This is how a dictatorship is born

My father often says that a democracy is certainty in the rules and uncertainty in the results. If there was something in El Salvador on Sunday, before the Salvadorans' votes were processed, it was certainty in the results, after a series of violations of the Constitution, the laws and the electoral rules at the whim of the president. Before the voting tables had even counted the votes, Nayib Bukele declared himself re-elected and became the first president in eight decades to declare his victory for a second term.

Re-election in El Salvador is clearly prohibited by six articles of the Constitution. But there is no longer an institution capable of imposing sanctions on Bukele or limits on his exercise of power. He controls the three powers of the State, the circuit of judges, the prosecutor's office, the police, the Army and the Supreme Electoral Court. We Salvadorans have lost our constitutional rights and the country has experienced an election under a state of emergency. Last week, the vice president, Félix Ulloa, told the New York Times: “We are not dismantling democracy. “We are eliminating it, replacing it with something new.” It's not new. We witness live the birth of a dictatorship.

While awaiting results, it seems that the majority of those who voted chose to bury democracy, which is what the president offers, arguing that limits on power were an obstacle to achieving what none of the previous governments were able to achieve: dismantle the gangs that kept the population terrified. It is a truly transformative fact for the majority of citizens. When you have lived with a gun to your head, security comes before constitutions and laws and democracies. The majority of those who voted have decided to give up their rights and hand over all power to a single person, in exchange for security.

It is a dangerous experiment by Bukele, who in two years has imprisoned more than 70,000 people through an exceptional regime that allows police officers and soldiers to imprison anyone they suspect of belonging to gangs. Human rights organizations estimate that barely a third have ties to gangs and have determined that torture is systematically carried out in Salvadoran prisons. Hundreds of people have already died. El Salvador today has the highest prisoner rate in the world.

The Police require their agents to have quotas of detainees per day to fill President Bukele's prisons. What always happens happens: young people detained because an agent saw them “nervous”; neighbors denouncing neighbors of gang ties; taxi drivers accusing the competition of it to get rid of it; men arrested for competing with that police officer for the love of a woman. This is how quotas are filled. Police agents extorting innocent people so as not to take them away.

In El Salvador, every detainee is guilty until proven otherwise; and it is almost impossible to prove it. They are tried in summary hearings by anonymous judges, along with hundreds of other detainees. One hundred guilty or one hundred innocent. Vice President Ulloa, who is a lawyer, said that this was the only way, because his government has put so many people in jail that it would take a hundred years to judge them individually. “It is a fair process because it is legal. Before they were individual trials but we changed the law.”

The security forces had not enjoyed such impunity since the years of our civil war, in which elements of the Army, the police and paramilitaries (the Death Squads) detained, tortured and disappeared thousands of people without fearing punishment.

Bukele's great specialty is not security but propaganda. He has a group of Venezuelan advisors from the teams of Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López, experts in making the right hand believe that what the left is hiding no longer exists. Bukele warned of people's fatigue with politicians and launched into the discourse of combating corruption. He won the presidency in 2019 and lashed out at the opposition until it was delegitimized to the applause of Salvadorans. Two years later he achieved a majority in the legislative elections.

The pandemic and its emergency decrees allowed him to suspend citizen rights, hide information about contracts and purchases, and his Government began a systematic looting of the State that journalism has been documenting since then and that makes his predecessors appear to be novices in corruption.

He secretly made a pact with the gangs to whom he made unprecedented concessions, such as releasing some leaders requested for extradition by the United States in exchange for reducing the homicide rates that he politically needed to show off the effectiveness of his supposed security plans.

In May 2021 he dealt a blow to the judiciary. He dismissed the judges of the Constitutional Court and the Prosecutor, and skipping all the procedures established in the Constitution that same day he appointed new judges and a prosecutor tailored to him. There he began his dictatorship in practice. By nightfall, he already controlled the three branches of government. All. It was no surprise to anyone later that the unconstitutional Constitutional magistrates ruled in favor of re-election.

Then Bukele's pact with the gangs was broken and the emergency regime, mass arrests and imprisonments came. But the inhabitants of the communities that were previously controlled by the gangs today live in a tranquility that they did not know, without having to pay extortion or fear that their family will be a victim of the cruelty of these criminal organizations. And this is the main cause of his re-election.

The so-called Bukele model, whose only components are the accumulation of power, propaganda and repression exercised from the violation of the rule of law and human rights, has been sufficient to maintain a very high popular support. But, lessons from history, this support is not forever.

Bukele is preparing for when the people get tired: he has increased the number of troops in the Armed Forces and has promised to double it in five years.

There is a point of no return in every authoritarian or dictatorial project. It is that which divides the desire to remain in power from the impossibility of leaving it, because it would have dire consequences for him and his family.

Evidence of Bukele's pact with organized crime is accumulating in a court in New York, where gang leaders who should have been serving prison sentences in El Salvador are being prosecuted. They are living proof of criminal pacts. The recently re-elected president has violated all the laws of El Salvador; and the State's use of assets and its systematic looting are sufficiently documented. It is bad news for those who want the return of democracy to El Salvador: Nayib Bukele has crossed the line of no return.

A dictatorship is coming.

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