Nayib Bukele, “savior” for some and “authoritarian” for others

Nuevo Cuscatlán: in this municipality of El Salvador, the political career of Nayib Bukele began. Ten years ago he was elected mayor in this place, and in public spaces, even in some private ones, his campaign symbol is still engraved in metal: the ‘N’ for Nayib.

The municipal park of Nuevo Cuscatlán, the traffic signals and some houses also have their particular seal: they are painted cyan, the color chosen by the politician to separate himself from the classic red, blue and white used by the parties that once dominated the political spectrum in El Salvador.

Although Nayib Bukele was also mayor of San Salvador, Nuevo Cuscatlán is the starting point of a political career that managed to undo three decades of bipartisanship concentrated in the ARENA and FMLN parties. Today, with almost four years in power, there seems to be no figure or political party that competes in numbers with the Bukele phenomenon.

“Nayib came here years ago. He stopped there and offered me a scholarship,” recalls a young woman, now a graduate in Psychology, from the balcony of her house located in the rural area of ​​Nuevo Cuscatlán. That time Nayib Bukele toured the cantons of a municipality of 8,000 inhabitants that he sought to govern.

Bukele was rarely seen again to walk the streets of the Central American country in a political campaign. When he set out to win the presidency of El Salvador, he preferred social networks: he reached everyone at the same time and at all times.

It was through this channel that he strengthened the image of deterioration that the traditional parties had already been dragging and, once on the political scene, he insisted that those parties represented the old side of politics. He, he said, was the young option in the midst of chaos. It was like that in 2019 Nayib Bukele won the presidency of El Salvador.

“The most important thing that Bukele has done for us is security. That has taken him higher,” says Joel Peña, a 32-year-old resident of Nuevo Cuscatlán.

For 10 months El Salvador has lived under exception regime with the purpose of imprisoning 118,000 gang members, who for decades murdered and extorted Salvadorans. Catches already amount to more than 62,975. And although the Bukele government has been sued internationally for violating human rights under this measure, Salvadorans, at least in Nuevo Cuscatlán, turn a blind eye to the price of living without gangs.

“He is a perfectionist. But also exaggerated”, this is how the young Juan Meléndez describes the meteoric management of the Salvadoran president. He frames it as ‘exaggerated’ because he knows of several people who have been incarcerated without belonging to gangs. Despite this, Juan assures that if it were not for this measure, security would still be ‘a myth’ in the country.

But Bukele is not only known for his recent heavy-handed policy against gangs. Inside and outside of El Salvador he is known by his own self-definitions with adjectives such as ‘cool’ and ‘handsome’ that he usually discloses on his social networks, or take a selfies at the United Nations General Assembly when he had just made his debut as president of the Central American country.

that clothing millennial and the latest political measures have given him, out of 10, an 8.37 approval rating for his management, according to the most recent opinion poll published by the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA).

But not all rosy…

“He is a dictator president,” says Rosa Mirna Deras, a member of the human rights organization Tutela Legal “María Julia Hernández.” Calling it that has not been a decision made overnight.

The human rights defender recalls the time that Bukele entered the El Salvador Congress with the military and began a plenary session without being the jurisdiction of the State body he represents. She also recalls the dismissal of the Supreme Court magistrates made by the deputies of Bukele’s party. And now, with the exception regime, he classifies him as “an authoritarian.”

“It is fine that they capture the one who has really done something, but that they investigate. It is not just about going to catch young people for having numbers in prisons”, adds Deras.

Disapproving of the exception regime is an unusual position in El Salvador. The approval that Salvadorans give to living without gangs is 75.9%, according to the UCA survey. The curious thing about this is that there are other policies that are not so accepted, such as the adoption of Bitcoin, which has a rejection of 77.2% and despite this, the popularity of the president remains intact.

“Nayib Bukele causes the scandal. He is not afraid of it, he feeds on it. He knows how to get revenue from it, ”concludes the doctor in Political Science, Ángel Sermeño, in an article for the Astrolabio magazine. “If populism flourishes in today’s world, it is simply because it finds the right conditions that make it thrive,” he adds.

In conclusion, for some Bukele is a kind of unrivaled savior. The politician whose image does not short circuit by mixing the position of ruler with the backward cap, the pose of cool and laser-like eyes on his Twitter profile.

For others, according to the testimonies obtained by the voice of america, the president has already harmed Salvadoran democracy. And neither the right nor the left of El Salvador seem to recover in a short time from the new elections, where Bukele, with the support, not of the Constitution but of the Supreme Court of Justice, will seek to be re-elected again.

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