Virus Gives Erratic El Salvador Strongman Excuse to Fill Jails

The Washington Spectator

On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a face mask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out—and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck—like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas—in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem—and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

The United Arab Emirates Is One of the US’s Favorite Middle East Monarchies

Jacobin

Last week, the Associated Press reported that efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to combat coronavirus had “renewed questions about mass surveillance” in the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms.

Believed to have “one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world,” the UAE is well poised to use the current pandemic to eviscerate civil liberties — not that there are really any to speak of in the first place.

The slightest criticism of the government can get you imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared; talking about human rights is a particularly dangerous pastime. In a country of obscene material wealth and malls with ski slopes, ubiquitous surveillance — of both physical movement and personal communications — means that freedom of speech, expression, association, and thought are practically nonexistent luxuries.

The AP report notes that, in May, the Dubai police announced the local surveillance camera system would start checking temperatures and ensuring social distancing. An experiment for thermal helmet cameras for police officers is underway, too, while “‘disinfection gates,’ which fog chemicals on people, similarly use thermal cameras that also can record and upload their data.” And as pleasant as fogging chemicals sound, there’s more: “Nothing prevents these additional cameras and their data from being fed into wider facial recognition databases.”

Having had the misfortune to find myself in the Emirates on a smattering of occasions, I can confirm the distinctly criminalizing sensation of having security cameras pointed at you from every direction. In fact, the UAE is one of the few places on earth where a mere few minutes in the country was enough to convince me that human existence is itself one big cruel experiment. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Friedman at 50 Friedman Units: What Did We Do to Deserve This?

FAIR

In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job security as an impediment to progress, innovation and national competitiveness—even lambasting the US Congress in 2004 for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean” (how’s that for unfeeling capitalism?)—it’s not clear why he’s suddenly concerned with saving US jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

As for Friedman’s own highly remunerated job (as of 2009, his speaking fee alone was no less than $75,000), this year marks the 25th anniversary of his service as foreign affairs columnist at the Times, where he has held various posts since 1981. To put it another way, Friedman has been writing a column on international relations for more than 50 Friedman Units—to use the metric coined by blogger Atrios (5/21/06) in honor of the pundit’s penchant for declaring that “the next six months” were always the critical ones in Iraq (FAIR.org, 5/16/06).

Unlike Susie Smith, Friedman’s livelihood has never been in jeopardy, despite his myriad professional defects. These range from rhetorical incoherence and continuous self-contradiction (e.g., Iraq was “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched,” even as Friedman self-defined as “a liberal on every issue other than this war”) to his tendency to imbue utterly frivolous jet-setting experiences with global political significance (e.g., that time on an Emirates Air flight from Dubai when the Pakistani passenger sporting a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” spontaneously evolved into a sign that Pakistan was the Titanic, or possibly the iceberg). (In the same article, Friedman cautioned that an American victory in Afghanistan was possible only if the US recognized that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.”)

Then, of course, there’s the fact that he is certifiably wrong on a regular basis. (“There is never going to be any European monetary union,” he wrote on October 4, 1995, a little more than three years before the launch of the euro. “Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”) And yet, thanks to his relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continue churning out his pseudo-thoughts week after week—even if, as he inexplicably joked in his 2005 ode to corporate globalization The World Is Flat, “some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.” READ MORE AT FAIR.