On January 31, 2022, members of the leftist FMLN party, social movement organizations, and others commemorated the one-year anniversary since two party activists were shot and killed and five others injured in an armed attack. The fatal victims, Gloria Rogel de Lopez and Juan de Dios Portillo Tejada, were ambushed on the way back to party headquarters after a midterm election rally in San Salvador. Both were older adults and surviving veterans of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

In the wake of the murders, multiple sectors throughout El Salvador and beyond, including US Congressmembers and international human rights organizations, condemned the violence as well as President Bukele’s divisive rhetoric that many saw as incitement to violence. A statement from the FMLN shortly after the attacks linked the murders to “the hate campaign sustained from the [Presidential Office] and President Bukele” against the party and political opposition. 

Following the shooting, various groups demanded an investigation from the Attorney General’s office, and then-Attorney General Raul Melara himself condemned the attack and promised to prosecute. In the short-lived investigation phase, two of the three gunmen were identified as security personnel assigned to Bukele’s health minister, Francisco Alabí. Not long after, however, once President Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party took control of the Legislative Assembly, Melara was (unconstitutionally) removed as Attorney General and replaced with a loyalist. The process has stalled and there has been no further investigation or prosecution into the murders. 

In the year since, other forms of violent repression of political opposition and dissent against the government’s growing list of human rights and other abuses has continued. The administration has jailed political opponents without due process; harassed and intimidated protesters; blocked, intimidated, surveilled, and undermined journalists (particularly women journalists); and illegally removed elected officials, among other deeply disturbing trends. In many cases, the president has carried out these abuses with the backing and threat of the Armed Forces, whose reintroduction into civilian life as a political force directly violates the Peace Accords,

On the evening of the anniversary of the murders, popular movement organizations remembered and demanded justice for the victims and called for an end to the repression of the Bukele regime. In the words of some of those who attended: “We fight so that this doesn’t happen again. This is why it’s important to know history: so that we do not return to the decades of repression, a situation that becomes more and more dangerous with this government.” “We honor the memory of compañero Juan de Dios and compañera Gloria Rogel: victims of the government 's hitmen, who in an act of hatred typical of this military dictatorship, ended their lives exactly a year ago today.”