The Two Dictatorships

Today, the dictatorship of Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran strongman, is the second in Central America, after that of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, the aging family dynasty in Nicaragua. Whatever political and economic differences these regimes certainly do express, in this second issue of Central America Monthly we identify their common playbook of repression: their total power, their unconstitutional reelection, their police states, their foreign-agents laws, their exiles, and their political prisoners, to name only a few pages.

The centerpiece of this issue is thus the resurgence of political prisoners in El Salvador. At his unconstitutional inauguration one year ago, alongside Donald Trump, Jr., Bukele asserted: In El Salvador, there are none. But the facts contradict him: Bukele’s prisons, his loyal police force, his prosecutors, and his courts contradict him. His very rise in El Salvador, singling out and punishing allies and enemies along the way, contradicts him.

Gabriel Labrador exhaustively reviewed cases of arbitrary and politically motivated arrests, the flouting of release orders by prison administrators, a string of in-custody deaths of men never tried for a crime, and a trove of leaked police records speaking to a pattern of state surveillance of perceived adversaries. Among them are prominent politicians and public officials of the Left and Right, human rights defenders, a former top government advisor who emerged dead from prison with his bald head sewn shut, and a mother who had rallied for justice for her disappeared daughter, Paola. He listened to the accused and their relatives and carefully documented Bukele’s coordinated media campaigns and sometimes-formal accusations: First comes the trial in the public square, then the criminal proceedings.

Labrador thus arrived at a conclusive title for his in-depth reportage: Bukele Ushers In a New Era of Political Prisoners in El Salvador. It contains 27 equally forceful pictures. As El Faro’s editorial board notes today, Salvadorans have now lived two-thirds of the Bukele era under multiple suspensions of constitutional rights, greasing the wheels of their imprisonment.

One week ago, after El Faro published this feature in Spanish, the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association (APES) denounced that members of El Faro had decided not to board a plane to El Salvador after learning of a police operation at the airport waiting to arrest them upon arrival. APES also reported a “massive exit” of journalists fearing for their safety. Last month, as we released the inaugural issue of this magazine, including major revelations about Bukele’s former gang negotiations, El Faro denounced arrest warrants for at least seven of our journalists.

For this to indeed be a new era, there must be precedent. In El Salvador, there is in spades. In The Tertulia, our monthly section showcasing academic research, Furman University historian Erik Ching digs into the annals of the last dictator before Bukele to be unconstitutionally reelected: General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who clung to power for 13 years until a general strike pushed him to resign in 1944. U.S. military intelligence recorded a list of dozens of the general’s purported foes. In a newly translated 2017 essay, In the Eyes of Maximiliano, Everyone Was an Enemy, Ching curates the analysis of four leading academics: Who were these names who drew such paranoia and intimidation? Many were executed.

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There is more recent precedent in neighboring Nicaragua — albeit still more extreme than in Bukele’s El Salvador. In 2018, as Carlos Martínez reports in our section From the Archive, the Nicaraguan government wielded terrorism charges, abduction, torture, rape, and assassination as it criminalized protest. At the heart of his chronicle, Daniel Ortega and His Sinister Time Machine, is a group of university student dissidents evading death squads and sniper rounds, slipping between safehouses and evading the prying eyes and ears of informant neighbors.

It is particularly eerie to read the words of one of the students, John Cerna, who went by nom de guerre “Tigrillo”, in days when he weighed life and death as equal possibilities: “Either I die, or that son of a bitch does,” he says, syringe in hand, referring to the possibility of a paramilitary or police attack on his hideout. Cerna was a student leader hunted by the regime prior to his imprisonment for over 1,000 days, including in Anastasio Somoza’s old prison, El Chipote. He is part of a generation of young Nicaraguans hounded and expelled from their universities and, ultimately, from their country.

In 2018, President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo worked in tandem to crush dissent, as this month’s special podcast episode of Central America in Minutes recounts. Since then, Murillo has only grown more prominent: Earlier this year, she launched a bid for dynastic control over the state by decreeing herself unelected co-president. In this episode, The Rise of Rosario Murillo, Co-Dictator of Nicaragua, we point to three dates that help explain how Rosario Murillo has become Central America’s first female dictator.

This second issue of Central America Monthly, a digital magazine by El Faro English, delivers sharper, deeper journalism at a time of threats for reporting, for dissent, and for the free exchange of ideas unseen in decades. We invite you to join us in shining a beacon on these uncomfortable realities — to ask how we got here, and where the ship is headed.