Nayib Bukele's power grab in El Salvador

[Judi Lynn]

A young president is weakening democratic institutions and empowering his family

The Americas
May 7th 2020 edition

On march 13th Carlos Henríquez Cortez returned to El Salvador from a two-day business trip in Guatemala. The 67-year-old engineer planned to quarantine at home. He knew that, to control the spread of covid-19, the government was holding returning travellers and visitors in “containment centres”. The elderly were exempt, or so Mr Henríquez thought. Airport guards detained him anyway. His containment centre had no toilet paper or space for social distancing, he told his wife. Mr Henríquez developed a fever. Authorities told him he could not have covid-19 because no cases had been reported in Guatemala. In hospital he tested positive for the disease. He died on April 22nd.

Mr Henríquez was a casualty of El Salvador’s lockdown, which is among the strictest in the world. The 2,394 Salvadoreans detained since April 6th for violating quarantine have faced 30 days of confinement. Other countries, such as Peru, Panama and Russia, detain violators for up to 48 hours. The architect of El Salvador’s measures is Nayib Bukele, the country’s 38-year-old president. He claims that his draconian lockdown is the only way to protect Salvadoreans from the pandemic. His critics think he is using the crisis to destroy the institutions that upheld democracy since the end in 1992 of a ruinous civil war.

Mr Bukele, a law-school dropout who spent much of his 20s managing nightclubs in which his family had invested, has a bond with El Salvador’s poor but aspirational youth. He seldom wears a suit and tweeted every 25 minutes on average during April. As mayor of San Salvador, the country’s capital, he rebuilt the city’s central squares. That wrested control from gangs, he claimed. In last year’s election campaign he fulminated against the corrupt rule of the two parties that have alternated in power since the war, the left-wing fmln (to which he once belonged) and the right-wing Arena party.

Emigration from El Salvador has dropped since Mr Bukele became president. That may be in part because Salvadoreans expect him to reduce the crime and poverty that have driven many abroad. Four-fifths approve of his handling of the pandemic. His New Ideas party looks set to win big in legislative elections, which are due in February 2021.

But Mr Bukele does not seem content to govern through ordinary democratic means. The first warning was what Salvadoreans call “9f” (for February 9th). At loggerheads with the Legislative Assembly, which is still dominated by the fmln and Arena, over financing for his security programme, Mr Bukele entered the chamber with gun-toting soldiers and sat in the speaker’s chair. Covid-19 emboldened the president further. When the Supreme Court issued rulings, starting in March, that he could not enact his quarantine without permission from the legislature, Mr Bukele pressed ahead. Salvadorean lives matter more than the opinions of “five people”, he tweeted. This week the legislature belatedly gave him the authorisation.

More:
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2020/05/07/nayib-bukeles-power-grab-in-el-salvador