World Tour: El Salvador under Bukele

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Up next…a World Tour Special Report from El Salvador.

The country was once overrun by gangs and violent crime. After a massacre in 2022, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele invoked a series of emergency powers that allowed him to restore order in the country.

NICK EICHER, HOST: But some Salvadorans expect that Bukele’s iron fist is here to stay after more than three years of martial law and the recent removal of term limits.

WORLD Latin America associate correspondent Carlos Páez has the story.

SOUND: [BUKELE RALLY]

CARLOS PAEZ: His fans call him a hero. His foes call him a tyrant. But the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” seems happy to claim both. At an address to the nation in June, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said the most important thing he’s called to do is ensure the nation’s safety.

El Savador went from being the murder capital of the world 10 years ago to one of the safest Latin American countries by 2024, Bukele’s fifth year in office. Last year he secured his reelection with a landslide victory. Despite arresting 85,000 civilians during his tenure, his approval rating among Salvadorans remains well above 80%.

SOUND: [BUKELE’S REELECTION CHANT]

But there’s a darker side to the story. A report this summer from the Public Opinion Institute of Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas concluded that more than half of Salvadorans fear expressing their political views. In February, Salvadoran authorities began to detain political opponents under questionable allegations of corruption. And in July, Bukele’s New Ideas party passed an amendment removing presidential term limits from the constitution.

A spokesperson for the Association of Salvadoran Journalists… or the APES… told me that restrictions on free speech began as early as 2019, when the newly elected Bukele administration stopped sharing government information with the public. However, hostilities against the press took a sharp turn three years later after Bukele invoked a State of Emergency across the country.

APES: Y bajo el régimen de excepción y bajo, digamos, las políticas punitivas del gobierno salvadoreño, no es posible afirmar que como periodistas tengamos garantías. Y no sólo como periodistas, sino como también ya lo han denunciado defensores de derechos humanos, como lo han denunciado, digamos, abogados… El uso del sistema judicial está en nuestra contra. No existe ninguna garantía de un proceso justo.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: And under the State of Emergency and, say, the punitive policies of the Salvadoran government, it is not possible to say that we journalists have any guarantees. And not only journalists, but human rights defenders have also denounced this, and lawyers too... The judicial system is working against us. There’s no guarantee of due process.

Under the State of Emergency, people gave up many of their civil liberties as the government battled organized crime. Months later, El Salvador reached the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Videos showing thousands of gang members at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center… or CECOT… have gone viral since then.

But even after soundly defeating the gangs, Bukele has continued to extend his emergency powers. According to the APES Monitoring Center, verbal and physical assaults from state officials to Salvadoran journalists have more than doubled over the past 2 years. Here is their spokesperson once again:

APES:  La misma sociedad que votó por el este presidente…  por el tema de las políticas de seguridad,  también ha comprado el discurso de que los periodistas son enemigos, no de la gestión presidencial, y ... se ha instaurado esta narrativa, ¿no? Y cuando proviene de un político tan popular y de políticos que manejan al dedillo el tema de la publicidad, pues es muy efectivo.

APES TRANSLATION: The same society that voted for this president... for security issues, has also bought into the narrative that journalists are enemies of the presidential administration… This narrative has been established. And when it comes from such a popular politician and from politicians who are experts at advertising themselves, it is very effective.

Journalists are not the only ones facing political persecution. In May, authorities detained human rights attorney Ruth Lopez without an arrest warrant.

BULLOCK: Around the same time, it became evident that there were units in the police that were being used to monitor, surveil and harass journalists and human rights defenders in their homes…

Noah Bullock is the executive director of Cristosal, the leading advocacy group in El Salvador where Lopez used to work. Her forced disappearance was just the beginning of political persecution against the rest of his legal team, now exiled in nearby Guatemala and Honduras.

BULLOCK: And so that kind of led us to feel like we had to choose between exile or prison. And we decided that we were no good to our colleagues who have been detained or to the victims that we accompany if we're also in jail. So we decided to relocate the organization in order to continue our work.

Opposition leader Marcela Villatoro says that following the latest constitutional reforms “democracy in El Salvador has died.” But the democratic backslide began long before this latest episode. Four years ago, Bukele’s party replaced all Constitutional Court justices with loyalists after winning a legislative supermajority. His party cut the National Assembly’s size by almost a third in 2023 and passed a law in January allowing easy changes to the constitution.

Still, Bukele’s mano dura —or hard hand— policies have gained support among other countries struggling with waves of violence. In March, Bukele agreed to imprison Venezuelan immigrants deported from the United States. Costa Rica and Ecuador recently pledged to copy the CECOT prison model. However, Bullock warns against surrendering basic freedoms for the promise of safety.

BULLOCK: It is not true that democracy, that limited government, that rule of law, that human rights themselves are obstacles for government…So I think it's important for people to challenge those assumptions to to try and understand that it's a false choice between what would be called, supposedly the Bukele Model or living in fear of gangs.

Reporting for World Tour, I’m Carlos Páez.

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