Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
San Salvador was the scariest place I’d ever been.
I was in the capital of the central American state of El Salvador thanks to the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, on one of its projects to try and inculcate democratic principles in the conservative parties of Latin America. The Tories’ sister party there was known as ARENA, which, like its opponents FMLN, was a faction in the country’s horrific civil war by then transmuted into a political party.
It had seemed for a while that the former death squad and the former terrorist organisation had reached an understanding about the rules of the democratic game, at least as it was played in a developing county where the vast majority of the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few families. They alternated in power, the FMLN abandoning its Marxism, and ARENA refraining from murdering bishops.
They reckoned without Nayyib Bukele.
Bukele is another of those adventurer-politicians that modern politics appears to throw up in large quantities. Of Christian Palestinian descent, his father owned a successful chemicals firm and converted to Islam, founding several mosques and even serving as an Imam. Bukele himself worked for his father’s companies and then moved into advertising, running the local branch of Saatchi and Saatchi, which, according to Wikipedia, was one of the firms hired to produce campaign material – for the ex-guerillas of the FMLN. He also worked for a passport printing firm…
Perhaps because of this, Bukele started out as an FMLN man, even becoming the mayor of San Salvador, the capital, for the leftists. He overcame a scandal where he was accused of running troll farms, and, after being expelled from the FMLN, ran his own campaign for president, winning in the first round in January 2019.
After negotiating a loan with the Trump Administration to fund a crackdown on criminal gangs, he found himself without the parliamentary majority to approve it, so appeared in parliament in February 2020 accompanied by soldiers to intimidate MPs into voting for it. This Cromwellian gambit failed because the assembly had too few members in attendance for a quorum, but Bukele invoked the right to popular insurrection, a right explicitly guaranteed by El Salvador’s constitution(!), precipitating a constitutional crisis overtaken by the Covid pandemic.
Parliamentary elections in 2021 finally gave him that majority, which he used to fire judges, repeal public procurement laws, and endorse an evasion of the constitutional prohibition on a president running for re-election by temporarily stepping down for campaign purposes. He was re-elected in 2023, with 84 per cent of the vote.
Aside from his showmanship and love of fads (he briefly turned El Salvador, which has a dollarised economy, into a Bitcoin state) and has self-defined as the “world’s coolest dictator”, Bukele’s popularity is due to his success in suppressing El Salvador’s gangs.
The country is terrorised by drug gangs, fuelled by guns left over from the civil war and lucrative American markets established after many Salvadoreans fled to the Western US as a result of the conflict. When I was there nobody walked on the streets, every house had its fence tipped with rings of barbed wire and any house of any size had a boy of about 16 outside it, armed with a shotgun, for protection. You always wondered whether he was being paid more by the house’s owners, or by the gangs.
The gangs, known as maras, extorted money from business and kidnapped young men and women for trafficking. The murder rate topped 107 per 100,000 (a more than one per cent chance of being murdered each decade); the UK’s is one per 100,000.
Bukele, after having failed to negotiate a reduction in violence with the gangs, put in place a “Plan of Territorial Control” that has brought the murder rate down (to the still high 20 per 100,000) and locked up some 70,000 gang members in new, huge, and brutal prisons. Arresting gang member is the easy bit: preventing them being replaced, and, finding ways to rehabilitate them after they’re released, will prove harder.
In the meantime, the former passport printer has another gimmick: a competition for 5,000 free passports for skilled foreign workers. These will come complete with all the rights due to a Salvadorean citizen, including voting for a parliament he can then intimidate with troops.
There is some debate over whether he is a left- or right- winger. There’s also debate about his religion, since he doesn’t say whether he’s Muslim, Christian, or atheist. In truth, like the boy with the shotgun outside the house, you don’t know who’s side he’s on, other than his own.
The post Garvan Walshe: Bukele’s El Salvador. Bitcoin, a passport lottery, and the world’s toughest gang crackdown. appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Garvan Walshe
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