After two and a half years of a exceptional regime which keeps fundamental rights suspended in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele is now raising the possibility of waiving this measure that was supposedly temporary and was applied as a security strategy to combat gangs.
The Salvadoran president believes that the achievements made in reducing murders and with the arrest of almost 81,500 people in that period could be maintained in the future without the state of exception, he indicated in an interview for the magazine Time published on Thursday.
“At some point in the near future, in the short term, we hope to be able to remove the state of exception, return to normality within the constitutional framework and be able to maintain the peace that we have achieved with simple judicial activity and normal judicial activity,” Bukele said, leaving open and undefined the date for making that eventual decision.
He mentioned that it could happen “as soon as possible.”
El Salvador has been in a state of emergency since March 27, 2022, which suspends fundamental rights for the population such as the right to be assisted by a lawyer in case of arrest, the right to be informed of the reasons for arrest, or the right to the inviolability of communications or association.
In addition, the period of detention was extended to 15 days without being brought before a court. In the 887 days that the exception has been in force, 81,420 people have been arrested for being gang members, but local and international organizations have reported cases of deaths, torture and arbitrary detentions.
More than 90% of them are in prison without a sentence and at least 7,000 have been released due to lack of evidence.
Bukele, who revalidated his mandate with a clear majority of votes last February despite the constitutional ban on re-election, he said that there are still more than 8,000 gang members at large. However, he considered in the interview that security in El Salvador “can exist without a state of emergency.”
As of Thursday, the human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario had recorded 307 deaths of adults in detention and four babies.
The president declared that “there is not a single piece of evidence of torture” and attributed the deaths to disease: “We are not killing anyone in prison.”
Regarding a possible new presidential nomination, Bukele dismissed the idea due to an agreement with his wife: “I cannot run for president again according to the Constitution due to the prohibition in Article 152. In addition, we have an agreement with my wife that this is the last one.”
Bukele was re-elected on February 4 with 84.6% of the votes despite the fact that the Constitution prohibits re-election in six articles and after the constitutional court interpreted, in September 2021, that one of the articles allows re-election only once.
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