Authoritarian drift in El Salvador

The overwhelming victory of Nayib Bukele, 42, at the presidential elections this Sunday in El Salvador, which he won with a percentage that is close to 85% and a completely broken opposition, is a warning for all of Latin America. The politician who once defined himself as “the coolest dictator in the world” will renew his term in office thanks to the immense popularity obtained through the dismantling of the maras, the bloodthirsty gangs that terrorized the small Central American country and which has led to a drastic reduction in crime and violence in the streets. The homicide rate — down from more than 106 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015 to 7.8 in 2022 — and extortion have plummeted. To achieve this, Bukele has imposed a state of emergency that already seems inherent to his term; he has co-opted the judiciary (which allowed him to run again despite the Constitution’s ban), trampled on human rights and harassed media outlets and activists who do not agree with his security policy. Under these conditions, El Salvador has not only become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world (prisoners have gone from 35,000 to 110,000 during his presidency), but also a nation where the drift towards authoritarianism is increasingly evident.

These are dangers that will not go away after the crushing electoral victory. On the contrary, Bukele’s success at the polls has elevated him to a beacon of the Latin American far right. From Chile to Mexico, voices are asking to follow his example to achieve power. It is an attractive and easy rhetoric, which offers a supposedly quick solution to one of the continent’s greatest scourges, although in reality it neither ends the problems of misery and lack of opportunities that are at the origin of crime, nor are its methods acceptable to a democracy unless one is willing to enter a permanent state of emergency.

Another very worrying sign is the attacks on voices that are critical of the Bukele government. The mockery of his adversaries, the attacks against international bodies and the harassment of media outlets that disagree with his ideology were already a daily occurrence during his last term in office. On Sunday, the president-elect exhibited his intolerance in the middle of his victory speech, dedicating three minutes to attacking EL PAÍS. It is an attitude that demonstrates his very low resistance threshold to questions from the independent press. Given this deterioration of democratic coexistence, it is necessary for the international community to maintain and increase pressure on Bukele. Only the denunciation of abuses by independent organizations and the surveillance of the great democracies can stop the drift that El Salvador is experiencing. It is necessary, on the other hand, for the opposition parties, whose poor results speak for themselves, to break with corruption and become capable of attracting voters with credible solutions.

El Salvador, after decades of violence and mismanagement, is going to begin a second Bukele presidency without having resolved its serious problems of development and inequality. Its economic policy, which presents El Salvador as the paradise of cryptocurrencies, has failed to the point that extreme poverty has increased (it has gone from 5.6% to 8.7%, according to the most recent ECLAC report). Addressing these challenges requires much more than resuming indiscriminate raids. Filling prisons should never be an end in itself of a state policy; rather, it should be to fight poverty, improve education and reduce inequality.

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