Organizations of the Popular Rebellion and Resistance Bloc (BRP), as well as the Movement of Victims of the Regime (MOVIR), marched from Cuscatlán Park to the historic downtown El Salvador on Sunday, January 12, commemorating the 33rd anniversary of the 1992 Peace Accords. Holding their closing rally on the steps of the National Library, which has been promoted by the Bukele government as a major achievement, marchers expressed their opposition to mining and called for an end to mass firings, political persecution, human rights violations, and displacement.

The march demonstrated an escalation for mass mobilizations under the State of Exception, as hundreds of demonstrators commandeered the National Library steps across from the National Cathedral, which form one side of what has become San Salvador’s most touristic square. Bukele’s government has invested heavily in converting the square into a tourist destination, displacing local businesses and vendors in the process through threats of arbitrary arrest under the State of Exception.

The Peace Accords, as organizers shared at the rally, “put an end to twelve years of war– a war imposed on El Salvador, financed by the United States.” Bukele, however, has characterized the Accords as “a farce” and claims that the civil war was a pact between the oligarchy’s right-wing National Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). His government and party legislators even went so far as to eliminate the national holiday commemorating their signing.

“Everything that was achieved by the Peace Accords is under threat. The governing clan, with the support of the oligarchy and the imperialists, has dismantled the institutionality created through the people’s struggle. They have, once again, imposed a dictatorial regime that has incarcerated thousands of victims under the State of Exception, including popular movement leaders,” organizers of Sunday’s march denounced.

Salvadorans and solidarity activists in Germany, Mexico City, as well as Chicago and Washington, D.C. in the U.S., also mobilized in support of the march. Gathered in front of the Salvadoran Embassy in D.C., organizations including La Chiltota Rebelde and CISPES rebuked Bukele government policies. In the words of one organizer, “The Bukele clan, instead of investing in the Salvadoran population, invests in deadly projects like metals mining, reduces the budget of key services such as agriculture, education, and health, unjustly fires tens of thousands of public servants in these and other institutions, and implements a State of Exception that criminalizes poverty.” The rally included an altar honoring victims of the State of Exception and called for the release of innocent victims and political prisoners incarcerated under the regime. Read the full statement here.

Back in San Salvador, Ivania Cruz of the Human and Community Rights Defense Unit (UNIDEHC) reaffirmed the organizations’ commitment to organizing in defense of the Peace Accords. “What we now have, after 33 years, is a total regression. Government institutions lack any independence and, as such, we are in a stage of resistance.”