On December 3, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who is also a Bitcoin influencer and the self-dubbed “coolest dictator in the world”, took to his favourite platform for governance, Twitter, to announce that 10,000 soldiers had surrounded the Salvadoran municipality of Soyapango.
According to the tweet, which came accompanied by a video set to dramatic music, “extraction teams” from the police and army had been tasked with removing gang members from the area “one by one”.
The following day, Bukele tweeted another annoying video to accompany the news that “more than 140 gang members” had already been arrested in Soyapango, El Salvador’s most populous municipality and a satellite city of San Salvador, the country’s capital.
And the day after that, he reported that the Soyapango operation had entailed the largest concentration of troops in Salvadoran history — no small feat in a nation whose 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992, killed upwards of 75,000 people. . . .
Of course, in his euphoria over the unprecedented mobilisation of an entire army division, Bukele failed to explain why a president should derive such delight in effectively waging war against his own country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.