It was his security minister who recently asserted that, although they had already won the “war against the gangs”, there are no plans to end the state of exception, which is currently being used to capture critics and opponents of those who govern the country today.
This is the terrible political reality that defines Nayib Bukele’s government: the escalating extinction of citizens’ rights and the concentration of power in the hands of a tyrant. We have been living like this for so long that the “state of exception” —that is, our defenselessness in the face of the arbitrariness of the president and his police, his prosecutor, his jailer, and his judges— is now part of normal life in El Salvador.
But it is not normal.
The return of a police state that persecutes dissent, hides information, benefits personally from public funds, and is governed by someone who has placed himself above the Constitution cannot be called normal.
We Can't Change the News
This is his efficient strategy: to keep the majority of the population in a state of passivity that allows him to be the sole executor and political actor in the country. He has done so through a costly propaganda machine capable of producing a hyperactive agenda of events and imposing his discourse; he has done so through harassment, persecution, and imprisonment of those who resist accepting his project; he has done so through decrees, laws, and the concealment of public information. He has done so by instrumentalizing the army and the police, guaranteeing them resources and impunity in exchange for loyalty to the tyrant.
The law has been replaced by the Bukele agenda.
The strategy requires the annihilation of all resistance. First, he attacked the opposition, then the state institutions, the legislative branch, the judiciary, the Attorney General’s Office, the Constitution... everything and anything representing an obstacle to his exercise of power.
We have entered a brazen new stage of dictatorship, which began in recent weeks with the arrest of representatives of poor communities and human rights defenders; with transportation businessmen imprisoned for not obeying a tweet; with threats to journalists and with the approval of a Foreign Agents Law that aims to make critical thinking and the generation of information impossible. The regime has thus moved on to stifling dissent and exemplary repression of protest and disobedience, the last bastions of civil resistance.
The drift has begun to take its toll on his popularity. Thousands of Salvadorans have begun to see the danger of Bukele’s project; they realize how this “normality” that is being imposed on them takes away their rights and hands them over to a single person. They have begun to see that the victims are no longer just opposition politicians or a disgraced adviser who ended up dead with his skull sewn shut; they are not just human rights defenders or journalists who have exposed the enrichment of the presidential family and its criminal pacts. The victims are also innocent Salvadorans tortured and murdered in Salvadoran prisons; they are displaced campesinos who dared to ask the president for help at the gates of his residence; they are environmentalists in the north of the country who oppose mining; they are universities that warn of the evils of dictatorships. That the entire population is at the mercy of the whims and complexes of an ambitious family.
A Mafia Regime in El Salvador
A segment of the population will continue to support Bukele’s project. Among them are corrupt businessmen who have put their petty interests above those of the country. They, better than anyone, understand the nature of the regime, but have opted for complacency and servility, sacrificing the country to earn a few more cents.
But there will also be many who genuinely believe that El Salvador will be a better country under those who govern today. Hopefully, they will not need to be broadsided by the dictatorship in order to open their eyes.
To those who still have doubts: Suffice it to remind them that Bukele has already begun his seventh year in office in a country whose Constitution allows only five, and not a day more. Open your eyes, for we still have that right. At least until a police officer, or the prosecutor, or the jailer, or the judges, or the president wakes up in a bad mood and one of you crosses their path.