| Political corruption |
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| Forms and concepts |
| Anti-corruption |
| Corruption by country |
Corruption in El Salvador is a problem at all levels of government, however, according to a poll conducted by the Cid-Gallup in February 2023, only 4 percent of Salvadorans believed corruption as the most pressing issue facing the country. [1]
On 6 September 2014, former President Francisco Flores Pérez (1999–2004) was arrested on corruption charges for allegedly misappropriating US$15 million during his presidency. [2] In December 2015, he was charged with embezzlement and illicit enrichment and was ordered to stand trial, but he died in January 2016 before his trial started. [3] In 2021, he was named in the Pandora Papers as having used companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands to hide funds. [4]
On 10 February 2016, former President Mauricio Funes (2009–2014) was ordered by the Supreme Court to stand trial for alleged illegal enrichment after he was unable to verify the source of US$700,000 in his personal bank accounts. [5] He was found guilty of illegal enrichment on 28 November 2017 and was ordered to pay US$420,000. [6] Overall, Funes has been accused of embezzling US$351 million during his presidency. [7] On 23 February 2023, a judge ordered Funes to stand trial for allegedly laundering US$8.4 million through a Guatemalan company. [8] Funes remains in exile in Nicaragua after he was granted asylum in September 2016. [9]
In October 2016, Former President Antonio Saca (2004–2009) was arrested on corruption charges. On 12 September 2018, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment after he pled guilty to embezzling and laundering US$300 million of public funds during his presidency. He was ordered to pay US$260 million. [10] On 19 September 2019, he was sentenced to an additional two years imprisonment for attempting to bribe a court official with US$10,000 for information regarding the initial corruption case against him. [11] On 5 January 2021, he was found guilty of illicit enrichment and was ordered to pay an additional US$4.4 million. [12]
In May 2021, the United States named five members of President Nayib Bukele's government as being corrupt. [13]
On 22 July 2021, the Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado ordered the arrest of former President Salvador Sánchez Cerén (2014–2019) as a part of a corruption probe. He was charged with embezzlement, money laundering, and illegal enrichment during his presidency. Sánchez Cerén remains in exile in Nicaragua. [14]
In October 2021, former President Alfredo Cristiani (1989–1994) was named in the Pandora Papers as having used companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands to hide funds. [4] In June 2023, Cristiani's properties were raided and seized by the office of the attorney general as a part of a "war against corruption". [15]
Salvadoran politicians from the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA), Nuevas Ideas (NI), and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) have been accused of paying criminal gangs (Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gang) to support their electoral campaigns. [16] Criminal gangs were also known for organizing extortion schemes. [17]
Funes' government organized a truce between the government and the gangs to lower the country's crime rate between 2012 and 2014. Funes has denied ever granting the gangs "perks" during the truce. [18]
On 23 July 2020, David Munguía Payés, a former Minister of National Defense (2009–2011, 2013–2019), was arrested for allegedly negotiating a truce with gangs to reduce crime. [19]
In September 2020, the news website El Faro accused Bukele of secretly negotiating with gangs to lower the country's murder rate in exchange for better prison conditions. Bukele denied the accusations and launched an investigation into El Faro for money laundering. [20] In December 2012, the United States Department of the Treasury also accused Bukele of negotiating with gangs to lower the murder rate, which Bukele again denied. [21]
On 4 June 2021, Ernesto Muyshondt, a former mayor of San Salvador (2018–2021), was arrested under suspicion of having committed electoral fraud and illegal negotiations with criminal gangs to gain votes for ARENA in the 2014 presidential election. [22] [23] On 11 November 2022, Norman Quijano, a former mayor of San Salvador (2012–2015), was ordered to stand trial for allegedly offering gangs favors in exchange for their support for his 2014 presidential campaign. [24]
In October 2021, two deputies of the Legislative Assembly, José Ilofio García Torres and Gerardo Balmore Aguilar Soriano, were accused of "conspiracy against the political institution" for allegedly being bribed with "perks" such as U.S. citizenship by the embassy of the United States in San Salvador to fracture 15 to 25 deputies of Nuevas Ideas to oppose Bukele's political agenda. [25] [26] The U.S. embassy denied the allegations. [27] In February 2023, García Torres was sentenced to three years imprisonment for corruption. [28]
On 6 September 2019, Bukele announced the establishment of the International Commission Against Impunity in El Salvador (CICIES) (es) as a joint effort with the Organization of American States (OAS) to combat corruption, drug trafficking, and white collar crimes in the country. CICIES would cooperate with the anti-corruption unit of the National Civil Police (PNC). [29] CICIES was dissolved on 4 June 2021 by the Salvadoran government in protest of the OAS' decision to appoint Muyshondt as an anti-corruption advisor. [30]
The following graph and table display's El Salvador's placement and score in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) since 1998, the first year the country was included in the index.
In the Corruption Perceptions Indexes of 1998 to 2011, countries were scored on a scale from 0 ("perceived as highly corrupt") to 10 ("perceived as very clean"). The rank in the Index was computed separately from the score. In the methodology used to create these Indexes, the ranks and scores were not intended to be compared from year to year; a country's rank or score in a given year's Index is meaningful only in relation the ranks and scores of other countries that year. [31]
 | Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
| Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
| Year | Rank | Score | Ref. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 51 | 3.6 | [32] | |
| 1999 | 49 | 3.9 | [33] | |
| 2000 | 43 | 4.1 | [34] | |
| 2001 | 54 | 3.6 | [35] | |
| 2002 | 62 | 3.4 | [36] | |
| 2003 | 59 | 3.7 | [37] | |
| 2004 | 51 | 4.2 | [38] | |
| 2005 | 51 | 4.2 | [39] | |
| 2006 | 57 | 4.0 | [40] | |
| 2007 | 67 | 4.0 | [41] | |
| 2008 | 67 | 3.9 | [42] | |
| 2009 | 84 | 3.4 | [43] | |
| 2010 | 78 | 3.6 | [44] | |
| 2011 | 80 | 3.4 | [45] | |
Starting in 2012, a different methodology was used to create the CPI. The 1998-2011 Corruption Perception Indexes are therefore not directly comparable with the Indexes of 2012 and after.
To underline the difference between the two sets of Indexes, those of 2012 and after score countries on a scale from 0 ("highly corrupt") to 100 ("very clean"), in contrast to the 0 to 10 scale of the 1998-2011 Indexes. The countries are then ranked by score; the country ranked first is perceived to have the most honest public sector. Scores computed for the 2012 CPI and afterwards can be meaningfully compared from year to year, as long as the year is 2012 or later [46] [47]
| Year | Rank | Rank Δ | Score | Score Δ | Ref. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 83 | n/a | 38 | n/a | [48] | |
| 2013 | 83 |  0 | 38 | 0 | [49] | |
| 2014 | 80 |  3 | 39 | 1 | [50] | |
| 2015 | 72 | 8 | 39 | 0 | [51] | |
| 2016 | 95 |  23 | 36 | 3 | [52] | |
| 2017 | 112 | 17 | 33 | 3 | [53] | |
| 2018 | 105 | 7 | 35 | 2 | [54] | |
| 2019 | 113 | 8 | 34 | 1 | [55] | |
| 2020 | 104 | 9 | 36 | 2 | [56] | |
| 2021 | 115 | 11 | 34 | 2 | [57] | |
| 2022 | 116 | 1 | 33 | 1 | [58] | |
| 2023 | 126 | 10 | 31 | 2 | [59] | |
El Salvador, officially the Republic of El Salvador, is a country in Central America. It is bordered on the northeast by Honduras, on the northwest by Guatemala, and on the south by the Pacific Ocean. El Salvador's capital and largest city is San Salvador. The country's population in 2023 was estimated to be 6.5 million.
The history of El Salvador begins with several distinct groups of Mesoamerican people, especially the Pipil, the Lenca and the Maya. In the early 16th century, the Spanish Empire conquered the territory, incorporating it into the Viceroyalty of New Spain ruled from Mexico City. In 1821, El Salvador achieved independence from Spain as part of the First Mexican Empire, only to further secede as part of the Federal Republic of Central America two years later. Upon the republic's independence in 1841, El Salvador became a sovereign state until forming a short-lived union with Honduras and Nicaragua called the Greater Republic of Central America, which lasted from 1895 to 1898.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is an index that ranks countries "by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys." The CPI generally defines corruption as an "abuse of entrusted power for private gain". The index is published annually by the non-governmental organisation Transparency International since 1995.
Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena is a Salvadoran politician and former journalist who served as the 41st President of El Salvador from 2009 to 2014. Funes won the 2009 presidential election as the candidate of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party and took office on 1 June 2009. Since 2014, Funes and his immediate family have been living in exile in Nicaragua due to allegations of criminality during his tenure. In July 2023, he was placed under sanctions by the U.S. State Department due to his conviction in absentia for negotiations related to the gang truces he made while in office, illicit enrichment, and tax evasion.
Observers maintain that corruption in Paraguay remains a major impediment to the emergence of stronger democratic institutions and sustainable economic development in Paraguay.
Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez is a Salvadoran politician and businessman who is the 43rd president of El Salvador, serving since 1 June 2019. He is the first Salvadoran president since 1984 who was not elected as a candidate of one of the country's two major political parties: the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), of which Bukele was formerly a member.
Nuevas Ideas is a Salvadoran political party. The party was founded on 25 October 2017 by Nayib Bukele, the then-mayor of San Salvador, and was registered by the Supreme Electoral Court on 21 August 2018. The party's current president is Xavier Zablah Bukele, a cousin of Bukele who has served since March 2020.
The 2020 Salvadoran political crisis, commonly referred to in El Salvador as the numeronym 9F or El Bukelazo, was an incident in El Salvador on 9 February 2020. During the political crisis, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele sent 40 soldiers of the Salvadoran Army into the Legislative Assembly building in an effort to coerce politicians to approve a loan request of 109 million dollars from the United States for Bukele's security plan for the country.
The COVID-19 pandemic in El Salvador was a part of the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The virus was confirmed to have reached El Salvador on 18 March 2020. As of 19 September 2021, El Salvador reported 102,024 cases, 3,114 deaths, and 84,981 recoveries. As of that date El Salvador had arrested a total of 2,424 people for violating quarantine orders, and 1,268,090 people had been tested for the virus. On 31 March 2020, the first COVID-19 death in El Salvador was confirmed.
Events in the year 2020 in El Salvador.
David Victoriano Munguía Payés is a former Salvadoran Army general who served as Minister of National Defense of El Salvador from 2009 to 2011 and again from 2013 to 2019.
José Alejandro Zelaya Villalobo is a Salvadoran politician. He served as Minister of Finance in the cabinet of President Nayib Bukele from 2020 to 2023.
Ernesto Alfredo Castro Aldana is a Salvadoran politician and businessman who currently serves as the president of the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador. Castro previously served as a secretary and private advisor to Nayib Bukele from 2012 to 2020 when he was elected as a deputy of the Legislative Assembly from San Salvador in the 2021 legislative election.
El Salvador became the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after having been adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. It has been promoted by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who claimed that it would improve the economy by making banking easier for Salvadorans, and that it would encourage foreign investment. The adoption has been criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy.
The Salvadoran gang crackdown, referred to in El Salvador as the régimen de excepción and the guerra contra las pandillas, began in March 2022 in response to a crime spike between 25 and 27 March 2022, when 87 people were killed in El Salvador. The Salvadoran government blamed the spike in murders on criminal gangs in the country, resulting in the country's legislature approving a state of emergency that suspended the rights of association and legal counsel, and increased the time spent in detention without charge, among other measures that expanded the powers of law enforcement in the country.
Opinion polling has been conducted in El Salvador since September 2019, three months after President Nayib Bukele took office on 1 June 2019, to gauge public opinion of Bukele and his government. Despite negative reception from outside of El Salvador, domestically, Bukele is considered to be one of the most popular presidents in Salvadoran history as his approval ratings generally hover around 90 percent.
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Osiris Luna Meza is a Salvadoran politician who currently serves as the General Director of Penal Centers and the Vice Minister of Justice and Public Security. He previously served as a deputy of the Legislative Assembly from the department of San Salvador from 2018 to 2019.
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Can country/territory scores in the 2011 CPI be compared to those in past indexes? The CPI is not designed to allow for country scores to be compared over time. This is because the index draws on a country's rank in the original data sources, rather than its score. A rank will always deliver only relative information – and therefore a ranking is a one off assessment. A country's rank in a given data source can change a) if perceptions of corruption in other countries included in that source change or b) if countries are added or removed from that data source.
To reflect the updates that have been made to the methodology, the CPI 2012 will henceforth be presented on a 0-100 scale. This is to clearly demonstrate that scores from the CPI 2011 and previous editions should not be compared with scores from 2012
