by BELEN FERNANDEZ
On August 2, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – whose Twitter profile has evolved from “officially the coolest president in the world” to the “coolest dictator in the world” to just “El Presidente” – took to his favourite social media platform to announce that El Salvador had gone from being the “most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in Latin America”.
Accompanying the tweet was the hashtag #GuerraContraPandillas – “war on gangs” – and a statistics chart from the Salvadoran National Civilian Police indicating that, on August 1, there had allegedly been zero homicides nationwide.
Granted, the country is not very “safe” for the casualties of the war on gangs which is currently being waged in the context of a state of emergency imposed at the end of March in response to a spike in gang killings. The spike was occasioned by a breakdown in secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and the Salvadoran gangs – for which underhanded business Bukele assumed the codename “Batman”.
Now our superhero is going after the same folks he was negotiating with – and loads of others as well. As of July 20, when the state of emergency was extended for the fourth time, 46,000 people – many of them having nothing to do with gangs – had been imprisoned in ghastly conditions. Some 63 people had reportedly died in state custody. According to the investigative website The Intercept, “an estimated 2 percent of adults” are behind bars in El Salvador, apparently putting the diminutive country ahead of the United States in terms of per capita incarceration – no small feat indeed.
From his Twitter podium, Bukele ceaselessly and gleefully ridicules the very concept of human rights – and anyone who supports those rights – all of which would seem to suggest that, in the end, none of this is really about gangs at all. It is, rather, an all-out war on society.
And yet Batman continues to command sky-high approval ratings from the society under siege, which just goes to underscore the perks of running a country like your very own cult.
A former advertising executive, the 41-year-old Bukele has certainly proved savvy at self-marketing. Expelled in 2017 from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) – one of the two main political parties that had dominated the Salvadoran landscape since the end of the bloody 12-year civil war in 1992 – Bukele went on to found Nuevas Ideas or “New Ideas”, a welcome premise in a nation exhausted by violence and political disillusionment.
Never mind that the main “idea” behind Bukele’s own political machinations is total personal control – and that right-wing authoritarianism is hardly anything “new”, even when it is conducted by the world’s “coolest dictator” sporting a baseball cap worn backwards.
After assuming the presidency in 2019, Bukele busied himself showing everyone who was boss and dispensing with annoying democratic obstacles to unfettered rule. In February 2020, he deployed military and police forces inside the Salvadoran parliament building as part of a threat to dissolve the country’s legislative body if politicians refused to do what he wanted. In May 2021, he orchestrated the dismissal of all five Supreme Court judges as well as El Salvador’s attorney general.
Al Jazeera for more