“The ‘Bukele method’ has become the benchmark of the Latin American right-wing, in a region hard hit by the rise of organized crime & drug trafficking.”
By Marco Consolo –
If this were no more than very serious and did not involve the fate of millions of people, it would be a joke (in bad taste). The elections of last February 4 (presidential and for parliament) in El Salvador were both a farce and a tragedy. Farce for the way they were developed. Tragedy for a population increasingly exhausted by the misrule of a president convinced of being “the coolest dictator in the world” (Nayib Bukele). But first it is necessary to take a step back in the past to understand the present.
A step back
As will be recalled, in the 1970s the “backyard” of the United States was in turmoil. In Central America there were armed movements in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and, to a lesser extent, Honduras. In 1979 the Sandinistas won in Nicaragua and that victory was confirmation for the other guerrilla movements that armed struggle was a road to liberation.
In El Salvador, after yet another civilian-military coup d’état in 1979, a large-scale armed conflict began (1979 – 1992) in the “little thumb of America” (as the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton had called it). In reality, the political and social crisis had begun during the 1970s, due to disastrous social conditions, brutal government repression and the closing of all legal space for opposition. The armed conflict was fought between the Armed Forces (financed, trained and armed by the US) and the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The conflict had a tragic toll estimated at more than 70,000 dead and 15,000 disappeared, and ended with the signing of the “Chapultepec Peace Accords” in 1992, which allowed the demobilization of the guerrilla forces and their incorporation into the political life of the country.
Since then, the country has been governed by the right wing, with a hiatus of two consecutive FMLN mandates. During one of Arena’s right-wing governments in 2001 the country adopted the dollar as its official currency, thus renouncing an independent monetary or exchange rate policy and tying itself hand and foot to Washington.
Bukele’s victory in 2019
At the end of the FMLN’s second term, Nayib Bukele won the elections with a “borrowed” party and took office in June 2019.
The son of a businessman of Palestinian origin, Bukele was previously close to the FMLN, thanks to which he became mayor of the capital, San Salvador. He later broke with the FMLN and, after reaching government, created his own party, “Nuevas Ideas” (New Ideas).
In his mandate, Bukele has governed under the banner of the “iron fist against crime” with which he has recomposed the right-wing. This has been a policy strongly criticized by human rights organizations – for the high number of new prisoners (officially about 71,000 out of a population of about 6,500,000 inhabitants) and for the prison conditions, as well as for the repression of the press and of protests of anyone who thinks differently. In this last aspect, there are several FMLN leaders in prison or forced into exile, based on accusations without any legal basis on the part of a complacent judiciary. In addition to them, there are dozens of innocent people in prison, detained as alleged “gang members” without any verification and swallowed up by the penitentiary system.
In recent years, this “Bukele method” has become the benchmark of the Latin American (and other countries’) right wing, in a region hard hit by the rise of organized crime and drug trafficking.
In addition to the dollarization of the past, in September 2021 El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as its official currency alongside the dollar, thanks to a law passed in a matter of hours.
How to win elections (not only with fraud)
In recent years, as a good communicator and unscrupulous user of “social networks”, Bukele has increased his consensus with the support of powerful businessmen and criminals, with whom he has imposed a right-wing and authoritarian turn in the country.
In this round of elections, Bukele wanted to win by “pulverizing the opposition”. And so began the manoeuvres to turn the elections into a tragic farce, which reminded many of the years of dictatorship before the civil war. But let’s go in order.
In 2021, the parliament controlled by Bukele dismissed the previous magistrates of the “Constitutional Chamber” and appointed people close to him. The new composition of the “Constitutional Chamber” allowed him to run again thanks to a scandalous ad-hoc sentence, in open violation of the current Constitution, which explicitly prohibits consecutive presidential re-election.
The second move was to change the electoral law, redrawing and decreasing the number of constituencies and municipalities (from 262 to 44), transferring the overseas vote to the capital constituency, changing the seat allocation formula from the traditional Hare system to the new D’Hondt system – drastically reducing both the number of deputies (from 84 to 60) and the plurality of political parties. In addition to changing the law, the government also modified its regulations, limiting the presence of the opposition in the bodies controlling the voting and the vote-counting in the country and totally eliminating it abroad, where thousands of emigrants, vote. Abroad, embassies and consulates blatantly campaigned in favour of Bukele and voting took place without any electoral roll.
The elections were held under a “state of emergency” (in force since March 2022), with severe restrictions on the electoral campaigning of the opposition, which was already suffering imprisonment and judicial persecution. This has been a “state of exception” that has served to violate the civil and political rights of citizens (with widespread [false] accusations of belonging to criminal gangs) and used to extend a campaign of threats and terror on the basis that if the population had not voted for Bukele, and for an assembly totally dominated by New Ideas, the gang members were going to return to the streets to kill at will. In reality, this is a “security” policy based on a combination of strong repression of micro-crime and agreements with the criminal gangs, the “maras”. Agreements by virtue of the fact that many of their leaders left the country with enormous compensations, while others controlled sectors of the State and the economy directly from “elegant salons”.
In other words, it was clear that the will of Bukele and his party was not to lose any institutional space they could control.
The puppets of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), controlled by the government, was one of the main instruments used in the recent electoral farce, and was in effect “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Since its opening, the ruling party has taken control of the polling stations, bypassing the TSE itself. The latter turned a blind eye to the fact that many members of the polling stations designated by lottery by the court could not be installed and were magically replaced on the spot by members of New Ideas to whom the TSE gave more credentials than they should have. At the time of the recount, the computer system (in the hands of a former Bukele presidential employee) crashed immediately after the partial transmission of the presidential election data, when the votes for the Parliament were being counted. In those hours, the TSE itself rejected the demands of the opposition for an expertise of the computer system and an audit of the results.
In the midst of the general chaos and uncertainty, the TSE’s directive was to count the votes by hand and transmit them somehow. And in the final scrutiny, the TSE ordered to recount the votes of 20% of the ballot boxes of the presidential, and all the ballot boxes, of the legislative elections.
Meanwhile Bukele, without waiting for the official pronouncement of the TSE on the partial results (and without respecting the electoral silence), proclaimed himself winner with 85%; even giving the numbers of the composition of the parliament, and self-assigning 58 of the 60 seats to his party.
In the scrutiny, the final farce was staged: massive and intimidating presence of unauthorized persons from the ruling party, police intimidation of the scrutineers of other parties who raised objections about the validity of the votes, new and unfolded ballots, many marked with marker pen (prohibited) in favour of Nuevas Ideas, and a long list of irregularities, including ambassadors abroad “helping” the voters.
All in all this was a step backwards in democratic matters, reminiscent of the dark times of the dictatorship.
The government’s numbers
With 48% abstention and with these methods, it is not surprising that the electoral “result” has thus guaranteed the Government a more than qualified majority in Parliament, with a whopping 57 deputies (54 from New Ideas and 3 from allied parties) and with only three deputies from opposition parties. These numbers will allow Bukele to pass laws without consulting the other parliamentary groups (reduced to nothing), as well as authorize loans, approve changes to the Constitution and elect the magistrates of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), the Attorney General, the Human Rights Ombudsman, the members of the Court of Accounts, the Attorney General and the members of the National Council of the Judiciary (CNJ).
For the first time since the signing of the peace accords, the left will have no deputies. In fact, thanks to the new electoral law and despite having obtained more votes than in 2021, the FMLN, which governed the country five years ago, is left without legislative representation.
The complaints
It is important to point out that the dozens of denunciations of fraud in favour of the government, both in the country and abroad, have been made by various sectors of the opposition, not only by the FMLN.
The electoral mission of the Organization of American States (OAS) itself expressed its concern for the “delay and lack of uniformity” in the scrutiny of the elections and pointed out a “lack of control” of the Electoral Tribunal over the development of the elections.
The blatant violation of the Constitution and the accusations of fraud cast a pall of illegitimacy over both the president and the new parliament. For their part, opposition parties have called for a re-run of the elections, but it is easy to predict that this will not happen.
Immediately afterwards, Bukele flew to Maryland, United States, before an audience of the world’s ultra-right, including Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Spaniard Santiago Abascal (Vox) and Giorgia Meloni, among others. The “coolest dictator in the world” cynically stated that “El Salvador had free and fair elections” and that “the judicial system is not used to persecute political opponents” (sic).
Meanwhile, the population suffers a continuous deterioration of living and working conditions and is forced to emigrate more and more. Added to this are the severe restrictions on protests and democratic participation due to the “state of emergency” to “deal with the threat of crime”. According to this instrumental conception, popular protest cannot “distract” attention from the “war against crime”, i.e it is not the time to worry about wages or living and working conditions.
Next March 3 there will be municipal elections and elections of deputies to the Central American Parliament. Bukele’s electoral farce is preparing for its second act, while the popular organizations try to reorganize.
- This article was translated into English by Francisco Dominguez.
Fonte: https://labouroutlook.org/2024/03/05/el-salvador-and-bukeles-electoral-farce/
