Bukele: the lie in democracy

Nayib Bukele's self-fulfilling prophecy warns (once again) about the fragility of the electoral device as the only antidote against authoritarianism. The new media caudillismo, built on old mechanisms of lies and “problem solving”, threatens the democratic health of countries desperate for violence and inequality.

The region faces the rise of old political phenomena embodied in new characters. They all have a couple of traits that we knew here in Colombia decades ago. One, demonize anyone who questions the honesty of the purposes of an enlightened president, or the necessity of his decisions. And the other, promote a state of opinion as a superior facet of the Rule of Law, which allows the popularity of the president to be invoked to delegitimize the formal controls of democracy and ignore constitutional limits or judicial decisions.

Lying in politics is part of the mechanisms that sustain these increasingly frequent democratic anomalies. Hannah Arendt warned more than 50 years ago: the lying politician constructs lies that are more credible and attractive than reality. Not only because he knows what his audience needs to hear, but because he bases them on ideas and theories that, due to his impatience, have never been subjected to verification processes. In return, to save time and avoid risks, the liar modifies the present and past reality so that it agrees with the line of his thesis and, thus, frees his success from the uncomfortable and disconcerting contingency of reality.

Today we only see the prisoners of the mega prisons that Bukele wants us to see. The tattooed and strong half-naked gang members, disciplined by the weapons of the state guard. We don't see the other prisoners. All the boys from marginalized neighborhoods disappear from the media reality, whose arbitrary arrests flood with habeas corpus the Salvadoran judicial system. The same thing happened with the false positives and the thousands of guerrillas killed in combat that they showed us in the uniformed bodies killed by rifle bullets. When they were nothing more than impoverished young people unrelated to the conflict, disguised as soldiers so that the stigma would work. His truth also disappeared from media reality.

The region knows this profile of a ruler. He has seen them rise to power in elections. Always enlightened men who have modified reality, magnifying horrors and disappearing data and biographies, in sophisticated and powerful marketing formulas that turn them into necessary formulas. And he has also seen them settle into declared tyrannies. The slope is slippery.

The danger has been warned. Not only 50 years ago by Arendt. Four centuries ago by Étienne de La Boétie in his speech on voluntary servitude. If the electoral device is maintained as the only shield against totalitarianism, the region will not see victory over the domination of lies. The people must assume without hesitation that democratic guarantees are their best shield. That they are the ones who become servants of the greed of their rulers when, being able to choose between servitude and freedom, they choose the former. They abandon the promise of rights, in a reckless betrayal of their own history, because that promise is a popular conquest that has cost demanding and, at times, bloody struggles. They choose, in return, to carry a yoke that causes their damage and stuns them to sleep in the most inexplicable submission.

Many Salvadoran voters, paradoxically, swell the numbers (far from the promised imagination) of those who are not protected from poverty and exclusion by democratic guarantees, nor do they live in the announced freedom from violence. Bukele's El Salvador, with its prohibited re-election and its punitive populism, is emerging as a Ni-Ni country. Neither democratic nor free. Like Colombia in Uribe's time, its re-election referendums and its false positives. Or like Argentina in the recently inaugurated Milei era. The misfortune of being a NEET country, although it appears to be a highly contagious eruptive disease, cannot be averted with a single outbreak. The only antidote is awareness. Pay attention!

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