Interesting piece by Geoff Shullenberger about the reign of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, most famous for suspending the constitution to jail all the country's gang members. Bukele is descended from Christian Palestinians and came into politics through the left-wing FMLN party. He was expelled from the FMLN in 2017 and founded his own party, New Ideas. He ran for president in 2019 and won; most observers thought his victory was due to the nation's exhaustion with the older parties of the left and right, which had alternated in power since the end of the Civil War and seemed incapable of improving the economy or controlling the violence that made El Salvador the murder capital of the world.
Under Bukele violence went down some and the economy was pretty good; people say, although this has never been proved, that he reduced crime by cutting some kind of deal with El Salvador's powerful gangs. Then in March, 2022, Bukele announced a state of emergency and his government launched a nationwide program of mass arrests, jailing 70,000 to 75,000 people they accused of being involved with the gangs. Human rights groups screamed, and even Bukele's supporters admit that thousands of innocent people were jailed, but violent crime fell by 50%, dozens of neighborhoods were freed from gang rule, and Bukele instantly became the most beloved leader in the world. He ran for an unconstitutional second term this year, and on February 4 won 80% of the vote in an election most observers think was pretty fair.
Shullenberger is ambivalent about this, as I think most outsiders are. I mean, violent crime isn't much of a problem in North Korea, either. But Bukele is not just a thug, and he cannot really be classified as a conservative. Among other things, Bukele spends a lot of time denouncing outside interference in El Salvador, and blaming its problems on the Americans:
He summarized the last four or five decades as an unbroken string of violations of Salvadoran sovereignty, mainly by the United States. First came the civil war, an “international war” that made El Salvador “one battlefield more” between foreign powers; then, the 1992 peace accords—“another of the tricks we’ve been subjected to in our history,” which “brought no peace,” only new forms of violence; then, the deportation of gang members from the United States, prompting new generations to flee. The same story, again and again: a population subjected to unending brutality by external forces, all due to a lack of sovereignty and self-determination. “From now on, we will build our own destiny,” Bukele declared.Bukele sometimes talks like a socialist, arguing that
the power exerted by gangs amounted to an acutely oppressive form of neoliberal privatization of public space, in which those who couldn’t afford walled compounds and private guards found their lives dictated by the whims of organized crime.
Shullenberger:
I asked the Honduran-Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, known for his paranoid, darkly hilarious novels about the region, what he made of the young president’s rise. He replied with a simple point that is often overlooked: “Bukele’s popularity is not the product of having defeated the gangs.” That happened in 2022, well after he had crushed the opposition, first in the 2019 presidential elections and then in the 2021 legislative elections, and consolidated the institutions of state power in support of his agenda. In this sense, it was his popularity that enabled the defeat of the gangs, not the other way around. It is hard to imagine the apparent lockstep loyalty of state institutions would be what it is today without the public support behind the president’s projects, and without many within them being believers in the project they are undertaking.
In Castellanos Moya’s account, Salvadorans coalesced around Bukele because they were “hypnotized by the promise of the new” the young leader embodied. In other words, it was the imaginative capture of the public by Bukele’s charismatic appeals that enabled the institutional capture. It is an argument one would expect from a novelist: Power over the imagination precedes political power and makes it possible. But I found this conclusion hard to dispute. . .
“Terror is the given of the place,” Didion wrote of El Salvador in 1982. Castellanos Moya told me something similar: “The form of social domination in El Salvador throughout time has been terror: The army, the security forces, the guerrillas and the gangs have been the instruments of that form of domination.” Today, terror no longer haunts the streets of central San Salvador, but it hasn’t been eliminated altogether, merely relocated and concentrated, as the glossy videos of the Terrorism Confinement Center (capacity: 40,000) make clear.
To Shullenberger, the case of Bukele is among other things a parable about how populist third parties come to power, and what people want from government: freedom from violence, and a positive vision for the future. Shullenberger says Bukele's only weakness seems to be the economy, which is ok but nothing like the modernizing transformation he has promised. But if growth does take off, Bukele could easily keep winning unconstitutional elections for decades.
2 comments:
When the French Revolution led to chaos, violence, hunger, and fear, the French people flocked to Napoleon despite having overthrown the absolutist monarchy only ten years prior.
They had wanted a republic, but when that couldn't be made to work, they were willing to settle for a military junta (and later emperorship). Why? Because even the most devoted opponents of the idea of monarchy were still willing to compromise their ideals if it meant achieving a functioning government and society, rather than the previous turmoil and dysfunction.
Like Bukele, Napoleon wasn't just a thug, and he couldn't really be classified as conservative a conservative.
Like Bukele, Napoleon could point to abuses at the hands of other countries as one of the major causes of his nation's suffering in the prior decades, and rallied his people around the desire for sovereignty and self-determination.
Like Bukele, Napoleon sometimes "talked like a socialist" - or at least, he talked like the Liberals of his time who were the predecessors of socalism - despite employing authoritarian tactics to achieve his ends.
Like Bukele, Napoleon was primarily able to improve conditions in France because of his astounding popularity, rather than gaining his popularity from being able to improve conditions.
And like Bukele, Napoleon's appeal was the promise of an end to Terror (or at least, the relocation and concentration of it to his own jails).
People will accept an awful lot of injustice if you can offer them sufficient stability after long periods of crisis and uncertainty.
It's a huge part of why Putin's Russia is the way it is, after The West was reticent to spend money of foreign aid to stabilize the former Soviet economic and political sphere. It's a huge part of why the Chinese population flocked to Mao's banner after decades of rule by local warlords and Imperial Japanese conquerors. It's a huge part of why the Iranians embraced a radical theocracy rather than continue to suffer under the autocratic Shah. Etc, etc.
When people live in desperation, principles and ideals of all kinds get sacrificed in the pursuit of stability and security. It's just a fact of humanity, shown time and again through history.
@G-the parallel to Napoleon is very interesting.
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