Nayib Bukele’s election as president of El Salvador in 2019 sent shockwaves that have reverberated throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. At just 37 years of age on election day, he was but a ten year old boy when the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed, ending his country’s protracted and bloody civil war. A right-wing populist and the former mayor of the capital San Salvador, Bukele campaigned on anti-corruption and a tough approach to crime, all in blue jeans and a leather jacket. His campaign was also unique in that it was so reliant on social media that he did not even bother to participate in a formal debate (a decision that may have helped him in the polls, distinguishing him from the establishment candidates).
Bukele’s election was unique in that it proved a repudiation of the establishment and the status quo in El Salvador, much like the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the rise of right-wing illiberal populists around the world. As a member of Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (or the Grand Alliance for National Unity), he became El Salvador’s first president elected from outside of the two-party system since his fellow former San Salvador mayor Jose Napoleon Duarte left the presidency in 1989. Contemporary Salvadoran politics has traditionally been dominated by the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) and the left-wing Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) FMLN and ARENA also represent the two main parties of the civil war.
This rupture of the two-party system in El Salvador is emblematic of a broader regional movement away from stable two-party systems, which have recently fallen in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Honduras,. While some of these countries have been able to support multi-party democracies, others have descended into authoritarian states. In his two years as president, Bukele is quickly leaving no doubt that he intends for El Salvador to be in the second category for the foreseeable future.
The U.S. Role in El Salvador and Why It Matters
In its history, El Salvador has long grappled with severe economic inequality, like many countries in the region. The smallest of the Central American republics (in fact, only about the size of Massachusetts), the country (like its neighbors) profited immensely when coffee became a major global cash crop, at one point responsible for up to 95 percent of the country’s income. Just two percent of the country, led by the country’s oligarchic richest 14 families, owned more than 75 percent of the nation’s arable land and more than 70 percent of its wealth during the 20th century. While these families were each worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, the Great Depression left millions of peasants with nothing, and in 1932, the peasants led an uprising in the western part of the country that was met with brutality from the military government.
Then, in 1969, the Football War between El Salvador and Honduras strengthened the power of the corrupt military government, which began to expand its arms imports, purchasing weapons from Israel, Brazil, West Germany, and the United States. The 1972 elections were rigged in favor of the military government, and left-wing groups like the FMLN began to become more militant, leading President Arturo Armando Molina to embrace modest land reforms that were ultimately defeated by the Salvadoran elite. Civil war ensued and did not relent until the 1990s.
The Salvadoran Civil War was one of the bloodier conflicts of the Cold War, with war crimes committed by both parties. However, the right-wing military government was the more brutal party, with the United Nations (UN)-supported truth commission finding it guilty of 85 percent of the war’s human rights abuses, compared to just 5 percent for the guerillas. Raymond Bonner of The Atlantic, who covered the war for The New York Times, described the war as “a civil war of the 1980s, one that pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of countries, oligarchs, and generals that had ruled the country for decades—with U.S. support—keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished...Peasants were shot en masse, often while trying to flee. Student and union leaders had their thumbs tied behind their backs before being shot in the head, their bodies left on roadsides as a warning to others.”
American nuns were assassinated on the orders of the military. So were Salvadoran priests who advocated for peace and spoke out against the military’s human rights abuses despite the Catholic Church’s long-standing, close ties with the military government. And on December 11, 1981, the government carried out its worst massacre, one of the most genocidal actions of the entire Cold War: the El Mozote Massacre. At El Mozote, the Salvadoran army and air force, alongside death squads trained by the United States, tortured and subsequently murdered the village’s men, raped the village’s women and girls — some of them as young as ten years old — and murdered them with machine guns. Children were killed, with their throats slit or by being hung from trees. Months later, the Salvadoran military would collect the skulls of the children they murdered to keep as good luck charms. After virtually the entire population of El Mozote had been killed, the soldiers marched to nearby Los Toriles, took its people from their homes, robbed them, shot them dead, and then set their homes on fire. It took the Salvadoran government two decades to apologize for the massacre, and litigation ensues to this very day to ensure its victims can be heard.
And where was the United States during this conflict? Unapologetically behind the military government. With the exception of a brief interlude when Jimmy Carter temporarily suspended aid to El Salvador (before ultimately increasing it on his way out the door), the United States ignored or even praised the repression of the anti-communist government. During the Reagan Administration, only Egypt and Israel received more American military and economic aid than El Salvador, and its embassy staff size rivaled that of the American embassy in India.
With that aid came next to zero accountability. After the massacre of the American nuns, the Reagan Administration ordered Ambassador Robert White to cover up the Salvadoran government’s culpability. When he refused, he was fired and expelled from the Foreign Service entirely. After El Mozote, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs (and later Trump’s envoys to Iran and Venezuela) Elliott Abrams smeared Bonner and the reporters on the ground in El Salvador as activists exaggerating both the death toll and the government’s culpability. He also extolled the Salvadoran government’s human rights record before the Senate. The State Department inflated claims of left-wing violence and downplayed their own links to the death squads to persuade the American public that backing a right-wing dictatorship was worth it in the end because nobody’s hands were clean. As Joan Didion wrote in her seminal account of the conflict, Salvador, “If it is taken for granted in Salvador that the government kills, it is also taken for granted that the other side kills; that everyone has killed, everyone kills now, and if the history of the place suggests any pattern, everyone will continue to kill.” This amoral, cynical Cold War policy contributed to the subsequent development of El Salvador immensely.
Bukele, El Mozote, and the Legacy of the War
Though the war ended in 1992 with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords, its legacy continues to haunt El Salvador. In a narrow sense, the Chapultepec Accords have been a success, with its prescribed ceasefire holding to this very day and the UN applauding the compliance of the parties in the immediate aftermath. The grave inequality that was long characteristic of El Salvador has been partially rectified with the FMLN’s integration into the political system and its reforms under President Mauricio Funes. But while the country continues to be a fragile democracy, its representatives have often failed to deliver on institutional reforms.
El Salvador ranks fifth in the world in its annual number of instances of gender-based violence. Inequality, although reduced, remains in place and threatens to persist thanks to the neoliberal project of ARENA that preserved wealth and political power in the hands of a small class of elites through intense privatization and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (with the support of the U.S.). The FMLN made some changes to the arrangement, but did not radically transform Salvadoran political economy, as it acted much less radically than its other left-wing equivalents in the region. Almost 1.5 million (or about 1/5 of the Salvadoran population) has been forced to migrate north to the United States due to the threat of domestic violence, economic depression, or the war as refugees. Once again, U.S. policy was at the center of the issue: during the Trump Administration, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed immigration courts not to grant asylum to victims of gender-based violence and gang violence, even if they had a credible fear of returning to their home country, a decision that severely and adversely impacted Salvadoran migrant women and their children.
Given these failings of the political establishment and the political fragmentation of the country, it was perhaps not surprising that Bukele was able to gain election as an outsider running on a nationalistic platform. But rather than the post-war candidate he ran as, he is increasingly resembling the brutal right-wing dictatorship responsible for the vast majority of its casualties.
At every turn, Bukele has responded to a myriad of political issues with intense repression. In early February 2020, Bukele countered parliamentary opposition to his proposal to increase funding for the police and armed forces to combat crime by asking his supporters to rally, and he ultimately had the armed forces occupy the Legislative Assembly. When the coronavirus pandemic reached El Salvador, Bukele used it as a pretext to ask the police to crack down on gang members, arbitrarily detaining citizens and holding them in unsanitary conditions. Some died after not receiving adequate medical care even as the country has universal health care for all citizens while others were assaulted by police for violating quarantine protocols. The crackdown was denounced by human rights organizations and the Democratic majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Despite nominally running an anti-corruption campaign, Bukele’s government has been under scrutiny for breaches of the public trust. While he fulfilled a campaign promise in 2019 to create a new anti-corruption commission modeled after the largely successful but now defunct UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) in Guatemala, journalists and prosecutors have uncovered sizable evidence of financial improprieties, misallocated funds, and corruption in government contracting since the advent of the pandemic. El Salvador was also singled out by anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International for its irregularities and corruption cases relating to pandemic-related procurement and “alarming concentration of power” in its executive branch. Furthermore, as these scandals have emerged, Bukele has moved away from his anti-corruption rhetoric, instead cracking down on independent media outlets that expose evidence of government wrongdoing. Investigative outlet El Faro is currently under an ongoing money laundering investigation after publishing a report claiming Bukele negotiated with gang leaders to secure a reduction in violence in exchange for political support. El Faro denies any malfeasance and asserts that the investigation is political retaliation.
Finally, the “post-war” president has exploited, not healed the wounds of El Mozote in particular. While he ran on declassifying military archives “from A to Z” that would allow inspectors to investigate the massacre in accordance with a court order, in June 2020 he reversed his position, claiming that national security would be endangered if he opened the archives. When the judge, Jorge Guzman, who issued the order scheduled the inspections anyway and showed up to the sites, he was denied access by a group of soldiers. Bukele had deployed troops and police officers to many one time FMLN strongholds using the cover of the pandemic to intimidate residents and inspectors. In a subsequent address, he bashed the courts, Salvadoran human rights organizations, and the bipartisan group of American legislators who sent him a letter expressing their concern over his lack of respect for the rule of law. He singled out Guzman as a saboteur of the government and military’s image motivated by FMLN sympathies.
Bukele’s disinterest in the rule of law poses a grave threat to El Salvador’s fragile democracy and the project of national reconciliation. His autocratic ambitions have disillusioned those who believed in transformative, structural change and should have eroded unconditional American support for his every action.
And yet Bukele was embraced wholeheartedly by the Trump Administration. Former Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson commended Bukele for his handling of the pandemic, arguing that the violent abuses and arbitrary detentions carried out by his police forces were merely consensual arrangements between the government and people to give up some freedoms for security in a crisis. Bukele was also a convenient ally for the Trump Administration on immigration and agreed to several accords to reduce protections for asylum seekers from El Salvador.
However, with a Democrat in the White House, it is possible that fortunes may change for Bukele’s critics. President Joe Biden has already suspended Trump’s anti-asylum immigration accords with El Salvador. In an attempt to curry favor with Biden, Bukele has invested in D.C. lobbyists and requested a private meeting with President Biden. However, the White House rebuffed his offer, citing concerns about Bukele’s lack of commitment to the rule of law and democratic rule. Biden’s National Security Council’s senior director for Latin America Juan Gonzalez also took an implicit recent shot at Bukele, asserting that no leader in the region unwilling to tackle corruption would be considered a U.S. ally. And the outlet that interviewed Gonzalez? El Faro, the very one subject to the retaliatory investigation.
Congressional criticism of Bukele is mounting as well. Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA) and Rep. Albio Sires (D-NJ, and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Latin America) sent a letter to Bukele urging him to refrain from stoking divisions and violence ahead of the country’s February legislative elections. And at the end of the Trump Administration, legislation supported by Democrats barring El Salvador from accessing a State Department program that finances the purchase of American weapons was adopted into law. The same bill authorizes targeted sanctions on government officials in Central America’s Northern Triangle — which includes El Salvador — who have undermined democratic institutions. What is clear is this: Congress and the White House are distancing themselves from Bukele’s El Salvador, and quickly.
With Donald Trump in the White House, aspiring autocrats like Bukele, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Bolivia’s former president Jeanine Áñez thrived free from American concerns about the rule of law and democracy. Without a course correction that prioritizes human rights and withdraws unconditional support for Bukele, democracy in El Salvador may be lost for good.