What do you call it when the president of a country deploys heavily armed soldiers and police inside the Legislative Assembly, threatens to dissolve the Assembly if lawmakers don’t do as he says, and then claims to have conferred directly with god?
If you’re El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—who did all of the above and more on February 9—you call it “respect[ing] the separation of powers.” This, at least, is what he argued in a February 16 letter to the editor of the Washington Post, while also cordially informing American readers that “anyone who suggested I was using our security forces for anything other than to protect the safety and integrity of the National Assembly is misreporting the truth.”
What better way to conduct damage control than by spontaneously rewriting events?
The spectacle Bukele staged in the Assembly was meant to coerce Salvadoran legislators into cooperating in his pursuit of a $109 million loan to finance the third phase of his Territorial Control Plan, which Bukele believes would—using the same failed strategies that have been flung at the wall in administrations past—increase security, reduce gang violence, and essentially make Bukele the savior of El Salvador.
And while god is apparently on board with the arrangement—recommending only that Bukele have “patience”—other powers that be were not so receptive to the show of force. United States ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson, for example, unleashed some admonishing tweets about the importance of democracy and respect for the rule of law, and the Washington Post editorial board condemned Bukele’s “alarming violation of democratic norms.”
Hence Bukele’s rebuttal in the Post, titled “As El Salvador’s president, I respect the separation of powers.” According to this short and sweet assault on logic and reality, the deployment of the military and police was necessary because “[t]he safety of the National Assembly was a concern, as tens of thousands of Salvadorans were outside the National Assembly calling for the full removal of its members.”
This is a bold statement, no doubt, from the very character who summoned said crowd to the National Assembly to do precisely that. READ MORE AT EL FARO.