It is with huge enthusiasm that the Latin American right has observed the measures taken by Nayib Bukele, incumbent president of El Salvador since 2019. According to his government, homicide rates in the country have dropped to 1.9 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants. If El Salvador had a homicide rate frequently above 50 deaths/hundred thousand people, now the country is arguably one of the Latin American states with lower taxes. The drastic reduction in the number of homicides in a region plagued by violence made Bukele an example to follow for the conservatives. However, his efforts to combat criminal organizations came at a severe cost. Like other leaders of the global right, the Salvadoran president has clearly attacked the country’s democracy. He even called himself the “world’s coolest dictator”. In 2022, following a series of gang attacks, Bukele managed to get parliament, where his party and supporters hold a supermajority, to approve a state of emergency granting the government enormous power, including the suppression of the right to protest. Various social movements, including feminist and LGBT groups, have denounced political persecution and restrictions on their political freedoms.

Since the declaration of the state of emergency, thousands of people have gone to jail. The Human Rights Watch has identified that many imprisonments have not respected the legal procedures, with torture being used even on minors. Bukele also managed to get the legislature to dismiss the Supreme Court and align the judicial system with his political interests. With the judiciary under his control, it is not surprising that he managed to get re-elected for another 5-year term, despite the country’s Constitution not allowing re-election. A country that has lived for 3 years in a state of exception that restricts various civil liberties, where people are imprisoned without trial, minors are tortured, and the Supreme Court is closed, cannot be considered a democracy. 

The question that arises, then, is whether this is the Latin American destiny. Do we either have democracy and violence, or do we have oppressive dictatorships and security? The discourse around such an arbitrary choice has taken over much of political discussion. If Bukele and the Latin American right want us to believe his authoritarianism is the only option to overcome........

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