On December 16, right before holiday vacation in El Salvador, the Legislative Assembly fast-tracked two new changes to the Constitution, eliminating the minimum budget that guaranteed financial autonomy to the Judiciary and extending the term of Supreme Electoral Tribunal magistrates.
The reforms also cut two years from the terms of the Tribunal’s current officials, two of whom were proposed by the opposition.
With these modifications, the Salvadoran regime has now reformed the Constitution six times in less than a year. The latest changes were made in just six hours, without legislative discussion or public debate.
There is precedent for the ruling party Nuevas Ideas making major national decisions right before vacation. Last year, on December 23, 2024, legislators reversed the total ban on mining.
“They take advantage of the periods close to holidays to make and unmake the Constitution as if it were a piece of toilet paper,” said opposition deputy Marcela Villatoro, of Arena.
A slashed budget
The first reform is to Article 172, which had required the Executive Branch to allocate to the Judiciary a budget of no less than 6 percent of current revenues for each year.
That minimum floor had been in effect since November 1991, under the Peace Accords, and was intended to guarantee the independence of the branches of government so that there would be no political pressure to influence the operational functioning of the justice system, courts, and judges. “It was a historic achievement,” wrote the Regional Human Rights Monitoring Team in Central America.
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The new wording of the reform, which is to be immediately implemented, allows the central government to allocate funds to the judiciary “according to the reasonable needs of that institution.” The next day, the Ministry of Finance requested a $164 million cut from the 2026 budget for the Supreme Court of Justice.
Attorney Jonathan Cisco told La Prensa Gráfica that this cut could have serious consequences, such as layoffs of judicial personnel, the closure of magistrates’ courts, and the dismissal of judges.
“Today, when the Supreme Court of Justice is already co-opted by the executive branch, eliminating this guarantee would dismantle it budgetarily,” he said. “It’s a return to a pre-1992 model, when judges and courts responded to political interests rather than the public interest.”
In El Salvador, the Judiciary has been under President Bukele’s control since 2021, when his deputies irregularly dismissed the Constitutional Chamber to install loyal magistrates and began purging judges who were inconvenient for the regime.
Synchronized elections
With a waiver of procedure, the ruling party deputies also changed Article 208 of the Constitution to extend the term of the magistrates of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the institution that organizes elections and administers justice in that area, from five to six years.
They also included a two-year cut in the term of the current magistrates, two of whom were appointed at the proposal of Arena and FMLN, one of the few spaces that the political opposition maintains in national institutions.
The electoral magistrates' term will now end early on July 1, 2027, “with the purpose of temporal synchronization with the term for which the President and Vice President of the Republic are elected,” the decree states.
The change is in line with previous constitutional reforms on July 31, 2025, which allowed —contrary to the 1983 Constitution— for indefinite presidential reelection, the extension of the presidential term to six years, the elimination of the presidential runoff election, and the synchronization of legislative and municipal elections with presidential elections in 2027.
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Out of six constitutional amendments enacted by Bukele’s legislators, for five of them they used a fast-track mechanism that does not require the approval of a subsequent Assembly to come into force.
This new modality —which was explicitly prohibited by the 1983 Constitution, requiring the approval of two successive legislatures— was ratified by the deputies in January of 2025.
The rapid changes to the Constitution have consolidated Bukele’s regime and concentrated power to the detriment of his opponents, as was the case with the reform that eliminated public funding for political parties in February 2025.