The Constitutional Chamber of El Salvador’s Supreme Court has admitted a case to declare the groundbreaking Medications Law set to go into effect this month unconstitutional, prompting popular outcry and accusations that the Chamber is serving elite economic interests above those of the general population. Domestic pharmaceutical groups presented the case, claiming the law, which was designed to regulate El Salvador’s notoriously un-regulated pharmaceutical industry, is an “excessive intervention” and a violation of the “right to economic freedom” of drug companies. Transnational companies like Pfizer and the pharmacies that carry their products have also threatened to abandon the Salvadoran market.

Passed in February 2012, the FMLN-proposed Medications Law took pharmaceutical representatives off of the board that oversees medicine quality, broke the industry’s monopoly on importing drugs and limited medicine prices that routinely run at up to 52.2 times the international average to under 3-5 times the international rates. Its approval was a severe blow to Salvadoran right-wing interests, which are intimately tied to the pharmaceutical industry; former Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party President Alfredo Cristiani and Grand National Alliance (GANA) party presidential candidate Tony Saca are both owners of major domestic pharmacy chains.

In a recent press statement, the Citizen’s Alliance Against Healthcare Privatization and the National Healthcare Forum denounced the Court’s decision, and charged that, “All of these threats from Cristiani and company are nothing more than maneuverings to generate a false climate of worry in the population, now that the brand-name products face alternatives in the market.”

President Mauricio Funes was also outspoken in his disapproval of the Court’s actions: “The approval of this law and it’s implementation constituted a historic moment in a country where some of the most expensive medications in the world are sold,” said the President, “I ask the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber that, upon making a legal evaluation of the law, they also evaluate the economic and social consequences of their decision.”