Trouble Brewing in Central America The region has issues that the Trump administration can’t afford to ignore. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-brewing-in-central-america-11600028832?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
President Trump made a deal with Central American governments and Mexico to end the 2018-19 migration crisis by requiring asylum seekers from Central America to register in a transit country before seeking U.S. entry.
Since then, the administration has taken a “problem solved” attitude toward Central America. In fact there are still plenty of regional worries that Mr. Trump ought to take seriously.
Exhibit A is El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has been widely praised as a good friend of the U.S. but may not be so hot after all.
The 39-year-old Mr. Bukele was raised, politically speaking, by the left-wing FMLN party, formed by Salvadoran guerrillas after the civil war. He was elected FMLN mayor of the city of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012 and FMLN mayor of the capital, San Salvador, in 2015. But he ran for president in 2019 on a third-party ticket, defeating both traditional parties: the FMLN and the center-right Arena party. Today he heads the New Ideas party.
Mr. Bukele claims he no longer holds the ideological beliefs of the FMLN of his youth. But he has retained the instincts that made him a young star in the party.
In his first year in office he has shown himself to be an ambitious populist with an authoritarian streak. In February he stunned the nation when he marched into the Salvadoran Congress with armed soldiers and sat in the speaker’s chair in an effort to intimidate lawmakers who were not rubber-stamping his proposals.
Mr. Bukele justifies his disregard for limits to his power because his tough-on-crime policies have made him popular. Yet if El Salvador is to remain free, popularity can’t be an excuse for consolidating power.
There are now real questions about the methods he has used to reduce El Salvador’s high homicide rate. A Sept. 3 investigative report by the online newspaper El Faro alleges that the number of murders in the country was brought down through a negotiation between gangs and the government. Previous governments have cut similar deals.
Using government records and sources, El Faro says it found that in exchange for better prison conditions, gang leaders agreed to cool the violence and use their influence to support Bukele candidates in the February 2021 legislative and municipal elections.
Mr. Bukele has denied the El Faro allegations on social media. His supporters dismiss the story because of the paper’s reputation for favoring the left, and Mr. Bukele’s official position that he has broken with the FMLN.
Yet his disregard for the powers of competing institutions is troubling. In April, after the Supreme Court ruled that he could not detain violators of his Covid-19 stay-home orders and confiscate their property, he ordered police to defy the court.
Because he has challenged more than one of the high court’s rulings against his Covid-19 lockdown policies, Salvadorans on the left and the right have worried out loud that he aspires to rule as a dictator. In response he declared on Aug. 10 that if he were a dictator, he “would have shot them all. . . . You save a thousand lives in exchange for five.” Those words sent a chill through a nation that struggles to protect its young and frail democracy.
The rule of law is equally shaky in neighboring Guatemala under President Alejandro Giammattei, who took office in January. Rampant corruption has defined the Guatemalan judiciary for decades. As the executive he cannot single-handedly clean the judiciary’s house. But he could propose and champion necessary reforms through Congress that would make justice timely, transparent and truly accessible. Without judicial certainty, the economic growth Guatemala needs to defeat misery won’t happen.
The case of the Russian migrant Bitkov family captures the dysfunction of the country’s legal system. The United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala worked with Guatemalan prosecutors and judges to convict the family for using false documents. But those documents were issued by Guatemalan authorities and the Bitkovs are migrants.
In 2018 a Guatemalan high court upheld a 2017 injunction by a lower court that said the none of the family members were criminally liable for the false documents. This ruling is consistent with international and domestic law.
Once exonerated in 2017 the Bitkovs should have been freed. But mysteriously a lower court judge and prosecutors have been allowed to keep the case alive. Igor’s wife, Irina, and the couple’s daughter, who was a minor when the false documents were issued, still face the possibility of long prison terms.
Guatemala and El Salvador are lauded by the Trump administration because of their cooperation on immigration, Venezuela policy and other Washington priorities. But Central American poverty and violence grow out of institutional weaknesses. By overlooking the lack of political will to adhere to the rule of law, the administration invites future humanitarian disasters.
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