Emergency legislation is being used in increasingly repressive ways to grab back land granted during the civil war, say campaigners
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n early May, the farming cooperative of El Bosque in Santa Tecla, one of El Salvador’s largest cities, received an eviction notice; a new battle in a decades-old fight for land. In response, community members organised a peaceful sit-in near hardline President Nayib Bukele’s private residence, hoping to appeal directly for help.
Instead, they were confronted by military police. The protest ended in five detentions: four members of the cooperative and its lawyer.
The arrests were met by a wave of panic. The cooperative’s president, José Ángel Pérez, and Alejandro Henríquez, a lawyer and human rights activist supporting the group, were formally charged with public disorder. Under the government’s extended “state of exception”, which suspends certain constitutional protections, their legal status has caused uncertainty among people in El Bosque.
