Bukele: The time of vengeance

In Park Chan-wook’s film Old Boy, the protagonist is kidnapped and locked in a cubicle with no windows and no sunlight. He doesn’t know who did it or why. He remains there, with no days or nights, for 15 years. When he comes out, he discovers that the atrocity to which he was subjected was the execution of vengeance. There were times when things were settled Old Boy style: you killed my mother, I got revenge by killing yours. Afterwards, revenge was replaced by justice, that attempt at preventing us from paying for an injustice with an even worse one, which allowed, for example, the genocidal perpetrators of the Argentine dictatorship not to be tortured or thrown alive from airplanes, as they did with thousands of victims, but subjected to trials in which they were able to defend themselves, and once sentenced, not to be hooded and locked up in a basement but taken to more or less common prisons. Juan Diego Quesada published a story in EL PAÍS about El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum security prison, the pride of President Bukele, who boasts of having wiped out the maras - a malignant body that eats and produces suffering - in less than two years. Many of the gang members that used to form them are in CECOT. There, Quesada says, there is no sunlight. Artificial light is on 24 hours a day. The prisoners leave their cells only 30 minutes a day, in shackles. They cannot receive visitors or phone calls. There are two toilets per cellblock. The sentences can reach 700 years. One more pit, of the many that humanity has spawned on earth, offers reparations to the families of the victims, or is it the manifestation of a state that does not seek justice but vengeance? This month, Bukele was reelected with, it seems, 85% of the votes. The formula “massive support/thirst for revenge” has diverse expressions in Latin America, and may possibly drag it to its darkest hour.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition