Keeping up (dis)appearances in El Salvador

 Al Jazeera English

In her brief book Salvador, penned during the bloody Salvadoran civil war of 1979-92, Joan Didion reflects on the Spanish word “desaparecer,” meaning “to disappear”. She notes that its “flexibility” in Spanish as both a transitive and intransitive verb had “been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students”.

Indeed, there was plenty of disappearing going on in the country — whether transitively or intransitively. The International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, estimates that about 9,000 people disappeared in El Salvador during the war. This is on top of the more than 75,000 people killed, with the majority of atrocities committed by the United States-backed right-wing military and associated death squads.

By coincidence, in 1992 — the year of the conflict’s ostensible end — the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance. In 2010, the UN declared August 30 as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

But declarations and international days do not make missing people reappear. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump and I can agree: The US is a ‘third-world country’

 Al Jazeera English

When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as “an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries”. He continued to lament that America had “now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before”.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed in on Twitter with the assessment: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!” Never mind that the FBI’s seizure of secret documents does not fit the “corruption” bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.

This is not the first time Trump has likened the US to a “third-world country”, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompted a surge in pejorative “third world” and “banana republic” comparisons from everyone from Biden to George W Bush, former US leader and civilised ravager of Afghanistan and Iraq. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel: normalising terror, one dawn at a time

 Al Jazeera English

Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip – codenamed Operation Breaking Dawn – spanned three days in early August and killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children. According to the Israeli government, the attack was a “preemptive” operation against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group – which is as creative an excuse as any for spontaneously bombing people for no apparent reason.

A total of zero Israelis were killed over the course of Israel’s sanguinary dawn-breaking in Gaza, an acute discrepancy in casualties that is par for the course in the Zionist state’s dealings with the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave. While lethal and nonlethal forms of Israeli military torment have continued to be fixtures of daily existence in Gaza even after Israel’s so-called “withdrawal” from the territory in 2005, Breaking Dawn was the bloodiest episode since the 11-day Israeli attack in May 2021 – nobly dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls – which killed more than 260 Palestinians, including 67 children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

 Al Jazeera English

On August 2, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – whose Twitter profile has evolved from “officially the coolest president in the world” to the “coolest dictator in the world” to just “El Presidente” – took to his favourite social media platform to announce that El Salvador had gone from being the “most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in Latin America”.

Accompanying the tweet was the hashtag #GuerraContraPandillas – “war on gangs” – and a statistics chart from the Salvadoran National Civilian Police indicating that, on August 1, there had allegedly been zero homicides nationwide.

Granted, the country is not very “safe” for the casualties of the war on gangs which is currently being waged in the context of a state of emergency imposed at the end of March in response to a spike in gang killings. The spike was occasioned by a breakdown in secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and the Salvadoran gangs – for which underhanded business Bukele assumed the codename “Batman”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.