Democracy Is Under Siege in El Salvador. Biden Needs to Speak Up.
The man who has referred to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” appears to be strolling toward another election victory. President Nayib Bukele, a millennial who sports a trademark backward-facing baseball cap, is the odds-on favorite to win El Salvador’s presidential contest on Feb. 4.
The fact that Bukele’s campaign violates a constitutional ban on consecutive presidential terms is just one reflection of his brash disregard for the rule of law. Before he has a chance to strengthen his autocratic grip on power, the Biden administration and other world governments must speak out and denounce his assault on democracy.
Late last year, more than four years into Bukele’s reign, one of us joined a fact-finding delegation to this Massachusetts-sized country of 6.3 million. We already knew that in the name of fighting crime, Bukele had pressed the national legislature every month since March 2022 to pass a “state of exception,” suspending such constitutionally guaranteed rights as freedom of association and assembly, the right to know why you have been arrested, and the right to be brought before a judge within 72 hours.
We knew that Bukele’s police and military had used this sweeping authority to arrest over 71,000 people, including five water defenders who became heroes around the world for a successful campaign to make El Salvador the first nation to ban toxic metals mining to save the country’s rivers. We knew that the small country is now home to the Americas’ largest prison.
And we knew that the Biden administration and many members of Congress, led by Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), had been quite critical of these violations of the rule of law and of human rights, and that U.S. lawmakers had protested Bukele adopting Bitcoin as legal tender (along with the dollar), since cryptocurrencies facilitate money laundering.
Yet what shocked us on the ground in El Salvador—as we detail in a new report, State of Deception—was the cruelty and corruption of this regime.
Originally in Newsweek.
