At the beginning of the year, The Economist magazine published the Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which gave El Salvador a rating of 5.9. Our country went from the category of “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime.” The next category is “authoritarian regime”.
When The Economist described El Salvador as such, the coup d’état of May 1 had not occurred, in which the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the Attorney General of the Republic were abruptly and unconstitutionally dismissed. It is difficult to speak of a democracy in a country where a coup has taken place that is consolidating, day by day, with the express or tacit support of some, and the silence of others.
The lawyers’ union, painfully, has stood out for its silence. It is particularly paradoxical that lawyers, whose profession depends directly on the existence of a minimum of the rule of law, allow this coup to consolidate with their silence or complicity. It is evident that in a scenario without law, lawyers are worth less and lobbyists more. The silence of the lawyers is professional suicide.
There are honorable exceptions to this collective silence. The lawyers’ associations, the Center for Legal Studies and the Ibero-American Institute of Constitutional Law-El Salvador Section, have maintained a permanent condemnation of the events that occurred since May 1. Similarly, there are many lawyers and judges who from their desks have maintained a firm defense of the rule of law in this very adverse scenario.
If these isolated voices were irrelevant, the regime would ignore them. But the attacks that have begun to take place against judges and lawyers who raise these voices for the rule of law express that they do have a favorable effect on democracy and pernicious on authoritarianism.
The pressures received by judges who reject the coup d’état, and the actions directed against lawyers in the free exercise, only reaffirm that this is no longer even a “hybrid regime”, but an “authoritarian regime.”
In Nicaragua, the regime does not blush to fill its prisons with political prisoners. The fact that here the pressures are made in corridors or through sanctioning procedures by the same authority, is only the prelude to an exacerbation of authoritarianism. We are closer to Nicaragua than we think.
Countries that fall into the authoritarian spiral can initiate their repressive measures with some discretion or by trying to cover them with legality. But then, as we observe today in Nicaragua, the masks are falling off and the attacks become more crude and evident against their political opponents, business leaders, social leaders and even pensioners. When that time comes, it may be too late to return to democracy.
The lawyers one day promised under our word of honor “to exercise faithfully and legally the profession of lawyer” (art. 143 Judicial Organic Law). In these times when the rule of law is seriously injured, we make a particular call to each lawyer to protect the Constitution and to do so together. If the lawyers’ union does not join in the defense of the rule of law and the Constitution, it is condemned to servitude and irrelevance.
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