El Salvador’s ‘Cool Dictator’ Says He’s Won Re-Election

Nayib Bukele, the millennial authoritarian president of El Salvador, said he had been re-elected to a second term in a widely expected victory on Sunday.

The official votes are still being counted—but the apparent landslide win by the self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” comes despite the country’s constitutional ban on consecutive terms, as well as international criticism that his administration’s crackdown on crime has allowed a human rights crisis to spiral under his watch.

Bukele and his New Ideas party claimed victory on Sunday, before official results were released.

“According to our numbers,” the president tweeted in Spanish, “we have won the presidential election with more than 85 percent of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly.”

He added that it was a new record “in the entire democratic history of the world,” and that he would give an address at 9 p.m. local time. “God bless El Salvador.”

Bukele, 42, is hugely popular in El Salvador, with approval ratings hovering around 90 percent, according to Agence France Presse. He has a fondness for aviator sunglasses, leather jackets, and flashy stunts, making bitcoin legal tender in 2021 and hosting the 72nd Miss Universe pageant last year. What’s more, his tough-on-crime tactics, particularly when it comes to the organized gangs that have terrorized the region for years, have caused homicide rates to drop to some of the lowest in Latin America.

But that sharp dip has been accompanied by the suspension of some civil liberties, with Bukele’s government imposing what was supposed to be a one-month state of emergency in March 2022. Two years later, it has been renewed by congress nearly two dozen times.

Under emergency powers, his administration’s war on gangs led to the arrests of more than 76,000 people, rocketing El Salvador to claim the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of Jan. 2024, with the government having freed around 7,000 people, El Salvador still boasted more than 1,000 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. The Associated Press reported in Oct. 2022 that mass hearings were being held for up to 300 defendants at a time.

Human rights groups have alleged that more than 150 people have died in custody since the arrest campaign began. In a December report, Amnesty International warned of “the gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence, whose principal victims continue to be poverty-stricken communities that have historically been ravaged by crime.”

Bukele, a former law-student-turned-entrepreneur and nightclub manager, served as the mayor of capital city San Salvador for three years before ascending to the presidency in 2019. Two years later, his party passed a motion to overhaul the Supreme Court, booting out its five judges in favor of a new chamber that swiftly reinterpreted the constitution to allow Bukele to run again.

“The election of 2024 will be a great farce,” attorney Eduardo Escobar of the nongovernmental group Citizen Action predicted to the Associated Press at the time. The court ruling was similarly condemned by the United States government, which said it “undermines democracy.”

But most Salvadorans supported the move, according to NPR. “Some people call it a dictatorship,” a fisherman named Sebastián Morales Rivera remarked to The New York Times earlier this month. “But I would prefer to live under the dictatorship of a man with a sound mind than under the dictatorship of a bunch of psychopathic maniacs.”

A pupusas vendor told NPR this week that Bukele’s policies had dispelled the presence of the MS-13 street gang from his neighborhood. Without the need to cough up extortion fees to be left alone, Arnulfo Cristostomo Mazariego said, he could finally afford a necessary eye operation.

“There are a lot of people who complain that there is no liberty or human rights under Bukele,” Mazariego said. “But I have seen children killed because they didn't want to do a favor for the gangs. Where were human rights then?”

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