Salvadoran Catholic Clergy Condemn Bukele’s Attack on Freedom

Time Period: 2020-25
Location: El Salvador
Main Actors: Catholic clergy, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez

Tactics:
- Letters of opposition or support
- Signed public statements
- Prayer and worship

Nayib Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in June 2019. Bukele won by positioning himself outside of the political mainstream and by promising to crack down on gang violence, although he took office at a time when homicide rates had cut in half over the preceding three years. Bukele has worked to extensively consolidate executive power, for example, firing Supreme Court justices and attorney generals and replacing them with loyalists. Alongside armed military and police, Bukele entered the legislature in February 2020 to pressure lawmakers to approve an international loan for security equipment.

Bukele is extremely popular in El Salvador for his response to gang violence, which he initially tried to address via negotiations with and concessions to gang leaders. After this failed, Bukele implemented a state of emergency in 2022 that has been renewed every month since and that broadly suspends Salvadorans’ constitutional rights. The Bukele model centers on widespread and arbitrary detention without due process and street militarization. Although El Salvador now has the world’s highest incarceration rate, Bukele can claim success as gang violence and extortion has decreased.

During the 20th century, El Salvador’s Catholic Church became an increasingly progressive critic of the US-backed dictatorships that ruled beginning in 1931. In this way, the church defected from its prior stance of alignment with the postcolonial status quo. During the 1979-92 civil war, elements of the church popularized the doctrines of ‘liberation theology,’ opposing the dictatorship’s political and economic injustices as religious imperatives. The dictatorship and its death squads murdered priests as well as El Salvador’s famed Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was canonized in 2018.

Bukele, the grandchild of Palestinian emigres to El Salvador, has both Christian and Muslim heritage. Despite insisting that he is not a religious person, Bukele has regularly justified his illiberal agenda by reference to God and described the war on so-called Satanic gangs as a battle between good and evil.

El Salvador’s Catholic Church has made a number of statements in response to Bukele’s authoritarianism. In several cases these have drawn on the church’s religious authority and historical legitimacy. For example, in July 2020, Generación Romero, a faith network inspired by Saint Romero, spoke out against “how far removed…the president’s actions [are] from the spirit of love and compassion preached by our saintly Monsignor Romero [who]…encouraged us…about the need for pluralism…to build our democracy.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the Bukele administration has taken actions to minimize Romero’s public presence in El Salvador.

To take some other examples, in 2021, groups of bishops criticized Bukele’s firing of judges and attorney generals as unconstitutional and in violation of the separation of powers. After the administration interpreted El Salvador’s constitution as to allow Bukele’s reelection, groups of bishops publicly criticized this as arbitrary and unconstitutional. After Bukele’s reelection in February 2024, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez powerfully criticized Bukele’s agenda through the use of Christian language: “this ‘state of exception’…is not [true] peace [but rather]…the peace of the cemetery…That’s why I am working patiently on proposals…That’s the role of the Church, the role of Jesus.” It should be noted, however, that some public clergy responses to Bukele have been laudatory, as in September 2022, when Salvadoran Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas made statements implicitly supporting Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection bid.

As the contrasting examples of Cardinal Rosa and Archbishop Escobar show, the actions of Salvadoran clergy can be aligned on a spectrum that spans active opposition to Bukele’s agenda, neutrality and silence, implicit support, and so on. How can we explain these different choices? In the realm of ideas, it is likely that clergy opposition is inspired by its inheritance of liberation theology ideas and the enduring legacy of Saint Óscar Romero. Liberation theology is concerned not only with the creation of a just political system but also a just economy, both of which are threatened by Bukele’s agenda.

At the same time, public clergy opposition has been somewhat limited, likely because of Bukele’s popularity, rendering silence a common response. Some of his opponents have restricted their critiques to environmental issues such as mining, which are less directly related to the assault on democracy and freedom. When it comes to those who have made more supportive statements about Bukele like Archbishop Escobar, some of this seems to derive from Bukele’s support for a traditionalist moral agenda, including opposition to abortion and support for restrictions on sex education.

Americans have become increasingly interested in El Salvador, especially as the relationship between Trump and Bukele grows and as Salvadoran prisons become repositories of American residents denied their constitutional rights. Both Trump and Bukele were elected on law and order platforms; many worry that the Bukele model, with its disregard for liberal freedoms of movement and expression, is already being implemented in the US. However, there is some space for optimism in the American context. For one, Trump’s popularity is much lower than Bukele’s, increasing the leeway of US opponents to make public criticisms without alienating their constituents. Furthermore, El Salvador did indeed suffer from a serious gang violence problem whereas this has been largely exaggerated in the US. Bukele’s measures have thus quelled one of the most serious concerns of ordinary Salvadorans, albeit at a great cost to their democratic freedoms. Meanwhile, Trump’s policies will likely fail to quell the concerns of ordinary Americans.

What can US democracy organizers learn from the examples set by Catholic leaders in El Salvador, with an eye to resisting the imposition of Bukele’s Mano Dura model? One lesson concerns the importance of reclaiming the language of ‘freedom.’ Recall Cardinal Rosa’s criticism of Bukele’s war on gangs as essentially a false freedom, one that is predicated on unconstitutional mass imprisonment. Similarly in the US, Trump’s authoritarian agenda relies on a definition of freedom that criminalizes dissent and erodes the rule of law. US organizers should continue to reclaim freedom as an inclusive and constitutional concept, refusing to allow its weaponization by autocrats.

Another lesson involves cynical appeals to religiosity. Neither Bukele nor Trump exemplify Christian values of honesty, humility, or compassion. From rampant misinformation to self-promotion—including the so-called Trump Bible—and divisive rhetoric about immigrants and refugees, authoritarian agendas ought to draw criticism for their patently un-Christian character.

Where to Learn More
- Mackey, D. (2024). Nayib Bukele’s Authoritarian Appeal. New Yorker.
- Mejía, D.D. (2022). In El Salvador, churches are essential to ending gang violence. But the government’s crackdown could hurt those efforts. America: The Jesuit Review.
- Meléndez-Sánchez, M. (2021). Latin America erupts: millennial authoritarianism in El Salvador. Journal of Democracy, 32(3), 19-32.
- Meléndez-Sánchez, M., & Vergara, A. (2024). The Bukele Model: Will It Spread? Journal of Democracy, 35(3), 84-98.

You can access all the caselets from the Pillars of Support Project here.

This article was written by Adam Fefer.