My father often says that a democracy consists of certainty in the rules and uncertainty in the results. If there was anything in El Salvador on Sunday before Salvadorans' votes were processed, it was certainty in the results, after a series of violations of the constitution, laws and electoral rules at the whim of the president. Even before the voting tables had counted the votes, Nayib Bukele declared himself re-elected, becoming the first president in eight decades to declare victory for a second term.
Re-election is clearly prohibited in El Salvador by six articles of the constitution. But there is no longer any institution that can impose sanctions on Bukele or limit his use of power. It controls the three branches of government, the judiciary, the public prosecutor's office, the police, the army and the Supreme Electoral Court. We Salvadorans have lost our constitutional rights and the country has experienced elections in a state of emergency. Last week, Vice President Félix Ulloa told the New York Times: “We are not dismantling democracy. “We're eliminating it and replacing it with something new.” It's not new. We are witnessing the birth of a dictatorship live.
While they wait for results, the majority of voters appear to have decided to bury democracy, which is what the president proposes, arguing that limits on power are an obstacle to achieving what none of the previous administrations have been able to achieve: the Breaking up gangs caused fear and terror among the population. For the majority of citizens, this is a truly transformative fact. When you live with a gun to your head, security comes before constitutions, laws and democracies. The majority of voters have decided to give up their rights and hand all power to a single person in exchange for security.
It is a dangerous experiment by Bukele, who has jailed more than 70,000 people in two years under an emergency regime that allows police and soldiers to lock up anyone they suspect of belonging to gangs. Human rights organizations estimate that barely a third have ties to gangs and have found that torture is systematic in Salvadoran prisons. Hundreds of people have already died. El Salvador today has the highest prison rate in the world.
Police require their agents to have quotas of prisoners per day to fill President Bukele's prisons. Whatever happens, happens: teens are arrested because an agent sees them as “nervous”; Neighbors denounce gang connections; Taxi drivers accuse their competition of trying to get rid of them; Men were arrested for competing with this police officer for a woman's love. This is how quotas are filled. Police officers blackmail innocent people not to take them away.
In El Salvador, every prisoner is guilty until proven otherwise; and it is almost impossible to prove it. They are tried alongside hundreds of other prisoners in summary hearings by anonymous judges. One hundred guilty or one hundred innocent. Vice President Ulloa, who is a lawyer, said this was the only way because his government had put so many people in prison that it would take a hundred years to try them one by one. “It is a fair trial because it is legal. Before it was individual cases, but we changed the law.”
The security forces had not experienced such impunity since the years of our civil war, when army, police and paramilitary elements (the death squads) arrested, tortured and disappeared thousands of people without fear of punishment.
Bukele's great specialty is not security, but propaganda. It has a group of Venezuelan advisers from the teams of Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López, experts in making the right hand believe that what the left is hiding no longer exists. Bukele warned that people were tired of politicians and started the discourse on fighting corruption. He won the presidency in 2019 and lashed out at the opposition until it was delegitimized to the acclaim of Salvadorans. Two years later he achieved a majority in the parliamentary elections.
The pandemic and its emergency decrees allowed him to suspend civil rights, hide information about contracts and purchases, and his administration began a systematic plundering of the state that journalism has documented ever since and that makes his predecessors appear as novices in corruption.
He secretly made deals with the gangs to which he made unprecedented concessions, such as the release of some leaders who had been ordered extradited by the United States, in return for a reduction in murder rates, which he needed politically to ensure the effectiveness of his alleged security plans to prove.
In May 2021 he dealt a blow to the judiciary. He dismissed the judges of the Constitutional Court and the public prosecutor and, on the same day, bypassed all the procedures laid down in the constitution by appointing new judges and a public prosecutor tailored to his needs. There his dictatorship began in practice. By nightfall he was already in control of the three branches of government. All. It was no surprise to anyone that the unconstitutional constitutional judges decided to run for re-election.
Then Bukele's pact with the gangs was broken and there was an emergency regime, mass arrests and imprisonment. But residents of communities once controlled by the gangs now live in a peace they have never known, without having to pay extortion or fear that their family will fall victim to the cruelty of these criminal organizations. And that is the main reason for his re-election.
The so-called Bukele model, whose only components are the accumulation of power, propaganda and repression based on the violation of the rule of law and human rights, has been enough to maintain very high levels of popular support. However, history shows that this support does not last forever.
Bukele is preparing for the people to get tired: he has increased the size of the armed forces and promised to double it in five years.
In every authoritarian or dictatorial project there is a point of no return. It is what separates the desire to remain in power from the impossibility of leaving it because of the dire consequences for him and his family.
Evidence of Bukele's pact with organized crime is mounting in a New York court where gang leaders who should have served prison sentences in El Salvador are being tried. They are living proof of criminal arrangements. The recently re-elected president has violated all of El Salvador's laws; and the state's use of assets and its systematic looting are well documented. It's bad news for those who want democracy to return to El Salvador: Nayib Bukele has crossed the line of no return.
A dictatorship is coming.
Carlos Dada is director of The lighthouse.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_