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Judi Lynn

(160,217 posts)
Tue Feb 9, 2021, 05:56 AM Feb 2021

Sources: Biden officials snub Salvadoran leader in DC trip

JOSHUA GOODMAN,
Associated Press Writer
Feb. 8, 2021
Updated: Feb. 9, 2021 1:20 a.m.

MIAMI (AP) — The Biden administration turned down a meeting request with El Salvador’s president on an unannounced trip to Washington last week, as criticism of the Central American leader mounts among Democrats, three people with knowledge of the decision said Monday.

The trip by Nayib Bukele, which has not been previously reported, came after a senior White House official warned in an interview with a Salvadoran news outlet highly critical of Bukele that the Biden administration expected to have “differences” with him.

Bukele was quick to embrace former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies restricting asylum requests, which won him a great deal of U.S. support for his tough governing style in El Salvador, where he is popular. But like other world leaders befriended by Trump, he faces an uphill climb pivoting to the Biden administration, which is seeking to undo those policies and has signaled its relationship with El Salvador is under review.

The president’s surprise trip amid a pandemic posed a dilemma for U.S. policy makers. They were given little advance notice and are mostly avoiding in-person meetings due to the coronavirus and because many senior positions remain vacant, said the the three people, all of whom are in Washington and insisted on speaking anonymously in return for discussing internal decision-making.

More:
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Sources-Biden-officials-snub-Salvadoran-leader-15934708.php

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A Wrecking Ball Moment: How Bukele’s Personal Power Grab Is Evidence of a Dangerous Ignorance of History
Héctor Lindo
Thursday, 13 de february de 2020



The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, accompanied by armed soldiers outside the
doors of the Legislative Assembly. Photo of El Faro: Carlos Barrera

The front page of last Sunday’s papers in El Salvador had different versions of the same jarring scene that president Nayib Bukele had staged for the media. The photos of the event showed the millennial head of state surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, his casual attire in sharp contrast with the bulletproof vests and automatic guns of the men around him. They were conspicuously out of place, presiding over the room where the national legislature meets, the “Salón Azul.” And yet something was missing. The operatic moment was marred by the absence of the majority of congress members. The carefully conceived staging was, therefore, missing the key ingredient of cowed deputies surrendering to the power of Nayib. Their absence blocked the president from achieving his goal of forcing the legislature to approve a loan to finance his anti-gang signature plan.

It was ironic for a president so notoriously unmoored in history to be the protagonist of a tableau vivant which, unwittingly, elicited profound historical resonance.

Bukele sees himself as the permanent replacement of the two political parties—the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA; and the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN—that have dominated Salvadoran politics for the past three decades. To Bukele and his supporters, his election marked the end of the post-civil war era. His government downplays the commemoration of the signing of the Peace Accords that marked the end of El Salvador’s painful war. He is bringing to power a new generation, and signals the change by eschewing a tie, wearing garishly colored socks, and by his savvy social media presence. In a moment of maximum international exposure, during his speech at the United Nations, he took a selfie. His most celebrated tweet describing himself as “The coolest and handsomest president in the entire world” was characteristically narcissistic and non-ideological.

Given his norm-breaking behavior, governing-by-tweet politics, disparaging of the press, ignorance of the importance of checks and balances, cavalier attitude to the rule of law, self-aggrandizement, interest in TV ratings, and tendency to demean opponents, outsiders see in president Bukele a follower of examples set further south in Brazil or, perhaps, north of Mexico. Someone I know refers to him as “nano Trump”.

Bukele pays little attention to history. Having done a somersault over the post-war period, he now hopes to move on and consolidate his power. But the army that is cooperating with him cannot forget the past. An ongoing trial has forced military officers to acknowledge their role in the horrific massacre of El Mozote, the sanguinary episode of the civil war when almost a thousand innocent civilians were slaughtered by the army’s elite unit, the Atlacatl Battalion. Military officers are also profoundly interested in reviving the amnesty law that protected them from prosecution for crimes against humanity before it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the young president mimics the norm-busting ways of twenty first century role models such as Trump and Bolsonaro. But it takes a profound ignorance of Salvadoran history to repeat its worst mistakes with such casualness. Bukele’s actions on February 9 repeated the twentieth century Salvadoran tactic of powerful civilians seeking alliances with the armed forces to achieve their goals. For most of the past century, an alliance between the Salvadoran Army and powerful civilians controlled the legislature, rigged elections, enjoyed a complicit press, and violently repressed any political participation outside the narrow boundaries imposed from above.

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202002/el_salvador/24022/A-Wrecking-Ball-Moment-How-Bukele%E2%80%99s-Personal-Power-Grab-Is-Evidence-of-a-Dangerous-Ignorance-of-History.htm

~ ~ ~

El Salvador’s Army, with the President’s Help, Blocks El Mozote Massacre Investigation
Published in:
Los Angeles Times en Español
Author image
José Miguel Vivanco
Executive Director, Americas Division
@JMVivancoHRW
@JMVivancoHRW

On the morning of September 21, a judge arrived at military headquarters in San Salvador with a warrant to review the military’s records regarding the 1981 El Mozote massacre, one of the largest mass killings in modern Latin American history. Soldiers blocked the judge from entering, blatantly refusing to comply with the judicial order. The judge went to six other military facilities in the following weeks. Each time, soldiers prevented the judge from examining the records.

It came as a slap in the face to Salvadorans reckoning with one of the most horrific episodes in the country’s 12-year civil war. It also signaled a reversal of President Nayib Bukele’s commitment to guarantee access to military records.

Three days after the judge’s first attempt to execute the order, President Bukele explicitly backed the military’s refusal. The judge, he said, “ha[d] no jurisdiction over the Armed Forces.” Bukele also asserted that the president was the only authority entitled to declassify military files.

To deflect attention from the military’s disregard for the order, President Bukele accused the judge of responding to “political interests.”

Nearly 40 years after the massacre, the memory of its brutality still shakes Salvadorans. The massive scale of the atrocity is part of the horror. Between December 11 and December 13, 1981, the Salvadoran Army killed 978 people, including 533 children, in and around the town of El Mozote. The Atlacatl Battalion, a US-trained military force that had been dispatched to the area to fight leftist guerrillas, took unarmed civilian villagers from their houses in the middle of the night and killed almost all of them. Many were raped and tortured.

More:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/11/09/el-salvadors-army-presidents-help-blocks-el-mozote-massacre-investigation

~ ~ ~









This is the way Bukele feels best for the treatment of El Salvador's prisoners during the lethal Covid-19 situation inside his prisons.





Bukele and his orange friend.

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Sources: Biden officials snub Salvadoran leader in DC trip (Original Post) Judi Lynn Feb 2021 OP
A Trump wannabe. Ugh secondwind Feb 2021 #1
Superb solution to such a dirty, greedy, underhanded move by Trujillo! Judi Lynn Feb 2021 #2

secondwind

(16,903 posts)
1. A Trump wannabe. Ugh
Tue Feb 9, 2021, 06:33 AM
Feb 2021

As a small child, we lived in El Salvador, my parents and my younger sister. My Dad was attaché Commercial to the Dominican legation. This was in the early 50’s.

What we didn’t know, was that the dictator Trujillo posted him there, so he could steal our lands. Trujillo and my father became mortal enemies and my dad flew a plane over the capital city and dispersed 150,000 pamphlets denouncing the dictator, and self exiled himself to Puerto Rico.

Judi Lynn

(160,217 posts)
2. Superb solution to such a dirty, greedy, underhanded move by Trujillo!
Tue Feb 9, 2021, 09:03 AM
Feb 2021

He did get the last word in the D.R., and everyone learned about it.

Trujillo definitely got his, later on, the big payoff for his lifetime of atrocities and treachery.

Thanks for sharing this extraordinary first-hand information, secondwind.

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