Salvador Melendez
The reason given on Saturday evening (local time) was that the judges and the attorney general had pursued private interests in office. The opposition, however, accused President Nayib Bukele of wanting to bring the judiciary on the line of government after the Chamber of Deputies. “This is a clear coup – here a constitutional organ is being dismantled,” said Enrique Anaya from the Ibero-American Institute for Constitutional Law of the newspaper “La Prensa Grafica”.
Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party had suddenly become the strongest force in the parliamentary elections in March. Together with the allied Gana party, it has a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. Most recently, the head of state had clashed with the constitutional judges several times because they had received several of his decrees to combat the corona pandemic.
Critics have long accused Bukele of cultivating an authoritarian style of government. “Bukele breaks with the rule of law and wants to unite all power in his hands,” wrote the regional head of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, José Miguel Vivanco, on Twitter.