A Millennial Authoritarian Wins Over El Salvador
This weekend’s legislative elections could make President Nayib Bukele his country’s most powerful leader in a generation.
Not welcome at the Casa Blanca.
Photographer: Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had a busy 2020. Last February, barely a year after taking office, he marched soldiers into the congressional chambers to intimidate the ostensibly obstreperous legislature. He stopped shy of a coup apparently because God told him to stand down.
A month later, when the pandemic hit, he sealed borders and ordered a severe lockdown, shunting some 16,000 violators into insalubrious quarantine camps. The detentions generated 1,600 human rights complaints and more Covid-19. When the constitutional bench of the Supreme Court demurred, he defied them too, three times.