Politics

Salvadorans protest ruling enabling Bukele re-election

San Salvador, Sep 5 (EFE).- Hundreds of Salvadorans, mainly young people, protested Sunday in the country’s capital against a Supreme Court ruling that enables presidential re-election and allows President Nayib Bukele from running for a second term in 2024.

“We express our absolute rejection of the recent arbitrary and authoritarian acts of the Nayib Bukele regime,” protesters humanitarian and feminist organizations at the Monument to the Constitution reading a statement.

They added that, in their opinion, the Bukele government and the ruling New Ideas party “have undertaken a series of actions that undermine democracy and dissent in order to consolidate an absolute executive power.”

“This has been a cascade of events that seek to collapse what little we knew about democracy,” they said, criticizing the recent congressional decision to dismiss judges and prosecutors in their sixties.

About 3,000 protesters carried banners with messages rejecting the government and against measures such as the implementation of bitcoin as legal currency.

On Friday night, the constitutional magistrates, appointed on May 1, reversed a 2014 ruling and enabled immediate presidential re-election.

In the resolution, the magistrates ordered the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to allow “a person who exercises the presidency of the (Salvadoran) republic and has not been president in the immediately preceding period to participate in the electoral contest for a second time.”

Journalists said on social media that agents of the National Civil Police arrived to photograph and capture videos of the gathering.

The agents of the Ocular Inspections unit did not carry their identification number, which Salvadoran legislation requires that they have in a visible place. EFE

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