Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Independence of the judiciary from executive and legislative encroachment. Specifically captures court-packing, selective prosecution, judicial reshuffles.
On 4 Jun 2021, the Bukele government terminated the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en El Salvador (CICIES), the anti-corruption agreement signed Sep 2019 with the Organization of American States and modelled on CICIG Guatemala. The trigger was CICIES's 2021 investigation into pandemic-procurement irregularities and alleged misuse of public funds by officials in the Bukele administration; the government cited the appointment of a former FMLN lawyer to OAS staff roles as its reason for unilateral termination. CICIES had been producing active case files on at least 12 government officials; those files transferred to the Fiscalía General — which, following the 1 May 2021 removal of Attorney General Melara, no longer pursued them. Human rights and anti-corruption observers (WOLA, Transparency International) mark the termination as a significant institutional-quality regression.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.