Nayib Bukele’s autocratic tendencies were already clear when he ran for a second term as El Salvador’s president in 2024.
He had extended a “temporary” state of emergency for two years, and used it to lock up legions of alleged gangsters without due process. He had ignored court rulings and used soldiers to bully lawmakers into supporting him.
After his party won a supermajority in the legislature in 2021, he used it to stack the justice system with cronies.
El Salvador’s constitution limits presidents to one five-year term, but those friendly judges waved him through. There was evidence that his government had done deals with the gangs, and bought their support in elections.
Salvadorans did not care. They re-elected Mr. Bukele in a landslide, with 85% of the vote.
They loved him because he made the streets safe. Gangs had terrorized the country for decades. The murder rate in 2015, at 106 per 100,000 people, was the highest in the world. Every corner shop and bus company faced the threat of extortion. Mr. Bukele ended this by jailing 85,000 people, equivalent to 8% of all young men in El Salvador.
Anyone suspected of gang ties — because of a tattoo, a tip-off or a policeman’s hunch — could be locked up indefinitely without trial. By 2024 the official murder rate was only 1.9 per 100,000: lower than in the United States. Extortion all but disappeared, since gangsters were too scared to show their faces.
Voters were so grateful that they overlooked the power grabs that came with all this. Only a few liberal voices warned that the strongman would one day aim his weapons of repression more widely.
One year after his re-election, he is doing just that. Journalists who report on his tyranny are being arrested, along with union leaders who question government spending and farmers protesting against land seizures.
On May 18 his goons seized Ruth López, a prominent human rights lawyer.
On May 20 his tame legislature passed a law that mimics the repression of Vladimir Putin.
Any organization that receives foreign funds or merely “responds to the interests” of foreigners must register as a foreign agent.
It can then be strictly monitored and shut down on a whim. That will be crippling for human rights groups, anti-corruption NGOs, and so on.
Mr. Bukele has also empowered himself to rewrite the constitution more easily. Now that the opposition has been neutered and most watchdogs are muzzled, there is little to stop the 43-year-old from remaining “the world’s coolest dictator,” as he styles himself, well into old age.
Mr. Bukele has been a beneficiary of President Donald Trump’s values-free foreign policy.
Whereas President Joe Biden objected to Mr. Bukele’s power grabs and slapped sanctions on his allegedly corrupt or abusive associates, Mr. Trump gushes that he is doing “a fantastic job.” In turn, Mr. Bukele lets Mr. Trump use El Salvador’s brutal prisons as a memory hole for deportees, beyond the reach of any law.
