More cruel than cool

After Nayib Bukele's offer to be Donald Trump's jailer for hire, there is a changing story about El Salvador being told in global media.  Bukele the image-maker is now having a tougher time controlling the narrative.  There is growing recognition that, behind the veneer of surfing and Bitcoin and tourism growth, exists a regime which is increasingly authoritarian, imprisons tens of thousands without trial or due process in incredibly harsh conditions, and actively represses journalists, human rights lawyers and community activists.

With this loss of control of El Salvador's story-line, Bukele may be regretting the deal he made with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. When Bukele shared the slick, but brutal, videos of Venezuelan men being dragged into CECOT, the world's focus shifted from sun-soaked beaches being enjoyed by Bitcoiners to overcrowded Salvadoran prisons.  Journalists asked not just about the show prison called CECOT, but also about conditions in other prisons, and how thousands of innocent persons were ending up there.

To be sure, Bukele does not hide his view of himself as the strong man in charge.  The former publicist employs a vast team to create the images surrounding his presidency.  On his favorite social media platform, X, he appears dressed all in black with an image of a military parade field with countless armed troops standing at attention.  Beneath his profile is the sobriquet  "Philosopher King" (formerly "world's coolest dictator"). 

And the Philosopher King can strike out against those who dare challenge that image.  When campesinos recently approached the elite neighborhood where Bukele has his private residence, he had the military police break up the group which included children and the elderly. His security forces arrested the evangelical pastor who accompanied the group which simply wanted to petition the president not to be displaced from their humble dwellings on land where they had lived for years.  

Journalist Bryan Avelar talks about Bukele's transition away from hip millennial ruler to Latin American autocrat in a recent piece in El Pais titled Nayib Bukele consolidates his authoritarian style in El Salvador.   Avelar, who himself had to flee El Salvador because of threats from the Bukele camp related to his journalistic work, writes:

Bukele — a former publicist who has put enormous effort into carefully crafting his image — has changed the way he projects himself to the world. He’s gone from wearing youthful clothes and backward caps to donning a long-cut black suit adorned with gold trim and a high collar — evoking historical figures like Simón Bolívar or Muammar Gaddafi, says 

[public opinion investigator Edwin Segura]. But it’s not just his look that has changed. His populist politics have also taken a significant turn.

“He went from a populism in which he spent more than the state could afford — giving away cash, Bitcoin, and even food packages — to a punitive populism through which he projects himself as a strongman, experienced and capable of getting things done, even by force,” says Segura ….

Avelar notes the change in Bukele's global image arising from his agreement with Trump to imprison deportees and even US citizens:

When Bukele dubbed himself a “cool” dictator, he was seeking to project an image of a modern president who had broken with old paradigms. He promoted Bitcoin and sold El Salvador as “the land of surf, volcanoes and coffee.” Now, his main claim to fame abroad is being a jailer — a role he assumed after reaching an agreement with the United States to accept deportees from that country.....

 Bukele seems to drift further away from the youthful, disruptive leader who made headlines in 2019 — and closer to the mold of traditional autocrats. He no longer needs to joke around to wield power: all he needs is an order. The cool persona of the self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” appears to be fading.

Scholar Ricardo Valencia similarly writes in an opinion piece in El Faro titled When the Narrative Slips Away, Bukele Resorts to Intimidation:

In an impoverished country like El Salvador, in growing social turmoil, what remains is repression and intimidation. The “cool” dictator is dead; the cruel dictator is born.

El Faro journalist Nelson Rauda wrote in the New York Times that The World Is Finally Seeing How Dangerous Bukele Really Is:

While the idealized version of him — an efficient, eloquent leader who has reduced crime in the country and is committed to fighting corruption — sounds great, the reality is that he is a mercurial and unrestrained politician who controls every institution at the expense of the country’s democracy....

Many are now realizing what some of us have warned people about for years: that even if Mr. Bukele has ironically called himself the “coolest dictator in the world,” he’s a dictator nonetheless.

Rauda also had to leave the El Salvador for his safety after he wrote that piece in the New York Times, and after El Faro published a three-part series of video interviews of gang members describing how they had worked with Bukele's team to provide him with votes in elections and support of various projects.  When El Faro subsequently learned from a credible source that the Bukele regime was preparing to arrest seven of its journalists, they left the country.

Rauda describes some of that in an interview on public radio - What life is really like in El Salvador under Bukele’s 'iron fist'.  Bukele has not yet been able to spin or control the flow of this ongoing reporting about repression and human rights abuses under his autocratic rule. 

There is at least some indication that Bukele's very high approval ratings among the Salvadoran public may also be slipping.  The Salvadoran newspaper El Diario de Hoy published results from a poll by the Center of Opinion Research, showing the percentage of respondents approving of Bukele's rule declining to 55%.  While I have my doubts about the credibility of that poll, there is a growing sense in El Salvador that a much safer El Salvador has not necessarily translated into one where standards of living are improving for the average family. There is a growing gap between rich and poor, with rising prices and slow economic growth plaguing the country.  While vast numbers of Salvadoran families have relatives in the US who are often undocumented, Bukele is seen aligning himself with the US president who wants to deport them.

Kate Linthicum notes in the LA Times:

Bukele has beefed up state-owned news outlets, which broadcast pro-Bukele content

and have prominent social media influencers on their payrolls. But behind TikToks touting improvements lie bleak statistics.

 The poverty rate rose from 26.8% in 2019 to 30.3% in 2023. The country has the lowest levels of economic growth and foreign investment in of all of Central America, worse even than nearby Nicaragua, a dictatorship that has been pummeled by U.S. sanctions.

And as the first images of El Salvador which come into the minds of persons around the world shift from "sun and surf" to "prisons, Trump and repression", Bukele may see negative impacts on tourism growth, which had been one of his principal achievements after dismantling gang-drivng crime.  

An article in the Washington Post titled El Salvador wants America’s prisoners. And its tourists explains:

Perhaps better known than El Salvador’s beaches and volcanoes, though, is the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT by its Spanish acronym.

Over the past few months, coverage of Bukele’s partnership with the Trump administration to house detainees from the United States has led to the spread of images of the crowded confines across social media and cable TV. The news has left some wondering whether a visit signals their support for Bukele’s government or whether a trip to El Salvador is safe despite the State Department’s recently lowered travel advisory.

For most of his time in power, Bukele has been able to rely on his enormous popularity among the Salvadoran public to assure his ongoing hold on power. But if and when he loses control of the story line which supported that popularity, El Salvador may find its president relying less on being cool and more on being cruel.  That time may have already come.