El Salvador, 2020 — military coup attempt

Event Summary

On 9 February 2020 President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador marched into the Legislative Assembly flanked by heavily armed soldiers and police in an intimidatory show of force meant to pressure lawmakers into approving a loan, an episode widely condemned as an authoritarian assault on the country's democratic institutions and characterized by some as an attempted self coup. Bukele, a young, popular, media savvy outsider who had won the presidency in 2019, was locked in a bitter dispute with the opposition dominated legislature, which had refused to approve a 109 million dollar loan he sought to fund his security plan. To force the issue, Bukele summoned the deputies to an extraordinary session and, when few complied, entered the assembly chamber surrounded by soldiers carrying assault rifles, sat in the speaker's chair, prayed, and told his supporters gathered outside that he could dissolve the legislature but would give it more time.

The spectacle, evoking the country's dark history of military intervention, alarmed observers at home and abroad. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that Bukele could not use the armed forces to pressure the assembly. Bukele backed down for the moment, but the episode presaged his steady concentration of power, and after his party won a supermajority in 2021 he purged the courts and the attorney general.