Vice President of Ortega from 1985 to 1990, Ramírez was banished to Spain and stripped of nationality for supporting the opposition protests of 2018, which left more than 300 dead, according to the UN.
The 82 -year -old novelist, Cervantes Award 2017, is in Guatemala to preside over the literary festival Central America counts.
Bukele enjoys great popularity in his country for his War against gangsbut has taken steps to govern without counterweight, according to their critics, among them, to remove judges from the Supreme Court and replace them with related magistrates, who gave green light to their re -election in 2024, something that prohibited the Constitution.
Question: What is your reading of the situation of El Salvador?
Answer: It seems to me that someone who decides to stay in power at all costs is willing, losing all scruples, to violate all the rules of democracy.
Passing over institutions is go over democratic conventions accepted throughout the world. And on that path it begins by repressing gangs and ends up repressing dissident voices.
And then, repression against non -governmental organisms, blaming them subversion or whatever. That is the same path of Ortega.
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That is, go suppressing freedoms to staysubjecting the army, subjecting the police, subjecting the other institutions of the State. I believe that this path is clearly marked in El Salvador.
We can talk about different ideological signs [de Bukele y Ortega]. It seems to me that, when These are dictatorships Or dictatorships, ideological signs are left behind. What is imposed above is repression, the suppression of freedoms, the contempt of democracy.
“Prison Tourism”
Q: Other presidents want to replicate Bukele’s security recipe.
A: There is that illusion that Hard hand against crime It is what peace and security brings in a country. Peace and security are not brought by repression, the living conditions, job opportunities bring them.
Q: What do you think that Bukele has in prison to Venezuelan migrants deported by the United States?
A: That seems grotesque. The other day I heard the statement of a Salvadoran official saying that, just as there is medical tourism, there are also prison tourism.
And returns to that bad reputation that we had the Central American countries of banana republics. Now we are not the banana republic, we will be a prison republic. That seems very painful for our countries.
“There will be a change”
Q: Are you still thinking that the change in Nicaragua will arrive?
A: I don’t know how that change is going to give, but there will have to be. I believe that the fate of Central American countries is democracy. There can be no real economic development, There can be no integration mechanisms without democracy.
Nicaragua is a country that today has as one of its political weapons the isolationism: Leaving international organizations, leaving the United Nations, OAS agencies. Then, isolationism cannot lead to any form of coexistence, neither internal nor external, nor with the other Central American countries or with the other countries of the rest of Latin America.
Q: Do you think Ortega will impose a dynasty?
A: Those are Obsolete forms of government. Nicaragua is a country that has already shaken a dictatorship in the past [de la dinastía de los Somoza en 1979]. And he tried to do it in 2018 and that’s why the great repression left so many dead.
But it would seem that it is a quiet, subjected, gagged country, but it is not. In the background there is a libertarian spirit, a spirit of rebellion against any dictatorship that is latent there. At a certain time there will be a change.
I have absolute confidence that the people of Nicaragua will solve this new accident in its history.
Q: And what will happen to your exile?
A: Well, exile is an evil that one does not seek and has to adapt to live it, right? If my choice were to return to Nicaragua, I would have returned before, but this is not possible. And, in addition, the Nicaragua to which I wanted to return at this time does not exist. That country that is there is not mine.
That country submitted, where all journalists are out, where there are more than 400 exiled journalistswhere he pursues, he imprisons, subject to fear, in that country it would be impossible for me to live.