The frightening popularity of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele’s authoritarianism

12 comments

1. **From Adam Isacson, works on security and migration issues at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA):**

   Bukele is one of the more successful examples of the global wave of elected authoritarians eroding democratic norms. Few other practitioners of this authoritarian playbook are as popular at home. Not Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, not Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not Argentina’s Javier Milei, not Trump.

   But can this popularity last? Weakening El Salvador’s gangs was the easy part for Bukele. Though savagely brutal, by organized crime standards, El Salvador’s gangs are poor. Big cartels had kept them out of more lucrative criminal income streams, such as shipping cocaine and fentanyl internationally, or mining precious metals. Instead, MS-13 and Barrio 18 made money mostly by extorting and selling drugs to people in their own neighborhoods, which made them especially hated. But it also meant they didn’t have a lot of resources to take on the security forces or to corrupt the government from within. They were easy to knock down.

   Read more: [https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-popularity-gangs-rcna201335](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-popularity-gangs-rcna201335)

2. He turned el salvador from a criminal hellhole into one of the safest in latin america. Gee i wonder why its popular

3. An impressive 1.5% imprisonment rate going by the wiki of imprisonment rate. Hopefully by the end of his indeterminate term, he’ll double that number. As someone once said, “he who gives up someone else’s freedom for his own temporary security deserve both”. I’m sure I’m paraphrasing that quote correctly.

4. From the reports I have heard his policies have worked fantastically, at least in the short run. All done though means that Americans traditionally considered authoritarian and un-American. It’s a wake up call for western governments. I think unfortunately a benevolent authoritarian can accomplish a lot, it’s just authoritarians usually turn out not to be benevolent.

5. On one side, it’s definitely plausible to see why El Salvadorians are ready to accept the erosion of democratic standards, accepting Bukele’s authoritarianism. And as people would often point out, it’s easy for anyone to criticize them for choosing the morally wrong option for the sake of security, whilst never understanding the pain and terror those people would have faced due to the gang violence.

   But that is exactly the same circumstances that brought forth people like Hitler. People who had been backed into a corner with nothing to lose, and someone comes along and promises to fix their woes, and all they needed to do was accept one person as the ultimate authority in the land. It’s only later on during the reign of the dictator that shit hits the fan, from demonizing a sect of people to blame their woes onto, rampant destruction of freedoms, keeping the populace poorly educated, and enshrining corruption at every level of government for the sake of keeping the dictator and his cronies in power.

   Authoritarianism usually starts out with good intentions and results. If it was a disaster from the get-go, then nobody would accept a dictator in their early days. But as the saying goes, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”, and it has been proven right time and time again. I’ve no doubt that whoever the dictator is, absolute power will eventually end up destroying their perception and duty towards their population.

   Bukele is popular right now because he is the most recent example of a dictator rising up, and people are seeing the “good” that can be done when you don’t have a bureaucracy to wade through to take decisive action, including the thousands of innocent lives that have been saved as a result of the absence of bureaucracy.

   But bureaucracy exists not just to prevent good from happening. It also exists to ensure a fair and just process is followed that can be trusted upon for many years, after one leader gives their leadership away to the next.

   The case of Anders Behring Breivik comes to mind for me. Norway is sometimes criticised for letting such a monster who killed dozens of innocent children live, and live in such relative comfort compared to what good, hardworking, honest people around the world get. Breivik gets to appeal his sentence every so often to plead for an early release. During those plea hearings, he openly voices his hateful ideology to the world, which ends up with Norway unfortunately giving him exactly what he wants, a platform to spread his hate to the world. Norway gets criticised for that as well. But in the end, Norway refuses to change their legal system and their bureaucracy for one man, because changing it for one man would mean laws are subject to interpretation based on who the person being accused is. And that should never be the case.

   Bureaucracy isn’t perfect, such is democracy. Both are slow, frustrating, and inefficient. But we can trust in them to make decisions that ultimately, are in the spirit of moving their nation forward towards a better life for all their people.

6. No due process, frivolous Martial law, and the highest imprisonment rate while all under a dictator.

   No wonder he’s popular with conservatives.

7. Yeah I’m as much of a bleeding heart liberal as can be, but I think that trying to lump Bukele in with the Putin/trunp/Orban worldview is so stupid. Even if he turns out to be corrupt as sin, it’s clear as day that he’s got a popular mandate, based on a legitimate need for security, and frankly, he seems to be an able diplomat, getting the good graces of the US while he’s at it. Think about all the Latin American dictators you know, and tell me with a straight face that Bukele isn’t a positive development for his region.

8. After a war is over you’re supposed to free the prisoners. He should have to answer when the war will be over.

9. This should be called ‘the frightening reality of people enjoying their own safety’. Only the woke left can’t understand why this man is so popular in his own country

10. How would you expect a leader to fix El Salvador without a very strong hand? The results speak for themselves

11. A lot of these comments come across as pretty sheltered westerners. Bukele has turned a country that was crippled by violent crime into one of the safest countries in the western hemisphere. Call him authoritarian if you want, but a liberal approach would not have achieved these results, and if you lived in a country like that I imagine your opinion on this would be very different.

12. Whats with all the “its bc of the low crime rate” comments? The article notes that very early on…Do yall just comment before reading?

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