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Presidential elections will be held in El Salvador on Sunday with a particularly predictable outcome: the outgoing president, Nayib Bukele, will win them by a wide margin, thus starting a second term. THE surveys they say that at least 70 percent of the population will vote for him, while the second candidate does not exceed 4 percent of the preferences.
Bukele’s popularity It is huge, despite a whole series of problems and open questions about his presidency. The Salvadoran constitution would prohibit Bukele from being among the candidates, having already served one term. In the five years of his government the country experienced a «alarming regression» on the subject of human rights, denounced among others by Amnesty International. Two percent of the population is in prison, over 25 percent live below the poverty line. Public debt is reaching more than worrying levels. Many personal liberties have been called into question and almost all political and judicial bodies have been occupied by men loyal to him. Despite all this, Bukeke’s approval rating in El Salvador is above 80 percent, mainly for one reason: safety.
Bukele transformed the country with the highest murder rate in Latin America into a rather safe one, in which the population was able to return to the streets, even in the evening, in which they no longer had to pay protection money to open a business, where gang violence is a memory. For years, large parts of Salvadoran cities have been under the total control of criminal gangs. Until 2018, around 3 percent of the wealth produced in the country was tied up in paying ransoms, and there were 53 murders per 100,000 people, one of the highest rates in the world. Today we are at 2.4 murders per 100,000 people, one of the lowest in the Central American region.
Bukele at the Miss Universe pageant in 2023 in San Salvador (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
This was achieved with a “state of emergency” declared almost two years ago, which led to a campaign of mass incarceration: it is believed that over 75,000 people have been incarcerated since then. Security forces can arrest anyone merely suspected of being part of a criminal gang, even in the absence of evidence: a tattoo or an anonymous complaint may be enough. Preventive detention, even prolonged, without the formulation of a charge is common, while the government has access to all private communications of citizens.
Bukele’s administration inaugurated last year a huge new prison of maximum security which will be able to accommodate up to 40 thousand inmates, while belonging to a gang is punished with a minimum sentence of twenty years (compared to the previous three). When the charges involve terrorism, the penalties become cumulative and sentences of 100-150 years in prison are usual.
The prigione di Tecoluca, El Salvador (El Salvador presidential press office via AP, File)
Bukele’s party, New Ideas, has also promoted and approved in parliament a justice reform that introduces mass trials: up to 900 defendants can be tried in a single session, almost completely limiting the possibilities of proving one’s innocence or to distinguish one’s responsibilities from those of others.
With these radical methods and with the suppression of many constitutional rights, Bukele has certainly achieved the result of almost completely dismantling the power of the criminal gangs, who for decades have killed, kidnapped and blackmailed the population of El Salvador. However, in addition to the suppression of the rights of the accused, Bukele’s “hard fist” has also brought many innocent people to prison, who have very little opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance of the accusations.
Calendar with the president’s photo (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
However, the majority of the Salvadoran population seems to support this approach, so much so that Bukele based much of his re-election campaign on the results obtained in terms of security and accusing the opposition of wanting to “free all gang members” if they were to win the elections . The 42-year-old president also bases much of his consensus on an informal style and communication that mainly passes through social networks. In recent years he has built a media and propaganda machine that makes frequent use of fake news, manipulated facts and attacks via social media on political opponents, also exploiting a significant number of fake profiles managed by private agencies.
The recovered safety in the streets and the propaganda have completely obscured the other failures of his management, starting with the economic ones. In 2021, Bukeke made El Salvador the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender, making acceptance of the cryptocurrency as a means of payment mandatory and converting a large part of the state’s monetary reserves into bitcoin. More than two years later, cryptocurrencies continue to be used very little by the population and have not transformed the country into a “paradise” for investors in the sector as promised by the president.
Murale to San Salvador, El Salvador (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
The growth in value of bitcoins was then extremely volatile, even experiencing periods of sharp decline, and the measure has become a problem for accessing loans from the International Monetary Fund. El Salvador would need it, because the public debt is constantly and strongly growing and because the growth of the gross domestic product is less than three percent per year and lower than neighboring countriessuch as Guatemala, Nicaragua or Honduras.
The recovery of the economy will become fundamental in the second mandate to maintain broad popular support, while the limitation of civil liberties and the authoritarian turn given to the country will not appear to be decisive factors for Salvadorans. Bukele, moreover, often defines himself as “the biggest dictator cool of the world“.
(AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)
The candidacy for a new mandate itself was possible thanks to Bukele’s increasingly greater control over the institutions and bodies that should counteract the president’s power. Bukele replaced the judges of the Constitutional Court with men close to him, effectively controlling it: and this has interpreted in a creative way the provision of the Constitution which limits the mandate of the president to one. He established that he could run if he resigned six months before the end of the mandate, thus formally not being the “outgoing president”. Bukele resigned on November 30, although he effectively retained power.