“Bukele’s willingness to utilise armed police within his own government’s buildings to silence debate and discussion was swiftly followed by the imposition of Nueva Ideas supporters in every governmental office”
By Logan Williams
Sunday the 4th of February marked the re-election of Nayib Bukele, the ‘Bitcoin President’, who won his re-election campaign to the presidency of El Salvador in spite of the constitutional processes enshrined since the peace agreement in 1992 which brought the country’s civil war to halt.
Bukele won 83 per cent of the vote, which was far ahead of his nearest competitor, the former governing party of Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which received 7 percent for its democratic socialist manifesto. This had sought to build upon its heroic history of fighting for transformative politics and its previous strengths as a government of working to support plans of regional integration.
Bukele’s victory seemingly comes as a positive reaction to his “tough on crime” policy platform which is centred on ensuring that every last gang member be hunted down and removed from El Salvador. These policies have enabled Bukele to build a quasi-personality cult amongst El Salvadoreans disgusted at the rise of gang (or maras) culture within their country which sees it rank amongst the world’s highest murder rates.
Both Bukele and much of the media, including even the Guardian, regard the maras problem as emerging from the L.A. gang culture of the 1980 and 90s and the decision from consecutive US governments to deport criminals hailing originally from Central American nations like El Salvador instead of tackling the problem at root in the US.
Despite this mammoth victory, Bukele’s victory has seemingly been tarnished internationally due to Bukele and his Nueva Ideas party’s ability to use its politically appointed judges to avoid at least six provisions in the constitution which prohibit a president of El Salvador from serving two successive terms.
This is part of Bukele’s systematic approach to disregard established democratic processes in favour of institutionalising the total control of his regime. The process began on the 9th of February 2020, when Bukele sent armed troops ahead of himself into the Legislative Assembly in order to silence opposition within the assembly to his plan to approve a loan package enabling the country to buy military equipment, primarily from the US.
Bukele’s willingness to utilise armed police within his own government’s buildings to silence debate and discussion was swiftly followed by the imposition of Nueva Ideas supporters in every governmental office, including the Attorney General.
These supporters would go on to enable Bukele to declare a State of Exception, beginning on the 27th of March, 2022, which worked to suspend a variety of due processes as well as human rights for persons arrested across the country. The adoption of this State of Exception included permitting the jailing of suspects without judicial orders, jailing without informing persons of the charges they face, suspending rights for any persons who have been arrested to talk with a lawyer, and indefinite detentions without trial.
Bukele declared that these procedures were necessary to enable his government to ensure that his war on the maras would succeed by seeing every last gang member be hunted down and removed from El Salvador. To date this process has seen more than 76,000 people arrested and thrown in prison, many without a trial and on the basis of unverifiable social media reports from security forces. Some have allegedly been targeted due to anonymous phone calls, which some critics of the Bukele government argue has led to politically targeted tip offs, especially against activists of the FMLN and other progressive parties.
Alongside these steps the Nueva Ideas government has worked to reduce the ability of the opposition parties to challenge Bukele’s strides towards his “new El Salvador”. The government has acted to reduce the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly from 84 to 60, which would force opposition parties to gain a greater share of votes to capture a single seat in its Parliament.
It has also stated that all votes cast over the internet, and all votes cast from the diaspora, should be allocated to the Department of San Salvador, a base of the opposition parties of the FMLN and the old right of the National Republican Alliance, as it has assumed much of the diaspora will vote for Bukele’s agenda.
These actions and allegations of widespread corruption within the Bukele regime have led to some commentators to describe him as “populist autocrat”. This claim has seemingly been supported by his running mate’s statement about human rights campaigners and critics in an interview in the New York Times which said: “to these people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes — we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new”.
The claim has also been supported by statements made by Bukele himself since his election that his party is “not substituting democracy, because El Salvador never had democracy”.
Despite assertions of mass support for Bukele’s policies and the clear attempts to paint Bukele as the absolute leader of El Salvador for life, there is clearly space for an opposition to grow against the “Bitcoin President”. Examination of the election results reveals that the number of votes cast in favour of Nayib Bukele represent only 30.59% of the total population living in El Salvador, with more than 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the United States also supporting him.
Moreover, 47.4% of the registered population decided not to vote, which in real terms represents 2,945,933 people. If the opposition can seek to gain the support of this silent majority of El Salvadorans it has the potential of stopping the “bitcoin president” and his transformation of El Salvador. But with Legislative Assembly elections fast approaching sadly it is unlikely that any of the opposition parties will be able to motivate and mobilise this base to turn its apathy into anger at the Bukele government.
It is expected that Bukele’s re-election alongside the victory of Milei in Argentina will continue to bolster the forces of the right wing of Latin American politics across the continent. As such it is vital that all internationalists and progressives in Britain remain focussed on defending those progressive movements in Latin America that are both in power or those that are seeking to overcome the fear of violence and the use of lawfare to silence political dissent within their own countries.
- Logan Williams is a National Education Union (NEU) activist, an organiser for Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America (LFPLA) and a regular Labour Outlook contributor.
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