Love him or hate him, all eyes are on Nayib Bukele. To many, El Salvador’s president is a national hero who took on the country’s violent gangs with an unrelenting hand. To others, the populist is a 21st century autocrat who has committed mass human rights abuses and has altered the rules of the game to concentrate power in his own hands. Bukele has captured the world’s attention in a way few other Latin American leaders have in recent times. The self-described “world’s coolest dictator” is likely to easily skate into a second presidential term in the election Sunday. After sidestepping El Salvador’s constitution prohibiting reelection in six different places, Bukele has the support of from seven to nine of every 10 voters, according to recent polling.
Quick Read
- Salvadorans Vote in Elections Focused on Security vs. Democracy Tradeoff
- Nayib Bukele Poised for Reelection Despite Constitutional Ban, Enjoying High Approval Ratings
- Voters in Formerly Gang-Controlled Areas Express Support for Bukele’s Transformation Efforts
- Critics Concerned Over Bukele’s Moves to Concentrate Power, Undermine Checks and Balances
- Traditional Political Parties in Disarray, Paving Way for Bukele’s Continued Popularity
- Bukele’s Harsh Gang Crackdown Results in Significant Arrests, Lower Violence
- Some Voters Overlook Democratic Concerns for Safety Improvements Under Bukele
- Bukele Campaigns on Maintaining Gang Crackdown, Warns Against Opposition Victory
- Bukele’s Rule Viewed as Case Study in Global Trend Toward Authoritarian Populism
- Nayib Bukele Poised for Easy Reelection in El Salvador Despite Constitutional Reelection Ban
- Voters Divided: Bukele Seen as Hero for Tackling Gangs but Criticized as Autocratic
- High Approval for Bukele Despite Concerns Over Democracy and Human Rights
- Bukele’s Security Measures Praised for Reducing Violence, but Mass Detentions Raise Alarm
- Bukele’s Popularity Extends Beyond El Salvador, Influencing Regional Leaders
- Critics Warn of Long-Term Democratic Risks Under Bukele’s Expanding Control
- Government Propaganda and Harassment of Critics Mark Bukele’s Tenure
- Bukele’s International Image Contrasts with Domestic Issues like Poverty and Economic Stagnation
- El Salvador’s VP Félix Ulloa Admits Mistakes in Gang Crackdown but Denies Police State
- Ulloa Defends Mass Detentions as Legal and Popular Despite Human Rights Concerns
- State of Emergency Continues, Suspending Some Rights to Combat Gang Violence
- Over 76,000 Detained Since March 2022, with 7,000 Released Amidst Torture Accusations
- Ulloa Denies Quota System for Arrests, Asserts Detention Policies Not Government-Ordered
- Homicide Rates Drop Significantly, Government Maintains High Approval Rates
- Ulloa Refutes Negotiations with Gangs and Denies Attacks on Press
- Government Accused of Concentrating Power, Undermining Democracy with Judicial Changes
- Re-election Sought Despite Constitutional Prohibitions, Ulloa Claims Legal Basis
- Possibility of Third Term Left Open if Constitution Changes
The Associated Press has the story:
El Salvador’s Presidential election sees ‘World’s Coolest Dictator’ on track for victory
Newslooks- MEJICANOS, El Salvador (AP) —
Salvadorans are voting Sunday in presidential and legislative elections that are largely about the tradeoff between security and democracy. With soaring approval ratings and virtually no competition, Nayib Bukele is almost certainly headed for a second term as president.
El Salvador’s constitution prohibits reelection. Nonetheless, about eight out of 10 of voters support Bukele, according to a January poll from the University of Central America. That’s despite Bukele taking steps throughout his first term that lawyers and critics say chip away at the country’s system of checks and balances.
José Dionisio Serrano, 60, was proud to be the first person in line at 6 a.m. Sunday as voters started to line up outside a school in the formerly gang-controlled neighborhood of Zacamil in Mejicanos just north of San Salvador. The soccer teacher said he planned to vote for Bukele and his party New Ideas.
“We need to keep changing, transforming,” Serrano said. “Honestly, we have lived through very hard periods in my life. As a citizen I have lived through periods of war, and this situation we had with the gangs. Now we have a big opportunity for our country. I want the generations that are coming up to live in a better world.”
He has lived in Mejicanos most of his life, but had to flee for several years after gang members shot him and threatened his life. Asked about concerns that Bukele was seeking reelection despite a constitutional ban, he brushed it aside, saying, “What the people want is something else.”
Moisés Zaldivar, preparing to vote in his first election, said he supported Bukele’s New Ideas party.
“This is a change I’ve never seen,” he said. “I’m only 19 years old and this is the first time I’ve seen such a radical change in the country. So I want to support this great project the party and the president have.”
El Salvador’s traditional parties from the left and right that created the vacuum that Bukele first filled in 2019 remain a shambles. Alternating in power for some three decades, the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) were thoroughly discredited by their own corruption and inefficacy. Their presidential candidates this year are polling in the low single digits.
“There’s a disconnect between the people and the political parties as a political structure,” said Joao Picardo, a researcher at Francisco Gavidia University. Salvadorans say they have “connected more with the figure of the president.”
Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” has gained fame for his brutal crackdown on gangs, in which more than 1% of the country’s population has been arrested.
While his administration is accused of committing widespread human rights abuses, violence has also plummeted, in a country known just a few years ago as one of the most dangerous in the world.
Because of that, voters like 55-year-old businesswoman Marleny Mena are willing to overlook concerns that Bukele has taken undemocratic steps to concentrate power.
Formerly a street vendor in San Salvador’s once gang-controlled downtown, Mena said she used to be scared to walk around the city, fearful she could accidentally cross from one gang’s territory to another, with potentially serious consequences. Since Bukele began his crackdown, that fear has dissipated.
“He just needs a little bit more time, the time he needs to keep improving the country,” Mena said.
On Sunday morning, Manuel Santillana waited outside a school in Santa Tecla, a commuter city southwest of capital.
“You have to tell the truth, everything is calm, without problems,” Santillana, 62, implored a journalist.
Also waiting to vote, José Salvador Torres said, “I have come to vote for my (president), to not go back to the past with the gangs.”
In the lead-up to Sunday’s vote, Bukele made no public campaign appearances. Instead, the populist plastered his social media and television screens across the country with a simple message recorded from his couch: If he and his New Ideas party didn’t win elections this year, the “war with the gangs would be put at risk.”
“The opposition will be able to achieve its true and only plan, to free the gang members and use them to return to power,” he said.
Still, the 42-year-old Bukele and his party are increasingly looked to as a case study for a wider global rise in authoritarianism.
“There’s this growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that, concepts like democracy and human rights and due process have failed them,” said Tyler Mattiace, Americas researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Alex Cisneros is among those who plan to vote for Bukele, many saying they have few options after years of corruption and violence under El Salvador’s traditional parties.
“He’s done many good things and many bad things,” said Cisneros, 32. “People criticize him, but he’s at least changed something.”
Growing up in one of the most dangerous areas of San Salvador, Cisneros fled to the U.S. when he was 20 after his cousin was slain by the Mara Salvatrucha gang. Now back home, he says he was disturbed when police jailed an elderly neighbor for protecting her son, a likely gang member, but he adds he can walk the streets freely at night for the first time in his life.
Bukele’s almost certain victory will further cement his grip on power as his tough tactics ripple out from this small Central American nation to other places with their own security crises like Ecuador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. That worries rights advocates across the region.
Tyler Mattiace, Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch, considers Bukele “one of the biggest risks for human rights and for democracy that we see in Latin America right now.”
“Bukele is incredibly popular, not only at home in El Salvador,” Mattiace said. “We see a growing number of people in countries across Latin America who are supporting this kind of authoritarian populism because they believe that it could be the only way to address rising levels of violence.”
When he was first elected in 2019, Bukele, a former publicity manager of Palestinian descent, became Latin America’s youngest leader. Fond of spectacle, he has attracted some of the world’s biggest names, recently hosting the Miss Universe pageant and pulling in soccer star Lionel Messi to play a pre-season match.
But his rise to wide recognition came in 2022 with his harsh war on the gangs that had long terrorized El Salvador.
Under a state of emergency, his government has locked up 76,000 people — more than 1% of the population — in prisons where rights groups have documented cases of torture and the deaths of more than 150 inmates. The government also has been accused of systematic human rights abuses.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Bukele’s vice presidential running mate, Félix Ulloa, acknowledged the government “made mistakes” in detaining thousands of people who had committed no crimes. He also conceded officials may have set arrest quotas.
But he denied the government has suspended the rights of “honorable” Salvadorans. He justified the crackdown as being for the greater good of the country and widely popular.
“This is not a police state, it’s a state that provides security,” Ulloa said.
El Salvador’s homicide rate has shriveled to among the lowest in the Americas, when just a few years ago the country was deemed one of the most dangerous places in the world.
In fulfilling his promise to bring security, something the country’s two traditional parties failed at, Bukele has gained the adoration of millions of Salvadorans like Paola Ventura.
The shop where the 25-year-old works in downtown San Salvador is plastered with the president’s face, on hats and soccer jerseys reading “Bukele 2024.” It also once stocked Bukele scarves and blankets, but they were all bought up by customers visiting from other countries.
Ventura said her boss also painted an entire wall of his nearby pupusa restaurant with a mural of Bukele, which has drawn in customers.
“He’s famous,” she said. “Bukele’s face sells.”
Others told AP they were too scared to talk about the election because of the mass detentions.
Bukele has pinned his campaign on the gang crackdown, warning Salvadorans that if his New Ideas party doesn’t win the election, the “war with the gangs would be put at risk.”
“The opposition will be able to achieve its true and only plan, to free the gang members and use them to return to power,” he said in one video as his message is spread widely on television, radio and social media.
Less visible to voters are the long-term democratic risks that come with the charismatic leader, constitutional lawyers, analysts and opposition politicians say.
As Bukele has grown more popular, he and his party have concentrated control over every branch of El Salvador’s government.
In 2020, Bukele entered the Legislative Assembly with soldiers after lawmakers balked at approving a security loan proposal. He clashed repeatedly with the then opposition-controlled congress during the pandemic when he tried to impose some of the regions toughest restrictions and lawmakers refused to grant him emergency powers.
When his party romped to victory in 2021 legislative elections, the newly elected congress purged the country’s constitutional court, replacing judges with loyalists who later ruled that Bukele could run for a second term despite the constitutional ban on reelection.
Bukele recently made electoral changes, slashing the number of municipalities in a way that analysts say further stacks the odds in his favor, particularly in congressional and local elections to be held in March.
The president has built a sophisticated communication machine pumping out highly produced government propaganda while his government has harassed journalists, political opponents and critics.
“These cumulative actions, the reforms, they’re part of a strategy. The idea is to have complete political control … and make any opposition basically null,” said Oscar Picardo, director of investigations at El Salvador’s Universidad Francisco Gavidia.
Bukele’s running mate denies the government has made any undemocratic moves to consolidate power. “There is nothing that we have done that does not have a legal foundation,” Ulloa told AP on Tuesday.
Seeing Bukele’s soaring popularity, some leaders in the region have turned to “The Bukele Model” for solutions to their own security crises.
In neighboring Honduras, following a brutal prison massacre by gangs, the government rounded up gangsters and vowed it would lock them up on a remote island prison.
With Haiti beset with a growing security crisis, in the neighboring Dominican Republic, highly popular leader Luis Abinader has increasingly mirrored Bukele’s discourse while pushing his own “fight against crime.”
As Ecuador staggers from a surge of violent crime, new President Daniel Noboa has annouced a crackdown on multiplying gangs, with dramatic scenes of police raids similar to the early days of Bukele’s state of emergency.
Bukele may be popular at home and abroad, but some Salvadorans feel he has spent too much time focused on his global image, and not enough on the country’s core problems like poverty, which has pushed Salvadorans to migrate for generations.
Despite efforts to project prosperity — adopting Bitcoin as an official currency and hosting a slew of international events — economic growth in El Salvador has largely stalled while inflation has jumped globally. Around half of Salvadorans faced food insecurity in 2023.
Julio Eduardo Durán, 57, has spent 40 years selling and fixing watches and has seen his earnings plummet since the government kicked walking vendors out of the capital’s main plaza in an effort to clean up the area.
“They’ve forgotten the poor,” Durán said. “Our government doesn’t help us at all, it’s all a lie. They want El Salvador to be like the United States, but we’re going hungry.”
Durán would not say how he would vote on Sunday’s election.
El Salvador’s government “made mistakes” in its war against the country’s gangs, but has never undermined the country’s democracy to consolidate power, according to the man likely to be reelected vice president.
Félix Ulloa, temporarily on leave as El Salvador’s vice president while he runs for reelection alongside Nayib Bukele, defended his government’s controversial crackdown in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, days before a presidential election they are expected to win easily. Such policies, he said, will continue until El Salvador’s gangs are defeated.
Ulloa acknowledged that in their administration’s mass detention of citizens the government imprisoned thousands of people who had not committed any crime, something he said they are correcting, but justified the harsh actions as being widely popular and completely “legal.”
Since declaring a state of emergency in March 2022 following a surge in gang violence, the government has detained 76,000 people — more than 1% of the population in the small Central American nation. The declaration, which suspended some fundamental rights like access to a lawyer and being told why you’re being arrested, has been renewed by congress every month since.
“There is no perfect work by humans … Look at the big picture,” Ulloa said. “Understand what this country is doing when we have defended people and the human rights of millions of Salvadorans whose rights were being violated by criminal structures.”
Around 7,000 people arrested under the state of emergency have since been released from prisons where authorities have been accused of torture, as well committing systematic and mass human rights abuses.
Ulloa said that in some cases officials may have asked security forces to meet quotas of detentions — arresting a predetermined number of people — but that it was “not an order from executives, nor a government policy.”
Human rights groups say more than 150 people have died in custody since the beginning of the crackdown.
Reporting by the Associated Press has documented that detainees pass through mass hearings of as many as 300 defendants at a time. They rarely have access to lawyers. The vast majority of those arrested under the emergency declaration remain in prison without having been tried.
“There is no police state,” Ulloa said. “Not a single right has been suspended in El Salvador. No public liberty has ever been suspended because of the state of emergency,” he said before noting a couple rights that had been suspended but clarifying that they didn’t affect the “honorable” Salvadorans.
Ulloa said the state of emergency would continue to be extended until the government decides it is no longer needed.
“When we declare the country free of gangs, of criminals, of criminal structures, there will be no reason to have a state of emergency,” he said.
Following the crackdown, rates of violence have fallen sharply, with homicide rates dipping to some of the lowest in the Americas, and the government continues to enjoy sky-high rates of approval.
Ulloa firmly denied accusations by the United States government that their administration had negotiated with gangs before the surge in violence and the state of emergency that followed.
He also denied that their administration carried out any attacks on the press, despite journalists, activists, union leaders and opposition politicians saying they were routinely harassed, spied on and even detained by the government. He accused critics of their administration of working with the country’s opposition parties, and people claiming their rights have been violated under the crackdown of being “connected with the gangs.”
Ulloa rejected accusations by constitutional scholars, experts and political opposition that the government has undermined the country’s democracy by concentrating power in the executive branch.
One such move took place in 2021 when the newly-elected congress — where Bukele’s allies have a majority — replaced the justices of the Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber with sympathetic judges. The government also pushed through electoral reforms that watchdogs say favored his own party, particularly in congressional and local elections.
Ulloa has maintained that seeking re-election is completely legal, adding that he and Bukele have taken leave before seeking a second term.
“There is nothing that we have done that does not have a legal foundation,” Ulloa said.
Lawyers and analysts argue that at least six articles of the constitution prohibit presidential reelection in El Salvador. But a 2021 resolution by the same court purged by Bukele’s allies enabled the leader to run and ordered the electoral authorities to comply with the resolution.
Ulloa would not directly answer a question by the AP about whether he and Bukele would seek a third term. He echoed Bukele in saying the current constitution prohibits it, but left open the possibility if the country’s constitution changes. Ulloa proposed more than 200 changes to the constitution in 2021.
“If the constitution is changed, (Bukele) wants to do it and the constitution enables that, I suppose he would be able to do so,” Ulloa said, adding that the current constitution allows for first and second term. “A third (term) is not allowed under the current constitution. I’m not saying it is not possible if it changes.”
