Residents of a mostly rural region of El Salvador woke up on Tuesday to 8,000 soldiers and police patrolling the streets on a mass hunt for gang members.
President Nayib Bukele said he ordered the raids in Cabañas, which has a population of about 150,000, because it had become the number one hiding place for “terrorists”. “The search will continue [until] the security forces can extract all the gang members,” he wrote on Twitter.
The military operation is the latest move in the authoritarian president’s severe crackdown on the powerful criminal gangs — principally Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) — which had made El Salvador one of the deadliest countries in the world per capita.
Bukele, 42, has clamped down on the gangs since taking office in 2019, reducing homicides, lifting his approval rating above 90 per cent and winning him admirers across Latin America. His popularity has bolstered his bid to be re-elected in February 2024 despite a previously long-held ban on leaders serving a second continuous term.
The president, who has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator”, had his legislators replace the constitutional court’s five judges in 2021. The new justices reinterpreted the constitution a few months later to allow incumbent presidents to run again immediately. The way the rules were redefined has raised fears Bukele could cling on beyond one more term.
“If he is re-elected, that tells us that the constitution doesn’t matter . . . what makes us think that in five years he would go?” said Álvaro Artiga, an academic at the Central American University. “The shrinking of spaces [for criticism] points to the idea that there is only going to be one voice.”
El Salvador’s electoral tribunal still has to validate Bukele’s candidacy for the election next year, but analysts said pushback may be limited by a new law that makes obstructing a candidacy punishable with up to 15 years in prison.
Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party also repealed a rule prohibiting electoral reforms within a year of elections, then slashed the number of seats in congress from 84 to 60 arguing it would save money.
“To me the elections are basically just going to be a formality,” said Eduardo Escobar, director of non-profit Acción Ciudadana, adding that the seat changes help Nuevas Ideas. “Bukele is going to be reelected, there’s no way to stop that.”
Since Bukele gained power his strong-arm tactics have included sending the military to storm congress and firing all judges aged over 60. He also enjoys a rubber-stamp legislature that made bitcoin legal tender after just five hours of discussion.
But residents of the notorious Lourdes district near El Salvador’s capital support the president, saying in less than 18 months their situation has completely changed. Before the crackdown, Lourdes was run by gangs who controlled entry to the area, extorting businesses and digging mass graves for their victims in nearby fields.
“Life wasn’t worth anything here,” said Enrique Serrano, 22, adding that the gangs had stopped him expanding his corn dough business into the next neighbourhood. Now “the country is getting better . . . I can go down those streets and no one says to me ‘Show me your ID’ and ‘Where are you going?’”
However, the country of 6.5mn people has slid down the Freedom in the World index from “free” to “partly free”, which the report attributes to widespread corruption undermining democracy and the rule of law and a lack of physical security remaining a problem.
El Salvador’s authorities have pursued a harsh, militarised response to the gangs, resulting in extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary arrests and other abuses, the report said. Social activists and the media risk harassment and violence in connection with coverage of organised crime, corruption and criticism of government policy.
Thousands of innocent people have been wrongly linked to gangs, family members and rights groups said. Human Rights Watch has documented arbitrary arrests, torture and deaths in custody since a state of emergency was implemented last March. Hearings are often held en masse and legislators last month approved trials for up to 900 people at a time.
The US government is advising citizens to reconsider travel to El Salvador after some of its citizens were reportedly arbitrarily detained.
Every two weeks Antonio travels to La Mariona prison to bring money and food packages to his 25-year-old son, who is a fisherman. Despite this, he said he broadly supported what Bukele had done. “It’s having good results, the only thing is . . . they should free the kids that have nothing to do with it,” he said.
However, opposition candidates said they believed the state of emergency meant people were afraid to criticise the government in public and that there was more discontent than polls were suggesting.
“It’s not an emergency regime anymore, it’s now a way of governing through fear because they are using it for everything,” said Luis Parada, an opposition presidential candidate for the centre-left Our Time party. “If all the gang members are in prison, why do they still need it?”
Bukele’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Surveys show voters’ principal concern is now El Salvador’s economy. Since Bukele’s authoritarian turn and bitcoin gambit, negotiations with the IMF for a loan facility have faltered. This year the country’s bonds are among the world’s best performing government debt.
Despite the president’s push to attract positive global attention, El Salvador had negative foreign direct investment last year of levels among the lowest in all of Latin America. The country’s economy is expected to grow just 2 per cent this year, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America.
“The government has focused its efforts on the security issue, but it’s also been a failure in economic terms,” said Manuel Flores, the leftwing FMLN party’s presidential candidate.
Bukele’s relationship with the private sector was “tense” but there was little appetite to confront him, said one business leader.
But for many voters the safety improvements seem to trump economic concerns for now. Maria Antonia, a 70-year-old resident of Lourdes, said she was thrilled the gang members that once extorted her gym business were now in prison.
“You remember how it was before? My God! It’s everything, it’s amazing what he’s done in such a short period,” she said. “If a dictatorship is how he’s got the country now, the dictatorship is welcome.”
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