El Salvador: the iron fist of 'the world’s coolest dictator'

To right-wingers, it's a beacon of light for the rest of the continent; for liberals, it's a warning signal to all of Latin America. Either way there's no denying the significance of what has been happening in El Salvador, said Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post. 

Under President Nayib Bukele, who has just won re-election in a landslide, the country has shifted from a functional multiparty democracy "to a de facto one-party state".

In his first term, he packed the constitutional court with loyalists, thereby managing to sidestep a ban on presidents seeking consecutive terms. And, last week, he duly triumphed again at the polls, winning 87% of the vote for himself as president, while his Nuevas Ideas party won control of the national legislature. His astonishing popularity hinges on one thing only: his sweeping crackdown on El Salvador's gangs and cartels. Within the space of a few years, El Salvador's once "world-leading homicide rates" have been dramatically reduced, and Salvadorans have enjoyed a sense of safety they could previously only dream of.

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A self-styled 'philosopher king'

With his "sunglasses and leather jacket", Bukele once jokingly styled himself on X/Twitter as "the world's coolest dictator", said Carmen Quintela in El Diario (Madrid), though now he calls himself "philosopher king". Born into a wealthy family with Palestinian roots, he was still at school when El Salvador's 13-year civil war ended in 1992. As a youth, he hardly had the makings of a right-wing dictator: he dropped out of law school, spent much of his 20s managing nightclubs, and joined FMLN, a left-wing rebel group turned political party. 

At 34, he was elected mayor of San Salvador on an FMLN ticket, vowing to reclaim dangerous areas from gangs, but was expelled from the party and set up his own. And it was on an anti-crime agenda that he was first elected president in 2019. Within a year, he'd embarked on his "Territorial Control Plan" to rid El Salvador of the "gang violence and extortion" that was plaguing the country.

His success has been extraordinary, said Diario El Salvador. Before Bukele came to power, El Salvador was one of the world's most dangerous countries: the streets of the capital, San Salvador, "were filled with corpses". Yet Bukele's "courage and determination" has changed all that. In 2018, the homicide rate was 51 per 100,000 people: last year it was just 2.4 per 100,000 (about half the level of the US); shops no longer have to pay protection money; people can leave their homes without fear.

Bukele's inhumane crackdown

None of that has been achieved by some miracle of good governance, said Catherine Ellis on Al Jazeera (Doha): it's the result of a truly draconian clampdown on civil liberties. Bukele has let police arrest anyone they suspect of gang links. Some 75,000 people have been jailed since he imposed a state of emergency in 2022, said Juan Diego Quesada in El País (Madrid). 

Those arrested, seldom given a proper trial, are housed in El Salvador's hideous 40,000-capacity "mega jail". Their heads are shaved, their hands and feet shackled, and they never see daylight. Bukele's crackdown might be popular, but it's astonishingly inhumane.

Nor have Bukele's policies – including his eccentric decision in 2021 to make bitcoin legal tender – done anything to improve the economy, said Julia Gavarrete in El Faro (San Salvador). El Salvador is still one of Central America's weakest economies; much of its 6.5 million-strong population can't afford basic staples. But that hasn't stopped other leaders in the region looking to El Salvador as the nation to copy, said Will Freeman and Lucas Perelló in The New York Times. 

But in truth, a Bukele-style crackdown is unlikely to work elsewhere. Unlike the big cartels in other Latin American countries, Salvadoran gangs – poorly financed and less well armed – have never been big players in the drugs trade: their focus has been extortion. When Bukele arrested their foot soldiers, they collapsed. That won't happen in places such as Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. Latin American leaders might envy Bukele for his popularity, but they face a chaotic battle with their own gangs if they try to take them on – and will do "lasting damage to democracy" in the process.