President Nayib Bukele reacted to an opinion article published in the Spanish newspaper El País, signed by the Mexican journalist Carlos S. Maldonado, calling the editorialist practicing “desperate activism.”
The note in question is entitled: “Bukele’s hell in El Salvador: a country submerged in a police state, without citizen rights and under censorship”, where the editor maintains that the Salvadoran police constantly violate human rights.
“An absurd headline that contradicts his own article, where he states that 90% of Salvadorans approve of our work (no president in the world has even similar approval),” Bukele said.
“In the past, not even a fifth-rate journalist would have signed such an absurd article, but the despair is great,” he added.
The president also shared the paragraph of a Washington Post editorial where he talks about his enormous popularity. Says the Washington Post: “And this is the problem: not only Salvadorans love him, politicians and officials from Honduras to Argentina have been impressed by Bukele’s iron-fisted regime, tempted by the political gain that implementing the same policies could bring. tactics in their crime-ridden societies.
He then mentions another line from the editorial in the American newspaper which states: “We must make a counterproposal that will succeed in reducing crime, or those of us who are interested in a democratic response will lose the battle of the narrative.”
Bukele insisted that “this is not journalism, it is simple desperate activism, ordered by those who fear the power of example.”
The president’s tweet published at 6:54 p.m. achieved almost 50,000 views in the first 30 minutes and his followers passionately defended him, as well as questioned the journalist’s article that covers the Central American region.