A Bukele Will Decide the Fate of Your Detained Children
<p>In El Salvador, justice, too, has become a family affair. But no one will ask Bukele for explanations because there is no one left to ask for them.</p>
El Faro
In El Salvador, justice, too, has become a family affair. Ibrajim Bukele, Nayib’s younger brother, recently revealed the existence of a secret commission operating outside the law, deciding the fate of tens of thousands of people detained under the state of exception.
Ibrajim Bukele confessed that he and others, including staff from the First Lady’s Office, participate in this commission. In other words, at least one of the dictator’s brothers and his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, currently decide who stays in prison and who is released in El Salvador.
The president of El Salvador’s brother holds no public office, and, in case there was ever room for doubt, nor does his wife have authority over the administration of justice.
According to the law, only judges can order the arrest, imprisonment, or release of a person. No one else. Violating this mechanism constitutes a complete degeneration of the judicial system and an attack on citizens’ rights.
But no one will ask Bukele for explanations because there is no one left to ask for them.
[rel1]
The justices of the Constitutional Chamber admitted to having been appointed in violation of the Constitution itself, willing to safeguard the interests of the Bukele family and their acolytes from that position.
The Attorney General’s Office is a personal tool of the Bukeles that persecutes opponents, critics, or those simply seeking justice, while cutting off any possibility of investigation against corrupt officials, torturers, or lawbreakers who are also instrumental to the dictatorship.
Judges have been removed or replaced by the Office of the President, and none seem willing to uphold the rule of law against the tyrant.
The Human Rights Ombudsman, whose job is to denounce human rights violations or defend victims, mocks political prisoners and endorses the state of El Salvador —a producer of victims recently accused by experts of committing crimes against humanity— as upholding human rights.
Without functioning institutions and the enforcement of the law, who guarantees Salvadorans their rights? If a secret commission deliberates in secret and reaches secret conclusions that determine the freedom or imprisonment of tens of thousands of citizens, how or to whom can a victim appeal these secret decisions?
Despite the gravity of Ibrajim Bukele’s revelations, made on the social media platform X, he delivered them with astonishing nonchalance, as an immediate response to another user to clarify that there are indeed people in the government concerned about the detainees.
[newsletter]
These are the people who, under his orders and supervision and that of Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, “review on a case-by-case basis” the tens of thousands of detentions carried out over the past five years without a warrant.
As if that —substituting the administration of justice— were not illegal and unconstitutional. As if revealing it were not a confession of a crime. Because there is no longer any state authority left to investigate it.
Worse still: we Salvadorans have learned how it is decided who remains detained and who is released only because Ibrajim Bukele responded to a comment on social media.
This normalization of illegality, opacity, and arbitrariness exercised by the dictatorship’s inner circle also illustrates how the Bukeles view themselves, how they view the rest of us, and how they view the country.
No laws stand above the will of the tyrant and his family circle. There is no public information beyond what they choose to share with us. The rest of us must settle for being passive subjects, waiting for their favor or fearing their contempt.
No trials, no judges; no demanding evidence or presuming innocence; no obligation to prove guilt. A brother and the first lady make the decision in secret. No explanations, no accountability, no checks and balances.
[rel2]
Isn’t this a scandal? How, in the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, is this not a scandal?
Have we already normalized dictatorship to the point of accepting, as just another thing, that the Bukeles and their subordinates determine the fate of thousands of people detained without charge, outside the law?
The apparent indifference of the population would suggest so. That is a dictatorship’s greatest desire: a passive population that offers no significant resistance to a country being taken over by a group of scoundrels.
But while the normalization of these actions is a political triumph for any dictatorship, the risk begins when it is the dictatorship’s own operatives who normalize the illegality in which they operate: because, when they lose their power, they will also lose their impunity. The dictator’s little brother, too. His wife, too.