On Saturday, March 26, El Salvador registered 62 homicides, the most recorded on any single day since the end of the country’s bloody civil war in 1992. The killings were attributed to a spike in violence presided over by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs.
Late that night, President Nayib Bukele took to Twitter – his preferred platform for presidential communications – to pressure Salvadoran lawmakers to approve a “state of exception”, which they obediently did in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, March 27.
Currently in place for 30 days but eligible for extension, the state of emergency basically entails a formal suspension of any residual hint of civil liberties in a nation where the president self-defines as the world’s “coolest dictator” and sports a backwards baseball cap accordingly. The emergency arrangement eliminates the right to association and legal defence while increasing the permissible period of detention without charge from 72 hours to 15 days and authorising the state to spy on private correspondence sans court order – not that the state ever seemed to require a court order for such activities in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.