On El Salvador and other Latin American states
Editor’s Note: In the current issue of National Review, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger called “Latin America: A Brisk Political Tour.” This week, Mr. Nordlinger elaborates in a series. For Parts I and II of the series, go here and here.
At the end of my installment yesterday, I touched on Bolivia. Evo Morales, who was president of that country from 2006 to 2019, is trying to make a comeback. He is hoping to return to power in elections scheduled for August. Morales is a chavista, one of the South American leaders who have followed in the footsteps of Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. Morales is idolized by his followers, as Chávez, Che Guevara, and others have been by similar followers.
My last line yesterday was: “Tomorrow, we will continue with more dictators, democrats — and those in between.”
Sometimes, the line between a dictator and a democrat — especially a populist democrat — is fine. We could talk further about Morales. But consider Dési Bouterse, who died last December at 79. He was dictator of Suriname from 1980 to 1987. In the manner of such rulers, he had dissidents tortured and killed. Later, in another phase of the country’s politics, he founded — get this — the National Democratic Party. He was a populist sensation — and won two presidential elections. Failing in a third attempt, he stepped aside. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years — but never served a day.
Was Dési Bouterse a dictator or a democrat? The answer, possibly, is yes.
• In El Salvador, the president has described himself as “the coolest dictator in the world.” He did so in his Twitter bio, in 2021. His current bio, in that same space, reads “Philosopher King.” In any case, he is Nayib Bukele, first elected in 2019, with 53 percent of the vote.
His father, Armando Bukele, was of Palestinian origin and became an imam. He founded several mosques in El Salvador. Nayib has brothers named “Karim,” “Yusef,” and “Ibrajim.” The ethnic and religious variety in Latin America is enormous.
Nayib Bukele belonged to the FMLN, the political party that grew from leftist guerrillas. In 2017, he founded his own party, Nuevas Ideas. This party dominates the legislature. Bukele and his confrères have effected sweeping constitutional changes, all to the benefit of the leader. His mode of governance is known as “bukelismo.”
A taste of him can be had in this report from the Associated Press, dated July 8, 2024. It begins,
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, famous for his heavy-handed crackdown on street gangs, threatened to use similar tactics against price gougers.
Since 2022, Bukele has rounded up tens of thousands of suspected street-gang members — often on little evidence — and filmed them being frog-marched in their underwear though vast new prisons.
In a speech late Friday, he threatened to use the same tactics on wholesalers and distributors whom he blamed for a recent steep rise in the prices for food items and other basic goods.
Said the president, “I am going to issue a call, like we did to the gangs at the start of 2019. We told them: ‘Either stop killing people, or don’t complain about what happens afterward.’ Well, I’m going to issue a message to the importers, distributors, and food wholesalers: Stop abusing the people of El Salvador, or don’t complain about what happens afterward.”
The president added, “We are not playing around. I expect the prices to come down by tomorrow or there are going to be problems.”
That is what you might call commanding the economy.
For years — decades — El Salvador was plagued by gang violence. Bukele cracked down. For three years — since March 2022 — he has governed with “emergency” powers. “Emergency” powers have a way of becoming permanent, all over the world.
Bukele has detained approximately 85,000 people. Some are guilty, the worst of the worst. Others are different — very different. More than 350 people have died in detention. Civil libertarians are appalled.
A headline from NBC News, appearing on February 4, gives you a taste of current events: “Rubio touts Bukele’s ‘generous’ offer to jail U.S. citizens in El Salvador, but experts say it’s illegal.” (“Rubio,” of course, is President Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio.)
On February 23, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal columnist who concentrates on the Americas, wrote that El Salvador has “become one of the least free countries in the region.” A paragraph from her column:
In February 2020, less than a year after he took office, Mr. Bukele brought soldiers in battle gear with assault rifles into the Legislative Assembly to intimidate opposition parties when they challenged an executive loan proposal. In May 2021, immediately after his party won control of the legislature, he fired and forcibly removed the Constitutional Court and replaced it with his own handpicked judges.
Moreover,
a new law makes media investigations not approved by the state punishable by a fine or jail time. For Bukele political opponents, silence is survival. There have been arrest quotas and police carry out personal vendettas. Most of the detained never learn what they’re accused of or the identity of their accusers. Under the law up to 900 people can be convicted in a single trial.
One more paragraph:
Some 8,000 Bukele prisoners have been released after captivity of as much as a year because they were so obviously innocent that their cases embarrassed the regime. Their stories are gruesome. A 2023 State Department human-rights report on El Salvador found “credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention” and “serious problems with the independence of the judiciary.” This could be Cuba.
Yes. Know this, too: Bukele is wildly popular. He has smashed crime. Last year, he was elected with 85 percent of the vote.
Here is a question for my fellow liberal democrats: Would you have voted for Nayib Bukele in 2019? Maybe, maybe not. Would you have voted for him again in 2024? Probably not. But . . .
The consequences of Bukele’s rule could reverberate in El Salvador for many years to come — reverberate negatively. Mothers may be wailing about the “disappeared,” as in Argentina. A terrible, as well as an interesting, case, El Salvador.
• Move back to the northern tier of South America, where Guyana sits west of Suriname. Neither one of those countries is Latin American, by a strict definition. Guyana was first a Dutch colony, then a British colony; Suriname was a Dutch colony (except in brief periods of British control). In neither country are Romance languages spoken. Be that as it may . . .
Guyana has long been a very poor country. But now it is becoming a “Gulf state,” as one observer puts it to me. In 2015, ExxonMobil found oil — lots of it. “Guyana is sitting on a jackpot of liquid gold,” read the opening sentence of a piece by William Mao in the Harvard International Review (September 27, 2023). Life is changing for Guyana’s population: 800,000 strong. But will they suffer from the “resource curse,” as some countries have? Will the jackpot turn out to be a mixed blessing, or no blessing at all? Students of these matters are keeping an eye on Guyana.
Tomorrow, we will continue our series with two big states: Argentina and Brazil.
If you would like to receive Impromptus by e-mail — links to new columns — write to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com.