Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who claimed to have been re-elected on Sunday, has been waging a merciless war against gangs since 2022 in a country that was among the most dangerous in the world, presenting himself with irony as a “cool dictator”.
Elected for the first time in 2019 thanks to a “clearance” of the two parties in power (Arena, on the right, and the FMLN, heir to the Marxist guerrillas) since the end of the civil war in El Salvador (1979-1992) , today it enjoys unparalleled popularity.
With this score, worthy of non-democratic regimes, and almost all of the 60 parliamentary seats won by his Nuevas ideas party, Mr. Bukele prides himself on having established “a record in the entire democratic history of the entire world” .
If Salvadorans voted en masse for him, it is because he “maintains a cult of personality, there is a devotion to him”, estimates analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter think tank for AFP. -American Dialogue in Washington. “His charisma and communication skills are unparalleled in Latin America.”
Abundantly present on social networks (5.8 million subscribers on cap backwards.
Before addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, Bukele, shirt collar open, asked the assembled diplomats to wait while he took a smiling selfie at the podium.
Ruthless
Having little taste for criticism, he responds directly to his detractors, using irony when he is accused of flouting the rights of prisoners in his war against the maras, the criminal gangs. His status on X (formerly Twitter) has evolved from “dictator of El Salvador”, to “coolest dictator in the world”, to today “the philosopher king”.
Photo published on the official / Nayib Bukele / @nayibbukele Twitter account/AFP/Archives
Despite his apparent taste for joking, Bukele knows how to be ruthless.
When gangs vowed to kill people at random in response to his state of emergency, he simply threatened to deprive imprisoned members of Barrio 18 and MS-13 of food.
Shortly after taking office, he ordered the police and army to enter an opposition-led parliament to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to finance a plan to combat criminality.
His party obtaining a majority in the Legislative Assembly in 2021, he began his conquest of total power by replacing the judges of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General of El Salvador.
Statues representing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in a market in San Salvador, January 30, 2024 / Marvin RECINOS / AFP
He thus managed to circumvent the Constitution, which only allows one presidential term, by being granted six months’ leave before the vote.
Bukele is also stubborn. He bet on cryptocurrencies, making Bitcoin an official currency alongside the dollar, brushing aside warnings from the IMF and the World Bank about the risks of volatility.
A study by the University of Central America (UCA) found that Bitcoin will see almost no use in 2023. Government investments in the cryptocurrency remain unknown.
“Stop all the murderers”
Married to Gabriela Rodriguez, psychologist and ballet dancer with whom he had two children, Nayib Bukele, of Palestinian origin, was born in San Salvador in 1981 and studied law at the Central American University in the capital but without obtaining a diploma.
President Nayib Bukele speaks to soldiers near a military barracks on the outskirts of San Juan Opico, November 23, 2022 in El Salvador / Marvin RECINOS / AFP/Archives
At the age of 18, he joined his father’s business empire, specializing in textiles, pharmaceuticals and advertising.
His political career only began in his early thirties, in 2012, under the banner of the FMLN, first as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a town in the suburbs of San Salvador, then of the capital itself. (2015-2018).
Excluded from the FMLN in 2017, he appeared as a new and conquering face in 2019, promising the establishment of commissions to fight corruption and impunity. Organizations which only lasted six months after his election despite the slogan he likes to repeat: “there is money when no one steals it”.
But his presidential feat is the state of emergency imposed since March 2022, authorizing army patrols and arrests without warrant, to attack the maras.
President Nayib Bukele at Mejicanos, in Salvador, January 17, 2023 / Marvin RECINOS / AFP/Archives
Some 75,000 arrests later, he repeats having made El Salvador “the safest country in the world”, with the homicide rate plummeting from 106.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, then one of the highest in the world outside period of conflict, to 2.4 in 2023.
But his “war against gangs” leads to arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment, cases of torture and deaths in prison, according to human rights organizations.
“Why do we have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Because we have transformed the murder capital of the world,” Bukele said on Sunday. “And the only way to do that is to arrest all the murderers.”
