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by For several decades, Central America has become closely associated with crime, political crisis, violence, and the control of drug cartels. However, one country has broken this trend with methods criticized as authoritarian by many international organizations. An election proved that the people don’t care.
An Election Watch Commentary by Abhinav Santhosh Nambeesan | Edited by Muskaan Mir
Research and Publications Division
Central America has been, for several decades, the hotspot of instability in the Western Hemisphere. Several countries—Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and others—have been plagued with civil wars, gang warfare, political instability, and the dominance of the various drug cartels of Latin America. They suffered, and in many cases continue to suffer, from horrific violence and crime, for which there seemed to be no solution. With the governments corrupt, parties incompetent, and the people under the submission of the cartels, the region looked likely to remain in this state of crisis for the foreseeable future.
A Brief History of El Salvador
Ever since¹ its independence in the 19th century, El Salvador had been racked with various issues, including external and internal wars, military rule, and foreign meddling, especially by the United States. The country had always been heavily dependent on agriculture, especially cash crops like indigo and coffee, which attracted a lot of business interests in the 19th and 20th centuries, including from the US. After it gained full independence and sovereignty in 1841, it continued to greatly rely on the export of cash crops, which enriched the upper echelons of society while the rest of the population remained dirt poor. The plantation elites dominated the country politically through the late 19th and early 20th century, till 1931, when the military regime of Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez came to power.
The country saw an almost unbroken string of military dictatorships, especially after the turmoil caused by a left-wing revolt caused “La Mantaza”² in 1932, which was brutally put down by the government, convincing the business elites that dictatorship was the only way to keep their power against left-wing forces. During this period of military rule that lasted well into the Cold War, American business interests were exceptionally influential in suppressing popular revolts due to fear of Soviet influence in the region, especially after the rise of Castro’s regime in Cuba. Meanwhile, it was in deep conflict with the neighbouring Honduras, with which it notably fought the ‘Football War,’ sparked by the qualifier matches for the 1970 FIFA World Cup.
The Civil War
Through the 1960s and 1970s, El Salvador was ruled by the military-aligned National Conciliation Party (PCN), and several elections held during this time were accused of being fraudulent, especially the 1977 presidential election. During this time, a left-wing guerilla force emerged known as the FMLN, standing against the right-wing authoritarian regime. They were mostly supported by the very poor lower classes who were tired of the rampant human rights abuses of the regime. The FMLN began to engage in guerilla warfare, and as support for them steadily increased, the Army intensified its own attempts to suppress it.
In 1979, the Salvadoran regime was overthrown in a military coup that placed a military junta in charge, triggering a civil war³ that raged on for more than a decade. The FMLN became the main anti-junta force; the country was torn apart by brutal fighting, with the government supported by the US as an attempt to prevent the radical left-wingers in the FMLN from taking over, as was the pattern in civil wars during the Cold War. As the war was fought, the army continued to dominate politics, using the need for security as an excuse for its abuses of power. At this time, a far-right party named the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) emerged, which, though opposed to the regime, comprised hard-right anti-communists who hated the FMLN as well.
In 1984, the Christian Democrats’ candidate Jose Napoleon Duarte won the presidential election, which, despite military rule, was considered rather free and fair. Despite his (unsuccessful) attempts to seek a truce with the FMLN, he lost the next election in 1989 to ARENA, which, at that point, had become more moderate, managing to achieve peace with the FMLN in 1992 and finally ending the civil war.
The whole conflict had truly decimated the country. The people had been roundly traumatized by government death squads, the killing of many democratic voices, and the destruction of the nation’s infrastructure. None of the issues of systemic inequalities and poverty that had created the FMLN insurgency in the first place had been resolved despite a transition to democracy. In particular, tens of thousands of children employed as child soldiers by both sides of the conflict were left deeply traumatized. Nevertheless, there was one issue in particular that emerged as the most severe problem created by the civil war.
Gang Warfare
El Salvador was already a country which had all the requirements for being a gang hub: a country with weak infrastructure, low social mobility, and most importantly, deep, systemic inequalities in society. The tinderbox was created by the civil war when almost half of the entire population migrated as refugees, with many fleeing north to the US. With their homeland in chaos, the very poor refugees, mostly in Los Angeles, began to come together to form gangs, which were chiefly made up of the children who fled the conflict. Two of these gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and its bitter rival Barrio 18 emerged in LA at the time, and came back to El Salvador when the US deported thousands of Salvadoran gang members.
In a country where poverty was extreme and widespread, and millions of people, especially children, had known nothing but violence, gangs spread swiftly and became some of the largest in the entire region. Despite Latin America being infamous for gang warfare, El Salvador was plagued by the phenomenon on another level; the nation became utterly consumed by gang violence.⁴ Performing tasks as simple as buying groceries could mean that one could just be shot dead for no reason at all. The homicide rate climbed to levels unseen anywhere in the world, with the exception of its neighbour, Honduras. With millions of young people without a hope of escaping poverty or their broken families, the situation became a perfect flash point for such senselessness.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, the political scene was dominated by two political parties: ARENA, and the demilitarized FMLN, which became a general left-wing party that won the presidential and legislative elections for the first time in 2009. Despite peace returning to the country, the two parties completely failed in their approaches to resolve issues in the face of poor infrastructure, economic inequality, and increasing gang warfare. Through the 2000s as well, the nation suffered from the worst homicide rate and brutal gang warfare, and the government took harsh measures such as indiscriminately imprisoning thousands, especially after a truce with the gangs collapsed in 2014. Despite enforcing heavy-handed policies, they saw little success, and the nation remained as what one could call a “failed state.”
The people of the country were looking for a savior. Then, he arrived.
Nayib Bukele and His Presidency
By the 2010s, El Salvador had become one of the most dangerous countries in the entire world, with gangs assuming control of many neighbourhoods in its cities, and the established political parties of the FMLN and ARENA being unable to deal with the problems of crime and poverty. In this environment, a young politician named Nayib Bukele⁵ emerged in the small town of Nuevo Cuscatlan, where his great success in virtually eliminating illiteracy, improving infrastructure and fighting violent crime propelled him into becoming mayor of the capital, San Salvador. He improved his public image by bringing huge investments into improving the city’s infrastructure and welfare services, and as he succeeded while the national government failed to tackle violent crime, he became a very strong candidate for the ultimate job: the presidency.
Bukele did not come from a family of politicians. Although his family was rich, he had started off in an advertising agency that served as the propaganda arm of the FMLN, and it was through that party that he entered politics. Through his time as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan and then San Salvador, he was no stranger to clashing with his party, as he continued to criticise and cite both mainstream parties as the reasons for the country’s failures.
Bukele was a different kind of politician—different from the incompetent, traditional, major parties. He portrayed himself as a fresh, young, “cool” politician with new ideas to tackle old problems. He largely avoided traditional news media, instead making use of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok where he directly advertised his policies and showed his progress at the local level. This made the public take to him.
Bukele clashed so much with his party, the FMLN, that just before the 2019 presidential elections, he was kicked out for insulting the party’s leader. However, at that point, he didn’t care; he was running for president, and he declared he didn’t need the traditional parties for that. He ran with a smaller party called GANA in the 2019 presidential election, where he called on the Salvadoran people to reject the establishment and vote for him and his new ideas. Nayib Bukele upended the political establishment by winning the presidential election with an outright majority, making him the first president from neither ARENA or the FMLN since 1989. As soon as he took power, it became clear that he would be in constant conflict with the two parties, since his own party had very few seats in the legislature, and he continued to criticize the major parties.
Conflict soon followed.
Bukele very quickly turned towards authoritarian tactics. He used his great populist appeal to continuously call out the major parties for stonewalling his plans, and the situation came to a head in February 2020. Bukele had a controversial plan to use what has been called “iron-fist” type policies to combat gang warfare—an approach which had been tried since the early 2000s, but which Bukele wanted to take even further. He immediately implemented his “territorial control plan,” which mobilized the police and military to take control of the most dangerous parts of the country—the first in a long series of measures. However, he soon encountered a roadblock.
Bukele wanted to heavily arm the police and military for his plan, funding for which would need to come from a legislature controlled by the two major parties. They, of course, did not approve, which led in Bukele calling a “special session” of the legislature, which was constitutionally only supposed to be done in extraordinary circumstances.
Thousands of people surrounded the legislative building, supporting the president who had a 90% approval rating; as legislators didn’t even turn up, he and the military occupied the building in a show of force⁶. While the international community had already been apprehensive, this was further alarming.
The situation soon dissipated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the president used to bring in a state of emergency that, despite the legislature refusing to extend it, and the constitutional court declaring it to be unconstitutional, the government continued to enforce anyway. The state of emergency was enacted in a heavy-handed manner by the government, and it continued to stoke fears about Bukele’s authoritarianism.
The legislative elections in 2021 solidified this, as his new party, Nuevas Ideas, won a large majority and gave him unprecedented powers. He used his majority to dismiss all the judges on the constitutional court along with the Attorney General—effectively eliminating the last checks on his power. Bukele seemed to not care about what the world thought; he literally called himself the “coolest dictator in the world.”⁷
While his authoritarianism was already apparent, it reached new heights in 2022. March of that year saw a sudden and massive spike in gang murders, which led Bukele to unleash his territorial control plan with full force. “A state of exception” was imposed and the government commenced a massive spree of arrests, detaining more than 50,000 people⁸ in just a few months in the name of suspicions of gang membership. This state of exception was supposed to last a short time, but it continues to this day. The government still employs extrajudicial powers to arrest and indefinitely detain thousands, while Bukele proudly shows off the achievements of his ‘cool dictatorship.’
The government has treated the tens of thousands of suspected gang members as terrorists, unveiling an infamous “mega-prison”⁹ where human rights have reportedly been completely ignored. The police and military continue to have unchecked power to arrest and detain anyone they want for suspicion of gang activity, but surprisingly, the people do not care about the loss of their rights.
What did the election show?
Bukele ran for re-election for the February 2024 contest despite the constitution actually barring¹⁰ any president from serving two consecutive terms. It was a violation of the constitution, but it wasn’t a problem for the self-proclaimed “coolest dictator” since he was extraordinarily popular among the people. Whatever international organizations said, the people only cared about one thing—crime—and they were desperate for anything to solve it. In a country where they could be shot for walking outside and their children could be kidnapped and killed indiscriminately, voters didn’t really care much about separation of powers or democratic backsliding. Their dictator was very good at dealing with crime, and they were proud of it.
The crime rate in El Salvador plummeted massively¹¹ after Bukele’s crackdown, and even if the government may be undercounting the numbers, rates of violent crime have undoubtedly declined, and the people have felt it. For the first time in decades, it is simply possible to exist without being in mortal danger all the time—to go to clubs, playgrounds, school, and offices without needing to prepare a last will and testament. For Salvadorans, nothing could bring more happiness than that, and they didn’t care how it was done. In fact, they wanted more.
ARENA and FMLN, now firmly pushed to the side in what has become a one-party state, knew they stood absolutely no chance against Bukele in the 2024 election. The man with a 90% approval rating was simply unbeatable, and the result showed it.
On 4th February 2024, Salvadorans went to the polls¹², and 84% of them cast their vote for their dictator. It is not that there was some mass fraud; Bukele is genuinely that popular. Nuevas Ideas also won a supermajority in the legislature, eliminating even that thin check on his power that existed.
Nayib Bukele has served as a model for ambitious leaders across crime-ridden Latin America. It is possible, by sacrificing democracy and the rule of law, to virtually eliminate organized crime, and to become extraordinarily popular as a result. Whether that sacrifice should be made is a question for every country to answer.
Characteristic of its foreign policy, India has remained strategically silent on the issue of democratic backsliding in El Salvador, and has engaged with Bukele’s government for cooperation on issues of trade, technology and infrastructural development. As in the rest of Latin America, India’s ambition is to act as a developmental partner for those countries looking aside from the US or China. China has been making many moves in the region, and to be in lockstep with its rival, India has done so as well. In August last year itself, India and El Salvador signed a Memorandum of Understanding¹³ to promote better technological cooperation and cyber security. This has shown that despite concerns over democracy, India remains as a player there, and is ready to invest to shore up its global position.
References
“El Salvador profile-Timeline.” BBC, 16th May 2018.
“Jan. 22, 1932: La Mantaza (“The Massacre”) Begins in El Salvador.” Zinn Education Project.
“Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992)” American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Garsd, Jasmine, “How El Salvador Fell Into A Web of Gang Violence.” NPR, 5th October 2015.
“How Nayib Bukele is becoming ‘the world’s coolest dictator’.” Directorio Legislativo.
Brigida, Anna-Cat, “Constitutional Crisis in El Salvador over Bukele’s security plan.” Al Jazeera, 10th February 2020.
“Fears for democracy in El Salvador after president claims to be ‘coolest dictator’.” The Guardian, 21st September 2021.
Aleman, Marcos, “El Salvador extends state of exception; 50,000 arrested.” Associated Press, 17th August 2022.
Ventas, Leire, “Coming face to face with inmates in El Salvador’s mega-jail.” BBC News, 15th February 2024.
“Despite prohibition, El Salvador President Bukele will seek re-election.” Reuters, 16th September 2022.
Aleman, Marcos; Janetsky, Megan; “El Salvador’s Bukele wins supermajority in Congress after painstaking vote count.” Associated Press, 20th February 2024.
Siddiqui, Huma, “India Launches Key Projects in El Salvador and Engages with Guatemala.” Financial Express, 23rd August 2024.
“El Salvador says murders fell 70% in 2023 as it cracked down on gangs.” Reuters, 4th January 2024.
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