El Salvador's Legislative Assembly was militarized last year by President Nayib Bukele in a coup attempt. | Photo: Twitter: Asamblea Legislativa El Salvador

San Salvador, February 16 (RHC)-- The Political Commission of the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador admitted two pieces of correspondence (propositions not of law), one of these to retake the report of the special commission that investigated the events that took place on February 9, 2020.

One of the initiatives, if successful in the plenary, would allow to recommend the dismissal of the Salvadoran president for the militarization of the Legislative Assembly on that occasion, but for the moment the report of the commission is in the hands of the Attorney General's Office of the Central American country.

The other is an initiative of the deputy of ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance, extreme right), Ricardo Velásquez Parker, to evaluate the mental incapacity of President Bukele, which invokes Article 131, numeral 20 of the Salvadoran Constitution.  This is under study but without establishing a date for its discussion.

However, before this last initiative was read, the non-partisan deputy, Leonardo Bonilla, asked at the time that it should not have been admitted because of the social upheaval it could generate, since he said that declaring the president "mentally incapable" would free him from criminal responsibility in the future.

In relation to this, the president of the Assembly and of the Political Commission, Mario Ponce, said that the initiative does not represent the body as such in its totality, but that it should be admitted because it is the power of the deputy who presented it.

GANA (Gran Alianza Nacional -- a right wing party which split from ARENA -- catalogued this initiative as a coup d'état against the Executive and Deputy Guillermo Gallegos assured that his proposal is, on the contrary, to create a special commission to investigate the request of Deputy Velázquez Parker.

This saga of tension between the legislative and the executive has been spiced up with a closed-door meeting held between President Bukele and members of the diplomatic corps in which he reportedly informed him of the "failed attempt" of a "coup d'état" by the Legislative Assembly, which he attributed to the pre-electoral environment; while denying that in his recent visit to Washington he had insisted on seeing President Biden, although U.S. officials said otherwise.

On February 9, 2020, Nayib Bukele militarized the Legislative Assembly headquarters for several hours, amid tensions with the legislative body regarding the approval of the budget.