Bukele Sabotages His Own Singapore Dreams
El Salvador’s leader should do more to balance the budget if he wants to fulfill his big ambitions for the country.
Lee Kuan Yew wouldn’t buy Bitcoin.
Photographer: Alex Peña/Getty Images South AmericaHaving crushed the political opposition and his country’s omnipresent crime gangs in less than five years, El Salvador’s disruptive President Nayib Bukele faces an even more demanding challenge: achieving prosperity for his people.
Some commentators have argued that Bukele’s endgame should be turning El Salvador into a Latin American version of Singapore, a paradise of order and free markets where a single party dominates politics in the name of efficiency — a model that the leader is not shy to tout himself. Just as Singapore became one of the world’s richest nations under Lee Kuan Yew, another disruptive leader, the argument goes, the 42-year-old millennial president can achieve progress through his total-security, technology-embracing, probusiness strategy.