BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ: The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

08 August 2022

The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

On August 2, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – whose Twitter profile has evolved from “officially the coolest president in the world” to the “coolest dictator in the world” to just “El Presidente” – took to his favourite social media platform to announce that El Salvador had gone from being the “most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in Latin America”.

Accompanying the tweet was the hashtag #GuerraContraPandillas – “war on gangs” – and a statistics chart from the Salvadoran National Civilian Police indicating that, on August 1, there had allegedly been zero homicides nationwide.

Granted, the country is not very “safe” for the casualties of the war on gangs which is currently being waged in the context of a state of emergency imposed at the end of March in response to a spike in gang killings. The spike was occasioned by a breakdown in secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and the Salvadoran gangs – for which underhanded business Bukele assumed the codename “Batman”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

“I doubt there’s another journalist quite like her… Fernández’s prose is so incisive, pithy, powerful, and often funny.” —Counterpunch

“One of the most poignant, searing, and, at times, deadpan critiques of the United States and its mass media that I have ever read… An extraordinary and unorthodox travelogue.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books on Fernández’s Exile

“This is a travel memoir like no other: incredibly funny, observant, humane, anarchic, politically incisive, sophisticated, and raffish. Belén Fernández is a dangerously enchanting siren." —Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy

“A politically astute, world-wise, and occasionally hilarious gem of a book. Fernández's prose is an antidote to quarantine, an aperture to the anti-humanism of apartheid politics." —John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond

“Written with the author’s trademark wine bottle in hand, between cartwheels on the beach of death, this book skewers politicians and other unworthy foes with a precision inaccessible to more sober writers...” —Adrienne Pine, author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras

Belén talks about her new book - EXILE: Rejecting America and Finding the World - on Otherppl with Brad Listi, a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.

Available on Amazon.

"Fernández shows the yawning divide between what is reported and what is actually happening across the globe through the lens of US foreign policy. She backs this with a plethora of examples across many countries and regions — rendered via a unique perspective garnered by her self-imposed exile and endless travel." Los Angeles Review of Books

Martyrs Never Die

Published by Warscapes, available from Amazon

Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon, is Belén's latest travelogue, Warscape's first e-book and available from Amazon. Repeating her hitching tour from 10 years previous, she asks everyone she meets along the way, “Were you here in 2006?”, thereby bearing witness to varying accounts of the previous wars and the current violence in Syria, memories of each war now colored by all the others since.

". . . in this lamentably short e-book [Fernández] . . . records her second hitchhiking foray into Hezbollah's south Lebanon. . . . Not many young women would stand on a lonely road near Bazouriyeh, home of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, to make what the French call auto-stop. Yet nearly all her drivers were courteous and went out of their way to take her to places off their route…It is a disappointment that the tale was over within an hour’s read. I look forward to the sequel.” – Charles Glass, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 2016

" . . . a refreshingly honest and human slice of Lebanese life, death, and resilience; a mosaic of martyrs, memories, and missing persons, woven together with threads of hope and an unwavering commitment to resistance." - Sara Moawad, Muftah, 31 August 2016

"Fernández's writing is brilliant, hilarious, compassionate and unflinching. Martyrs seethes with moral outrage, yet is never shrill or preachy. If I were a media mogul, I would create a Hitchhiking Bureau for this brave and insatiably curious wanderer, and send her all over the globe." - Liza Featherstone, author and contributing editor to The Nation.

"[A] powerful account of the ghosts of wars past and present in the Middle East . . . [that] also captures the spirited resilience and political ambivalences of communities and peoples in a place that too few bother to consider. Accessible and engaging, it should be widely read by those seeking to make sense of not just Lebanon, but of the daily reminders of war." - Toby Craig Jones, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University

Factual errors, ham-fisted analysis, and contradictory assertions—compounded by a penchant for mixed metaphors and name-dropping—distinguish the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. . . .The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice.

Kudos for "The Imperial Messenger"

“thorough and academic destruction of Friedman's career and philosophy . . . an incisive dismantling of the man and his message.”

—Hamilton Nolan, in Gawker

“heroic. . . . [Fernández] documents at length, and in his own words, how thinly informed Friedman's pronouncements are, and how utterly careless he is about being wrong.”

—Scott McLemee, in The Washington Spectator

“Filleting the silliest man on the planet needs a sure scalpel, and Belén Fernández wields hers with deadly finesse.”

—Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch

“There is no wittier or sharper account of Thomas Friedman’s intellectual and moral atrocities than Belen Fernandez’s The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work.”

—Pankaj Mishra, writer/critic

“A long overdue takedown of a dangerous fraud. Fernández deserves great credit for . . . her witty, fact-based and ruthless deconstruction of all his contradictions, incoherence, jingoism and inane aphorisms.”

—Nir Rosen, author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World and In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq

“Via razor sharp analysis and meticulous research, Fernández reveals the consistently disastrous effects of the neoliberal policies Friedman cheerleads. The hubris, fallacy, consistent hypocrisy, and buffoonery of the New York Times' most widely read columnist is systematically deconstructed and laid bare. A must read.”

—Dahr Jamail, journalist and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

“The Imperial Messenger is a superb dissection of the character of Friedman, and all the representations he snootily imitates. Belén Fernández’s style is most witty and unique, and her book is the antithesis of Friedman’s various attempts at logic.”

—Ramzy Baroud, The Palestine Chronicle

“Belén Fernández . . . insinuates so effortlessly, you think she is just chilling—she is not. Her book on Thomas Friedman is an act of restitution, a declaration of independence from a young, idealist, brave, and defiant generation of Americans who have had it up to here with barefaced banality that has been fed to them for too long. She is talking back—boldly, patiently, chapter and verse, going in for the kill.”

—Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University

"Fernández skewers empire’s messenger Tom Friedman. . . . After reading The Imperial Messenger . . . the thought of sharing a profession with Friedman revolts me. Fernández demonstrates meticulously how The New York Times columnist seeks to make racism respectable. . . .Few books on current affairs merit being called page-turners; because of Fernández’s witty and punchy style, this one does."

—David Cronin, The Electronic Intifada

“. . . masterful, with sharp analysis and biting commentary on the arrogance of Friedman and his often dimwitted observations about the role of the US in the world. . . . a quick read, yet full of important analysis, particularly on Friedman’s take on the US since 9/11 and in the Israeli/Palestine conflict. For a study in how US journalists act as cheerleaders for empire, this book delivers.”

—Jeff Smith, Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

Reviews of "The Imperial Messenger"

DAVID WEARING, New Left Project: “. . . the sheer volume of butt-clenchingly awful prose and heart-tearingly twisted logic that [Fernández] has endured in her research . . . means at least that she will never have to prove herself to the global left in any other way. She brings to the task a delicious, dry wit, and a gift for perceptively and efficiently dismantling a bad argument. Her voice is a cool and authoritative one, and – from Friedman’s point of view - is all the more devastating for that. . . . reading this book feels like a small but significant experience in intellectual liberation, for which we have its author to thank.” READ MORE

ROBERT JENSEN, Truthout: “The Imperial Messenger . . . is as much about the cultural and political crises in the United States as it is about Friedman's flaws. This larger focus transforms what could have been a sarcastic hit piece that took easy shots at Friedman's most mangled prose into a thoughtful meditation from a young journalist willing to state the obvious: the emperor's messenger has no clothes.” READ MORE

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Institute for Political Economy: “Fernandez subjects Friedman to careful scrutiny and assigns him failing grades for logic, consistency, and integrity. After reading Fernandez dissect Friedman column by column, the unavoidable question is: How did Friedman ever pass himself off as a journalist? Why isn’t Belen Fernandez the New York Times’ lead columnist? The answer is clear. Fernandez won’t lie for the establishment.” READ MORE

DAVID CRONIN, The Electronic Intifada: “Fernández skewers empire’s messenger Tom Friedman. . . . Few books on current affairs merit being called page-turners; because of Fernández’s witty and punchy style, this one does.” READ MORE

MAX AJL, Jadaliyya: “In a world in which ideas are relentlessly invoked as explanations for the whirring of the empire, there is something compellingly honest about Fernández’s attention to the material context within which Friedman’s ideas find succor. . . . carefully argued, relentlessly well-written polemic.” READ MORE

JOHN ROBERTSON, War in Context: “. . . a systematic, detailed take-down of the neo-liberal bias, myopic US-Israeli chauvinism, and general intellectual shallowness that almost scream to be noticed in Friedman’s writing. . . . Fernandez’s book deserves to be read widely and discussed in depth.” READ MORE

STEVE MARLOWE, Chapati Mystery: “Fernandez’s spit-roasting of Friedman’s career is . . . proof that America’s reading public should have itself a come-to-Jesus meeting about whom it reads, and on what subjects. . . . Point by point, column after column, Fernandez compiles a litany of misstatements, historical reductionism, cultural ignorance, journalistic sloth, bald errors, obfuscations, ethnocentrism, banality, nonsensical business jargon, multitudinous contradiction and rank assholery.” READ MORE

SANDRA SIAGIAN, IPS: “Whatever the reader's political bent, The Imperial Messenger raises thought-provoking questions about the objectivity of mainstream media when it comes to U.S. economic and foreign policy interests.” READ MORE

CYRIL MYCHALEJKO, Toward Freedom: “a meticulously researched book, written with wry wit and an unrelenting critical eye, that should be read by both Friedman's fans and critics alike; not just for what it reveals about his journalism or the New York Times, but for what it says about the state of American journalism as a whole. In short, if New York's 'paper of record' wanted to start rectifying its own journalistic deficiencies, it would do well to start by replacing Friedman with Fernandez.” READ MORE

JIM MILES, Palestine Chronicle: “Imperial Messenger should be the companion volume to any and all reading of Friedman.” READ MORE

ANATOLE ASHRAF, Columbia Spectator: a "sustained criticism that highlights not only many of the shortcomings of the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the state of American journalism in which a figure like Friedman can rise to prominence. . . . The Imperial Messenger is required reading." READ MORE

"Hillary Does Honduras"

False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, edited by Lisa Featherstone and featuring Belén's essay "Hillary Does Honduras," is now available from Verso Books and Amazon.com

“This collection of essays deconstructs Hillary’s problematic history as a candidate who professes to be a feminist but whose policies have been pretty straight garbage for the nation’s vulnerable since the start.” – Holly Wood, Medium

“A feminist critique of a feminist candidate…devastating.” – Kirkus Reviews

Belén is a member of the editorial board for Jacobin magazine, a contributing editor at Ricochet, blogs for TeleSUR English, and writes regularly for Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America. Her articles have also appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Salon, Middle East Eye, AlterNet, In These Times, Al Akhbar English, Guernica Magazine, The Electronic Intifada, Upside Down World, and Venezuelanalysis.com, among others.

Born in Washington, DC, in 1982, Belén earned her bachelor's degree with a concentration in political science from Columbia University in New York City. Contact her at belengarciabernal@gmail.com.

Freddie DeBoer on Belén's reporting: "We are living in an America that has spent over a decade engaging in the systematic punishment of the Muslim world. In the commission of that crime, we have cloaked ourselves in a garment of our superior righteousness, our democracy, and our victimhood. If you let yourself dwell with that, you can go a particular kind of crazy. What Fernandez’s work allows me to do is to reclaim the disbelief that came before disgust. The clarity of her writing and her thinking remind me that I am allowed to say this is crazy. That may be a cold comfort, but there are times when it’s all you need." Read more.

Truthout interviews Belén on "Monsanto, the corporate mainstream media under-reporting stories such as the suicide epidemic in India and buffoonish commentary on GMOs by the likes of Thomas Friedman." 17 Oct 2013

Belén's takedown of Monsanto's claim to be a "sustainable agriculture company" has been listed in Project Censored's Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-2013 and reprinted in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, a compilation of news stories ignored or inadequately covered by the mainstream corporate press.

"It's hard to pull off a book that's simultaneously serious and silly but Fernández managed to do it. A delightful read."--NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

"On September 17, 2006, Amelia and I found ourselves on the border between Syria and Lebanon, drinking orange soda with the Syrian border guards. It was 34 days after the end of the 34-day war between Lebanon and Israel, and the sun was shining..."

Thus begins a hitchhiking tale like no other. MORE

Click here to buy now in paperback or as a file download.

Also available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

08 August 2022

The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

Belen interviewed by Rattansi & Ridley in London

Blog Archive