How Salvadoran Democracy Was (and Wasn’t) Upended in One Afternoon

On July 31, El Salvador crossed a political Rubicon. In one day, the Legislative Assembly approved and ratified constitutional reforms abolishing presidential term limits, clearing the way for President Nayib Bukele to seek reelection indefinitely. This is no technical amendment. It strikes at the letter and spirit of the 1983 Constitution, a document born out of a bloody civil war, designed to set the foundations for peace and to keep power from concentrating in a single pair of hands.

The vote was fast. In five hours, Bukele’s loyalists dismantled one of the last remaining guardrails against authoritarian rule. The irony is sharp: when Bukele was first elected in 2019, he publicly affirmed he would serve only one five-year term. Today, he’s in his second term and holds the legal pathway to become a president for life.

The change may have been rushed, but the road to this moment was not. Over the past four years, a sequence of calculated political maneuvers has eroded judicial independence, dismantled checks and balances, and stripped the Constitution of its most fundamental protections, clearing the path for indefinite presidential rule.

1. Removal of the Constitutional Court and its key ruling

The stability of El Salvador’s constitutional order rests, in great part, on a Constitutional Chamber within the Supreme Court of Justice. It consists of five justices who, according to the Constitution, must be independent of political pressure. Upholding this independence has been a perennial struggle, with repeated attempts by political actors to capture or weaken the chamber over the last fifteen years. 

They always stopped short of fully dismissing the court until 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Bukele ordered the detention of individuals with apparent symptoms in so-called “containment centers.” The Constitutional Chamber struck down this policy, affirming that no one could be detained by presidential decree alone. On April 15th, 2020, Bukele crossed a historic line: he declared that he would not comply with the ruling and instructed the police to continue the detentions in open defiance of the Court and the rule of law.

For the next year, pro-government social media channels smeared the justices, even declaring their rulings sought to kill millions of Salvadorans. In August 2020, during a late-night nationwide broadcast, Nayib Bukele acknowledged that some were beginning to call him a dictator, brushed it off, and joked: “If I were a dictator, I would have had the justices executed already.” By late April 2021, they started being harassed by police officers in unmarked vehicles.

On May 1st, 2021, when Nayib Bukele triumphantly gained a supermajority in the Legislative Assembly, his newly-installed deputies illegally ousted all five Constitutional Chamber justices and replaced them with loyalists, a move many legal scholars denounced as a self-coup. The Constitution lost its impartial referees.

The new justices issued a ruling allowing consecutive presidential reelection, despite explicit prohibitions in at least six constitutional articles. One article even criminalized the promotion of reelection, and another called for popular insurrection if a sitting president refused to step down at the end of their term.

2. A constitutional reform process rewritten

When the 1983 Constitution was enacted, it deliberately made reforms difficult. Any change required two successive legislatures: the first had to approve it with a simple majority, and the second had to ratify it with a two-thirds supermajority. This safeguard prevented temporary political coalitions from reshaping the foundations of the state. Additionally, some constitutional principles, such as the republican form of government, the country’s territorial integrity, and the ban on consecutive presidential reelection, were considered immutable.

In April 2024, during the final session of the outgoing legislature, Nuevas Ideas deputies introduced a reform to Article 248, the clause that governs how the Constitution can be amended. They added a new path for reform: the same legislature could now ratify constitutional changes with a three-quarters majority, removing the need for a second legislature. In effect, they gave themselves the power to modify the supreme law at will and in record-breaking time. 

This left the Constitution completely malleable, indistinguishable from any other law. As Juan Pappier, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Latin America division, recently put it: “El Salvador is practically a country without a Constitution.”

Scholars quickly denounced this as illegal. First, they argued, the reform process itself cannot be used to weaken the very article that serves as the Constitution’s lock. Second, voters must be thoroughly informed of any reform and its implications. And third, they rushed to approve a reform that removed the procedural guardrails that made the Constitution stable.

A group of lawyers challenged the reform in court. Predictably, the Constitutional Chamber, now under the President’s control, refused to block it. One year later, Ruth López, one of the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, was arrested on opaque money laundering charges, a move widely seen as retaliation for her attempts to denounce corruption, concentration of power, and human rights violations of the Bukele administration.

In January 2025, the reform was ratified. The Constitution, once designed to constrain power, is now malleable in the hands of any temporary super-majority. It ceased being a safeguard and can soon become a tool for entrenching authoritarian rule.

3. The end of term limits

On July 31st, 2025, just before a national holiday, Nuevas Ideas introduced a last-minute bill to reform four constitutional articles. The reforms eliminated the presidential term limit, removed penalties for promoting reelection, abolished runoff elections (allowing a president to win with less than 50% of the vote), shortened the current presidential term to align with legislative elections, and extended all terms from 2027 onwards from five to six years.

Despite the clear disruption this posed to democracy, loyalist deputies praised the changes, claiming that Salvadorans loved their president and should be allowed to re-elect him indefinitely.

The public was blindsided. The most sweeping change to El Salvador’s political system in at least three decades was neither announced nor properly debated. It was introduced, voted on, and ratified in under five hours, just as citizens began to tune out for a week-long holiday.

The earlier reform to the amendment process had already cleared the procedural path, and the installation of a loyalist Constitutional Chamber ensured no legal challenge would stand in the way, a four-year path culminating in a five-hour assault on the very aspiration of democracy.

That night, as Salvadorans were beginning to understand the implications of these reforms and the prospect of a lifelong ruler, fireworks lit up major squares in San Salvador, the capital. El Salvador had joined the ranks of countries where leaders can rule for life, doing so while persecuting critics, concentrating power in the executive, and dismantling judicial oversight.

As Bukele’s popularity endures, many eyes are on El Salvador. Some watch with alarm, seeing the start of a new authoritarian cycle. Others, however, may already be taking notes, learning from the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator.”

These three steps, and many other erosions of democratic norms, have been instrumental in transforming El Salvador from a fragile democracy into a consolidated authoritarian regime in the Americas. A dictatorship, no less… and it only took five hours.