The vice president of El Salvador, Félix Ulloa, has rejected this Friday the idea of setting a time limit on the state of exception, in force since 2022, arguing that he has the backing of more than 90% of Salvadoran citizens. These statements come one day after he boasted of the improvement in security that, according to the Government, this measure has brought with it, which allows the authorities to restrict certain fundamental rights.
“Number two” of Nayib Bukele has reiterated that the Executive will consider the state of exception concluded “when the people want it,” in an interview with Europa Press in which he has defended the high levels of popular support for a decree that has already been extended on 56 occasions.
“Every time the population is asked whether it wants the state of exception to continue, 97% says yes, that it should continue. Then, a government that governs for the people does what the people ask it to,” he said, before emphasizing that support for the Salvadoran president is close to 90%.
With this data, on which he has not offered any further breakdown, Ulloa argues that support for the emergency regime goes beyond Bukele’s figure. “People who do not support President Bukele want the state of exception to continue. The answer is obvious. It will be lifted when people say that they no longer want it,” he insisted.
The vice president has defended that the state of exception is aimed exclusively at members of the gangs and has no impact on “absolutely anyone of the honest population.” “No public freedom has ever been affected. Neither freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of mobilization,” he said emphatically.
Along these lines, he has detailed that “two constitutional guarantees” have been suspended and that their application is “individual.” As he explained, it concerns the inviolability of correspondence and the procedural guarantees of the detainees, so that the deadline to bring an arrested person before a judge or to release them has gone from 72 hours to 15 days.
“That is why the rest of the population, not feeling that it is affected and, on the contrary, that it guarantees that gang members will be prosecuted, people want it to continue” the state of exception, Ulloa added from Madrid, after his participation in the XXX Ibero-American Summit.
These words arrive one day after Ulloa himself underlined at the Summit the radical shift that, in his judgment, El Salvador has experienced in the last decade, going from being "the world capital of homicide" in 2015 to "the safest country in the Western Hemisphere," ensuring that more than 1,300 days without homicides have been surpassed.
However, the vice president has criticized that "out there there is a bad interpretation" and a "wrong reading" of the decree. "There are those who think that people are limited to move or that they cannot express themselves" freely, he pointed out, categorically denying those perceptions.
When asked about the origin of those interpretations, Ulloa has explained that he has had to clarify the scope of the state of exception even to his foreign counterparts. "At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France they were worried about the 2024 elections in case Salvadorans were not going to be able to vote freely" in the 2024 elections, when I tell them what are they talking about? As if with the state of exception Salvadorans cannot leave the house, who has told them that?", he emphasized.
"Disinformation is such and the bad interpretation is such, that at that level they believed that the state of exception affected public freedoms. No public freedom has been affected and the measures are for members of gangs (...) it does not affect life," he reiterated, insisting that citizens "feel that it protects them."
However, Amnesty International (AI) and other Human Rights organizations denounce a very different impact: more than 90,000 people have been arrested and at least 470 have died in police custody in the four years that the state of exception has been in force, according to their data.
These figures add to the "thousands" of families searching for missing relatives, according to an AI report published in June, which warns that this policy has resulted in "a permanent security policy based on the prolonged suspension of rights and the systematic weakening of the rule of law" in the country.
"What began as a temporary measure to supposedly combat violence carried out by gangs has turned into a permanent system that promotes and justifies mass arbitrary detentions, suspension of guarantees, and serious violations of Human Rights that could constitute crimes against humanity," the organization warned.
Ulloa supports Bukele's third term
Ulloa, who will run again as a Vice President candidate in the elections scheduled for February 2027, has once again claimed improvement in security since 2022 and, in general, since Bukele came to power three years earlier.
In this regard, he has recalled that Salvadorans first chose Bukele because "he saw that 30 years after the peace agreement was signed, that was what it had: corruption and violence," and he has highlighted the increase in electoral support for the head of state: 54% in 2019 and more than 85% in 2024.
He has also pointed out that between 2009 and 2019, 41,000 Salvadorans were murdered, figures that he attributes to the Institute of Legal Medicine and that he uses to denounce "almost a genocide and exponential corruption."
"All the presidents who preceded Bukele (...) Just came out (of prison) one who was held for ten years -- with reference to Elías Saca (2004-2009) for diversion and money laundering of public funds -- another is on the run, and the last two of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) went to Nicaragua prosecuted for corruption (...) more than 500 million dollars are the charges," he explained.
Thus, he has described that Bukele inherited a country "on the brink of the precipice, hitting rock bottom" after three decades of Arena and FMLN governments, and he has contrasted that stage with his party's proposal, Nuevas Ideas.
"Our offer is to continue in the same direction in which we have been working since 2019, when for the first time the Salvadoran people broke the two-party system it had been entrenched in for 30 years," he said, in reference to an election in which Bukele is aiming for a third term after a reform that allows for indefinite presidential reelection.
"What we are guaranteeing is that they be free, transparent, secure, competitive elections, so that the people can freely choose who they want. Now (Bukele) will run for the third time, we will see if the people are satisfied" with his management, he concluded.