You can listen to the full PINDROP podcast on El Salvador featuring an interview with the Mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador Will Salgado on Spotify, Amazon, or Apple Podcasts. The show higlights President Bukele's crackdown on gang crime, his embrace of bitcoin as legal tender, and his critics' concerns over what they call authoritarian policies.
For most of its history, El Salvador has been par for the Central American course. It gained independence in the early 19th Century, just as nearly all of Latin America did. Communist insurgents waged a bloody civil war against an American-backed government in the 1980s, just as Guatemala and Nicaragua experienced their internal flashpoints in the Cold War. Gang violence spiked in the 2010s in El Salvador with police unable to enter certain neighborhoods, child abduction leading to chronic absence from schools, and a torrent of homicides pushing a mass exodus from the country, just as its neighbors underwent the same crises. But in the past 10 years, El Salvador has broken the Central American mold in both tragic and triumphant ways.
First came the unequivocal tragedy. As mentioned, that El Salvador struggled with gang violence was not unique to the region. However, that violence truly exploded in El Salvador. Between 2005 and 2007, about 38% of the population of San Salvador – the country’s capital – either left for the relative safety of the countryside or fled the country outright. San Miguel, El Salvador’s third city, saw a withdrawal of 42% of its residents during the same period. Unfortunately, the worst was yet to come: in 2015, violent crime skyrocketed to the point where, on average, 18 people were murdered every day in the country. At 107 murders for every 100,000 Salvadorans, the country not only had the world's highest rate of intentional homicide, but it was twice as high as the runner-up.
But the second way El Salvador broke from the trends of its neighbors is – at least on the surface – a scarcely believable triumph. Reigning in crime and providing for public safety were put front and center of the government’s priorities. By 2019, homicides had dropped to about nine murders each day – still among the world’s worst, but half as bad as what El Salvador had faced four years prior. Then, in June, a new president representing an upstart third party was elected: 37-year-old Nayib Bukele. President Bukele had already made a name for himself nationally as the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a suburb of the capital city, and later as mayor of San Salvador itself. He had gained a reputation for getting things done, particularly when it came to confronting the gangs. Bukele set about bringing the tough-on-crime policies he had experimented with locally to the national stage, and it worked tremendously. Three years into Bukele’s administration, the homicide rate had fallen even more dramatically to just 3 murders per day in 2022. By June of 2023, most days went without a single homicide in the entire country. In four years, El Salvador went from 1 murder every 3 hours, to 1 murder every 3 days.
But success this great seldom comes without a comparably great cost. This begs the classic Spanish question, “¿Vale la pena?” – “Is it worth the pain?” What had been a promising, if flawed, democracy at the time of Bukele’s inauguration has since devolved into a hybrid regime inching closer to authoritarianism. After investing massive sums into modernizing the police force and creating a new state-of-the-art prison that dwarfed all others in the country, the Salvadoran government declared total war on the gangs. Raiding areas known for gang activity, they arrested young men by the thousands. In total, 1.6% of Salvadorans are now behind bars, an incarceration rate that is not only three times higher than the United States but the highest anywhere in the world. It appears all but certain that many innocent people were swept up during the crackdown, with due process and other civil liberties being suspended since May 2022 under an emergency decree issued by Bukele and approved by the Legislative Assembly.
Internationally, Bukele’s measures have been met with resounding criticism. Groups from the US State Department to the United Nations to Amnesty International have denounced the plan, especially because it does not provide a right to legal representation and allows detention for two weeks without seeing a judge. While El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice was initially able to keep a check on Bukele’s powers, a supermajority in the Legislative Assembly allowed Bukele to oust the judges most critical of his administration and replace them with loyalists in 2021.
Within El Salvador, Bukele’s efforts have been rewarded with an approval rating that consistently tops 90%, making him the most popular world leader among his country’s citizens. San Miguel Mayor Will Salgado appears to be speaking for the vast majority of Salvadorans when he told PINDROP:
All war has collateral effects. For example, when the planes were going to Vietnam to drop a bomb, they were dropping the bomb on the terrorists. But it’s possible the bomb would land a bit to the side of the terrorists and the expansion of the explosion could hurt innocent people. Well, those are the collateral effects. It’s very difficult for everything to be perfect.
The controversy around Bukele has continued as the president seeks a second term. According to the Salvadoran constitution, no one can be a candidate for president, “who has filled the Presidency of the Republic for more than six months, consecutive or not, during the period immediately prior to or within the last six months prior to the beginning of the presidential period.” Despite the understood constitutional prohibition on presidential re-elections, the stacked courts have approved his 2024 campaign. Still, Salvadorans generally don’t mind the constitutional discrepancy of Bukele’s candidacy. “As long as a person goes to popular elections and the people continue to elect them,” Mayor Salgado said, “it’s because they are doing something good.”
Ironically, President Bukele’s authoritarian tendencies are, in a way, quite democratic. That is, he has certainly repealed civil rights and ignored the constitutions in what might be called an illiberal manner that flaunts the institutions and protections that Americans and Europeans typically consider crucial to democratic republics. Yet, Bukele does so with nearly universal support among Salvadorans. If democracy is meant to be the will of the people, Nayib Bukele is more democratic than John F. Kennedy or Nelson Mandela. Then again, some of the world’s most notable tyrants rose to power through democratic procedures and with popular support. The legacies of figures from Mussolini to Hitler remind us that democratically beginning one’s stint at the helm of state does not guarantee they will always govern with the people’s consent. Where does President Nayib Bukele lie on this spectrum? We’re welcome to make our arguments now, but it’s ultimately too soon to say.
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