Salvadorans take to the streets led by youth and women to protest Nayib Bukele on Independence Day

Fatima Ortiz has been moving between meetings, video calls and her social networks since September 7 to push the call of the marches called to protest against the government of Nayib Bukele this September 15, the day that commemorates 200 years of the independence of the Savior from the Spanish crown. She is not the only one.

The calls for this Wednesday’s marches – there are about 20 different ones – are flying to unite in a single event the rejection of Bukele and its most controversial and unpopular measures, such as its intention to seek presidential re-election, a reform that would purge a third of country judges or the entry into force of bitcoin as a digital currency in legal circulation.

Officialism is also on the agenda for the day the presentation of a set of reforms to two-thirds of the articles of the Constitution, including those relating to the possibility of re-election of Bukele.

These will not be the first marches of opposition to the president, but this, according to some of its organizers, aims to be a watershed that marks the beginning of a more robust street protest and, for the most ambitious, the creation of a more vigorous opposition front in a country where Nayib Bukele and his followers have seized power of the Executive -public force included-, the Legislature and the head of the judiciary.

It was on September 7, the day bitcoin took effect, that Bukele witnessed the first nurtured street call since he took office as president in June 2019. Master of record popularity indices, of a victory unquestionable of his party in this year’s legislatures and barely bothered by a formal political opposition torn apart, civil society’s response to government actions had been irrelevant. Bye now.

“September 7 marked a turning point in street fighting, discontent and fatigue are already reaching unsustainable levels for the population”, Says Ortiz, feminist and digital activist who is among the most public group of promoters of the marches convened.

The expectation of the organizers is to fill the Plaza Morazán with at least 5,000 people, In the center of San Salvador, a modest number compared to the great marches of the 70s and 80s in El Salvador of military dictatorships and the civil war, but relevant in the times of bukelismo, which had just seen rallies of a few dozen when his deputies appealed to the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office to appoint related officials to these institutions.

There is something else that distinguishes the organizers of these previous leadership marches. Although officialdom, through spokespersons such as the Minister of Labor, has insisted on gluing the organization to the traditional left and right, the truth is that this time there are no big political parties, unions or strong guilds behind the protests. Leadership is rather horizontal, and among the most visible organizers are feminists and young people.

“It is women and young people who feel the oppression faster … Young people do not find opportunities, there is no future for them. There is no hope. There is nothing. The first option may be frustration, but then comes the struggle, and women are the ones who suffer the most from gender violence, masculinity, misogyny, which is multiplied by a thousand in oppressive regimes, “says Juan De la Cruz de el Popular Youth Blog, one of the movements that will be in the marches of the 15th.

The government’s previous response to the call for street protests, made mostly on social media, has followed almost every step of the bukelismo propaganda manual to divert attention.

President Bukele has not addressed the issue so far and has tried to divert the conversation to the alleged reactivation of the publicly funded digital app “Chivo Wallet,” for bitcoin transactions, and even announced the opening of free vaccination against Covid-19 to children between 6 and 11 years of age, which was already objected to by the association of pediatricians of El Salvador because it considers that “there are not enough efficacy data to give support for the “presidential decision” (the United States, for example, does not yet approve vaccination in this age range).

Bukele even had time left on the eve of September 15 to confront a journalist on Twitter about the legislative reform that will allow the purge in the judiciary.

Protesters, however, understand that the government has prepared and some already fear that the state apparatus will prepare infiltrations of intelligence or security agents in civilian clothes to try to rape the marches.

“There are people who are afraid of reprisals, the organizers talk about how to guide those who want to arrive and remain incognito on the march or those who face police who want to stop them or confiscate their phones”, Says Andy Failer, a member of the opposition party Our Time and who participates individually in the organization of the marches.

Failer and others of the organizers he spoke to Infobae they explain that on the eve of September 15 they arose rumors that government agents would infiltrate the marches to “cause riots and damage to private property, to give a bad image.” Another strategy would be to send the National Civil Police on the access routes to San Salvador to prevent the protests from fueling from the interior of the country.

For now, the only official government communication is that the president will speak on a national radio and television station at 8 p.m. (local time).

An unprecedented coalition in recent times

That it may be necessary to go back to 1944 to find a synergy of social forces similar to that which, that year, helped push the fall of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, the military man who commanded El Salvador with an iron boot for 13 years and went leading, in 1932, the massacre of tens of thousands of natives.

This time, as had not happened since the signing of the peace agreements that ended the civil war in 1992, the streets of San Salvador rush to receive members of different ideologies and creeds with a common slogan: rejection of Nayib Bukele and his policies.

Officialism has sought to use this amalgam of thoughts against the marches, painting it as a call for left-wing and right-wing policies that ruled the country between 1989 and 2019 and the decline contributed to Bukele’s rise to power. power.

Ernesto Sanabria, the president’s press secretary, referred to the protests in a thread of several tweets late on the night of September 14th. “The ‘marches’ convened are not real expressions of citizenship, but a desperate attempt by the ARENA-FMLN binomial (parties that ruled El Salvador) and … their satellites to resume the old manual of conflict and division “, wrote Sanabria, himself a former militant of the right-wing ARENA and a close adviser to Antonio Treu, a former sand president who has been arrested for corruption.

The organizers have been quick to move away from traditional political leadership and insist that it is a spontaneous citizen call from disparate sectors, all fed up with bukelismo.

“The most important challenge has been to articulate such diverse people and organizations, so distant on some issues and with different ideological agendas so that they can be seen as a single front,” says Failer. “It is a diverse collective group that in the short term has agreed on these marches. “, Add.

Fatima Ortiz, a feminist, talks about the diversity of the call, which has involved “building bridges to find minimums.” Carlos Clarà, literary editor, had said to Infobae in the previous one that these minimums agglutinate around the rejection to the presidential policies: “Outrage over the Executive’s disrespect for the rule of law.”

Roberto Dubón, a digital activist who has taken part in organizing the protests, also insists that this is a public call: “This call deserves to be recognized as the first where the protagonist is society, without ideological overtones, but in response to a dictatorship that has led us to confrontation”, daus.

There are also absences. The most notable is that of the great Salvadoran business community, the main representatives have remained close to Bukele and have even publicly supported him. In recent weeks, the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) issued a statement in which it greets the merchants and urges the government to respect them on the streets. What the ANEP does not do is call on its members to leave.

The leadership of the Catholic Church, still the most influential in the country, also issued an official statement on September 12 condemning the attempted presidential re-election. The bishops did not advance their participation in the march, but some organizers say there are prelates who have informed them of their intention to go.

At the end of the day on September 15, which will end Bukele’s message to the nation after the first real and public show of opposition, it will be known whether the coalition born of the repudiation of the president made noise in the streets.

Mario Gómez, a computer specialist who was arrested on September 1 by Bukele Police after criticizing bitcoin policy, has faith: “I think the marches on the 15th will be just a start, because not everyone is going to leave he wants to leave. It is striking that people have a clear motivation to leave, whether it’s the rejection of bitcoin, the issue of re-election, ”he says.

Ruth López, a lawyer, also sees, in the marches of the 15th, a spark, ignited by the policies of Nayib Bukele. “(The president) has gotten (these sectors) to come together, not to unite; unity cannot be circumstantial, it is not one-day. There is one goal that can be unifying: to dispute power.”

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