Former president Danilo Medina receives current president Nayib Bukele, April 15, 2019. Photo courtesy of Gobierno Danilo Medina/Flickr
The Danger of Bukele to El Salvador
Despite the arrival in the U.S. of Joe Biden, hailed as the “most progressive president since FDR” by Senator Bernie Sanders— a discussion in itself for another day—the surge of destructive, despotic far right governments across the globe has continued.
In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele has risen to power. The charismatic 39-year-old has utilized his past experience as a marketing executive to gain support through social media. His populist, outsider message has allowed him to retain an immensely high approval rating, consistently around 90 percent.
The message that carried him into office two years ago was to defeat corruption, address pervasive gang violence and operate outside of the two-party system. This wave of populism—Bukele claims to be neither right nor left wing—has been effective to say the least. However, there has been a worrying trend that almost all onlookers can spot—a steady descent into authoritarianism, with the possibility of fascism on the horizon.
Using his tough-on-crime agenda, security forces in El Salvador have been bolstered immensely, allowing security forces to crack down on gangs and use lethal force. Bukele also instituted sweeping reforms to the prison system, reversing the long-established policy of segregating members from rival gangs (primarily from MS-13 and Barrio 18), along with sealing off the windows and doors of prisons with metal sheets. These actions are just one of many taken unilaterally that extend Bukele’s authority, using gang violence as one justification for his consolidation of power.
Perhaps even more concerning though, are Bukele’s actions against the courts and legislature. On Feb. 9, Bukele marched into the Legislative Assembly. He was accompanied by armed military members and demanded that the assembly fund his national security plan (which further consolidated more state power into his own hands).
Using the COVID-19 pandemic, Bukele has also been able to further wrest power from the courts and assembly, unilaterally taking actions to shut down and restrict the country. When the courts declared his actions unconstitutional, namely that his security forces could not detain individuals who violated the lockdown and then forcibly make them quarantine, he took steps to challenge their ruling, even threatening to go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (despite governmental branch disputes not being within its jurisdiction).
Then, earlier this May, lawmakers within El Salvador’s unicameral legislature voted to remove all of the top judges from the Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber. Keep in mind, Bukele’s party also swept into the assembly as well, and after the midterms in February, now control more than a two-third’s supermajority of the legislature. However, shortly before the vote took place, the judges being removed had ruled that the vote taking place was itself unconstitutional. Despite this ruling, the assembly then went ahead to appoint a new president of the court, along with four new judges, and in doing so ousted the uncooperative magistrates.
Again, this was justified under the guise of a COVID-19 response, with Bukele’s “New Ideas” party legislative leaders saying it was necessary in order to control the spread of the virus. Anabel Belloso, of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), who is in opposition to Bukele, decried the move as a coup and undemocratic, according to Reuters. It is undoubtedly a dangerous concentration of power into Bukele’s hands, as those five judges were among the last vestiges of a check on his capabilities. Combined with the fact that his party controls the legislature, Bukele is poised to only further expand and tighten his grasp on power.
The US’s Role in the Rise of Bukele
Photo courtesy of scottmontreal/flickr
Of course, it would be remiss to speak about the gang violence that has so embroiled El Salvador, and the accompanying corruption, which primed the political upheaval for Bukele to take power, without mentioning the role of Western interference. Specifically, the actions the United States took to spread chaos and destruction to further their own regional interests.
The United States backed the El Salvadoran government from 1979 to 1992, during which the U.S. funded death squads that sowed rampant destruction, according to Raymond Bonner of The Nation and Brett Wilkins of CounterPunch. These death squads deliberately targeted civilians (with Catholic clergy members among them), along with recruiting child soldiers. Tens of thousands either disappeared or died, and even in recent years bodies are still being exhumed to attempt to identify the total number of disappearances. All of this was done to fight the FMLN, which was then a coalition of left wing groups (the modern day FMLN is a legal, unarmed major left wing political party), under the Cold War pretense of preventing the spread of leftism.
The U.S. was sending as much as $2 million a day toward this murderous government during the Carter and Reagan administrations, according to Professor Larry Hufford of the Incarnate World College and Uppsala University. By 1983, U.S. military leaders had assumed high level positions in the military-juntas hierarchy, making crucial war decisions. The United Nations Truth Commission estimated that 85 percent of the violence was attributed to the state agents of the Salvadoran government (receiving U.S. training and backing), with only a tiny portion (5 percent) attributed to the leftist rebels.
However, it is a direct result of that American intervention that El Salvador has been so ravaged. The Salvadoran army and paramilitary forces, backed by the United States in the ‘80s, operated in order to “prevent a takeover by the leftist-led guerrillas and their allied political organizations” according to the U.S. Dept. of State. Bureau of Public Affairs (1985).
The US State Department has openly admitted that addressing the political arm of the leftist movement in El Salvador was a higher priority than the guerillas, making clear the U.S.’s meddling role in a sovereign nation’s politics. The State Department went on to say that the rebels’ greatest strength was, “by far, not in force of arms” but in their “mass organizations” made up of labor unions, student and peasant organizations that could be mobilized by the thousands in El Salvador’s major cities and could shut down the country through strikes.”
That excerpt from the U.S.’s very own state department demonstrates that American involvement was based around repression of workers and the Salvadoran people, and was another implementation of neoliberal foreign policy abroad. This was a conscious effort to ensure that the workers would not grab hold of their resources so that western interests could maintain control over said resources and continue to extract their value.
All of this destruction makes it clear how someone like Bukele, who rose to prominence promising peace and a break from the constant struggle, was able to sweep into power and continually enjoys such a high approval rating. However, those conditions also create a highly volatile political balance, one which Bukele can use to his advantage to further consolidate power. It’s important to recognize the conditions that have given rise to Bukele, both to prevent future occurrences, and to understand the U.S.’s culpability that has resulted in this political upheaval and anti-democratic tumble.
