El Salvador: News & Updates

This article published in The Guaradian talks about the excruciating reality of criminalization faced by Salvadoran women who face obstetric emergencies.  

In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele – a populist who described himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” – assumed emergency powers and suspended civil rights in a move known as the “state of exception”. Framed as a temporary response to combat rampant gang violence, the crackdown has had far-reaching consequences for human rights and the justice system. Due process has been suspended, and about one in 50 adults imprisoned.

Advocates say those emergency powers have quietly expanded into hospitals, ensnaring women who suffer miscarriages, stillbirths and other obstetric emergencies. There is a new spiral of criminalization against women.

Support a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy. House Resolution 1056 calls for ending the Monroe Doctrine and building a “New Good Neighbor” relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean. Urge your US representative to co-sponsor this landmark resolution acknowledging two centuries of intervention and injustice. 

A new Salvadoran film about the 1981 El Mozote massacre premiered with government backing, sparking controversy for downplaying state responsibility while promoting the country’s security image. At the same time, survivors won a historic step toward justice as the long-stalled massacre case advanced toward trial after decades of impunity.

This op-ed recently published in Cleveland.com by Dr Gina Pérez, a cultural anthropologist and professor of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, examines a rethoric weaponized by structures of power to defame the ones they murder.  She highlights parallels between the Reagen administration's reaction to the assasination of four women missioners who were murdered in El Salvador in December 1980 and the current administration's response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. 

If the rhetoric of Jeane Kirkpatrick, a top foreign policy adviser to President Reagan, sounds familiar ("the nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were also political activists"), it's because we're hearing it again in the discrediting trash-talk from the White House aboutu Renee Good and Alex Pretti ("domestic terrorists").

The hardline approach to violence, a model used by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, is gaining increasing support in Central America, a region that has been historically plagued by insecurity, whether related to gangs or drug trafficking.

Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Honduras are three countries that have adopted measures similar to those implemented by the Salvadoran leader, despite the criticism he receives from human rights organizations.

A sharp reflection on how U.S. officials have long responded to state violence by blaming the dead—-from the murder of churchwomen in El Salvador to the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE—-and a warning that such lies can only hold for so long.

Leaders like Daniel Ortega and Nayib Bukele turn people’s bodies—whether prisoners, supporters, or critics—into tools of control, using public shows of loyalty and punishment to prove their power. These choreographed images of marches, prisons, and masked forces update old colonial methods of repression, turning fear and spectacle into a new style of “strongman”. 

More than 150 faith-based organizations from 25 countries launched an open letter on supporting an El Salvadoran ban on metals mining that was overturned by right-wing President Nayib Bukele in 2024. 

“We stand in solidarity with civic and religious leaders who are being persecuted and imprisoned for working against injustices, including the devastation that metals mining would cause their communities.”