Bukele: ‘I don’t care if they call me dictator. Better than seeing Salvadorans killed on the streets’

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, made it clear on Sunday that he does not care if the media or the international community call him a “dictator,” and dedicated 80 minutes of national television coverage to attack critical voices inside and outside the Central American country. The Salvadoran leader, who has just completed six years in power, the last of which exceeds the constitutional mandate, said to Congress: “To the international media, you know what? I don’t care if you call me a dictator. Better that than seeing Salvadorans killed on the streets. When I pick up the phone I see that they say: ‘Dictator, dictator, dictator’. I prefer that to reading: ‘Murder, murder, murder’.”

Surrounded by an imposing military and police presence, Bukele walked into the National Palace on a red carpet in front of thousands of Salvadorans and gave an address that had little to do with the government accountability that he is required by law to provide to Congress each year. It was Bukele’s first annual address to Congress of his second presidential term, which exceeds the five-year term limit established by the Constitution. This is a historical milestone in El Salvador, as the last president to be reelected was the dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who ruled from 1931 to 1944.

Bukele began his speech by emphasizing his successes on the security front. He claimed that in the 25 years that the feared gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18 operated in the country, they were responsible for more than 200,000 murders. However, the president did not say where those figures came from. “The transformation of El Salvador has been one of the fastest in modern history, but for us it has been slow. We have already achieved the impossible, but our work is just beginning. We’ve had to fight for what other countries take for granted, which is the possibility of building a future on our own terms,” he said.

The president went on to mention recent news stories and statements by human rights organizations that have denounced an escalation in his authoritarianism. In the month of May, at least 15 people were arrested in El Salvador, including entrepreneurs of the transportation sector, activists, human rights defenders and peasant leaders. More than a dozen journalists have also had to leave the country for fear of reprisals.

Bukele’s authoritarian style has been consolidated throughout his six years in power, morphing from a fresh and modern young leader to a more classic, autocratic one. However, it is not yet affecting his popularity. According to the last poll published at the end of May by Cid Gallup, the 43-year-old leader continues to enjoy an approval rating of over 80%.

In his speech, Bukele alluded to the democracy index published by the British publication The Economist in February. In this index, El Salvador shows up in 95th place out of 167, with a rating below 5, where 0 is not democratic at all and 10 is very democratic. The president took the opportunity to compare El Salvador with Spain. “I am impressed by how countries with monarchies get better scores than us. A few years ago we had the King of Spain as a guest, a real gentleman, by the way. And we respect the self-determination of the people who want a monarchy. But, in the end, they are the ones who draw up the index at their own convenience,” he said. In the same index published by The Economist, Spain came in 21st place with a score of 8.13.

“Some say that before this there was democracy in El Salvador, and now there isn’t. You have read that, right? But the truth is that before this you could choose between either bad or worse. Whoever says it is not so, does it because that was their source of income. The only ones who say that are those who don’t know any better, or those who used to make a living off of that,” he added.

The president asserted that recent criticism of his punitive measures and the persecution of activists are all part of a “globalist agenda that is afraid of a domino effect”. “They say that we are jailing human rights defenders, dissidents, opponents of the regime. I get to thinking, how can we fight corruption if all the opposition has immunity? Some of them have put on a badge of ‘politically persecuted.’ Being a journalist of the club allows them to break the law without consequences”, he said.

“They are not there to defend any causes, they are there to get impunity from corruption and crime for their members. They want to impose their narrative, which every political party in the world does,” he said. Bukele also assured that the international news coverage of El Salvador is a “coordinated attack” and that there are “external forces” sponsoring it. “They are not journalists, they are political activists who are doing business,” he said.

The president also took the opportunity to justify the Foreign Agents Law approved on May 20, with which his government will be able to decide which organization can work in El Salvador and which cannot, in addition to charging 30% tax on their income to those he decides. “I believe that [alleged foreign interference] should be prohibited in all countries of the world. But we are still going to allow it. The only thing we are going to ask is that they pay their taxes,” he said.

In addition, he assured that humanitarian aid organizations will be exempt from this tax, but those that carry out “political” activities will have to pay. The law establishes that it will be the president himself who gets to define the “concepts” of the law, that is to say, he will be the one to determine what it means to carry out political activities.

Rise to power

At the time of Bukele’s address, 2.6% of the country’s adult population was in prison, and a recent poll shows that 74% of Salvadorans are afraid to express their opinions.

In just 12 years, Bukele has gone from being a publicist and nightclub manager to an all-powerful president and one of the most influential politicians in the world. At 43, he has consolidated absolute power in the small Central American country, demolishing institutions from within and replacing the system with one centered on himself. Although his authoritarian style has deepened in recent years with the implementation of the state of emergency and, more recently, with the support of President Donald Trump, his strategy began long before that.

In six years, Bukele has managed to crush, one by one, the country’s most powerful institutions: the traditional parties, the historic business elite, and the feared gangs. He has done so by applying a formula that has proved unbeatable: making alliances and destroying from within.

His political career began in 2012, when he became mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a town less than twice the size of New York’s Central Park, which had little political significance on El Salvador’s national agenda. He arrived as an outsider who had recently joined the leftist FMLN party, for whom he had previously provided publicity services. He soon began wearing red clothing and chanting The Internationale. Three years later, in 2018, under the same banner, he became mayor of the capital, San Salvador, and although he was never part of the party’s leadership, he became one of its most widely recognized politicians. A recent news investigation published by El Faro has revealed that Bukele then allied himself with the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs to become mayor.

A week before he took office as president in May 2019, an MS-13 spokesperson said in an interview that he trusted “in God and in Nayib Bukele.” In the first years of his administration, the main gangs that had sown terror in the country over the past 20 years and caused tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances in El Salvador had suffered several internal ruptures and were weakened. In March 2022, the MS-13 murdered 87 people across the country in just three days. In response, Bukele changed his strategy and launched a brutal crackdown against them. This, according to journalistic investigations, was due to the breakdown of a pact Bukele had had with criminal organizations since at least 2014.

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