A Salvadoran living in Washington goes to El Salvador to compete against Bukele in the 2024 elections

Salvadoran lawyer Luis Parada, a resident of the Washington area, and who was the key witness for Salvadoran justice in prosecuting the soldiers who perpetrated the massacre of six Jesuit priests and two workers from the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) in 1989, agreed this Wednesday to compete for the presidency of El Salvador in the general elections to be held on February 4, 2024.

Parada, an expert in international litigation and who has defended El Salvador in successive lawsuits against the State before the International Center for Investment Arbitration of the World Bank (ICSID) – which it has won – told the voice of america this Thursday before leaving for El Salvador, which has been a “quick” decision at the request of the organizations and parties that see him as a figure who can unite a national movement, for which reason “he has decided to accept the challenge.”

“We are more Salvadorans with a democratic vocation and commitment to build a country for all,” Parada said on social networks when accepting his candidacy.

Luis Parada is emerging as the sole candidate of the Salvadoran opposition, after learning that there would be an agreement between the political forces and the social movement to have a single opposition force in the 2024 presidential elections under the slogan “Sumar por El Salvador”, according to Salvadoran media have revealed.

The movement seeks to wrest power from President Nayib Bukele, who, against the constitutional mandate that prohibits re-election, would launch his candidacy boosted by his high popularity.

Bukele began this year with 90% approval in his management, according to an opinion study carried out by LPG Data from La Prensa Gráfica, his popularity would be reinforced by the combat the gangs MS-13 and Mara 18 that for many years caused thousands of deaths in the country and that the government has stopped with a state of exception that is already 15 months old mass captures and imprisonmentswhile the rest of the citizens have suppressed constitutional rights.

Parada will register with the Nuestro Tiempo Party, of the center-right tendency, and would complete the formula together with the human rights defender, Celia Medrano, according to the deliberations reached by the organizations that postulate them.

Initially the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance Party (ARENA), which governed the country for 20 years, and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which led the Executive for 10 years, both bipartisan forces, declared in a principle that they would not unite in coalition.

But the two formerly ruling parties have seen their quotas of power reduced in the municipal and legislative elections of 2021, which left their benches in the National Assembly of 84 deputies at a minimum; 14 seats for ARENA and four for the FMLN, far from the absolute majority of the pro-government Nuevas Ideas, which won Congress in a campaign denounced by opponents as unequal for the parties in contention amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recent days it emerged that both parties would be about to reach an agreement with the center-right parties Nuestro Tiempo and Vamos to form the opposition block to Bukele on the presidential ballot, reported the investigative environment The lighthouse.

“Within Arena and the FMLN there is still a discussion about whether to close this deal that, according to sources, they have helped to build. The members of civil society and the other political parties are determined to follow this collective plan”, said that medium.

Human rights defender with a long history in the Central American country Celia Medrano, who has taken center stage in the last two years in the face of successive complaints of human rights violations and the arbitrariness of the State security forces under the exception regimesaid on social networks that he joined the participation as a formula with an “option that is as representative as possible” of Salvadoran society.

Luis Parada studied at Georgetown University Law School in Washington. Before arriving in the US capital, he had a military career, reaching the rank of captain graduating from the West Point Military Academy, in the US.

After testifying in the case of the Jesuits murdered during the “final offensive” in the last stage of the Salvadoran civil war, the young captain was sent by former Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani to Washington as a military attaché to safeguard his security in the face of the risk to his integrity during the judicial process in El Salvador, which was closely followed by the international community.

In 2018, Parada tried to compete in the ARENA party primaries as an “outsider” candidate, but abandoned the competition before the campaign process began, pointing out that there were no internal conditions in the party for “fair competition.”

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