Hybrid Authoritarian
World’s Population
Population
HRF classifies El Salvador as ruled by a hybrid authoritarian regime.
Following a 12-year civil war (1980-1992) between the Salvadoran state and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the Chapultepec Peace Accords launched a transition to peace and democracy that demilitarized internal security, legalized the FMLN as a political party, and established new oversight institutions, including an independent electoral authority. For nearly three decades, El Salvador experienced competitive elections with alternation in power between the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party and the former guerrilla movement, the FMLN. In 2019, the two-party system was upended when former mayor Nayib Bukele became the only candidate not from ARENA or the FMLN to win the Salvadoran presidency since 1984, running as an anti-establishment candidate who promised to break with entrenched corruption and insecurity. After securing overwhelming electoral support, Bukele’s New Ideas party won a legislative supermajority in 2021 and subsequently approved sweeping institutional changes, resulting in New Ideas and its allies ensuring near-total control of political institutions. Parallel to this institutional consolidation, the regime has implemented aggressive “iron fist” security policies under a nationwide state of exception in force since March 2022, suspending constitutional protections and leading to the mass detention of nearly 90,000 people in the campaign against gang violence, according to official figures.
Electoral competition in El Salvador has been significantly skewed in favor of the regime, to the point where any political opposition has a highly unlikely, although realistic chance to win. Although no opposition parties or candidates have been unfairly barred from competition, the regime has enjoyed significant structural advantages, including the extensive use of public resources for campaigning in the last elections and a near-total control of the legislature with a supermajority that enabled the regime to rewrite electoral rules in its favor. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal adopted a largely passive posture, acquiescing to the Constitutional Chamber’s 2021 reinterpretation that allowed presidential reelection, failed to enforce rules on public financing of political parties, and did not monitor the use of state resources in the campaign. In the 2024 general elections, President Nayib Bukele was reelected with 85% of the vote.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public are seriously and unfairly hindered in their ability to openly criticize or challenge the regime in El Salvador. While some independent voices continue to operate, dissent has become increasingly risky under President Nayib Bukele’s administration. The regime has used a prolonged state of exception, aggressive policing, criminal prosecutions, online intimidation, and the domination of media narratives to silence critics. Media outlets, civil society organizations, and opposition figures face increased surveillance, legal harassment, and fear-based self-censorship.
Institutions in El Salvador largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. After gaining a legislative supermajority in 2021, President Nayib Bukele’s bloc restructured the political system by reducing the size of the legislature and municipalities and replacing top judges, including the entire Constitutional Chamber and Attorney General, with loyalists. The 2021 Judicial Career Law forced the removal of hundreds of judges and prosecutors, enabling sweeping executive control over the judiciary. Since then, courts have repeatedly enabled measures that undermine electoral competition — including authorizing immediate presidential reelection despite explicit constitutional prohibitions and later approving amendments eliminating the presidential runoff. Courts have also permitted the use of the ongoing state of exception to prosecute critics and human rights defenders, validating prolonged detentions without due process.
Electoral competition in El Salvador has been significantly skewed in favor of the regime, to the point where any political opposition has a highly unlikely, although realistic chance to win. While elections formally continue to take place and the regime has not unfairly barred opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections, opposition parties operate under severe structural disadvantages due to the regime’s overwhelming control of state institutions, media dominance, and extensive use of public resources for campaigning. Independent electoral oversight has been seriously undermined through the removal and replacement of high court magistrates who previously acted as institutional checks, and new legal reforms have discouraged or criminalized legitimate challenges to the president’s candidacy.
The regime has enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages, especially when it comes to the use of public resources for electoral campaigns in the media. To illustrate, according to a monitoring civil society organization, Acción Ciudadana, between August and October 2023, the incumbent regime spent $2.57 million on electoral campaign ads, compared to $64,476 by all eight other political parties combined. Other reports from international observers, such as the OAS mission, also highlighted the misuse of state resources for campaigning and how difficult the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) made it for opposition parties to access public financing stipulated by law. The EU/EOM noted that while the election was technically free, it was not fair due to the uneven playing field created by the regime’s control over key state institutions and the media. These campaign advantages contributed to the regime skewing the electoral playing field so much so that it claimed victory with a very high vote share: Nayib Bukele was reelected in February 2024 with 84.65% of the vote. However, his overwhelming popularity is mainly driven by his aggressive stance on gang violence and extensive social media presence, which played a crucial role in this victory. In February 2025, the regime-controlled Congress approved a reform that eliminated public financing of political campaigns. This reform formally eliminated the funding resources the opposition already struggled to access, solidifying the uneven playing field for future elections.
Moreover, the Bukele regime has seriously undermined independent electoral oversight. The Legislative Assembly’s removal of Constitutional Chamber magistrates in May 2021 and their replacement with judges aligned with the ruling party enabled a rapid reinterpretation of constitutional rules to allow immediate presidential reelection, overturning a long-standing precedent. This ruling obligated electoral authorities to admit Nayib Bukele’s candidacy for the 2024 elections, when he would otherwise have been ineligible after serving his first term from 2019 to 2024. Despite being the highest electoral authority and formally independent from all branches of government, the TSE chose to comply with the ruling without a challenge. Furthermore, in February 2023, the Legislative Assembly approved reforms criminalizing any attempt to impede a candidate’s registration, defining such actions as electoral fraud punishable by six to 20 years in prison. Before the 2025 constitutional amendments, El Salvador’s Constitution explicitly prohibited anyone from promoting presidential reelection. The new reform served as a deterrence mechanism and discouraged legal challenges to Bukele’s candidacy, which would have been consistent with the original constitutional framework. The TSE’s passivity extended across the entire electoral process: it failed to enforce rules on public campaign financing in place at the time, did not regulate or sanction the misuse of state resources for partisan ends, and did not uphold Article 218 of the Constitution prohibiting public officials from engaging in political activity using their office.
In El Salvador, independent media, civil society leaders, political opponents, organizations, and members of the general public are seriously and unfairly hindered in their ability to openly criticize or challenge the regime. The Bukele administration has targeted dissent through surveillance, smear campaigns, politically motivated prosecutions, and the prolonged state of exception, which suspends constitutional guarantees and enables arbitrary detention. Independent journalists and human rights defenders face digital espionage, harassment, exile, and criminal charges, while restrictive legislation and legal intimidation have obstructed the work of civil society organizations. The regime has also extended repression beyond national borders by weaponizing international mechanisms such as Interpol Red Notices to pursue dissidents abroad, contributing to a climate of fear and sharply shrinking civic space.
The Bukele administration has seriously intimidated or obstructed the work of independent, dissenting media. Journalists and media outlets face aggressive digital harassment, smear campaigns, and surveillance. In 2022, Citizen Lab reported that at least 35 journalists and civil society members were targeted with Pegasus Spyware in El Salvador between July 2020 and November 2021. This included reporters from investigative outlets such as El Faro, GatoEncerrado, La Prensa Gráfica, Revista Digital Disruptiva, Diario El Mundo, El Diario de Hoy, and two independent journalists, as well as members of civil society organizations, such as Fundación DTJ and Cristosal.
Moreover, Bukele and senior officials routinely use social media to label critical journalists as “traitors,” “liars,” and “gang collaborators,” facilitating harassment by online troll networks with ties to the regime. Several independent media outlets have recently gone into exile. In 2023, El Faro moved its operations and legal status to Costa Rica, citing a lack of conditions to continue operating in El Salvador, and in October 2025, GatoEncerrado and El Salvador’s Journalists Association (APES) followed suit. In June 2025, APES had documented a mass exodus of 43 journalists who had fled the country amid a rise in harassment, surveillance, and arbitrary restrictions imposed on the press, while noting that the figure did not account for other activists, community leaders, or public critics who have also gone into exile, driven by an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and persecution.
Although the regime has not directly shut down independent, dissenting civil society organizations, it has seriously obstructed their ability to operate freely. In May 2025, the government introduced the Foreign Agents Law, which requires organizations receiving international funding to register as “foreign agents” and pay a punitive 30% tax on all external resources. Civil society groups argue that the measure is intended to financially suffocate independent NGOs, stigmatize their work, and deter international support, given the law’s broad language and intrusive reporting requirements. Also in May 2025, Ruth López, a prominent lawyer who leads the Anti-Corruption and Justice unit of Cristosal, one of El Salvador’s leading human rights groups documenting abuses under the state of exception, was arrested on trumped-up charges of illicit enrichment. She faced a judge on a closed-door hearing only after two weeks of being held, and is currently in pre-trial detention without access to legal counsel or family visits. In July 2025, Cristosal announced that it was moving its operations to Guatemala due to escalating legal and security pressures.
The regime has also attempted to engage in transnational repression against dissidents abroad by weaponizing INTERPOL Red Notices. Two Salvadoran activists and lawyers, Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya, who had sought asylum in Spain after facing legal harassment in El Salvador for their work with the CSO UNIDEHC supporting a rural community, La Floresta, against forced eviction, were targeted through INTERPOL at the request of Salvadoran authorities. UN experts stated that the charges against them appeared baseless and directly linked to their criticism of government actions under the prolonged state of exception, and condemned the move as a violation of Interpol’s constitutional prohibitions against political persecution and called for the immediate revocation of the notices and guarantees against their forcible return to El Salvador. The regime had previously arrested the UNIDEHC spokesperson, Fidel Zavala, in February 2025, who is currently jailed in a prison with the same guards that he had denounced for torture of people in detention.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime in El Salvador. Since President Nayib Bukele’s party secured a legislative supermajority in 2021, the regime has systematically restructured judicial and legislative institutions to eliminate oversight and consolidate executive control. Courts have unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to undermine electoral competition and repress dissent, while the Legislative Assembly has passed reforms that seriously weaken institutional independence. The removal and replacement of top judges, the forced purge of hundreds of judicial officials through the Judicial Career Law, and rulings authorizing consecutive presidential reelection despite explicit constitutional prohibitions illustrate the extent to which institutional accountability has been dismantled.
The regime has subjected legislative institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence or operational effectiveness. Following the 2021 legislative elections, where Bukele’s New Ideas party and other allies won a supermajority in the legislature, they implemented sweeping reforms that reduced the number of deputies from 84 to 60 and municipalities from 262 to 44, and changed the seat allocation formula to the D’Hondt method, a form of a proportional representation system that aims to reduce political fragmentation in smaller districts by favoring larger parties. This adjustment significantly reduced opposition representation by enabling the governing bloc to secure 57 of 60 seats in the subsequent 2024 elections, leaving only three opposition legislators and effectively eliminating legislative oversight. Moreover, a reform passed in February 2025 removed the requirement that Constitutional amendments be approved by two separate legislative assemblies. The reform enables an accelerated procedure for Constitutional changes that eliminates parliamentary debate and public participation. As a result, the supermajority allows the executive to pass major constitutional and legal reforms with virtually no institutional resistance.
Members of the judicial branch who ruled contrary to the governing authority’s interests or were perceived as a threat have faced systematic retaliation. On May 1, 2021 — the same night President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party assumed its newly gained supermajority in the Legislative Assembly — lawmakers voted without debate to summarily dismiss the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, along with the Attorney General. The Constitutional Chamber had previously issued rulings that checked executive power, including decisions limiting Bukele’s use of the military to pressure the legislature and restricting aspects of the state of exception. Rather than following constitutionally mandated procedures, which require the establishment of misconduct and formal impeachment proceedings, the Assembly declared the judges “unfit” and replaced them within hours.
The regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. In August 2021, lawmakers passed a sweeping reform to the Judicial Career Law that lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges to 60 years or 30 years of service, forcing the automatic removal of at least one-third of the country’s roughly 690 judges, as well as dozens of prosecutors. The reform enabled the executive and its legislative allies to replace experienced judicial personnel at once, bypassing merit-based and competitive appointment procedures. The law was proclaimed by the President in September 2021, and the Supreme Court swore in 98 new judges the following day, many of whom were reportedly selected for political loyalty rather than qualifications.
Since the restructuring of the judiciary, courts in El Salvador have unfairly failed to check and have instead enabled the regime’s attempts to significantly undermine electoral competition and skew the electoral process in its favor. On 4 September 2021, the newly installed Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court issued a ruling reinterpreting the Constitution to allow immediate presidential reelection. The ruling reversed decades of constitutional jurisprudence and dismissed multiple explicit constitutional clauses prohibiting consecutive terms, arguing that the people’s “right to choose freely” superseded the reelection ban. This judicial reinterpretation cleared the path for President Nayib Bukele to seek a second term immediately after his first. Following his reelection, the Legislative Assembly approved constitutional amendments in August 2025 that codified consecutive reelection and eliminated the presidential runoff, allowing a candidate to win the presidency in a single round with a simple plurality. These reforms structurally advantage the incumbent and weaken electoral competitiveness by reducing opportunities for opposition coalitions to form in a second round.
Furthermore, courts have frequently and unfairly failed to check and instead enabled the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and retaliate against those who openly oppose its policies. Since the imposition of the state of exception in March 2022, Salvadoran courts have routinely accepted the government’s use of emergency powers as a basis to prosecute and detain critics with no link to criminal activity. Judicial authorities have allowed due process guarantees to be suspended, including the right to legal defense, the inviolability of communications, and the constitutional limit of 72 hours before a detainee must appear before a judge, enabling prolonged incommunicado detention. In 2025, courts permitted the application of state of exception provisions against prominent human rights defender Ruth López and constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya, both outspoken critics of the government. Each spent more than 15 days detained without being brought before a judge and, as of December 2025, remains without access to lawyers or family. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures in September 2025, warning that the judiciary’s use of emergency powers in these cases amounted to political retaliation, noting that the courts’ actions placed the individuals “at grave risk.”
HRF classifies El Salvador as ruled by a hybrid authoritarian regime.
Following a 12-year civil war (1980-1992) between the Salvadoran state and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the Chapultepec Peace Accords launched a transition to peace and democracy that demilitarized internal security, legalized the FMLN as a political party, and established new oversight institutions, including an independent electoral authority. For nearly three decades, El Salvador experienced competitive elections with alternation in power between the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party and the former guerrilla movement, the FMLN. In 2019, the two-party system was upended when former mayor Nayib Bukele became the only candidate not from ARENA or the FMLN to win the Salvadoran presidency since 1984, running as an anti-establishment candidate who promised to break with entrenched corruption and insecurity. After securing overwhelming electoral support, Bukele’s New Ideas party won a legislative supermajority in 2021 and subsequently approved sweeping institutional changes, resulting in New Ideas and its allies ensuring near-total control of political institutions. Parallel to this institutional consolidation, the regime has implemented aggressive “iron fist” security policies under a nationwide state of exception in force since March 2022, suspending constitutional protections and leading to the mass detention of nearly 90,000 people in the campaign against gang violence, according to official figures.
Electoral competition in El Salvador has been significantly skewed in favor of the regime, to the point where any political opposition has a highly unlikely, although realistic chance to win. Although no opposition parties or candidates have been unfairly barred from competition, the regime has enjoyed significant structural advantages, including the extensive use of public resources for campaigning in the last elections and a near-total control of the legislature with a supermajority that enabled the regime to rewrite electoral rules in its favor. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal adopted a largely passive posture, acquiescing to the Constitutional Chamber’s 2021 reinterpretation that allowed presidential reelection, failed to enforce rules on public financing of political parties, and did not monitor the use of state resources in the campaign. In the 2024 general elections, President Nayib Bukele was reelected with 85% of the vote.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society organizations, and members of the general public are seriously and unfairly hindered in their ability to openly criticize or challenge the regime in El Salvador. While some independent voices continue to operate, dissent has become increasingly risky under President Nayib Bukele’s administration. The regime has used a prolonged state of exception, aggressive policing, criminal prosecutions, online intimidation, and the domination of media narratives to silence critics. Media outlets, civil society organizations, and opposition figures face increased surveillance, legal harassment, and fear-based self-censorship.
Institutions in El Salvador largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. After gaining a legislative supermajority in 2021, President Nayib Bukele’s bloc restructured the political system by reducing the size of the legislature and municipalities and replacing top judges, including the entire Constitutional Chamber and Attorney General, with loyalists. The 2021 Judicial Career Law forced the removal of hundreds of judges and prosecutors, enabling sweeping executive control over the judiciary. Since then, courts have repeatedly enabled measures that undermine electoral competition — including authorizing immediate presidential reelection despite explicit constitutional prohibitions and later approving amendments eliminating the presidential runoff. Courts have also permitted the use of the ongoing state of exception to prosecute critics and human rights defenders, validating prolonged detentions without due process.
Electoral competition in El Salvador has been significantly skewed in favor of the regime, to the point where any political opposition has a highly unlikely, although realistic chance to win. While elections formally continue to take place and the regime has not unfairly barred opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections, opposition parties operate under severe structural disadvantages due to the regime’s overwhelming control of state institutions, media dominance, and extensive use of public resources for campaigning. Independent electoral oversight has been seriously undermined through the removal and replacement of high court magistrates who previously acted as institutional checks, and new legal reforms have discouraged or criminalized legitimate challenges to the president’s candidacy.
The regime has enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages, especially when it comes to the use of public resources for electoral campaigns in the media. To illustrate, according to a monitoring civil society organization, Acción Ciudadana, between August and October 2023, the incumbent regime spent $2.57 million on electoral campaign ads, compared to $64,476 by all eight other political parties combined. Other reports from international observers, such as the OAS mission, also highlighted the misuse of state resources for campaigning and how difficult the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) made it for opposition parties to access public financing stipulated by law. The EU/EOM noted that while the election was technically free, it was not fair due to the uneven playing field created by the regime’s control over key state institutions and the media. These campaign advantages contributed to the regime skewing the electoral playing field so much so that it claimed victory with a very high vote share: Nayib Bukele was reelected in February 2024 with 84.65% of the vote. However, his overwhelming popularity is mainly driven by his aggressive stance on gang violence and extensive social media presence, which played a crucial role in this victory. In February 2025, the regime-controlled Congress approved a reform that eliminated public financing of political campaigns. This reform formally eliminated the funding resources the opposition already struggled to access, solidifying the uneven playing field for future elections.
Moreover, the Bukele regime has seriously undermined independent electoral oversight. The Legislative Assembly’s removal of Constitutional Chamber magistrates in May 2021 and their replacement with judges aligned with the ruling party enabled a rapid reinterpretation of constitutional rules to allow immediate presidential reelection, overturning a long-standing precedent. This ruling obligated electoral authorities to admit Nayib Bukele’s candidacy for the 2024 elections, when he would otherwise have been ineligible after serving his first term from 2019 to 2024. Despite being the highest electoral authority and formally independent from all branches of government, the TSE chose to comply with the ruling without a challenge. Furthermore, in February 2023, the Legislative Assembly approved reforms criminalizing any attempt to impede a candidate’s registration, defining such actions as electoral fraud punishable by six to 20 years in prison. Before the 2025 constitutional amendments, El Salvador’s Constitution explicitly prohibited anyone from promoting presidential reelection. The new reform served as a deterrence mechanism and discouraged legal challenges to Bukele’s candidacy, which would have been consistent with the original constitutional framework. The TSE’s passivity extended across the entire electoral process: it failed to enforce rules on public campaign financing in place at the time, did not regulate or sanction the misuse of state resources for partisan ends, and did not uphold Article 218 of the Constitution prohibiting public officials from engaging in political activity using their office.
In El Salvador, independent media, civil society leaders, political opponents, organizations, and members of the general public are seriously and unfairly hindered in their ability to openly criticize or challenge the regime. The Bukele administration has targeted dissent through surveillance, smear campaigns, politically motivated prosecutions, and the prolonged state of exception, which suspends constitutional guarantees and enables arbitrary detention. Independent journalists and human rights defenders face digital espionage, harassment, exile, and criminal charges, while restrictive legislation and legal intimidation have obstructed the work of civil society organizations. The regime has also extended repression beyond national borders by weaponizing international mechanisms such as Interpol Red Notices to pursue dissidents abroad, contributing to a climate of fear and sharply shrinking civic space.
The Bukele administration has seriously intimidated or obstructed the work of independent, dissenting media. Journalists and media outlets face aggressive digital harassment, smear campaigns, and surveillance. In 2022, Citizen Lab reported that at least 35 journalists and civil society members were targeted with Pegasus Spyware in El Salvador between July 2020 and November 2021. This included reporters from investigative outlets such as El Faro, GatoEncerrado, La Prensa Gráfica, Revista Digital Disruptiva, Diario El Mundo, El Diario de Hoy, and two independent journalists, as well as members of civil society organizations, such as Fundación DTJ and Cristosal.
Moreover, Bukele and senior officials routinely use social media to label critical journalists as “traitors,” “liars,” and “gang collaborators,” facilitating harassment by online troll networks with ties to the regime. Several independent media outlets have recently gone into exile. In 2023, El Faro moved its operations and legal status to Costa Rica, citing a lack of conditions to continue operating in El Salvador, and in October 2025, GatoEncerrado and El Salvador’s Journalists Association (APES) followed suit. In June 2025, APES had documented a mass exodus of 43 journalists who had fled the country amid a rise in harassment, surveillance, and arbitrary restrictions imposed on the press, while noting that the figure did not account for other activists, community leaders, or public critics who have also gone into exile, driven by an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and persecution.
Although the regime has not directly shut down independent, dissenting civil society organizations, it has seriously obstructed their ability to operate freely. In May 2025, the government introduced the Foreign Agents Law, which requires organizations receiving international funding to register as “foreign agents” and pay a punitive 30% tax on all external resources. Civil society groups argue that the measure is intended to financially suffocate independent NGOs, stigmatize their work, and deter international support, given the law’s broad language and intrusive reporting requirements. Also in May 2025, Ruth López, a prominent lawyer who leads the Anti-Corruption and Justice unit of Cristosal, one of El Salvador’s leading human rights groups documenting abuses under the state of exception, was arrested on trumped-up charges of illicit enrichment. She faced a judge on a closed-door hearing only after two weeks of being held, and is currently in pre-trial detention without access to legal counsel or family visits. In July 2025, Cristosal announced that it was moving its operations to Guatemala due to escalating legal and security pressures.
The regime has also attempted to engage in transnational repression against dissidents abroad by weaponizing INTERPOL Red Notices. Two Salvadoran activists and lawyers, Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya, who had sought asylum in Spain after facing legal harassment in El Salvador for their work with the CSO UNIDEHC supporting a rural community, La Floresta, against forced eviction, were targeted through INTERPOL at the request of Salvadoran authorities. UN experts stated that the charges against them appeared baseless and directly linked to their criticism of government actions under the prolonged state of exception, and condemned the move as a violation of Interpol’s constitutional prohibitions against political persecution and called for the immediate revocation of the notices and guarantees against their forcible return to El Salvador. The regime had previously arrested the UNIDEHC spokesperson, Fidel Zavala, in February 2025, who is currently jailed in a prison with the same guards that he had denounced for torture of people in detention.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime in El Salvador. Since President Nayib Bukele’s party secured a legislative supermajority in 2021, the regime has systematically restructured judicial and legislative institutions to eliminate oversight and consolidate executive control. Courts have unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to undermine electoral competition and repress dissent, while the Legislative Assembly has passed reforms that seriously weaken institutional independence. The removal and replacement of top judges, the forced purge of hundreds of judicial officials through the Judicial Career Law, and rulings authorizing consecutive presidential reelection despite explicit constitutional prohibitions illustrate the extent to which institutional accountability has been dismantled.
The regime has subjected legislative institutions to reforms that abolish or seriously weaken their independence or operational effectiveness. Following the 2021 legislative elections, where Bukele’s New Ideas party and other allies won a supermajority in the legislature, they implemented sweeping reforms that reduced the number of deputies from 84 to 60 and municipalities from 262 to 44, and changed the seat allocation formula to the D’Hondt method, a form of a proportional representation system that aims to reduce political fragmentation in smaller districts by favoring larger parties. This adjustment significantly reduced opposition representation by enabling the governing bloc to secure 57 of 60 seats in the subsequent 2024 elections, leaving only three opposition legislators and effectively eliminating legislative oversight. Moreover, a reform passed in February 2025 removed the requirement that Constitutional amendments be approved by two separate legislative assemblies. The reform enables an accelerated procedure for Constitutional changes that eliminates parliamentary debate and public participation. As a result, the supermajority allows the executive to pass major constitutional and legal reforms with virtually no institutional resistance.
Members of the judicial branch who ruled contrary to the governing authority’s interests or were perceived as a threat have faced systematic retaliation. On May 1, 2021 — the same night President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas party assumed its newly gained supermajority in the Legislative Assembly — lawmakers voted without debate to summarily dismiss the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, along with the Attorney General. The Constitutional Chamber had previously issued rulings that checked executive power, including decisions limiting Bukele’s use of the military to pressure the legislature and restricting aspects of the state of exception. Rather than following constitutionally mandated procedures, which require the establishment of misconduct and formal impeachment proceedings, the Assembly declared the judges “unfit” and replaced them within hours.
The regime has systematically subjected judicial institutions to reforms that seriously weaken their independence and operational effectiveness. In August 2021, lawmakers passed a sweeping reform to the Judicial Career Law that lowered the mandatory retirement age for judges to 60 years or 30 years of service, forcing the automatic removal of at least one-third of the country’s roughly 690 judges, as well as dozens of prosecutors. The reform enabled the executive and its legislative allies to replace experienced judicial personnel at once, bypassing merit-based and competitive appointment procedures. The law was proclaimed by the President in September 2021, and the Supreme Court swore in 98 new judges the following day, many of whom were reportedly selected for political loyalty rather than qualifications.
Since the restructuring of the judiciary, courts in El Salvador have unfairly failed to check and have instead enabled the regime’s attempts to significantly undermine electoral competition and skew the electoral process in its favor. On 4 September 2021, the newly installed Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court issued a ruling reinterpreting the Constitution to allow immediate presidential reelection. The ruling reversed decades of constitutional jurisprudence and dismissed multiple explicit constitutional clauses prohibiting consecutive terms, arguing that the people’s “right to choose freely” superseded the reelection ban. This judicial reinterpretation cleared the path for President Nayib Bukele to seek a second term immediately after his first. Following his reelection, the Legislative Assembly approved constitutional amendments in August 2025 that codified consecutive reelection and eliminated the presidential runoff, allowing a candidate to win the presidency in a single round with a simple plurality. These reforms structurally advantage the incumbent and weaken electoral competitiveness by reducing opportunities for opposition coalitions to form in a second round.
Furthermore, courts have frequently and unfairly failed to check and instead enabled the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and retaliate against those who openly oppose its policies. Since the imposition of the state of exception in March 2022, Salvadoran courts have routinely accepted the government’s use of emergency powers as a basis to prosecute and detain critics with no link to criminal activity. Judicial authorities have allowed due process guarantees to be suspended, including the right to legal defense, the inviolability of communications, and the constitutional limit of 72 hours before a detainee must appear before a judge, enabling prolonged incommunicado detention. In 2025, courts permitted the application of state of exception provisions against prominent human rights defender Ruth López and constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya, both outspoken critics of the government. Each spent more than 15 days detained without being brought before a judge and, as of December 2025, remains without access to lawyers or family. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures in September 2025, warning that the judiciary’s use of emergency powers in these cases amounted to political retaliation, noting that the courts’ actions placed the individuals “at grave risk.”
