Is Democracy Under Attack in El Salvador?
You can call Nayib Bukle many things, but you can’t call him boring. The 40 year old populist president, who rocked the political establishment when his “New Ideas” party received the overwhelming majority of votes in 2019, is incredibly popular — with approval ratings above 90%. He gained even more popularity when he responded swiftly and assertively to the pandemic, sending laptops to rural villages so they could work remotely and quickly acting to secure enough vaccines, making them available here before many European nations (El Salvador is even donating extra vaccines to its Central American neighbors). His ability to mobilize resources quickly and cut out unnecessary bureaucracy is the type of leadership most Salvadorans crave.
But outside of El Salvador’s borders, he is the target of heavy criticism from the Western media, and even the White House. The list of accusations is long and wide ranging. There are the more petty complaints on his unconventional, iconoclastic, and sometimes combative style — he takes selfies before speeches at important events, goes after his political opponents on social media, and even posted a video of police humiliating convicted gang members in an attempt to demonstrate his zero tolerance policy for crime. But there are also more serious accusations that he is overturning many of the democratic institutions in the country in an attempt to consolidate power — he has removed judges, attempted to change constitutional rules to create longer term limits, and his party now has an overwhelming majority in the legislature which they can use to pass further changes.
His supporters do not seem to mind. The overthrowing of institutions to pass a specific agenda is not a problem to most people if they agree with that agenda. A taxi driver told me there is a popular phrase here amongst Bukele supporters: “Nunca nadie nos había dado nada” or “No one has ever given us anything before”. The direct payments, laptops, and aid the Bukele administration has provided are enough to win their vote. But the international community is not convinced. They fear that El Salvador is sliding away from democracy and that Bukele is a classic Central American dictator who needs his power checked.
The US in particular has taken notice. As the dominant economy on this side of the world, and the issuer of El Salvador’s currency (El Salvador has used the US dollar since 2001), the US has significant soft and hard power to use if they want Bukele to fall in line, and they have a long history of not being afraid to intervene, specifically in this region (in my previous blog I discussed the US’ role in funding the El Salvador civil war).
While Bukele claims that his attempts to grow the economy will curb illegal immigration at the US border by creating more economic opportunity for his people, Joe Biden’s administration has been far from helpful. In February of 2021 while in Washington, Bukele requested to meet with President Biden and was turned down. In May, the US State Department declared key allies to President Bukele were ‘corrupt’ and key US politicians condemned his removal of constitutional court judges. Kamala Harris’ trip to Central America was short on details on how the US could help, as she simply ordered potential migrants: “Do not come.”
The point here is this “international criticism” is not just hypothetical. The US and other dominant powers have, and can, use economic sanctions or physical violence to cripple El Salvador and force Bukele to govern his country in a way that is more acceptable to them. Further, El Salvador has little leverage in the international community and is heavily dependent on outside financing. This opens up a whole debate on whether this sort of intervention is just, even if it is for the benefit of El Salvador’s people.
Bukele has made his position clear. He has tweeted to his ‘friends in the international community’ who were concerned about his removal of judges that [translated] “We want to work with you, trade, travel, get to know each other and help in any way we can…but with all due respect: we are cleaning our house…and that is none of your business.”
Bukele’s short reign in El Salvador reminds me very much of Paul Kagame’s regime in Rwanda. Both have out-of-the-box, charismatic leaders who have bold ideas and broad support from their people, yet receive scorn from international governance bodies and human rights organizations. I have been interested in Rwanda for years and when I went to visit, I wrote this profile of the country. In it, I talk about the blurry lines between dictatorship and democracy. In the US, we like to paint these lines very simply…democracy = good; dictatorship = bad. But really it is more of a spectrum.
The advantages of a democracy are numerous, but one of the disadvantages is the inability to make change happen quickly. In the United States, we have approached a period of “institutional sclerosis”, as the economist and social scientist Mancur Olson put it, because our systems have so many checks and balances it is difficult to get anything done. We can’t reform healthcare or pass the bold action needed to address the climate crisis. In contrast, smaller countries with less robust institutions can act more quickly and put innovative policies in place to “leapfrog” the unnecessary steps.
The tradeoff of having strong institutions is usually considered worth it in countries like the US which are already rich. But in countries where the majority of the people are suffering daily from extreme poverty, a 100% democracy is not always preferred or advised. In the case of Rwanda, the 1994 genocide left the country desperate. Kagame, who took power after the genocide and has governed it strongly ever since, has been able to get things done to transform the country that we would never be able to imagine in a country closer towards the democracy side of the spectrum. In 2019, I wrote:
“People consider themselves happier and better off each year. Access to healthcare has skyrocketed along with primary school enrollment and foreign investment. Universal healthcare is provided to anyone that pays the fee of around $3 USD per year. Rwanda has a higher percentage of women in government than any other nation in the world (64% of Parliament seats in 2018). Kigali, the capital city, is one of the cleanest in the world due to strict anti-littering laws. On the morning of the last Saturday of every month, the entire nation of Rwanda does community service together. There are mandatory “no car days” to encourage exercise and healthy lifestyles.”
When I was preparing for my Truman scholarship interview and offered similar sentiments to the ones above, the team tasked to prepare me for the interview responded, “We get what you are saying, but you can’t really say that in the interview…” Taking a nuanced view on democracy in the West is not popular. But while Paul Kagame and Nayib Bukele are mostly hated by the Western media, they are adored within their countries, and enjoy two of the highest approval ratings of any two presidents in the world.
Having said all this, I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush. My experience talking to locals here so far has been quite different from in Rwanda. In Rwanda, at least in my experience, I found pretty much nothing but genuine admiration for Kagame from local Rwandans. Most of the international hate towards Kagame, they said, comes from Western misconceptions. Meanwhile here, I have already met quite a few Salvadorans with very serious concerns on Bukele’s consolidation of power and dictator-like tendencies. It might just be a sampling error, but I have encountered far more outspoken critics than fans. They said Bukele is a master marketer (before politics, he was an advertising executive) who has completely duped the majority of the population so he can amass as much power as possible.
I even brought up my experience in Rwanda with some people, and after some discussion on the major differences, we came to the conclusion that the biggest one was probably that El Salvador already had functioning democratic institutions when Bukele came into power, and him undermining them has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Sure, there were a lot of corruption and governance issues before, but it also wasn’t a genocidal state like Rwanda. Also, Bukele has only been in power for two years, so any benefits people are seeing have been short lived and are not guaranteed to be sustainable, especially the drop in crime rates.
So while certainly parallels exist between Rwanda and El Salvador, they are two entirely different situations with different socio-political contexts on opposite sides of the world. The streets of San Salvador look nothing like Kigali. Given I haven’t been to many Central American cities, the closest thing I can compare it to is Lusaka, Zambia. It is a chaotic metropolis where everything is being sold all at once. Listen closely and you can hear the sing-songy voice of someone selling the product you need. Outside of the informal markets near the city center, much larger buildings rise up from the capital city’s business districts. The manufacturing plants, telecommunications companies, energy plants, and banks found there are essentially the only big business to be found in this tiny country, and thus a huge portion of people from all over the country commute daily (often up to 2–3 hours each way) to work. As the cars and buses converge on San Salvador from all sides, essentially the entire country is in one big traffic jam. The lack of infrastructure and a coherent public transportation system do not help the cause.
El Salvador is clearly a country still in poverty, and typically countries in poverty play nice with the rest of the world so they can get financial support. But Nayib Bukele is not your typical president. Someone I met who works in the finance sector here said that people are getting uneasy about having their money in El Salvador because of the uncertainty tied to the Bukele administration. El Salvador’s bonds have taken a dive as investors fear his whims. Potential economic sanctions from powerful nations and potential backlash from the IMF loom. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s currency (USD) is being rapidly devalued by the US printing money throughout the pandemic, but none of the benefits of that printing are being seen by El Salvador. This causes a further cycle of poverty, forcing more Salvadorans to flee the country for the US border.
Under these difficult financial circumstances, most leaders would ask for more aid, increasing their dependence on risk nations. Instead, Bukele wrote Ley Bitcoin (Bitcoin Law), making Bitcoin the new co-national currency, in an attempt to decrease El Salvador’s dependence on the rest of the world.
This law, which will go into effect on September 7th, will make El Salvador the first country in the world to use Bitcoin (BTC) as their national currency, and explicitly says that “every economic agent must accept bitcoin as payment when offered to him by whoever acquires a good or service.” When this law becomes a reality, El Salvador will take a major first step in attempting to free themselves from the economic control the US has had over them for centuries. If widely adopted, Bitcoin could give financial access to millions across the country who are excluded by the financial system. And perhaps most important to a marketing guru populist politician like Bukele, Bitcoin is much cooler than US dollars. With three short pages, 16 bullet points, and a tweet, Nayib Bukele became a household name amongst tech bros from Silicon Valley to Miami, and may have just written the next chapter in the monetary history of the world.
Will this impulsive move from a renegade president turn into the national disaster most people think it will? Or is there a chance El Salvador just beat the rest of the world to the inevitable?
Only time will tell. Bukele’s leadership style and rash decision making could have major upside but also major consequences. His consolidation of power and ability to push dramatic new ideas like Bitcoin forward means we can only be certain of one thing: change is coming to El Salvador…very quickly.
But are Salvadorans ready?
