Authoritarian drift in El Salvador

The landslide re-election of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele was cheered by supporters of his gang crackdown, but has worried opponents who fear the country is sliding into a de facto one-party state.

Bukele had appeared to deliver a crushing victory, with the backing of around 83% of voters. The president said his New Ideas party was on course to bag 58 posts in the 60-seat congress, although only 5% of the vote had been counted. These are the most unequal presidential elections in El Salvador where there is a dominant propaganda. 

The result grants Bukele unprecedented control of the assembly, where last term he used his party’s supermajority to reshape institutions and pack the courts. One such tribunal let him seek re-election despite a constitutional ban on consecutive terms.

In his victory speech on Sunday night, Bukele said the opposition had been “pulverized” on the back of his popular anti-gang crackdown and emphasized that his victory was the result of a free vote.

Bukele lashing out at foreign governments, journalists and rights groups who have warned of an authoritarian drift and railing against the U.S. for its role in the country’s brutal 1979-1992 civil war.

The fact that there is this concentration of power implies that there are no more guarantees in El Salvador.

Bukele’s popularity underlines how some Central American countries have struggled to launch sustainable democratic models in the aftermath of civil conflicts between left-wing guerrillas and U.S.-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes.

Most voters seem unbothered by Bukele’s political dominance, or the suspension of civil liberties that has led to the arrest of 76,000 Salvadorans, often without due process, since he launched his crackdown in March 2022. 

The drop in crime and emigration that accompanied the crackdown presents a dilemma for U.S. policymakers hoping to encourage democracy but also eager to stem border crossings.

Bukele has vowed to continue to push his hard line on gangs. Bukele manipulated Salvadorans, preying on their fears of gangs to win an unconstitutional reelection, shutting down opposition members and denying them federal money to campaign

He has hinted he would also now turn to the economy, the slowest growing in Central America and likely to be an increasing concern for voters in his second term. Bukele’s experiment adopting bitcoin as El Salvador’s legal tender has not produced the economic panacea he promised. There are concerns about the government’s transparency, including in spending and borrowing of public money, as well as corruption allegations against members of his government.

With his unprecedented power and ability to overhaul El Salvador’s constitution, opponents fear Bukele will scrap term limits and seek to rule for life, echoing moves by President Daniel Ortega in next-door Nicaragua.

When asked if he would amend the constitution to allow for indefinite re-election, Bukele told he “didn’t think a constitutional reform would be necessary,” but did not directly answer questions on whether he would contest a third term.

El Salvador’s legacy parties, meanwhile, have a long way to go to earning back public support.

Opposition parties were presented by Bukele’s campaign as allies of the gangs, which they deny.

But Bukele has successfully controlled the narrative through a sophisticated media machine powered by an army of paid trolls who attack journalists and political opponents.

In recent years, the legislative assembly has broadly rubber-stamped Bukele’s proposals and most laws passed by the body came from the presidency. Opposition proposals were rarely taken up.

As in Venezuela, the opposition is divided and lacks a clear short-term plan for how to take on Bukele.

Democratic spaces are closing in El Salvador, civil society is closing down and there is an environment of fear to speak out.” 

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had soaring approval ratings leading up to the election and no strong competition, apparently secured a second term by a wide margin, garnering 83 percent of the vote compared with his closest competitor’s 7 percent. 

Bukele’s apparent reelection comes after he exercised special powers awarded to him under a state of emergency during his first term that gave rise to concerns about the rollback of democratic norms, but it also resulted in a drastic decrease in crime in a country that had faced a notorious gang violence problem.

Bukele’s government arrested more than 76,000 people, more than 1 percent of the country’s population, under the state of emergency approved in March 2022. He made clear he expects the new Legislative Assembly to extend the state of emergency.

“We are not substituting democracy because El Salvador never had democracy,” Bukele said. 

Bukele’s vice presidential running mate Felix Ulloa, meanwhile, told The New York Times shortly before the election that they were “eliminating” and “replacing” democracy. “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,” he said.

Some poll workers were unable to enter vote totals in the system, and others who did were unable to transmit them.

The self-described “world’s coolest dictator” had soaring approval ratings and virtually no competition. That’s despite concerns that Bukele’s government has chipped away at checks and balances in his first term and accusations that he dodged a constitutional ban on reelection.

Bukele made clear that he expects the newly elected Legislative Assembly to continue extending the special powers he has enjoyed since March 2022 to combat the country’s feared gangs.

Bukele didn’t appear at a single campaign event before the election, instead posting social media videos taped from his couch and urging Salvadorans to vote for him so the opposition doesn’t “free the gang members and use them to return to power.”

Garcia strolled through San Salvador with their 5-year-old son and mother, beaming at the chance to be on streets that not long ago were no-go zones for ordinary citizens.

Bukele is therefore regarded by many in Latin America not as a dictator but as a hero, and his counterparts in neighbouring countries look up to him with admiration. These include the left-wing government of Xiomara Castro in Honduras, the World Bank official Rodrigo Chaves in Costa Rica and the entrepreneurial scion Daniel Noboa, who rules in Ecuador. They see the 42-year-old as a model for political success to solve one of the continent’s biggest structural problems and thus secure their hold on power. Consequently, they have copied some of his measures, such as the state of emergency or the construction of high-security prisons.

Bukele has indeed achieved something extraordinary: during his five years in office, the murder rate fell from 36 to 2.4 per 100 000 inhabitants. El Salvador, which was still considered the most murderous country on the continent in 2015, has thus become one of the safest countries in the region. However, the methods used are questionable: these include the state of emergency, which has been repeatedly extended for two years and is now completely unfounded, suspending all basic rights, as well as the establishment of a police state in which the most people in the world are behind bars in proportion to the population and the legal persecution (lawfare) of political rivals, critical journalists and environmentalists. The co-optation of all institutions has also fuelled nepotism, corruption and a lack of transparency.

Over half of the Salvadoran population is under 30 years old. Most of them do not consume traditional media but inform themselves via social media instead. However, these are dominated by Bukule’s PR machine, fuelled by bots, trolls and algorithms. Opposing views find little echo there: the fact that extreme poverty rose from 5.6 to 8.7 per cent since 2019, that Bukele dissolved the structural fund for the provinces, and since then, health and education as well as infrastructure have been in ruins, that he gambled away taxpayers’ money with Bitcoin speculations, that suddenly heaps of officials and confidants of Bukele won the state lottery and others built themselves luxury villas, that the state owes millions to private contractors, that his re-election is a clear breach of the constitution, that his supporters illegally handed out food parcels on election day and that his party manipulated the outcome of the election by redistributing the constituencies.

Bukele, however, has not been able to reduce poverty and the economic indicators are not very encouraging. the labor market will be one of his main tasks. 

The list of violations is long — some of which are likely to appear in the election report of the observers from the EU and the Organization of American States (OAS). Such criticism is important, but it does not get through. Bukele is a master at manipulating the hopes and pride of a population that he has propelled from the shadows of world affairs into the limelight. That is what makes him so attractive in the eyes of some heads of state. 

El Salvador is not the first country in the region to succumb to the totalitarian temptation of a a strongman. Latin America has had a long tradition of authoritarian rulers since independence from Spain. But since the democratisation of the region in the 1990s, no one has enjoyed as much support. Even in his heyday, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela received just 62 per cent of the vote; Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua even had to make a pact with his arch-enemy, the corrupt liberal Arnoldo Alemán, for an electoral reform so that 38 per cent of the vote was enough for his victory in 2006. And the conservative Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras was re-elected in 2017 with just 42 per cent of the vote, despite numerous manipulations and a suspicious computer crash.

In contrast to Bukele, Chávez, Hernández and, for a long time, Ortega at least endeavoured to create the appearance of democratic legitimacy — even if they discreetly undermined its foundations. To this end, they used the classic populist recipes: plebiscites, populist social programmes that only brought dependence instead of structural improvements, agitation against critics, rivals and intellectuals, harassment of non-governmental organisations and the media, bringing the state apparatus into line, especially the judiciary, and weakening transparency and control mechanisms.

The symbolic capture of Congress paved the way for the militarisation of the country, which culminated in the imposition of a state of emergency and the arrest of thousands of innocent people in 2022.

Bukele pushed the boundaries of what can be said and done with well-considered stagings — and thus reinterpreted history.

Back in 2020, when parliament failed to approve a loan he had requested for security projects quickly enough, he marched into parliament with the military. At the time, the traditional parties still had a majority there and were speechless in the face of this taboo-breaking. However, Bukele justified the transgression to his cheering supporters with the true interests of the people, which were supposedly being disregarded by Congress. He said, the military had sided with the people, not the oppressors. The symbolic capture of Congress paved the way for the militarisation of the country, which culminated in the imposition of a state of emergency and the arrest of thousands of innocent people in 2022. 

The heavy-handed policy has long been regarded as the elites’ traditional response to the problem of violence in Latin America. It produces short-term results and enables social control. But it has always fallen short — even in El Salvador. This is because it does not address the root of the problem: on the one hand, the lack of the rule of law, which is sabotaged by elites out of self-interest. On the other hand, the structural poverty and inequality of opportunity in countries that are still trapped in neo-colonial schemes — due to both rigid hierarchical social structures and unjust economic globalisation.

Bukele’s model is a so-far successful new edition of the heavy-handed policy. Honduras may have declared a state of emergency, but violent crime has hardly decreased. The country has far fewer security forces than El Salvador, which are also more corrupted by organised crime. President Noboa has also declared a state of emergency in Ecuador and sent the military onto the streets. What may deter some from total ‘Bukelisation’ is the fact that most authoritarian presidents of the modern era – Chávez in Venezuela, Hernández in Honduras or Alberto Fujimori in Peru – did not end well. Cracks in Bukule’s model are already visible. According to initial projections, only two of the six million eligible voters went to the polls— which puts his success into perspective. In his victory speech, Bukele revealed a complete lack of ideas on how to proceed in El Salvador. He now faces challenges that cannot be so easily dismissed: despite the improved security situation, there is a lack of foreign investment. The economy grew by just 2.3 per cent in 2023 — less than in its Central American neighbours.