Nayib Bukele seeks re-election amid complaints of authoritarianism

When opponents began to denounce that a dictatorship existed in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele decided to change his description in X, on September 20, 2021, from “president” to “dictator” of that small Central American country of 6.3 million inhabitants . A few hours later, he again modified his biography on that social network to another in which he defined himself as “the most powerful dictator.” cool of the global world.”

In this way, Nayib Bukele responded with irony to criticism from the opposition, which at that time questioned a presidential decree that ordered the retirement of judges, magistrates and prosecutors over 60 years of age, and a ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice, controlled by him. same, which allowed presidents to opt for immediate re-election, despite the constitutional prohibition. “President Bukele is extremely skilled at reframing realities,” says Omar Luna, a data analyst at the Salvadoran consulting firm Lab-Dat.

That decision of the Supreme Court justices in 2021 is what allowed Bukele to secure a place on the ballot for the general elections that will be held this Sunday, February 4, and to which he arrives as the favorite. Salvadorans, according to polls, support a new mandate for the extravagant politician – with waxed hair and a outlined beard – who wears jeans, leather jackets and a cap with the visor turned back, who came to power in June 2019 with the promise of ending with violence, and that has made its image an “export model” in Latin America.

“There are people from Latin American countries who want a ‘Bukele’,” analyst Luna tells Newtral.es. Bukele’s image, experts say, has been greatly strengthened because he has managed to stop El Salvador’s gangs with an iron fist, bringing tranquility to neighborhoods that before 2019 were the focus of murders and extortion. “Bukele has gotten where he is because of the intervention he makes in Salvadoran society with the issue of maras (gangs),” says Amparo Marroquín Parducci, researcher at the Department of Communication and Culture at the Central American University of El Salvador (UCA), in dialogue with Newtral.es.

Nayib Bukele, the president who “bent” the gangs of El Salvador

In February 2023, the Presidency of El Salvador released a video in which President Bukele appeared touring what is considered the largest prison in America and in which he intended to lock up more than 40,000 alleged gang members. The images, similar to those of a film production, showed him from different angles surrounded by police and military agents. That same month, the Government used videos to report that more than 2,000 gang members had already been transferred to the 23-hectare mega penitentiary.

Since coming to power, Bukele declared war on the gangs. In June 2019, a few months after taking the presidential sash, he launched a territorial control plan as a security strategy and a month later he announced the state of “maximum emergency” in prisons after violent acts perpetrated by criminal groups. Violence finally decreased in one of the most violent countries in the world, but according to journalistic investigations, it was partly due to the Government’s negotiations with senior leaders of the three main Salvadoran gangs, as its predecessors had done.

For Gabriel Labrador, journalist of the Salvadoran digital newspaper The lighthouse and author of one of the most complete profiles of Nayib Bukele, the “undeniable security” that his country experiences responds in part to this negotiation with the gangs. But this agreement was maintained until March 2022, when criminal groups unleashed a series of unprecedented murders in that small nation. On the weekend of March 26 and 27 of that year, there were 87 homicides, so Bukele turned to Congress, where he enjoys a majority, to allow him to declare the “exceptional regime” with the intention of stopping an “increase.” “unconscionable” murders.

“From the beginning of his mandate he had communication channels with the gangs and little by little we have discovered the negotiations with three gangs. He has hidden that and has done it with heavy-handed images (on social networks). With that he sells the image that he will never negotiate,” Labrador tells Newtral.es. Under the emergency regime, security authorities have detained more than 75,000 people and homicides decreased in 2023 to a rate of 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2018, the homicide rate in that country was 51 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.

However, the security strategy in El Salvador has been criticized by different human rights organizations that accuse the Bukele Government of systematically committing serious violations. Amnesty International said last year that the measure has resulted in thousands of mostly arbitrary detentions, subjection to ill-treatment and torture, and flagrant violations of due process. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), for its part, has called to restore the rights and guarantees suspended by the emergency regime.

Bukele, however, has ignored the requests of human rights organizations and has warned the gangs that he will take drastic measures such as leaving them without food regardless of “what they say.” “We are about to win the war against the gangs,” he highlighted on September 15, 2023 in a speech for the independence of his country, which he called ‘True independence’. “In two centuries of history we have never known peace, until now,” he said. That was the dream of Salvadorans, says the expert Luna, and Bukele has known how to capitalize on it.

Nayib Bukele’s political journey: businessman, publicist and “chameleon”

Nayib Bukele is one of the nine children of the businessman of Palestinian origin Armando Bukele Kattán, who in the 1980s became close to the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist organization involved in the Salvadoran armed conflict of the last century. . It is not surprising that, at the beginning of his career, Nayib Bukele defined himself as a radical left-wing politician. Before running for elected office, he ran a marketing and advertising agency and was the architect of the FMLN’s electoral campaigns.

In 2011 he joined the FMLN to compete as a candidate for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small municipality in the west of the country. And from there he jumped, in 2015, to the mayor of the capital, San Salvador. “Bukele was testing if things worked for him and, clearly, they worked for him from the beginning,” says journalist Labrador in a telephone conversation with Newtral.es. However, the same party that welcomed him in 2011 expelled him in 2017, thus ruling out a presidential candidacy in that box.

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Carlos Monterrosa, professor at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the UCA, considers that this decision by the FMLN, far from affecting him politically, boosted Bukele’s image and caused him to participate in the 2019 presidential elections as a presidential candidate of the right-wing Gran Alianza por the National Unity (GANA). “At the beginning of his career he was identified as a disruptive man among the left, but already in his exercise he could be defined as a person with conservative thinking. “Closer to right-wing parties, an anachronistic right,” says Monterrosa when asked in which ideological spectrum he places Bukele.

This metamorphosis of Nayib Bukele is seen by analyst Omar Luna as part of a “chameleon-like” process that allowed him to mutate “within a political framework and the polarization of two hegemonic parties”: the FMLN and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). Both parties governed El Salvador after the end of the civil war that was sealed with the peace agreements in 1992. That bipartisanship was dismantled with the emergence of Bukele in 2019, as he himself says. At the age of 37, on June 1, he became president millennial youngest in Latin America. Now Bukele has his own party, which he named New Ideas.

Bukele’s re-election accentuates authoritarianism in Central America

A year after coming to power, in April 2020, Nayib Bukele faced the judges of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court who stopped different measures that his executive implemented to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and that were considered unconstitutional. Bukele used his account in X to announce that he would not comply with the judicial resolution. The following year, after the legislative elections that gave him control of Congress, the Supreme Court judges and the Attorney General were dismissed, and in their place the deputies appointed officials related to the president.

These changes in the Judiciary were questioned by the Organization of American States (OAS), the United States and the United Nations because they represented an attack on the separation of powers of El Salvador. “Three years ago I said that Bukele was not a democracy. Daniel Ortega (from Nicaragua) and Nayib Bukele are authoritarianism or dictatorships that come to power, perhaps legitimately, but then look for illegal or unconstitutional mechanisms to stay in power,” Santiago Cantón, secretary general of the Commission, tells Newtral.es. International of Jurists and member of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank.

Ana María Méndez-Dardón, director for Central America of the Washington Office for Latin American Affairs (WOLA), recently warned, in an interview with the Costa Rican newspaper The Nationn, that what Hugo Chávez did in Venezuela in ten years, it took Nayib Bukele two in El Salvador. Despite the attacks on democracy, Bukele enjoys the support of 90% of Salvadorans, according to the 2023 Latinobarómetro. However, Bukele’s re-election, according to the study, places him on a par with the “dictators” Alberto Fujimori, Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro who “stayed with all the power.”

On the eve of the presidential election, US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar sent a letter to the US State Department urging it to take action against the threat to Salvadoran democracy posed by Nayib Bukele’s re-election. President Bukele, like him in X, retweeted the publication with the following message: “We feel honored to receive his attacks, a few days before our election. I would be very worried if we had his support. Thank you”.
This response reflects, according to the experts consulted by Newtral.es, a ruler who resorts to provocation, discredit and the role of victim to maintain the support of the masses. And in Latin America, a region plagued by violence, this way of governing is “seductive.”