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For the right, it is a beacon of light to the rest of the continent. For liberals, this is a warning signal for all of Latin America. Either way, there is no denying the importance of what is happening in El Salvador, Ishaan Tharoor said in the Washington Post.
Under President Nayib Boukre, who won reelection in a landslide, the country transitioned from a functioning multiparty democracy to a “de facto one-party state.”
During his first term, he filled the Constitutional Court with supporters, thereby successfully circumventing a ban on presidential terms of office. And last week, he once again won a deserved victory in the polls, winning 87% of his own votes as president and giving his party Nuevas Ideas a majority in the National Assembly. His incredible popularity is determined solely by his thorough crackdown on gangs and cartels in El Salvador. Within a few years, El Salvador’s once “world-leading murder rate” has fallen dramatically, and Salvadorans are enjoying a sense of security they could previously only dream of.
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Self-proclaimed “Philosopher King”
Carmen Quintera wears “sunglasses and a leather jacket” at El Diario (Madrid), while Bukele once jokingly described himself on X/Twitter as “the world’s coolest dictator” He said that he now calls himself the “Philosopher King.” Born into a wealthy family with Palestinian roots, he was still attending school when El Salvador’s 13-year civil war ended in 1992. In his youth, he had few qualities of a right-wing dictator. He dropped out of law school and wasted his time. He spent most of his 20s managing nightclubs and joining the FMLN, a left-wing rebel organization turned political party.
At age 34, he was elected mayor of San Salvador by the FMLN, vowing to take back the dangerous area from gangs, but was expelled from the party and founded his own party. And when he was first elected president in 2019, it was on an anti-crime agenda. Within a year, he launched a “territorial control plan” to rid El Salvador of the “gang violence and extortion” that plagued the country. .
Diario El Salvador said his success was extraordinary. Before Bukele took power, El Salvador was one of the most dangerous countries in the world, with the streets of the capital San Salvador “strewn with corpses.” But Bukele’s “courage and determination” changed everything. In 2018, the murder rate was 51 per 100,000 people, but last year it was just 2.4 per 100,000 people (about half the rate in the United States). Stores no longer have to pay protection fees. People can leave their homes without fear.
Bukele’s inhuman oppression
Catherine Ellis told Al Jazeera (Doha) that none of this was achieved by miracles of good governance, but the result of a truly severe crackdown on civil liberties. Bukele has had police arrest people suspected of having gang ties. Juan Diego Quesada of El Pais (Madrid) said some 75,000 people have been imprisoned since he declared a state of emergency in 2022.
Those arrested rarely receive a proper trial and are held in El Salvador’s terrifying 40,000-capacity “mega-prison.” Their heads are shaved, their hands and feet are shackled, and they never see daylight. Bukele’s crackdown may be popular, but it is shockingly inhumane.
Bukele’s policies, including his bizarre 2021 decision to make Bitcoin legal tender, also did nothing to improve the economy, said Julia Gabarrete in El Faro, San Salvador. El Salvador remains one of the weakest economies in Central America. Many of the country’s 6.5 million people cannot afford basic necessities. But that hasn’t stopped other leaders in the region from looking to El Salvador as a country to emulate, said Will Freeman and Lucas Perello of the New York Times.
But the truth is that Bukele-style enforcement will not work in other regions. Unlike large cartels in other Latin American countries, El Salvador’s gangs have never been big players in the drug trade because they are poorly funded and poorly armed. Their focus was extortion. When Bukele arrested the infantry, they fell. That won’t happen in places like Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. Latin American leaders may be envious of Bukele’s popularity, but any attempt to challenge them would face a chaotic battle with their own gangs, causing “lasting damage to democracy” in the process. will be given.
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