Nayib Bukele has had tremendous hours. The president of El Salvador took a crowd bath this Sunday on the presidential balcony after the overwhelming victory he obtained in the elections and spent the following hours sharing on social networks the congratulatory messages that came to him from all corners of the world. Bukele, 42, has become a global phenomenon for having deactivated gangs and broadcast it live on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok. That has earned him the nickname of the millennial president, an image he likes to cultivate. Nobody imagined five years ago, when he won the elections for the first time, that he would become an all-powerful president who would govern under a regime of exception, a radical measure that he has used to take the army to the streets, fill the prisons with young people with tattoos and pacify the neighborhoods that for decades had been in the hands of the gangs. He has now re-validated his mandate until 2029, crushing the opposition, which has been reduced to ashes. Power has six letters: Bukele.
The truth is that he lived a peaceful election night, without any emotion. The polls gave him an overwhelming majority and that is what happened. He raised some suspicions by announcing the results before the Supreme Electoral Tribunal did so, but when the counting of ballots began it was confirmed that El Salvador has placed itself in his hands. With 70% counted this Monday, he had received 1.6 million votes, eight times more than the next two parties, FMLN – the classic left – and Arena – the traditional right. With the same forcefulness, his party, Nuevas Ideas, won in the Legislative Assembly, where it is predicted that it will have 58 of the 60 deputies. Bukele said that it was the first time that the single-party figure was established “in a democracy.”
If these elections were a plebiscite on his policies, he has more than won it. It has already announced that it will continue with the emergency regime given the good results it has produced, despite criticism from human rights organizations, which consider that there have been many arbitrary arrests, and some international institutions that have shown concern about what which they consider an autocratic drift. At this point, many are wondering what his next steps will be. In the previous legislature he faced an Assembly that was in the hands of the opposition and he entered it with the Armed Forces and a crowd that was waiting for him feverishly at the door. The images were shocking. He took over as speaker of the Assembly and said: “Now I think it is very clear who is in control of the situation.” Then he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. And he prayed.
After some legislative elections, he took control of the chamber, in the middle of his presidential term. He removed the members of the Constitutional Chamber and installed like-minded jurists, and dismissed the previous attorney general. The path was clear. He established the emergency regime, which has been renewed 24 times. Bukele, however, has not managed to reduce poverty and the economic indicators are not very encouraging. He attributes this to the fact that the country is emerging from a shock and that the reduction in violence is accompanied by a drop in extortion and other illegal businesses that had an upward impact on the country's GDP. Analysts foresee that reviving the labor market will be one of its main tasks. The security that he now commands can improve tourism, attract international investment and immigrants who have historically lived in the United States.
A good number of international leaders have congratulated the winner. Some have done it with ulterior motives. The Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, also congratulated him, but at the same time, in something that does not seem coincidental, he added that he hopes that priority will continue to be given “to good governance, inclusive economic prosperity, the guarantees of a fair trial and human rights.” Bukele maintains an ambiguous relationship with Washington. He has responded angrily to the comments that come to him from there about his supposed authoritarian drift and has approached China, which has financed the construction of a spectacular National Library, with a modernist air, illuminated at night on the horizon of San Salvador . The president defends that the policies of the United States and Europe that they wanted to implement to reduce violence years ago have been a failure and have only increased organized crime. Here, he often repeats, NGOs, nor the media, nor foreign institutions are in charge. He congratulates himself for having taken the helm applying “a Salvadoran recipe.”
It has been none other than to completely dismantle the gangs, or at least reduce them to a minimum with a wave of mass arrests. Many have been held in Cecot, a prison built from scratch to house alleged terrorists, in which gang members from the two main gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, appear subdued, and in apparently good hygiene conditions. Some mixed with others, what was previously a utopia. It has an air of American prisons. These days they have accessed them youtubers close to bukelism and have shown inmates in silence, shaved to the bone, still in their cells like birds on a branch. These videos portray them doing gymnastics and receiving therapy from what appears to be a psychologist or a pastor. When they move them you wear shackles on your hands and feet. Salvadorans have breathed a sigh of relief to see them subdued and not in the streets imposing terror. Many of them recognize that judicial guarantees have been breached for a few, that there are innocent detainees, but it seems to them that the benefit has been greater than the cost. This vision of things prevails even among relatives who have inmates there and with whom they have barely managed to contact. The Bukele effect absorbed everything. Its power, today, is immense. The era of the single party and the single leader in El Salvador is born.
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