Elections in El Salvador: “This country has perhaps the greatest freedom of expression that exists”

Felix Ulloa, vice president of El Salvador and candidate for re-election alongside President Nayib Bukele in Sunday’s elections, defends his government’s controversial model and policy of fighting criminal gangs within the framework of the state of emergency. And he warns, in an interview with RFI, that if it were proven that officials secretly negotiated with the gangs, They must be punished.

-In view of Sunday’s elections, what would be a good result for you? Why do we take it for granted that Nayib Bukele will win…

-A good result, first of all, is that a fair, transparent and democratic electoral process develops, that the people have the opportunity to vote without any type of pressure and that its result, its expression, whatever it may be, demonstrates the future from the city.

-And in numbers?

In quantitative terms we would like to exceed 75%, which is already a very high figure. If we managed to have a vote higher than 75%, it would be a historic record for our country and for many countries in the region, because the participation levels of our people, given that voting is not compulsory in our countries, have always been around around 50 something percent. Therefore, massive participation and a vote in favor of President Bukele above 75% would be ideal.

-There are many voices that speak of this risk of accumulation of power by Bukele, in addition to having a high percentage that this re-election went against several articles of the Constitution. Isn’t this a bit of a strangulation of the rules of the game?

-I think this is rather the way democracy is understood, because many critics, some of whom are called intellectuals, some of whom are called analysts, see democracy as an entelechy. They have a concept of democracy and when democratic reality does not fit into that concept, democracy no longer exists for them. (…) A dictator oppresses, represses, humiliates the people. In the case of President Bukele, when people speak out, they see him as a protector, as someone who gives them security and who is with the people in critical moments, as seen during the pandemic.

-The opposition could remain in the residual indices on Sunday. You criticize the opposition, accusing them and Bukele of wanting to free gang members. Why do they accuse you of this? What indications do you have that this may be true?

-Well, if you see, there is currently a television commercial in which all the deputies of all the opposition parties expressed themselves in these terms, saying that the emergency regime must be suspended, that it should not have been imposed, and that The MP from the Arena party says that if Bukele loses power, the prisons will be opened, that is, it is not a threat or an attempt to scare.

-You know that one of the most controversial issues concerns procedural guarantees for prisoners. How would you evaluate the guarantees available to a prisoner in El Salvador at this time?

-Well, first we have to separate the prisoners. There are prisoners who are common prisoners for common crimes, which is the vast majority of people who commit a crime, it can be a robbery, a murder, any type of common crime, and those detained for belonging to criminal structures. That is, ordinary citizens do not go to CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center, maximum security penitentiary) and the procedural measures that apply to gang members are not applied to them. And to be clear, the emergency regime in El Salvador today affects only two constitutional guarantees.

-Which ones are they?

-One has to do with prison time. When there is no emergency regime, a person is detained for 72 hours and then subjected to the judge’s order. Now, with the exception regime, this period is extended to 15 days. The second is the inviolability of your correspondence: no one can control your correspondence, your email or anything else. With the exception regime, the police immediately check their phone, their computer and their communications if they are caught on suspicion of being part of a criminal structure so that they can identify them. These are the only two guarantees that affect the exception regime. Therefore, when many people, especially in Europe, have suggested how there can be elections in a regime of exception, well, since the regime of exception does not affect the Salvadoran population, not a single public freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of mobilization, the freedom of association, all public freedoms are guaranteed.

-Surely some of these things are questionable, but they respond, we understand, to the reality of El Salvador. But by focusing on the long term, we cannot even have a state of exception for life. And I suppose to address the reality of gangs so that the problem doesn’t come back we’re going to have to look at deeper structural causes and we’re going to have to have long-term policies that attack inequality and poverty and other kinds of things. It must be there, in the political vision you embody…

-Absolutely, I agree 100% with you. The gangs were not born through spontaneous generation, they are the product of social inequality, of the state’s abandonment of an abandoned childhood after the war. This is the saddest and most tragic thing, because these children, war orphans, whose parents either died in the conflict or abandoned the country and abandoned them, were not cared for by the State and began as simple juvenile delinquents who later, when they met members of gangs deported from the United States, were structured to become a parallel state.

-What is the plan so this doesn’t happen again?

-So that this phenomenon does not repeat itself, which is a product of the post-war period, of the governments that administered the post-war period and that did not take care of these children, these young people or the economic model, we must see it done with that exemplary vision so as not to repeat it, make mistakes. I believe this is what will ensure that the mafia phenomenon does not happen again. Having them detained in the CECOT is a containment measure and a coercive measure by the State, just like capturing them and putting them there. But the corrective measure is, as you say, to attack the structural causes that generated the gangs, and these lie mainly in the exclusive economic structure in which the transitional economic and political elites took advantage and forgot about the popular sectors of the working classes because gangs emerge precisely in those neighborhoods.

-There is an NGO that reports 224 deaths in prison during the state of emergency. Are these cases being investigated?

I think so, but when NGOs provide these figures, I have my doubts. If you see that the history of people who die or have died in the prison systems of El Salvador, it has been 200 people every year. If you retrace history before the State of Exception 10 years ago, 8 years ago, 5 years ago, 20 years ago, an average of 200 people died, that is, 248 is not an extraordinary figure or one that could break your heart. .

–Given the international criticism of the authoritarian drift, will you, as vice president, be able to guarantee democratic standards for El Salvador in the next term?

-Yes, if we go back to the concept of democracy again, because I mean democracy in the etymological sense, we give power to the people and to Kratos, that is. If we are doing what the people need, want, expect from a government and the people give it in that delegation of sovereignty….

-But obviously this desire must also be accompanied by a free and independent press, by the ability to demonstrate in the streets of those who are against it…

-This country has perhaps the greatest freedom of expression that exists, because there is not a state, a government, a president who is attacked every day in the morning, in the afternoon, every other day and the next, as far as I know . main newspapers and the main media. If you have the opportunity to review the two large newspapers linked to the Arena and the small Colatino newspaper, linked to the FMLN, you will see that there is not a single positive reference to the Government or to President Bukele or his project.. They are all critics and none of them has ever received a sanction, a censure, a rule that limits their practice, there is no journalist in prison, there is no gag law, there is absolutely no threat to the freedom of expression.