El Salvador’s 38-year-old President Nayib Bukele, a millennial strongman in casual black turtlenecks, baseball caps and aviator shades, likes to brand himself as the ‘world’s coolest dictator’. Against the corpulence of Donald Trump, the shifty-eyed paranoia of Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un’s bizarre hairstyles, Bukele certainly cuts a sleeker figure. But his ‘cool’ stops right there. The tens of thousands of Salvadorians tossed into prison under his reign over vague or unevidenced ties to gangs, many without trial, don’t find Bukele cool. Neither do their families who have lost contact with them in El Salvador’s carceral black hole of deaths, torture and indefinite detention. The result is an incarceration rate higher even than that of the United States, with almost two per cent of the Central American country’s population behind bars, including thousands of children.
In the six years since Bukele was elected, promising to strengthen democracy and tackle corruption, he’s done all in his power – and beyond – to transform El Salvador into a one-party authoritarian state. This includes overriding the constitutional one-term limit for presidents, packing the Supreme Court with his toadies and stripping the population of civil liberties through his ‘state of exception’ emergency measures, enacted supposedly to tackle gang violence.
