Since March 2022, El Salvador has lived under a continuous state of emergency in which fundamental constitutional rights have been suspended as part of President Nayib Bukele’s so-called war on gangs. In that time, detentions have surged: Nearly 2 percent of the adult population has been arrested, and most of those individuals are being held in pretrial detention with little hope of a speedy judicial process.
The state of emergency was wildly popular when Bukele first imposed it, and more than three years later, a majority of the population continues to support it today. While journalists and analysts point to other factors, including backroom deals that Bukele negotiated with gang leaders, much of the Salvadoran population views Bukele and his hardline policies as responsible for improving security and reducing gang violence across the country.
More recently, however, what began as an anti-gang crackdown has metastasized into a systematic campaign targeting anyone who questions Bukele’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Unfortunately, Bukele is following a pattern seen before in Latin America: A leader dismantles democracy while popular in order to hold onto it once that support is gone. Alberto Fujimori in Peru in the 1990s and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in the 2000s are examples of democratically elected leaders with authoritarian tendencies who used their early popularity to undermine democratic values, often with the support of a majority of the population. Then, as they became less popular, the abuses increased. And the institutions that previously could have checked their power had been dismantled or captured.