To our readers: With the title “El Ejemplo Bukele”, the Spanish newspaper El Pais, publishes this Tuesday the opinion of the renowned journalist and press commentator, Martín Caparrós, in which he acknowledges that Bukele has done so far in his first presidential term, more than politicians have done in the past thirty years
Take away from Caparrós’s article the qualifiers and the “bad milk” that stand out in the article and you will see that much of what he says is true; economically, politically and socially, above all, in what refers to social peace. He has reduced crime to levels never seen before, allowing citizens to feel free and confident. If the Hitlers, the Francos, the Videlas and the Pinochet (we add: The Hernámdez Martínez, in El Salvador and the Ubico in Guatemala), who never reached popularity levels above 75%, are being claimed by their peoples, imagine What will happen to Bukele, who for now has (98%), popularity and acceptance? DiarioLatino.net
We don’t like to know it, much less say it: there is always a time when the people love their dictators. Or, put another way: it is very difficult to become a dictator if you have not managed to get a significant part of your people to place great expectations on you. Later we try to forget it, because the memory humiliates us, but it is easy to know that the barbarism of General Videla or General Pinochet or Generalissimo Franco or Corporal Hitler was claimed by millions, who took years to stop living it –or never did. .
Those millions loved them, for the most part, because they took on tasks they thought were necessary and that law-abiding governments didn’t: wipe out a guerrilla or two, wipe out all red atheist worker advocates, wipe the world out of Jews, those things. Mr. Nayib Bukele, the young president of El Salvador, is at that moment.
The context is very clear: right now the world – a good part of the world – believes that politicians are useless. Or worse: that they serve to get rich, enjoy their power, fornicate something else, deceive millions with lies and promises that they never think to materialize. Politicians are generally seen as a necessary evil – and more and more people are asking why they were necessary. Democracy is defined as a system of impeding, where the pacts and arrangements between those advantagers perpetuate the real problems. Against this background that is hitting rock bottom, appears –let’s say, for example, in El Salvador– a gentleman who does what two or three decades of policies did not achieve. Or, worse: what the politicians of those two or three decades aggravated to the unspeakable.
El Salvador had been subjected to the brutal power of two large armed business groups for too long, organized to obtain the maximum economic benefit at any cost –kidnappings, murders, extortion, trafficking–, which they call maras or bands or gangs.. Their governments tried to limit that power with various methods –more or less legal repression, various pacts– and they could not. And suddenly this man appears and succeeds. Its system is radical: it imposes unlimited state violence, builds gigantic prisons, detains some 80,000 people in a few months without looking for proof that they are guilty, accumulates the highest ratio of prisoners per inhabitant in the world, viciously exhibits the cruel conditions in he rounds them up, tries them in prearranged trials – and, within weeks, the streets of his country are once again passable and millions of people who lived in fear of gangs resume more “normal” lives.
Many of us (?) are indignant, rightly so: it has transformed El Salvador into a surveillance society, where its government can repress whoever it wants however it pleases, under the pretext that it could belong to – or “support” – those gangs. ANDIt’s intolerable, but he has met his goal and millions thank him and support him.
Nayib Bukele now has a level of approval that few presidents have had: after four years of leading one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, he is estimated to be between 80 and 90 percent enthusiastic. And, of course, he intends to be re-elected even though the Constitution of his country does not allow it, because so many want it to be so – and for him to have more and more powers, since they redound to the “general welfare”. And, of course, politicians who promise similar policies and citizens who ask for them appear in other countries of the region: Bukelismo advances.
Bukele has become a problem and an example. Couldn’t democracies get those results without breaking their own laws? In general they have not. So how long can they survive if they don’t fix the really urgent problems? In certain countries it may be violence, hunger or marginalization or inflation in others. How much longer will they be able to maintain their prestige, the illusion of their need, if they don’t remedy them? The fewer solutions democracies achieve, the more societies will claim characters like Nayib Bukele. The danger, in reality, is not Bukele and El Salvador; we are all the rest and our impotences. With all due respect to the founding ancestors: there are already several generations of Americans who believe that democracy is a means, not an end. If that means does not serve to reach the end, they look for other means – because, ultimately, the end is what matters.
What do we oppose them, what do we argue? That this authoritarian method puts all citizens at risk, that anyone can be imprisoned and especially anyone who opposes the Government? It is so, without a doubt – and it is terrible – but the majority of citizens imagine that it cannot happen to them because they do not interfere, that what they want is to live in peace and that with the gangs they could not and now they do. And yes, it is necessary to denounce the Bukeles when they advance on the freedoms that we should have – but it is useless. Those freedoms should be used to solve the urgent problems of citizens – and not to sing about their undoubted beauty. Either the democracies realize that it is not enough for them to exist and show their magnificent Hellenic profile, or the Bukeles of this world are going to keep almost everything.
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