El^Salvador

In September 2006, after the Salvadoran Congress passed the Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism, then-US Ambassador H. Douglas Barclay congratulated the Salvadoran people.

“The US and El Salvador are [now] partners in the war on terror,” he beamed.

The law, modeled on the USA Patriot Act, establishes a special terrorism tribunal and allows for anonymous witnesses and undercover agents to participate in those trials. It also criminalizes acts such as public protests, street blockades and “publicly justifying terrorism” with punishments of up to eighty years in prison. More than a year later, this law has turned scores of Salvadoran citizens into fugitives.
…
María Silvia Guillén, executive director in El Salvador of the Foundation for Studies of Applied Law, believes the law is being used as a political weapon. It creates “wild cards that allow the concepts and penalties of the law to be invoked or left aside at any given time, influenced by any political motive,” she says.

Pedro Juan Hernández, a professor of economics at the University of El Salvador, concurs. “The objective of these antiterrorist laws isn’t to fight terrorism, because there haven’t been acts of terrorism [in El Salvador] in many years,” he recently told In These Times.

The Bush and Saca administrations maintain close ties. El Salvador is the only Latin American country with troops still in Iraq and was the first to sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The country receives $461 million over five years in US aid through the Millennium Challenge Corporation and is home to the controversial US-run International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in San Salvador.
…
US economic interests run deep in El Salvador. After the 1996 privatization of the country’s electricity industry, corporations like North Carolina-based giant Duke Energy, once a business partner with Enron, swooped in to invest.