Bukele’s rise to dictatorship in El SalvadorBukele’s first move was to bring the courts under his effective control. On the day the new Assembly first convened in May 2021 with his party in the majority, it fired the attorney general and all the members of the country’s Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. This was clearly illegal, but there was nowhere to challenge it, so now he had a Constitutional Chamber that would not rule against him. Bukele followed this with an ostensibly neutral civil service “reform” that forced the removal of any judge in the country over 60 years old or with more than 30 years of service. Among those removed were judges hearing human rights-related cases and those who had shown independence. Those judges who were left can be taken off a case or moved around the country at the will of the Supreme Court, leaving them vulnerable to summary removal if they angered the authorities. In one of its first decisions as, essentially, Bukele’s pet court, the reconstituted Constitutional Chamber in September 2021 found him eligible for reelection, despite clear constitutional language to the contrary.
(Emphasis added.) This seems likely to happen to us: a push past the last legal line of defense so that no one knows who is to push back. Among the many things the Constitution does not spell out is who’s supposed to enforce the law if the president defies a court order. It just assumes the president will obey the law and will be impeached and removed if they don’t.