President Nayib Bukele walked up a red carpet and into El Salvador’s congress where armed soldiers lined the chamber. He sat down in the Speakers’ chair, repudiated lawmakers who hadn’t passed his security plan, then put his hands together to pray.
“I asked God, and God told me: ‘patience’,” he told angry supporters gathered outside afterwards. “If they don’t approve the plan . . . I’m not going to stand between the people and Article 87 of the constitution,” he said, referring to a clause permitting insurrection.
The shocking stunt in 2020, less than a year after Bukele took office, preceded a rapid concentration of power in Central America’s smallest country. The backwards baseball cap-wearing strongman, who has more TikTok followers than leaders of much larger countries, has won admirers across Latin America.
Last weekend, Salvadoreans overwhelmingly backed him for a second presidential term after judges picked by his party overturned a ban on re-election. With 70 per cent of ballots counted he held 83 per cent of the vote, though technical problems in the count mean the results aren’t yet official.
Since taking office, Bukele has gained de facto control of legislature, military, much of the judiciary and has presided over an environment of fear among journalists and critics. But his power stems from his “state of exception” provision, which allowed security forces to round up 76,000 alleged gang members without due process, dismantling the criminal groups that terrorised the population.
Lucía Ballero, a 46-year-old tortilla stand owner in the notorious La Campanera neighbourhood on the edge of the capital, says the gangs stopped coming for extortion money almost immediately. “We’re going to give him 30 more years, god willing,” she says.
Aged 37, Bukele took office as the youngest president in Latin America in 2019. At present, he holds approval ratings of almost 90 per cent. His disregard for the rules is partly why his supporters love him, but it has also prompted rights groups and the opposition to worry the country will slide into dictatorship.
“His intention is more power,” says Nidia Díaz, a founder of the opposition leftwing FMLN party, which Bukele represented as mayor of San Salvador. “[He] wants to control everything and exclude the plural forces in the country.”
The former adman has a knack for memorable phrases and images that go viral online, boosted by beefed-up state media and a network of influencers. Comments on his TikTok videos are filled with adulation from all over the region.
“We need you in ECUADOR” one wrote. “I’m Chilean, how do I vote for you?” said another. “I love you Bukele my brother, it’s a shame I’m not Salvadoran.”
Bukele is the grandchild of Palestinian Christians who migrated to El Salvador in the early 20th century. His father built a business empire that spanned restaurant chains to textiles.
Nayib, one of 10 children, was educated at the elite Escuela Panamericana, but later dropped out of university. His father was close to the guerrilla-group-turned-political-party the FMLN, and Bukele initially worked on their campaigns.
But as president he pivoted to a discourse critical of the peace accords that brought the country’s bloody civil war to an end, recasting them as a “pact of the corrupt” that led to intense gang violence, giving the country the highest recorded homicide rate in the world in 2015.
“Nayib wasn’t born from nothing,” says his vice-president, Félix Ulloa. “He’s the product of exhaustion with a two-party model installed after the peace accords where the two sides that committed the war ended up managing the state.”
Bukele’s family is central to his decision-making and image. At San Salvador airport visitors can pose for a picture in two gold-trimmed chairs with photographs of Bukele and his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez.
Three of his brothers are close advisers and local media outlet El Faro reported that they were key in Bukele’s headline-grabbing decision to make bitcoin legal tender. The move won him a devoted fan base outside El Salvador that now defends him vociferously online.
“He likes bitcoin because it gets people around the world to praise him and he’s figured out that that’s like a social media hack,” says Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and a bitcoin advocate critical of Bukele.
On Sunday evening, before any official results had been published, Bukele claimed victory in the presidential vote and gave a speech scathing of foreign journalists and his critics.
Reporters are routinely called out by the president, many have had their phones infected with spyware and others say the pressure has led to self-censorship.
“There is a much darker environment,” Sergio Arauz, an editor at Salvadoran outlet El Faro, says. “In newsrooms I think there is a pretty pessimistic feeling about what will happen to us.”
The US government has dramatically scaled back its public denunciation of Bukele, preferring private diplomacy rather than opposing such a popular leader.
Bukele’s team continues to argue that critics outside the country don’t see the facts on the ground.
“Here there is strong leadership, a strong president,” Ulloa says. “Of course the guy from Harvard or Oxford doesn’t like it because it doesn’t chime with their scheme of democracy, but we’re living it and we’re enjoying it.”
Read the full article here
