El Salvador: Rolando Castro says that Jean Manes "should leave the country"
The Minister of Labor of El Salvador, Rolando Castro, said this Monday (11.01.2021) that the business manager and head of the United States diplomatic mission in San Salvador, Jean Manes, should leave the country .
"I think that the healthy thing to do should be that Mrs. Manes should retire from the country and she should do it in a decent way," Castro said at a press conference. "I am Minister of Labor, if I were chancellor, perhaps I would have already made the corresponding statement," he added.
"We believe that (Manes) has already caused too much damage to the country," Castro assured and, without providing any evidence, accused her that when she was ambassador to El Salvador, between 2016 and 2019, she "took over some institutions of this country", and that the then attorney general, Douglas Meléndez, "was practically an employee" of the ambassador.
What caused these statements?
On October 31, the US Embassy "categorically" denied accusations that its diplomatic representation in El Salvador would allegedly support a "conspiracy" against the ruling party Nuevas Ideas (NI). This after said party, led by a cousin of President Nayib Bukele, announced on his Twitter account the separation of two deputies from his legislative group in Congress for allegedly participating in a meeting to "conspire".
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The ruling party added that, in the recording, a leader of the Salvadoran diaspora and former member of NI offers them to go to the diplomatic headquarters "to negotiate the perks that would be granted by the United States Government, in exchange for getting that between 15 and 25 deputies leave the faction". Given this, the diplomatic mission assured that "the people who speak in the audio are not representatives of the United States Embassy" and that it "does not support one political party over another."
For his part, Bukele, without pointing directly to anyone, reacted to the NI publication: "This is the 'democracy' they want us to return to. The 'democracy' of black briefcases, perks and purchases of deputies. It is not democracy, it is quite the opposite. In addition to being interference and corruption (which they also claim to want to fight)," he said on his social networks.
The Bukele government maintains a tense relationship with the United States Embassy and has clashed on Twitter with officials of the Joe Biden Administration.
At the beginning of last July, the US Department of State published a list of 55 people who work as officials or are former officials of the governments of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) whom it points out for corruption, including Rolando Castro. According to the so-called Engel List, Castro "obstructed investigations into corruption and undermined democratic processes or institutions in order to harm his political opponents." In addition to Minister Castro, on the aforementioned list are Conan Castro, the president's current legal secretary; Carolina Recinos, head of the Government Cabinet, and the head of prisons, Osiris Luna Meza.
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