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.