SAN SALVADOR, (AFP) – In his four years as president, Nayib Bukele has shaken up El Salvador: consolidating power, making Bitcoin legal tender and waging a “war” on gangs that’s earned him opprobrium from rights groups but adoration from a crime-fatigued nation.
As he gears up to contest a second term in February 2024, the 41-year-old president, who adopted the label “Dictator of El Salvador” in an ironic nod to critics, is basking in sky-high approval ratings.
Brushing aside two establishment parties to sweep to victory in 2019 elections, Bukele, who assumed office on June 1 of that year, stuck to his promise to tackle one of the world’s highest murder rates, jailing tens of thousands of suspected gang members.
To house them, he had the largest prison in the Americas built in a matter of months, a 40,000-person complex that more than doubled the country’s penitentiary capacity.
The murder rate plummeted.Bukele’s first year in office, the poverty-stricken Central American country had 38 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
In 2020, that number was less than eight. Bukele’s main achievement has been “security, the dismantling of gangs,” economist Carlos Acevedo, a former central bank president, told AFP.
This, in turn, “has really generated a new climate where we begin to see a revitalisation of the productive fabric of microenterprises.”
Small business owners, street vendors and residents alike celebrate their new-found freedom from drug-dealing gangs that demanded protection money and fought bloody turf battles.
Among them is Cristina Arevalo, who was forced to close her small shop on the outskirts of the capital San Salvador several years ago due to nonstop gang activity in her neighbourhood.
“With the security we are experiencing, I will soon reopen, because I will no longer be extorted,” she told AFP. Polls indicate that nine out of 10 Salvadorans support Bukele’s assault on gangs which formerly controlled 80 per cent of the country, according to the government.
On the other hand, rights groups, the United States and the United Nations have all expressed alarm about arbitrary arrests, inhumane prison conditions and growing authoritarianism in the country.
Shortly after taking office, Bukele ordered heavily armed police and soldiers to storm a then opposition-led Parliament to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to finance an anti-crime plan.
Bukele’s New Ideas party and its allies subsequently won a majority in the legislative assembly.
Parliament then replaced the five judges of the Supreme Court’s highest body, the Constitutional Chamber, and the attorney general – two institutions with which Bukele had clashed – as well as a third of all the country’s judges.
The refreshed Supreme Court later allowed Bukele to seek reelection despite the constitution’s single-term limit.
“The government and the president have everything they need for reelection, not only because of popular support, but also because they control the majority of the institutions”.
