.

“It is crucial that in the coming years,” Montenegro concludes, that “new coalitions coalesce between businesses, civil society, Indigenous peoples, and international allies, in order to promote a democratization of the country—otherwise, the only path forward will be the one that leads to authoritarianism.”

From Guatemala, González and Zúñiga will travel to El Salvador, though there are doubts that they will meet with President Nayib Bukele, who González and other officials declined to meet with in Washington this February. In its 2020 human rights report, Biden’s State Department offered a confrontational reading of the Bukele administration, asserting that, “on February 9, the executive branch used security forces to attempt to interfere with the independence of the legislature.” 

The State Department also noted “serious restrictions on free expression and the press” in El Salvador. This past week, the prominent private television network Canal 33 announced it would stop broadcasting Focos, an in-depth multimedia political journalism show. “The move comes as a surprise...and without room for negotiation,” wrote Focos co-directors Saúl Hernández y Karen Fernández in an editorial. 

Focos will now move entirely online. While the network’s precise reasoning behind the decision remains unclear, the directors of Focos were unequivocal about the broader context for the move: “Our government is intolerant of criticism and rejects the scrutiny of the press. It’s in this context that checks on power are reduced to civil society and the independent press.”

The State Department’s evaluation of press freedom in El Salvador, among numerous issues including judicial independence, corruption, and state-sanctioned violence, echoed its evaluations of Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Against the latter, though, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the most strident stance in the region, directly mentioning Nicaragua in his introductory remarks alongside the likes of Syria and Yemen. 

By contrast, his department’s report made no mention of the drug trafficking scandals threatening to sink Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. Earlier this week, Tony Hernández (brother of current president, Juan Orlando Herández) was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison and ordered to hand over $138 million dollars in drug profits that he earned from trafficking, over the last 15 years, at least 400,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States. Prosecutors were explicit that he wasn’t working alone, but as part of a network of “state-sponsored drug trafficking.”

An assistant US attorney also made it abundantly clear that Hernández “conspired with his brother, the president of Honduras.” It’s yet another blow to the legitimacy of Hernández, who completes his final year in office. 

Today, we’re sharing a column from Dardo Justino Rodríguez about the rise in cocaine production in Central America. For decades now, Central America has been a key thoroughfare for cocaine trafficking, as South American cultivators and producers were squeezed by DEA policing in the Caribbean. In an emerging trend, cocaine is increasingly planted and processed in Central America. 

Although the region may not offer the most ideal conditions for coca cultivation, in a February drug bust in the northern coastal department of Colón, the Honduran military and counternarcotics police claimed to have found and eradicated over 13,000 coca plants. As Central America continues “to suffer the effects of persistent economic crises, which have led to mass displacement and migration. These conditions also provide fertile ground for coca cultivation, as it becomes a means of survival alternative for marginalized families living in rural areas, among the hills, forests, and jungles, with little to no law enforcement presence.”

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By Álvaro Montenegro

On March 10, Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei named Leyla Lemus, his current chief of staff, as a magistrate to the Constitutional Court, the country’s top constitutional authority. With this move, Giammattei dealt the final blow to Guatemala's justice system. In recent years, the courts presided over a wave of prosecutions which, more than in any other Central America nation, put the country’s most powerful political and business elites up against the ropes.

By Dardo Justino Rodríguez

The notion that Central America serves merely as a thoroughfare for South American drugs headed to consumer markets farther north is coming under increased scrutiny. While the region continues to be used to receive and dispatch cocaine shipments from the south, the fact is that, for some years now, countries like Guatemala and Honduras have slowly started to produce the drug themselves.