 Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America, CodePink's weekly YouTube program of hot news out of Latin America and the Caribbean. In partnership with Friends of Latin America and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast every Wednesday, 4.30 p.m. Pacific, 7.30 p.m. Eastern on CodePink YouTube. On September 7, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, allowing the cryptocurrency to be used in any transaction from buying a cup of coffee to paying taxes. The bold move, largely celebrated by the international Bitcoin community, has found a more skeptical reception at home and in the traditional financial world amid concerns that it could bring instability and unnecessary risk to the Central American country's fragile economy. President Naid Bukeli has promoted the digital currencies adoption, pitching it as a way of bringing more Salvadorans, about 70% of whom don't have banking accounts, into the formal economy. Using the cryptocurrency would make it faster and cheaper to get remittances from abroad, he argues, and could free the indebted nation from the hold of the traditional global financial system. In El Salvador, many are viewing the move with confusion and distrust, afraid that the volatility inherent to using virtual tokens with no physical backing, which is like not unlike the US dollar, I would say, which are apt to soar and crash in value. This could be dangerous for the economy and people's individual savings. El Salvador's moves puts it at the forefront of a revolution in finance on the blockchain where a parallel universe of crypto-based alternative banking services is booming, an eliciting alarm from officials in Washington and beyond. To talk more about this global first, we are joined by Yesenia Portillo of CISPAS, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Welcome, Yesenia. Hi, Terry. Thank you for having me. Oh, so wonderful you could join us. Really, I'm so delighted that you could talk to us today right on the heels of Tuesday's announcement. And it's a pretty big story for a small country to be the first to do this. Can you give us a little bit of background as to how this decision came about? Yeah, so I think that's one of the most troubling about all of this is that it was very sudden. There was no consultation with civil society about this at all. So if we know a little bit about what's going on in El Salvador right now, because of the legislative elections that happened in February, President Naib Bukele was able to secure a legislative assembly that is beholden to him. And does everything that his regime asks of them, they have a supermajority. His party, the New Ideas Party holds a historic supermajority over the legislative assembly, along with a very small handful of an allied party, Ghana, which is the party he ran for presidency. So they control the legislator and they're able to pass legislation without discussion or debate. And this is what happened with the Bitcoin announcement. It was basically the first time I think Salvadorans really heard about or anybody really heard about this was that some cryptocurrency convention that happened that Jack Mahler's, I believe this is his name, who was slated to provide the Bitcoin wallet strike where Salvadorans would be able to change the Bitcoin into dollar. Anyways, he was the first person to basically announce that he was in conversations with the president of El Salvador. This is a conference happening in English. It was in Miami, I believe. Probably not coincidentally Miami. So a couple of days after that is when the Bitcoin law was presented by the executive and passed very quickly after that in the middle of the night by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly by the Navasivea Salvadoran Legislative Assembly. So that's kind of the background of the rollout. There's more we could get into, but I'll kind of leave it at that. Let's talk a little bit about how the Salvadoran people are responding to this. I mean, the president touted this or I guess maybe said made it palatable to Salvadoran citizens because he is saying it can facilitate receiving remittances from abroad, which is a pretty big selling point to people. But how realistic is this for the majority of Salvadoran citizens? How many people or what percentage of the population actually has devices? Has the access to the devices? I think it's a wallet, an electronic wallet that you have to use. And so that's going to require some sort of electronic device and an electronic device is going to require access to the internet. So Wi-Fi, cellular data. How realistic is the technology for the majority of people? So I think at this point, most people have cell phones and have smartphones. The problem is internet connection and data. So a lot of people that are living in extreme poverty or poverty do not have unlimited access to internet. It's usually very limited access to the internet. And a lot of in the rural communities, the connection isn't very strong. So folks have to go to another person's house or to a hill in order to tap into data. So that's, I guess, accessibility is that with regards to how it's being received by the population also. So it was announced about three months ago. And when the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly passes legislation, it has three months to kind of be hashed out where legislators can submit reforms, et cetera. I don't think that any reforms were really made. There were reforms presented. For example, one of the major things about the way the legislation is written is that Salvadorans will be required to receive payment in Bitcoin if somebody wants to pay in Bitcoin. So one of the reforms that has been proposed by FMLN legislators was to change that and to get that out of the law. And this is why it's a little bit kind of convoluted. But the way the idea with Bitcoin and El Salvador, and the problem too is that the information, the specifics, the details, have not been very well communicated to the people of El Salvador. So we have tech experts from civil society, economists from civil society doing all the public education that the executive should be doing. Because there is no transparency, the legislators themselves don't even know what the law means or how any of it is really going to function. So yeah, that's kind of what these three months have been. The Salvadoran people kind of learning about what this all means through educating themselves, through folks, activists, tech experts, economists that are kind of filling in the gaps with whatever information they do have. Because of course, the government hasn't provided all of the details about how things are being financed, et cetera. And that's another major point that we can get to is how the infrastructure for this is, where the money is coming from for the infrastructure for this and getting Salvadorans to actually buy into it. Because it's not as easy just to say El Salvador is going to become the first country to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender. You can say that. There's all these things that have to go behind that. Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is something that is very, very confusing to the masses. And when you have a population that's used to buying and selling things in cash, you have informal vendors that live off of $5 a day with what they can sell on the street that day in order to feed their family. Cryptocurrency just doesn't make sense to those populations, but they're going to be required to accept Bitcoin as payment supposedly. And as far as the remittances go, so because of the dynamic that I just mentioned, the idea is that there's going to be a wallet that changes Bitcoin into dollars. So that's the strike wallet that I was mentioning, which has gotten replaced with a state run wallet. And it's called Chivo wallet. So that was announced sometime after. And so where the money is coming from is that they're investing almost a quarter billion dollars in setting up the infrastructure for this cheap state run wallet that's going to supposedly transfer Bitcoin into dollars. So if you download this wallet and somebody wants to pay you in Bitcoin, you can receive it and then supposedly automatically turn it into dollars and then go to an ATM, a Chivo ATM, a state run ATM, and then get the dollars. So then there's many different kind of players that have to go into all of these things, into the different transactions. And so that there's, as far as I understand, in order to send a remittance, you still have to go through third parties. It's not like you're just sending someone a Bitcoin and they're going to go use a Bitcoin on the street. And all of this costs money. And there's no analysis about what this is costing the taxpayer to set up this infrastructure and how much each Salvadoran is paying for that thing, for this infrastructure, plus the fees that, because there are fees that are, that are charged as well. The idea that, you know, Wells Fargo and Washington Neutral or whoever, the, you know, the remittances that are getting sent, they were completely exaggerating about how much people, how much, you know, the percentage of money that gets lost through the banks. The numbers that they were saying were just like not factual. And so, so yeah, the kind of benefit that they were giving in relation to remittances is just not clear. Well, you know, we all want to believe that cryptocurrencies Bitcoin is so simple and takes out the middle person, you know, the whole blockchain technology and just listening to this description, it sounds, you know, as complicated as using a credit card, if not more so. I mean, and this is this, this is the thing that I'm, that I was saying about it. And this is what tech activists and tech experts in El Salvador are saying they're not against cryptocurrency. They're against the way it's being implemented in El Salvador. And the way that it's being implemented in El Salvador is really goes like kind of flies in the face of what it stands for, you know, because now you have a national government whose corrupt has been stealing the money of the people and is, you know, they're the intentions are not to actually provide liberation for the Salvadoran people, it's to line their pockets with this. And so there's going to be, they're now going to have to control this wallet and Bitcoin goes through there, so people are having to give a lot of information about their money through there anyways. Yeah, it seems very contradictory because cryptocurrency is supposed to be a system independent of central control, and yet the system being introduced in El Salvador is definitely government introduced and government managed at the very least on a certain level, which seems totally contradictory to what the, you know, invention of cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology was about. Yeah, and then kind of, I mean, I don't know, the last thing I'll say about this, but like something else to say is that there's just no, because of the lack of transparency and the lack of information that's being given. And we can talk about the tax on government transparency and why this is all, because this is all very contextual to Bucharest regime, right. He is a dictator, this is, there's just no question about it anymore. And he's engaged in, there's just so many different things that his regime has done to attack government transparency laws. And he is a, his government is one that lies to the population and doesn't provide them the information that they need for all kinds of things. And this is very true for the Bitcoin decision. So the idea that Bitcoin is going to liberate El Salvador from the rest of the U.S. dollar, from the World Bank, from the IMF, there's just no evidence of that. He hasn't convinced the masses of that because he hasn't told them how, you know, the U.S. government is still sending military equipment to Bugele in just the couple of days prior to yeah, you know, they're still sending military equipment to El Salvador. He's still asking the World Bank to help him finance this infrastructure. And yeah, we can get also to the point about the economic situation that El Salvador is in, you know. So just, you know, the fact that he's doing this without convincing the masses, this is a highly, highly unpopular measure. This is one of the most unpopular things that Bugele has done since he's become president. I think like he's done a number of unpopular things. Right, but this is one of the things that the polls show the vast majority of Salvadorans don't want it. And they certainly don't want it to be mandatory for them to have to receive payments in Bitcoin, which is kind of essential to their project. So you mentioned the IMF and the World Bank and both institutions are considering a financial deal with El Salvador. And they've, now the country's adopted Bitcoin. And what you're hearing from Wall Street and international financial institutions is that this system now introduced by the Salvadoran government is open. And then I find this ironic that these international financial institutions are saying this, but it's open to money laundering and other illicit financial activity. And, you know, we know that can be done regardless of a cryptocurrency or not. But it's interesting that that is how these international financial institutions are interpreting Bukele's move at this point. And what do you, I mean, is that something that's potentially true? That is a concern of the Salvadoran people. When you're dealing with a government that has attacked the institutions of government transparency in a very systematic way. So in the previous two administrations, there was a law passed that's the law laid access to all the information public gather law of access to public information. They set up a secretariat of government transparency within the executive and an autonomous institute for access to public information. And then of course, the law itself delineates what the different government institutions need to do in order to keep the population informed. And he systematically dismantled all of that. When he first came to office, got rid of the transparency secretariat and has attacked the Institute of Access to Public Information, taken out any of the magistrates, illegally removed magistrates who were trying to keep the institute running and doing what it was supposed to be doing, have passed laws to reform the law. Sorry, has passed reforms to the law. So there's just all of these things. And there's a lot of credible information about his dealings with criminal networks and transnational criminal networks. That is a very real concern about what the Bugele administration's intentions are with this. Let's move on. There's two things. I want to, because it's international criminal networks, I mean, you know, the country to the east Honduras is run by a president whose brother was convicted of narco trafficking. And also, you know, one thing I'd like us to touch on, you mentioned it to me in comments before we went to our broadcast, was the support by the Venezuelan opposition for Bitcoin in El Salvador. And I think we should be clear with the audience, not the Venezuelan opposition in general, but a very specific fraction of the Venezuelan opposition in that being the opposition segment of Leopoldo Lopez. Yeah. And I don't know that it's like, I don't know that I would say a support of a section of the opposition. No, it's more specific than that. So the Bugele administration's basically inner ring of his administration are Venezuelan opposition, right? We in Venezuelan opposition people who were working with Leopoldo Lopez. And this was reported on, I mean, this has been reported on for a while, but this specifically what came out yesterday from El Faro is that, you know, the specifics about their involvement with the Bitcoin law. And what El Faro is reporting is that Sarah Han, I believe is her name. And I can't remember her specific role with Leopoldo Lopez, but I think it had to do with public education and youth programs. And so she's part of Nayib Bukele's inner circle. And as the way El Faro has reported it, as some of the minister, some of the Nayib Bukele's ministers have been kind of identified by the U.S. State Department as corrupt actors on the angles list. These right wing opposition Venezuelans are gaining even more prominence within his official kind of executive structure. So within the education ministry, as well as what again was reported in El Faro. But yeah, this is not something that gets talked about very much. It was very odd to me. And because it is something that El Faro has been reporting for a while, is that the fact that these folks are very, very tied into his administration. And they were from the beginning, his campaign until now, actually being at the head and leading the Bitcoin rollouts and everything having to do with Bitcoin and Bitcoin wallet. From the start of his presidency? Or even before? Yes. It's been reported that he had Venezuelan campaign advisors as well. Well, so let's talk about Bukele's plan to stay in power. Now that he's there, he's created a financial system unique to El Salvador and he's manipulated the judiciary in the legislature. What's next? What do you see as next? Well, so you know that he's known to be, he's a populist. So this is kind of a well-known thing or a well-known belief that he's widely, widely loved by Salvadorans. They gave him the presidency in a landslide and then they gave him the legislator and they gave him a super majority within the legislator. And he hypes that number up and downplays the opposition. He says three percent. He calls his opposition the three percent, which is just not factual. But as his presidency has gone on with attacks against the other branches of government, with political persecution, persecution of journalists, persecution of activists, persecution of ex-FMLA and government officials, recently a major kind of very, very extremely troubling thing that happened recently was one of the tech activists who has been doing incredible work in terms of informing the public about Bitcoin and about the concerns that Bitcoin brings. I mean, and like I said, it's kind of a group of economists and tech specialists who have been doing that work. One of the main critics, one of a major critic that's been on Salvador News channels, panels, active on the internet, the day after his interview with a Salvador News station aired, the last one that he did, he was arrested. He was arrested without cause. He was with his mom and she was scared for him and she didn't let the cops take him without her in the vehicle. And he was released after a few hours because of just the amount of pressure that the government got to let him go. So those are just some examples of the political persecution of, of course, we have the five ex-FMLA and functionaries that are being held in pre-trial detention on supposed charges of corruption and very, very likely lacking the kind of evidence needed to pursue these charges. And then we also have, you know, the mass murder that happened, the mass shooting that happened in January against FMLN, FMLN officials as well. And within, and so those, that's the political persecution piece, but as far as like the discontent that's growing as well, folks are, people in El Salvador are seeing, are seeing this stuff happen. They're also seeing the, the cost of living going up. So fuel prices are constantly increasing. And the cost of food is going up as well. And they're just, people are just getting really fed up with him. The big, like again, the Bitcoin law is just so highly unpopular. So that's definitely not helping him. And so he needs to ensure his control by other means. And this, we, this is something that we could have guessed would happen, like that this dynamic would occur, and that he would need to take control over, you know, the, the, the judiciary, the legislative assembly and the electoral, the electoral body in order to secure his, his, his presidency, because he's not going to win via popular election or at least his chances of, of winning via popular election are becoming smaller and smaller. Besides the fact that he's not allowed to run for a second term under the Salvadoran constitution, which is a major thing. So there's two things, you know, he's not, he's not allowed to run for, for a second term. And in order to reform something like that, you know, this legislator would have to pass that, and then the next legislator would have to approve it, which would be after the next election. And so we had last week, the five Supreme Court magistrates who he illegally, his legislator illegally put in an office, because I don't know if I think you had Alexis on here. We've talked about this, yes, for our audience, and I can post that link in the program description for people to review, but we have had this conversation with Cispus earlier this year. Yeah, so I'm sorry I'm kind of going on and on, but hopefully folks are following here. But basically, when, again, when the legislator took over on May 1st, they immediately moved, removed the five, the five top court magistrates, the constitutional, it's like the Supreme Court magistrates, all five were illegally removed and replaced with their own magistrates. So you have the head of the judiciary completely controlled by the Bugale regime. And they also removed the Attorney General and illegally replaced him as well. And so, you know, their terms weren't up. And they, they were removed because they, they had been making decisions and carrying out investigations against the administration. And so this, these illegally appointed Supreme Court magistrates on, when was it September 3rd, I believe, they, they made a decision or they put out a ruling that the president, that the, that the electoral body needed to change the rules basically to permit the president to run for a second term. So, and that is against the constitution. It's not unlike the country next door, how they got their president. Right, right. And I mean, and we have, we know that there's, we're talking about this too, right? Our political prisoners that are still in prison out of the 17, I believe, that were arrested in the aftermath of, of that, of that, I believe was the election, right? Yes. Of one Orlando or another. Yeah. Right. Which he was able to run, it was a fraudulent election in the same way that he was able to run because of a change, you know, it was unconstitutional, right, for him to run again. Somebody changed the constitution. So he changed the constitution in this situation, there's been no change to the constitution. Not yet. The constitutional judges are just saying that he can do it, even though it's against the constitution. Wow. So El Salvador is looking at a government, a president, a president specifically who controls the executive, the judiciary, the legislature, and, and now the monetary system. Well, maybe it's a total wanting, wanting, like that sounds like the, where he's, that, that sounds like his goal, right? So that's the problem, right? So he's not liberating anybody, like he just wants to control it for himself. So all of us excited about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, you know, need to take a second look at what he's doing. Yes, definitely. It is a very dangerous, we need to look at the context here, you know, this is not a, you know, he's not a socialist, even though he tries to talk like one sometimes. And the other, he also controls the military and the police, you know, and that's another major, another major, major element there. And the US keeps sending him money for that and equipment for that. Wow. It's, it's actually overwhelming. It really is. And it's, I mean, it's, it's huge. And, and as you and I said, when we first discussed doing this episode, it's, it's huge. And we talked a little about it. So I hope that you will, you know, keep us surprised and we can do additional episodes and watch how this all unfolds. And the reason I support, you know, and Terry, like also, so we need to, you know, be very vigilant and listen to what people in El Salvador are saying about him because the arrogance, the arrogance that I'm hearing from people in the crypto community, you know, Salvadorans are not stupid and they're not talking about the tech itself. They're talking about their context and their reality, you know, and, and the crypto community is being very myopic. And it's very, very troubling. They're supporting, they're supporting a fascist dictator in order to carry out their view of the world. And so it's very colonial and it's very imperialist. And Salvadorans have lived through this before. And it's not, it's not okay. People really need to listen to what people on the ground are saying. The majority of Salvadorans don't accept this. It wasn't, there was, he passed it overnight without any consultation and without any transparency. It's very, it's very, very, it's very gross to me that people are acting like they know better, you know, than people on the ground. Well, that's that whole colonial thing, right? Regardless, regardless of the language you speak or the color of your skin or your family heritage, that it's still that paradigm. Yeah, you know that your system's best, that you know what's best for a people in their country. And I totally agree with you. It's so important to listen to what the Salvadoran people want. And like you said, the context in which they're living in and the political environment that they're currently functioning in. You know, before, before I let you go, because I really want you to come back, because there's two, two things that I want to share with our audience. And I shared them with you before we started broadcasting that this, when I started promoting our episode this evening, I immediately started getting comments on social media and different messaging apps. And it was, it was fascinating. I got responses from Puerto Rico, comments not unlike what you have shared with the audience today, as far as it's a form of fascism, it's a form of authoritarian, it's a form of colonialism, taking control of the economy through a cryptocurrency. And I, and then contrary to that, we got pre-broadcast comments from people who do a lot of anti-sanctions work in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, specifically those three countries saying cryptocurrency could, could not definitively, but could be the answer for those countries to get off the US dollar to not have to deal with the overnight swift banking system. And those are all the dollar and the swift system are tools that the US controls. And because the US controls them, they can, you know, use sanctions, prohibit countries from interfacing with the dollar and with the international banking system. So it's really, it's fascinating, because literally as I shared with you, you know, there's these two very strong camps. And then you have all the tech people who have developed the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies who, you know, who tend to, I would agree with your, your comment and with those from Puerto Rico that they're, they're basically, you know, another, a new modern form of colonialism, the people supporting this. Yeah. I mean, I think if it's, I don't like, I think, I think we address kind of that at this point, right? In the sense of like, it's really important to look at the context and how this is being used by the Bukele administration, a fascist dictatorship, or becoming one very, very quickly, if not one already, that has no accountability to its people. So this is not something that's going to be in the hands of Salvadorans and had deep connections and ties with the Trump administration, continues to receive military equipment from the US government, is asking the World Bank to help him finance this stuff. So that the idea that he's some sort of liberator of the Salvadoran people just, just doesn't make any sense. So yeah, I think that that's it. And I was just going to kind of also add in the sense of like, yes, listening to the Salvadoran people and what is happening right now is folks are taking to the streets more and more and more. And so we did have several marches that were called this, this pass yesterday in the capital. So we had a few, you know, a couple thousand people taking to the streets for this, which is pretty remarkable because, you know, the Bukele administration has been so widely popular so far, but this is just not, this is not a popular, it's not something that the people want. So let's have you come back, let's follow this story and see the ramifications of it. And I'm also really, it'll be really important to watch how Bukele stays in power if he's able to finagle that. And to follow the Salvadoran people as you, you know, yesterday you mentioned they were in the street, yesterday was the day that was September 7th, was the day this Bitcoin project was announced. And so that's, so there was an immediate negative response, which is. Yeah, I mean, and they've been, they've been taking to the streets. So all last week as well, it started off before the, before the Supreme Court, the illegally appointed Supreme Court magistrates passed that ruling that he can run again for president, even though it's that's an unconstitutional ruling. A few days before that, the legislator also overstepped its own mandate and changed the age limit for which judges can sit. And so they said any judge over 60 has to, is immediately expelled. So they expelled about 200 judges earlier last week. So legislators, you have all the branches of government doing just any, you know, just doing his bidding. And so the, some of those magistrates that he, some of those judges that he, that the legislator removed because they're over 60, are judges that are in charge of very important cases and that, that he's attacked, he's been attacking. So one of them being the judge that's overseeing the El Mosote massacre case that has ruled that the government needs to open the archives, for example. And another part of that reform that the legislator passed was that the legislative assembly can, like, shift judges around to different municipalities. So, so yeah, it's, it's a very dangerous situation. And it is really important to demand for the US government to stop sending military equipment to Naibu Kelle and to stop, you know, imposing neoliberal extractivist policy. And, and, and it's a regional issue as well. So CSPES has a campaign, it's hashtag and harmful aid to Central America. And you can go to CSPES.org to slash take action to contact congressional representatives and call for no US financing to these harmful, yeah, these, this harmful kind of aid that goes to Guatemala Honduras and El Salvador specifically, that the Biden administration is pushing. Wow. So there's so, there's so much, I wish we could just keep talking and I want to have you come back so we can follow all of this. I think, so people can find you at cispis c-i-s-p-e-s dot org and the, and the action they can take again is it's at cispis.org slash forward slash take action. Take action. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Yosinia, for this terrific conversation. And I really hope our audience has a, has a different perspective now on the headlines across the world are almost, you know, are so exciting. First, you know, national implementation of cryptocurrency. And there's a lot of excitement about it. And I really appreciate you joining us today to take some of that gloss off of the preconception of what a cryptocurrency is and how it's, and how it's being used in El Salvador. Thank you, Terry. No, thank you. I'm so thankful to talk with you again and so happy to see you. And I want to remind our audience that you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America. We broadcast every Wednesday, 7 30 p.m. Eastern, 4 30 p.m. Pacific on Code Pink YouTube. And also please be sure to tune into Code Pink Radio. Code Pink Radio broadcasts every Thursday morning, 11 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific on WBAI out of New York City, summer casting on WPFW out of Washington D.C. Okay, everyone, thank you so much. Really appreciate you joining us. Thank you again, Yosinia. And I look forward to a follow up conversation. Awesome. Thank you, Terry. Have a good day.