Latin Analysis: El Salvador Grows More Authoritarian Under Nayib Bukele
APHOTOGRAFIA
Latin America has had its fair share of strongmen presidents and heads-of-state. Democracy has been a struggle to maintain in most countries, and recently there have been a handful of leaders who were democratically elected yet have undermined democratic institutions once in office. Current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is a leader that falls under this category. Back in February, the country’s legislative elections brought about a supermajority of Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) into the national assembly. The election worried many both domestically and internationally, and the concerns are valid. On May 1st, the first day of parliament’s session this year, the legislative body voted to oust all five supreme court judges and the attorney general, immediately replacing them with political allies.
Bukele was a businessman before entering politics. His political career started in 2012 when he was elected as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a city near San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. In 2015 he then became the mayor of San Salvador. Both of his campaigns for mayor were run with the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a left-wing political party that is one of two major parties in El Salvador. Modern politics in El Salvador has been defined by the civil war of 1979-1992. The FMLN was founded in 1980 as five leftist guerilla organizations merged and engaged in armed struggle against government forces. In response to the FMLN’s rise, opposition forces created their own political party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). Once the civil war ended in 1992, the FMLN transitioned into an official political party. Since then both the FMLN and ARENA have dominated elections at every level of government.
Bukele’s rise as a politician has completely broken this two party trend. He was kicked out of the FMLN in 2017 due to accusations of violating the party’s ethics. The following year he created his own party, New Ideas, which has an “inclusive,” populist platform instead of a strict ideologically-based platform. The 2021 legislative elections were a testament to this, as the party garnered 56 seats out of 84 in the national assembly. Now, ARENA only has 9 seats, having lost 26 seats, and the FMLN only has 4, having lost 14 seats. New Ideas has completely changed post-civil war politics in El Salvador.
Since New Ideas doesn’t have a strongly backed ideological base, it is essentially a party that revolves around the image of Bukele. Simply put, that alone is enough for a lot of voters. Bukele is very popular domestically. Certain polls measuring his pandemic response have him at over 90% approval. Bukele took the pandemic seriously, closing off the country’s borders completely before a single case of the coronavirus was reported in El Salvador. The WHO has praised the country’s handling of the pandemic in regard to the government’s increased investment in hospitals and health care. However, Bukele’s authoritarian tendencies appeared in how he handled the pandemic as well, enforcing such strict lockdown measures that thousands of people had been arrested for breaking them. Human Rights Watch labeled these lockdown measures as ‘abusive,’ and they were even deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. With so many people suddenly being detained during the lockdown that occurred from late March to mid-June, the detainment centers became crowded and unsanitary, resulting in coronavirus outbreaks within them.
Bukele’s excessive use of force against people during the pandemic is an example of a wider problem regarding security forces and democracy. Abuses committed by the military, police, and other government security forces are a part of a wider trend across Latin America currently, where increased security is a tactic that oppresses the people under the guise of curbing gang violence or migration. El Salvador is no exception to that trend under Bukele. Last year, Bukele sent in the military to grill congress so that they would pass a large loan for new security equipment after it was up in the air whether or not it would pass. In April 2020, due to an increase in the murder rate, Bukele even authorized the use of lethal force by security forces.
Nonetheless, security forces have not been able to decrease the gangs control over their territory nor the violence they commit. Part of this is because gangs have cut deals with multiple political institutions in El Salvador, including political parties and elected officials. This extremely high level of corruption maintains the gang’s status quo, and Bukele hasn’t done much to change this. He has however tied up hundreds of imprisoned gang members to each other for a photo op he posted on social media to make it look like he’s hard against the gangs.
Perhaps the greatest reason why Bukele is so popular is how the government frequently hands out spoils to the masses. Packages of food and money have been delivered to homes, and computers to students as well. While spoils can be a good thing for people in need, they serve an important political rationale for politicians. A government that provides free food and money to its people (especially in developing countries) is a well known tactic to garner voters’ favor in elections. The PRI party in Mexico, which governed autocratically for over seventy years was able to consistently win elections in part due to their distribution of spoils to the Mexican people. It is essentially large-scale bribery.
Nayib Bukele’s style of governing is very much akin to how many Latin American autocrats have governed in the past and present. His political savvy has completely changed Salvadoran politics, but the hefty problems the country faces are still not solved under his presidency. This past year the economy shrunk by 9%. Gang violence and corruption are still deeply entrenched in society. But while El Salvador’s president is charismatic and charming, his authoritarian tendencies will undoubtedly bite back and become a larger problem for the country’s people in due time.
