Why are the adventures of an authoritarian named Nayib Bukele important?

In early February, a minor figure on the Latin American scene, the controversial President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, arrived in Washington without warning. The visit produced curiosity. No official in Joe Biden’s new administration, even at the lower levels of the administration, received it. He had to defend himself against the embarrassment by arguing that it was a private trip and that he had not requested the interviews.

In the White House’s reaction, it is unlikely that the close and even brotherly connection that the authoritarian 39-year-old President of Central America has established with the former administration of Donald Trump, which, we recall, is far from mutual affection described El Salvador as “a crappy country.” But since Bukele adhered to the Republican plan to contain immigration that drove reaching the United States, with the controversial “third country” program to retain people in refugee claims the mogul returned the gesture, ignoring the populist excesses of his young colleague.

Biden, on the other hand, has sought to show with his rudeness that things have changed and, most importantly, to do so under the current US administration’s urgency to overestimate its humanitarian concerns in the effort to regain global leadership. lost in recent years. At least in the region.

Miguel Vivanco, from Human Rigths Watch, put it in simple words. The White House “shows that the behavior of human rights, corruption and failure to respect the rule of law have consequences for the bilateral relationship.” And remarks to clarify the new command: “Biden makes it clear that bilateral relations must be based on the fight against corruption, respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law.”

The case of Bukele and his echoing visit may be an anecdote, but far from this impression, it serves to understand other more complex processes. A few years ago, the International Monetary Fund changed its internal policies with the approval of the so-called Framework for enhanced engagement on governance, a regulatory framework built to take into account the institutional situations of the countries, beyond the economic variables that the organization observes exclusively.

In announcing this new program, the organization stressed that the intention “is to promote a more systematic, effective, sincere and equitable engagement with member countries with regarding governance vulnerabilities, including corruption, considered critical from a macroeconomic point of view ”.

What worries, in reality, is the certainty that abuses of institutions, corruption are part of it, end up producing unpredictable scenarios and anti-systemic leadership worse than those they leave behind. The cases of Nicaragua and Venezuela are paradigmatic. Interestingly, this look at the institutional behavior of governments is deepening now, when Biden’s Minister of Economics Janet Louise Yellen holds the IMF key to the United States’ decisive weight in the organization. .

It is this official who, amid the current economic chaos caused by the pandemic, must begin an extraordinary issue of 500 billion dollars of special drawing rights, the currency of the fund which is established with a basket of coins. It’s a complex but possible step that we already discussed in this column last January (Joe Biden, President: Age of Restoration?) And one that is critical to alleviating the crisis in the south of the globe. The episode with Bukele states what will be the conditions to enter this distribution.

There is more to observe in the long-suffering Salvadoran region. This controversial president, despite or perhaps because of his authoritarian tendencies, displays an extraordinary popularity which is around 85% and has campaigned well received by the people, precisely with the pipe to end corruption. In a few days, on April 1, he will begin the second part of his administration with full control of Congress, which will allow him to advance on the three powers, to elect the new attorney general, a substantial part of the judges of the Supreme Court. and the human rights defender, in addition to suspending constitutional guarantees without having to negotiate with the opposition.

He is thus able to relieve all those who have criticized the abusive actions of his government. In particular, in the fight against Covid, in which he had notable success, but at the cost of extreme measures and barbaric violations like those in Argentina questioning the governor of Formosa Guido Insfran. With unjustified arrests and the action of the military thrown in the streets to suppress attentive to tweets with instructions that the president constantly shoots.

Indeed, like the presidential elections which surprisingly brought him to power in 2019, Bukele has just won the legislative elections at the start of the month with overwhelming differences, at the head of his party. New ideas, which is run by a cousin. An interesting and didactic fact to observe from other borders: This victory brought down Salvadoran bipartisanship. The right wing of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and the nationalist left of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), they have shared control of the country for thirty years, after the peace accords that ended more than a decade of internal warfare. In this endogamous system, they admitted all kinds of outbursts of corruption and inefficiency, as in Venezuela of the “puntofijismo” between Adecos and Copeyanos, a melting pot that ended up giving birth to the Chavist phenomenon.

In El Salvador, these “traditional” forces are now struggling against a minority fragility and a thorny fate. Consequence of the people fed up, a situation that careless leaders are often blind to until history abandons them. This happened in Chile with the uprising against inequalities and the constitution of Pinochet. And it happened in Bolivia, even if the opposite is said, with the popular rebellion against the perpetuation of Evo Morales.

Bukele knew how to take advantage of this steeply tilted scene. “The men these parties elected to rule our peace have plundered this country by the handful. They have affected our peace for years, ”writes the brilliant Salvadoran colleague Óscar Martínez in The New York Times on the failed experiment of bipartisanship. He refers to former presidents Francisco Flores and Elías Antonio Saca, of ARENA, and Mauricio Funes of FMLN.

Flores died in 2016 before being tried for embezzling $ 15 million in Taiwanese donations. And Saca has been in prison since 2018 after confessing to embezzling more than $ 300 million from the state budget. Funes is in asylum in Nicaragua (along with Chavista Venezuela, the FMLN’s other ally) and faces several criminal proceedings for embezzling more than $ 351 million in public funds. By the way, Latin American “progress” has been careful to avoid reporting these three cases under the fashionable alibi of “lawfare”.

“Bukelism is in any case the tragic outcome of an imperfect two-party system … a system incapable of solving the problems that most afflict Salvadorans, namely poverty, inequalities and violence, ”he explains in The Washington Post El Salvador-based Spanish journalist and writer Roberto Valencia. Violence, precisely, is a point in favor of Bukele who has succeeded in reducing the savage attacks of mara gangs to unprecedented levels but with his typical authoritarian methods.

El del Salvador is a formidable shattered mirror where many governments in the region should look at each other. It is a film that interprets them. With its parable, the Central American country makes it clear to the monsters that abuse eventually sprouts. Bukele, an independent businessman who was once a member of the FMLN and was the mayor of the capital, has amassed enough political power to carry on. He’s another king in the making. And experience the same vices he condemned.

In February last year, after several weeks of discussions with MPs over legislative authorization to negotiate a $ 109 million loan for his security plan, Bukele, as Tejero transplanted from Spain, He invaded the Legislative Assembly with 5,000 worshipers, military and police, and within the compound he prayed surrounded by guns. “He came out and said that God had just spoken to him and asked him for patience,” journalist Martínez said. That is, God asked him not to pursue his plan to dismantle the Legislature. Even during the Salvadoran civil war, the military did not take control of the Assembly ”.

The description is completed by his colleague Valence: “Bukele has authoritarian delusions, is militarist and does not tolerate independent journalism. In less than two years, his government has accumulated accusations of corruption, nepotism, questionable economic management and non-respect for human rights, ”he wrote. Synthesis of deformations that come and go, much further from the crushed borders of El Salvador.
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