Nayib Bukele’s administration in El Salvador has come under fire from rights groups for apparently falsifying Covid-19 figures in an attempt to cover up the true cost of the pandemic.
Two-thirds of the country’s Covid-19 fatalities were left out of official figures in order to give the illusion that the authoritarian government had the pandemic under control, the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica reported on Monday.
Documents obtained from the Salvadoran health ministry’s internal database show that the true number of Covid-19 deaths was likely three times higher than those made public, the paper says.
According to government figures, which are also published by the likes of the World Health Organization, 4,230 people have died from Covid-19 in El Salvador to date.
Internal documents reveal, however, that the ministry registered a total of 15,956 deaths related to Covid-19 between March 2020 and January 2023.
The Salvadoran newspaper verified the underreporting of deaths by examining hospital figures and studying the deadliest day of the pandemic. The leaked documents state that 57 Covid deaths were confirmed and 14 suspected on 1 October 2021 while the health ministry tweeted that only 17 had died from the illness that day.
Death certificates with Covid-19 listed as a cause of death corroborated that deaths were left out of the public record, La Prensa Gráfica said. In total, the number of people confirmed to have died from Covid-19 was underreported by 3,226 while another 6,977 suspected Covid-19 deaths did not make it into the public tally.
The president’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
The investigation is the latest instance to shed light on how President Nayib Bukele has monopolised the control of information in El Salvador since taking office in 2019.
The Latin American strongman’s crackdown on gangs has earned him the highest approval rating in the Americas but critics say the bitcoin-fanatic millennial has won support by employing an army of online “trolls” and shutting down freedom of expression.
El Salvador’s health ministry regularly broadcast the country’s Covid-19 daily death count in what appeared to be a regional success story. The country has recorded 668 Covid-19 deaths per million people, according to official figures – the lowest in Central America except for Nicaragua, which has reported an even more implausible 245 deaths under the dictator Daniel Ortega.
In contrast, the figures obtained by La Prensa Gráfica would give El Salvador one of the highest per capita death rates in Central America, exceeding Guatemala and Honduras, among others in the region.
Salvadoran doctors had alleged that the government was censoring information during the pandemic to give the illusion it had the public health crisis under control while in reality the public health system was collapsing.
Government misinformation is increasingly difficult to challenge as it is silencing civil society groups, says Ruth Eleonora López, a lawyer at the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal.
“Bukele has guaranteed full control over the access to information in El Salvador,” López says. “Information is increasingly being withheld, or the government denies that it exists at all. This allows the government’s narrative to be the only narrative and prevents citizens from being able to check and confront their information.”
The Salvadoran leader is disregarding constitutional norms as he dismantles democracy in order to tighten his grip on the country, warn human rights groups.
Bukele has marched armed soldiers into congress to intimidate lawmakers into pushing through a bill, stacked the supreme court with allies and suspended the right to trial, which has led to innocent civilians from across the world being wrongly caught up in his assault on the country’s gangs.
News outlet El Faro left the country in April, saying that Bukele’s clampdown on the media had made it impossible to operate there.
Bukele’s New Ideas party announced in June that the 41-year-old will run for president again despite a second term being unconstitutional – a fact the president has acknowledged in TV interviews on several occasions.
