The United States government expressed on Tuesday (5) support for El Salvador’s constitutional reform – which approves the president’s indefinite reelection, something that paved the way for Nayib Bukele to run for a third term – and said the Central American country be compared to a dictatorship.
“The El Salvador Legislative Assembly was democratically elected to promote the interests and policies of its voters. The decision to make constitutional changes is theirs. It is up to them to decide how the country must be governed,” a US Department spokesman told EFE agency.
“We reject the comparison of El Salvador’s legislative process, based on democracy and constitutionally solid, with illegitimate dictatorial regimes in other parts of our region,” he added.
The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador ratified on Friday (1st) a constitutional reform that allows indefinite reelection, expands the presidential mandate to six years – which is five – and eliminates the second electoral shift.
The reform offers Bukele, widely popular because of the fight against criminal groups in the country, the possibility of running a third consecutive term, although so far he has not officially announced the intention of doing so.
The salvadorenha opposition and some international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), criticized the reform because they consider it “erodes the country’s democracy” to “perpetuate” bukele in power, and compared the situation with those of Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Bukele defended the reform and stressed that many developed countries allows the indefinite reelection of heads of government, among which cited the United Kingdom, Spain and Denmark.
The Bukele government is one of the leading allies in Latin America of US President Donald Trump’s government – both made an agreement to send illegal immigrants to the highest maximum salvage security prison.
