State of exception

And then I think just really targeted acts of repression that sent messages to the business community, to the general population, the, uh, more or less, uh, the expectation was for people not to speak out, not to be critical.

But for us, the state of exception here was, uh, a huge turning point.

And we can talk more about it, but generally, uh, when the agreement between Bukele and the gangs broke down in March of, uh, 2022, then he declared a state of emergency.

Uh, they suspend due process rights, and the soldiers and the police proceed to round up 85,000 Salvadorans without judicial, uh, warrants, uh, imprison them indefinitely without access to their families.

Uh, but his security model is predicated on lawlessness.

He is a, he is one of the principal benefactors of, you know, terrorist groups in this country, and he's built a political regime around that popularity that now is responsible for mass human rights violations as well.

Yeah, so, so with that sort of set on the table, let's move then to, to this declaration of the state of exception, which as you say, is really, as far as I understand it, crucial to the groundwork of those, those mass human rights violations.

What brings it about, and what has it enabled since then?

So having this kind of inspiration and treating it very seriously, so actually following the footsteps of those transitions that took place in Germany in the 30s, made Kaczynski and his political party an incredibly dangerous party.

Why? because the doctrine of Karl Schmitt is the doctrine of the state of exception.

And what the Peace Party tried to do was exactly to repeat the state of exception formula in Poland.

What that means? It means that, first of all, you want your government to be the only creator and obviously also executor of law, but also you want to exempt the sovereign from the rule of law.

So this is exactly the same thing as Trump is doing or Bolsonaro or Putin.

They try to really have the biggest power of law creating possible, but also they want to violate the law without any consequences.

So this is very dangerous for any political option, except fascism, I would say.

Then the policy of state of exception also is based on appointing enemy or enemies, enemy group.