How El Salvador's constitution guarded one rule and lost it

Why the constitution guards presidential alternation so heavily

A constituent assembly elected in 1982 drafted the present constitution, and it was promulgated in December 1983, in the middle of the civil war. Britannica counts it as the third constitution since 1948. Its Article 249 repeals the text of 1962 and everything in older law that conflicts with it.

The rule has a history behind it. Maximiliano Hernández Martínez came to the presidency through the coup of December 1931, resigned six months before an election so that he could stand in it, and won as the only candidate on the ballot. He governed from 1935 to 1939 and again from 1939 to 1943, and began a fourth term in 1944, which he resigned that May after a general strike. The constitution in force barred his re-election, and he had said he would respect it.

The 1983 text repeats the rule. The principle it calls alternabilidad, that a president cannot succeed himself, appears in five places:

Article 87 sits beside them and recognises a right of the people to insurrection, for the sole purpose of restoring a constitutional order that has been broken. It limits that right to removing the officials responsible and replacing them temporarily, and states that no single person or institution may ever exercise the powers of the three organs of government. The six-month clause in Article 152 would have caught the manoeuvre Martínez used, a resignation timed to clear the way for a candidacy.

What the Chapultepec accords rebuilt in the state

The government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) signed the final peace agreement at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City on 16 January 1992, under United Nations mediation, and the ceasefire began on 1 February. The text the Peace Accords Matrix at Notre Dame reproduces is largely a list of constitutional reforms, and several of the institutions described below were created by it.

The armed forces were placed more clearly under civilian authority. A National Civil Police was created for public order in town and country, independent of the army and answerable to a different ministry, and a State Intelligence Agency was set up outside the military under the president. The National Police, the Treasury Police, the National Guard and the Civilian Defence were to be dissolved. On 20 July 1992 the assembly amended the constitution to take police powers away from the armed forces.

The judiciary was rebuilt around a qualified majority. Supreme Court judges would henceforth need two-thirds of the deputies to be elected, and the same threshold was set for the Attorney General, the Chief State Counsel and a new National Counsel for the Defence of Human Rights. The judiciary was promised a budget of no less than 6% of current state income. A Supreme Electoral Tribunal replaced the Central Board of Elections, with the instruction that no party or coalition should dominate it.

The FMLN itself became a party. In July 1992 the assembly passed provisional changes to the electoral code by 76 of its 84 votes to allow that, even though the constitution forbade armed groups from forming parties. During the negotiating round that opened in Mexico City on 4 April 1991, the FMLN also put on record its view that Article 248 should be opened up, either by amendment or by referendum, so that the constitution could be changed more easily. A Commission on the Truth delivered its report in 1993, and the assembly passed an amnesty for the war five days later. In 2016 the Supreme Court ruled that amnesty unconstitutional.

How El Salvador elects its Legislative Assembly

The Legislative Assembly is a single chamber. Its deputies are elected by proportional representation on open lists for three-year terms, may be re-elected, and begin their period on 1 May of the election year. Article 79 makes population the basis of the electoral districts. A resolution needs half the elected deputies plus one, and the constitution reserves larger majorities for particular acts: two-thirds to elect Supreme Court judges, the Attorney General and the human rights counsel, and three-quarters to suspend certain guarantees of detention.

That arithmetic is why the size of the chamber matters. The assembly had 84 seats in 1992 and still had 84 in 2021, and a reform passed in June 2023 reduced it to 60 in time for the 2024 election. Eight months before that vote the seat allocation was changed to the d'Hondt method, which analysts quoted by the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) say favours the majority party. A further reform in June 2023 merged the 262 municipalities into 44. Legal experts cited by the BTI criticised both changes as unconstitutional, and government officials said they would increase pluralism.

For most of the post-war period two parties shaped the chamber: the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) on the right and the FMLN on the left. According to the BTI, no single party held a legislative majority between the 1992 accords and 2021. In the February 2021 election Nuevas Ideas, a party founded in 2017, and its GANA allies took 56 of the 84 seats by Britannica's count and 61 by the count in the Wikipedia article on El Salvador. Either figure reached the 56 votes that make two-thirds of 84.

The 2024 election left ARENA and the FMLN with under 3% of the vote each and no municipality between them. The sources disagree by a seat or two on the new chamber: Wikipedia gives Nuevas Ideas 58 of the 60, and the BTI gives Nuevas Ideas and its allies 57 of 60.

How a president is elected and for how long

The president and vice-president are elected together by direct vote. A candidate needs an absolute majority, and where nobody reaches one, Article 80 requires a second round between the two leading parties or coalitions within thirty days of the first result becoming final. Article 79 sets the election between two and four months before the term begins. A candidate must be Salvadoran by birth, a layman, over thirty and affiliated to a registered party, and Article 152 bars recent ministers, senior officers and the president's close relatives.

The presidential election of 20 March 1994 went to a second round. About 1.5 million people voted, roughly 55% of the 2,653,871 registered by the extended deadline of 19 January 1994, and the UN observer mission ONUSAL considered the vote acceptable. ARENA, which had won in 1989, won that election and the two after it, and held the presidency until 2009. Mauricio Funes, a television journalist, won for the FMLN on 15 March 2009, and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander, won narrowly in March 2014.

In February 2019 Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador, won with nearly 53% as the candidate of the small GANA party, which ended three decades in which ARENA and the FMLN had shared the presidency. In February 2024 he was re-elected. The reported share differs by source: about 83% in the BTI, 84% in Wikipedia and some 85% in Britannica, on a turnout the BTI puts at 53%.

The Organization of American States observer mission called the 2024 campaign "atypical and unequitable". It found that only 56% of the polling stations it observed counted and transmitted results according to the established protocol, and that 55% of them hosted pro-Bukele propaganda activities in breach of the Electoral Code. The vote took place under the state of exception.

Who was meant to check the presidency

The constitution gives the check to the courts and to officials chosen by a qualified majority. The Supreme Court has fifteen magistrates elected by the assembly for nine years, renewed by thirds every three years, and both their election and their removal require two-thirds of the deputies. Article 183 makes its Constitutional Chamber the sole court that can strike down a law in general terms, and any citizen may petition it. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has five magistrates serving five years: three drawn from lists put forward by the three parties with most votes at the last presidential election, and two with no party affiliation elected by two-thirds from lists the Supreme Court proposes.

The Procurator for the Defence of Human Rights, the office the peace accords created, must be notified of every arrest and is charged with watching that the legal limits of administrative detention are respected.

In May 2021 the new majority removed the Attorney General and all five judges of the Constitutional Chamber, some of whose terms ran to 2028. In June 2021 the new Attorney General ended cooperation with the International Commission Against Impunity in El Salvador (CICIES), which had been set up in 2019. Laws passed in August and September 2021 retired judges and prosecutors aged 60 or over, and the BTI counts more than 200 of the 700 serving judges affected and more than 100 prosecutors retired.

The same majority voted through the Bitcoin Law in June 2021, by 62 of the 84 deputies, making the cryptocurrency legal tender; the assembly rescinded that status in February 2025.

How the ban on re-election was taken apart

The rebuilt Constitutional Chamber ruled in September 2021 that a sitting president could stand for immediate re-election, provided he took leave from office before the election. Human Rights Watch and Freedom House both describe the 2024 candidacy as one the constitution prohibited, and the BTI notes that several articles of the constitution explicitly prohibit consecutive terms.

The leave followed the ruling's terms. On 30 November 2023 the Legislative Assembly granted the president and vice-president leave to campaign, six months before the new term was due to begin on 1 June 2024. Claudia Rodríguez de Guevara served as acting president in the interval, the first woman in Salvadoran history to hold the office. The second term began on 1 June 2024.

The rule's last protection was procedural. Article 248 required an amendment to pass one assembly and be ratified by two-thirds of the next, which gave voters an election in between. In January 2025 the assembly amended Article 248 itself so that the constitution could be reformed in a single legislative session. In July 2025, using that procedure, it approved amendments allowing indefinite presidential re-election, among other changes.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called the measures "a serious setback for democracy and the rule of law in the country". Freedom House lowered El Salvador's score for the fairness of its electoral framework from 2 to 1 out of 4, on the ground that lawmakers had used the single-sitting procedure to abolish term limits. Its total for the country stood at 42 out of 100 in the 2026 edition, against 47 the year before: 15 of 40 for political rights and 27 of 60 for civil liberties.

The FMLN had asked in 1991 for Article 248 to be opened up so that the constitution could be changed more easily. The change it asked for arrived in January 2025, and the first use made of it was the removal of the re-election ban.

What the state of exception suspends

Article 29 allows the guarantees of free movement, free expression, association and assembly and the privacy of correspondence to be suspended in war, rebellion, disaster or serious disturbance of public order. With three-quarters of the deputies, the assembly may also suspend the right to be told the reasons for an arrest and to have a lawyer, and the 72-hour limit on administrative detention, which may then run to fifteen days. Article 30 limits a suspension to thirty days, renewable for equal periods by fresh decree while the circumstances last, and says the guarantees return in full if no decree is issued.

Between 24 and 27 March 2022, a wave of gang killings left at least 92 dead by the count of the Inter-American Commission, and 87 in three days by the count in the Wikipedia article. The assembly approved a state of exception on 27 March 2022. Britannica lists what it suspended: the right of association, the right to be told the reason for an arrest and the right of access to a lawyer, with the government free to open the mail and monitor the telephone calls of anyone suspected of gang activity. The BTI adds that it allows detention beyond the 72 hours normally allowed for charges to be brought.

Human Rights Watch's World Report 2026 counts 45 extensions and more than 90,000 arrests, among them more than 3,000 children, and a prison population of about 118,000, or 1.9% of the country's people, more than double the system's capacity. The rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario counts at least 458 deaths in custody under the measure. In its September 2024 report the Inter-American Commission said the state's own security statistics appeared to show that the country had moved beyond the emergency, and urged the state to restore the suspended rights.

Human Rights Watch records that gang violence has markedly declined. Official figures cited by Human Rights Watch put the homicide rate at 105 per 100,000 people in 2015 and at a historic low in 2024, and the Wikipedia article reports 495 homicides in 2022 against 154 in 2023. Human Rights Watch also records that the government has restricted public access to crime data and changed which killings are counted as homicides.

The exception reached the press as well. An amendment to the penal code in April 2022 made reproducing or transmitting gang messages punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. A Foreign Agents Law passed in May 2025 requires anyone receiving foreign funds to register with the Interior Ministry and taxes that funding at 30%; it came into force in September. Between May and September 2025 at least 140 human rights defenders and journalists left the country, and the Association of Journalists of El Salvador closed its offices that September.

Where local power went after the municipal merger

El Salvador is divided into 14 departments, which under the 2023 reform contain 44 municipalities, which in turn are divided into 262 districts, the same number as the municipalities before the reform. Municipal councils are directly elected for three years and may be re-elected, and the constitution makes their members popularly elected officials alongside the president and the deputies.

Money moved before the map did. Before 2021 the law required 10% of the national budget to go directly to the municipalities. That year the government created the Department of Municipal Works to decide allocations for public works and administration. The government said the change would curb waste and misuse at the local level, and critics cited by the BTI say it lets the centre claim credit for local investment and favour electorally useful places.

Before 2019 the vote had a clear geography. The central departments, the capital and the coast were known as departamentos rojos, red departments, for their leftward vote, and the east, west and highlands as departamentos azules, blue departments, for their conservative one.

Who El Salvador stands with abroad

El Salvador belongs to the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the Central American Integration System, whose main offices are in San Salvador. Its voters elect deputies to the Central American Parliament directly, under Article 80, and Article 89 commits the state to promote the reconstruction of the Republic of Central America, in unitary, federal or confederate form, with any plan of union submitted to popular consultation. The country is a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the free trade agreement with the United States and its neighbours, CAFTA-DR, took effect for it on 1 March 2006.

The United States recognised El Salvador as a separate state on 1 May 1849 and opened its legation in San Salvador on 15 June 1863. It withheld recognition from the government that came out of the December 1931 coup, under a 1923 treaty on governments that took power by revolution, and recognised Martínez on 26 January 1934. In the 1980s it supported the government against the FMLN.

In August 2018 the government broke relations with Taiwan and recognised China, which has since built the National Library and the National Stadium. Between March and April 2025 the United States transferred 252 Venezuelans to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), paying El Salvador to hold them, and they were sent on to Venezuela in July. In February 2025 the government agreed a US$1.4 billion programme with the International Monetary Fund, whose later review found that recommendations on judicial transfers and tenure had not been carried out. El Salvador: history covers the war the accords ended, and El Salvador: economy the dollar, the remittances and the bitcoin.