El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has been reelected. While the official results aren’t yet in, with 70% of the ballots counted, Bukele has received an astounding 83% of the votes. He declared victory on Sunday night over X (formerly Twitter).
Under the Shadow host Michael Fox was on the ground for the election. He takes us there, and sits down for an in-depth conversation with Dartmouth assistant professor of Latin American Studies Jorge Cuellar.
They look at the vote. Concerns for the country’s democracy. Bukele’s reelection, his image, plans, and what it all means going forward.
Under the Shadow is a new investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
Recorded in San Salvador, El Salvador.
This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.
Guests: Jorge Cuellar.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Follow and support journalist Michael Fox or Under the Shadow at https://www.patreon.com/mfox
Use of Michael’s election day report courtesy of The World.
Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi folks. I’m your host Michael Fox.
So, like last week, when we went to Guatemala for an update on the inauguration of that country’s new president Bernardo Arevalo… this week, is also going to be a little different. I’ve been covering the elections in El Salvador. The country’s president Nayib Bukele was reelected on Sunday, February 4th. And there is so much to say.
I want to start by just diving right in. I’m first going to play for you a radio story I filed The World. It ran on Monday, February 5th, the day after the vote. I then sit down, in El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, with Salvadoran Dartmouth Assistant professor of Latin American studies Jorge Cuellar. If you’ve been listening to this podcast you’ll remember him from episodes 4 and 5, which looked at the Civil War in El Salvador and Radio Venceremos.
Finally, at the very end of the episode, I also have a bit of an update on rather concerning news from El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Court and the vote count.
OK. Here’s the show…
[THE WORLD STORY]
Supporters of Nayib Bukele danced and cheered last night in El Salvador’s main plaza.
Among them was Teresa Vazquez. She wears a scarf with a slick cartoon image of 42-year-old Bukele in sunglasses.
Teresa Vazquez: I am happy, because we are enjoying true freedom. I’m 67 years old and we’ve never had a president like we have today.
Michael Fox: Bukele has amassed an almost fanatical fan base. And they turned out for him on election day.
The vote itself was relatively without incident. People made their choice for president and legislative assembly.
But there were issues. Political campaigning is usually prohibited on the day of the vote. But on Sunday, billboards and banners of Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, New Ideas, draped across roadsides, and filled the streets in front of voting centers.
Outside polling stations, Bukele supporters cheered for their president and even-directed some voters how to vote for Bukele or New Ideas candidates. During his first term Bukele’s party in congress ousted five Supreme Court Justices, and appointed a new court. The new justices re-interpreted the constitution, enabling Bukele to run for an unprecedented 2nd term.
Voter: This election is unconstitutional. As citizens, we have the right to come and vote, but that doesn’t mean that it’s constitutional.
Michael Fox: But that was not an issue for most at the polls. For every other Salvadoran I spoke with on election day, one thing shined above all the rest: Security.
Vilma Perez is a retiree. She wears a blue Bukele hat with the image of the president. Slick-backed hair, manicured beard, leather jacket and aviators.
Vilma Perez: Now, we have so much security. We can go anywhere in the country without being afraid.
Michael Fox: That has been Bukele’s greatest achievement. Two years ago, he instituted a state of emergency, suspending habeas corpus and the rule of law. It’s enabled state security forces to detain and jail 70,000 alleged gang members indefinitely.
But family members of the detained say tens of thousands of those jailed are innocent. And they want their loved ones returned.
Last Friday, dozens of mothers and sisters of the detained rallied outside of the country’s Attorney General’s office. The Attorney General had closed the investigations into 142 deaths of detainees.
Crowd: Enough Bukele
Michael Fox: They say they’re afraid for their loved ones on the inside and they want the investigations re-opened. Reina Hernandez carries a large pink sign, which reads, “freedom for my son.”
Reina Hernandez: They captured my son on May 4, 2022. He’s not involved in gangs, he hasn’t done anything wrong. He has no criminal record. And that’s why I’m here.
Michael Fox: Analysts say Bukele will likely double down on the harsh measures that have won him so much popularity. And he’s inspiring others abroad.
Outside the main voting center in San Salvador, a group of Peruvians watch a mass of Bukele supporters celebrate the impending victory. They’re here at the invitation of Bukele’s party.
Armando Mendoza is the president of Peru’s municipal police force.
Armando Mendoza: We are here to copy this very successful security model of President Nayib Bukele, which has shown the world that it can work. Ecuador has already started to copy it, Costa Rica wants to copy it. Guatemala. Colombia. In Latin America, everyone wants a Bukele model, because it has shown results.
Michael Fox: During a press conference yesterday, Bukele said he was already exchanging ideas with Argentina’s new libertarian president Javier Milei.
At home, the future of El Salvador is unclear. Bukele has amassed unprecedented power. He says he’s creating a new democracy, though to outside observers it looks a lot like autocracy. And the majority of the country seems on board.
Marcos Lopez has been selling political party t-shirts and flags every election for years, outside the voting center where Bukele cast his ballot.
Marcos Lopez: A long time ago, we used to sell shirts from the other parties when they were around, but now that there’s the official party that’s what we sell. We don’t need to sell any other shirts, because people only ask for the official party shirt.
Michael Fox: It’s a telling sign of the uncertain road ahead in El Salvador. Though one thing is for sure. Bukele is in charge and he has a mandate. For The World, I’m Michael Fox. San Salvador. El Salvador
That ran on Monday, February 5th. Now on to my conversation with Professor Jorge Cuellar. We look at the vote. Concerns for the country’s democracy. Bukele’s reelection, his image, plans and what it all means going forward.
[CONVERSATION WITH JORGE CUELLAR]
Jorge Cuéllar: What’s up, Mike?
Michael Fox: What’s up, Jorge? This is so cool. OK, so. We are, right now, in the courtyard of the Museum of Art and Image. It’s kind of fitting that we’re having our little conversation right here in San Salvador. I’m honored to be in your presence, Jorge. This is fantastic. Thank you so much. Super cool.
So Jorge and I have been in San Salvador for the last week. We’ve been running around town, we’ve been interviewing a lot of people. We’ve been seeing a lot of things. Obviously, we were on the ground for the elections on Sunday.
And so I wanted to have this little conversation with you to kind of bring people up to speed with where we are now connected to the past and and take a look at where we’re headed into the future. And I guess I’ll just start how, how are you feeling?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. Well, well, First off, thanks Mike. It’s really good to be here with you, you know, at the at the Museum of the Word and Image, which has been a sort of such an important place for safekeeping of country historical memory. For reminding people of the Salvadoran past in order to you know forge a better Salvador future. And they’re they’re just sort of the memory keepers institutionally at least. And so it’s it’s kind of fitting right to be here and to be having this conversation with you.
And so, how do I feel? That’s I mean. It’s a complex one, you know, I’m Salvadoran. I actually went to a vote myself with with my mom and it was a kind of a weird, weird experience. There was, I mean, I right now I’m feeling a bit, you know, in kind of in a suspended period. Like I’m suspended in time in the sense that I don’t know where this is going because we’re in totally, you know, a new political moment that the Salvadoran people haven’t experienced.
And I myself, in my lifetime have never experienced, you know, there’s dictatorships that have happened in the past, authoritarianism has passed, military coups in the past, but this is something totally, totally new. And so my, my feelings around it aren’t fully, you know, sort of cemented or articulated, but but I do feel kind of suspended. Because I’m not sure where this is going to end up, and even after, you know, exercising the vote yesterday.
And seeing and seeing folks really kind of euphoric about this victory, but at the same time, there’s a lot of people who have remained silent and and quiet around around this moment. We’re still really unclear about the vote count at this point so we don’t know what’s happening there but there’s a sense that you know we sort of we lie in wait to as to what’s going to happen and and I really share that sentiment with with my Co-nationals.
Michael Fox: Yeah, just as context, right? So elections were Sunday yesterday, now.
Over 1500 voting centers around the country. Salvadorans hit the polls everywhere. And obviously the tbig person on the ballot is President Nayib Bukele, right, who’s been in power for five years.
He’s running for re-election. Re-election is unconstitutional according to the Constitution. But he was able to remove the Supreme Court, put in another Supreme Court, and then they approved it.
And that opened the door for his reelection. There was also a shift in the in the Congress, the legislative assembly. They changed the number of legislative assembly members and so this now they were voting yesterday for 60 new members of legislature. Also the foreign vote like the US vote out out of the country. The diaspora is the first time they’ve been able to vote. Which there were some complications. Online voting started 7:00 AM and ended at 5:00.
What we know until now is that Bukali had said that a couple hours later, like he would declare his victory. And that’s what he did over Twitter, right? We we still don’t have the full results from the tribunal, the Supreme Electoral Court, and we don’t know when we will get them. But Bukeley, a couple hours later said I’ve won with 85% of the vote and I’ve won 58 of 60 congressional representatives.
And then? After the vote then we, you know, we went to downtown San Salvador and and and Jorge was there to watch his speech. I was busy working. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so that’s like that’s like that that’s the, that’s the big really quick context. Did I miss anything in in terms of like understanding like what what the date was like given to the specifics in a second.
Jorge Cuéllar: No, no, no. I think the context is right. Yeah, I think that’s precisely what what this what this election has been about. I think you know it’s been five years of bouquet and it’s a it’s a reality that has for some people really paid off in the sense that they feel security right. And this is what what really Salvadorans were voting on.
Bukele as a sort of steward of country security, this is the main reason Salvadorans took to the ballot box and as as you said like Nayib Bukele like an overwhelming amount of the popular vote, 85% not it’s not clear yet even though Sid Gallup had also similar result. But the official results you know from the tribunal aren’t in yet. So we can’t we can’t be certain that that’s the exact figure yet.
Michael Fox: Yeah, as well before we get dive into like because I’m excited to to kind of walk through Election Day and and look at our takeaways and what did you see and what were the some of the highlights. But before we get into that, could you give me just a really quick overview of the Bukele administration, I think it’s important for people that don’t know that much to like, understand what have these last five years meant for El Salvador.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. So when Bukele comes into power in 2019, you have a kind of this is a breakthrough moment, It’s a watershed moment in Salvadoran politics, he’s a political outsider, right? He’s sort of unknown on the political scene nationally his previous roles has been have been as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán as well as mayor of San Salvador. And you, you see, you see the people in a situation where where gang criminality is such a norm. In these in the country where people have been, you know, haven’t accumulated hurt around gang criminality. Many people have migrated and Bukele comes in as a sort of messianic figure that is going to rectify all these country problems.
And do away with them and build the new El Salvador and you see that on some ads actually
and what you see is in fact is the way that he approaches this problem is not that dissimilar from politicians before other presidents right? He he he unleashes during the pandemic he he gets this like really important opportunity of the of the pandemic to basically unleash the military and police apparatus all throughout El Salvador in order to deal with the the sanitary emergency of the pandemic right.
But as well a station police officers in strategic locations in order to deal with the gang problem And so it’s a kind of double double move that that he’s afforded during the the early pandemic and through that he he he calls this thing the territorial Control Plan which is his approach to combating gangs right it it works right it works and he and what he does is he asks the legislative assembly at that moment.
And to give him exceptional powers, right, emergency powers, not only to deal with the pandemic but also to deal like with the profound sort of structural problem of gangs by you know giving him.
What is it? It’s a it’s a it’s a defense bill. It’s a defense bill where he actually occupies the legislative assembly with military in tow in order to pressure the legislative assembly to support the passing of this bill, right. So there’s all these sort of moves that he’s making in order to ensure that he has the resources, to combat these gangs and that has been like just scaling up year after year across these 4 1/2 years of Bukele to deepen the repressive and the security apparatus with continual funds, with the upgrading of military equipment, with the buying of tanks which some Salvadorans were taking pictures of with actually in at the celebration yesterday, but it’s this kind of sort of fetish right around security that Buchanan has really seized upon and has made it the hallmark of his administration.
And that’s what the last 4 1/2 years have been about. But in order to achieve that, there’s been this kind of democratic erosion, right? The occupying of the legends of legislative assembly, the stacking of the Constitutional court, as you mentioned, with people that you know would feel favorably later favorably interpret the Constitution, right to allow for his reelection. As well as you know putting Nuevas Ideas as his party’s officials throughout, you know, El Salvador. And so it’s this is, this is what has happened over the last 4 1/2 years. And people have been taken by that. They’ve been really convinced by this. They’re they’re enthused about it, They continue to be euphoric, because there’s been concrete results and that those concrete results have, you know, have come from these criminal like gang sweeps that they’ve done throughout the country that has led to the overwhelming, you know, like 70,000 people being detained in through Salvadoran prisons, but also with the building of new ones, right? Like the terrorism containment center and and these other which you know, has been has led to huge abuses in human rights, but have nonetheless, you know, people overlooked that because the problem of insecurity was so deep rooted and was such a issue right in everyday life.
Michael Fox: Awesome context. We’re going to dive into a bunch of the stuff. But I want to start kind of on like dive into Election Day yesterday, right? You were on the ground. What did you see? What were some of your takeaways? From yesterday.
Jorge Cuéllar: I mean I saw, I saw the Salvadoran people in different contexts. I saw him in in a rural, a kind of semi rural context and also in San Salvador in an urban context take to take to the voting centers, you know with, with, with a sort of, it was sort of somber in in many ways. There was a It was a this. The election results were a foregone conclusion. It was already known that Bukele was going to win, it just was a matter of by how much right and really the struggle of of the election was in the Legislative Assembly, so much of what I heard in the people that I spoke to, from taxi drivers to people on the street to standing in line to buy food, right is is this idea that that Bukele has done a magnificent, magnificent job right, in securing, you know, the country. But at the same time they don’t want him to have full power, right. By by complicating the legislative assembly and not giving that fully over to remacideas, his party, right.
And so it’s that that’s that’s one of the main sort of nuances, right, that I caught when I was speaking to people. But I think Despite that what what what was clear is that people were were still willing to give Bukele right and his party of which is is an extension of him right another chance to rectify not only right keep the gang members in the prisons which you know they they they really did run a fear a fear campaign in order to ensure that was kind of the dominant issue right on the ballot, but also to address economic problems, right, that had that have been lingering since the the pandemic, right and the spending on on security and the spending on the emergency itself, right that that is still really impacting Salvadoran families?
Michael Fox: You know, I was, I was, I was really like kind of shocked and taken aback by the amount of, like, government propaganda at so many of the polling stations like in front, inside people’s colors, people voting with that. I was an election observer. We talked a little bit about this last couple days. I was an election observer 20 years ago and it was that was that was really key, was to make sure that there was this independence, that you couldn’t be just people couldn’t be flying the day of the vote. I mean, obviously there’s other countries, they have different realities.
But in El Salvador that was really, really clear, like you can’t just be promoting people’s vote outside, you can’t be directing people from a specific party. You can’t go inside. And you couldn’t vote with like a specific color shirt, right?
And yesterday I go to the main voting center. I was there right before they opened. And there’s this huge Nuevos he there is banner. Banner right out front. This is the spot that like was downtown in front of the stadium. This is where Bukile ended up voting at the very end of the day. But the big banner. And then there’s these little, these little like, what do you call them? Not booths, but these little tables with these little tents. Yeah, canopy tents. And those are all like Nuevas Ideas with the people down sitting down beneath them.
And I talked to some of them and they and I said, oh, so you guys are getting the vote. I said no, no, no. We’re here to just help guide people if they need help. So like they would guide them, but they would be with a with a Nuevos idea’s flyer with the the face of the candidate. And then here’s your, here’s your table. And this was all in the way of his ideas. It wasn’t anybody else, right. And even inside the colors of you, you know, in the past. You had the the vigilantes, the people from the different parties who had to be there to watch the vote. And and then you would have like the president of the table who would be like independent.
And this time everyone’s wearing like there were, there were a couple of other parties in there, but especially in that main voting center it was all the sky blue and the white, the buckele colors like that was it everywhere. And if there was any other color it was the orange and the the orange. The Gana, the Gana, which is the party that Bukele won, came to power in five years ago.
So it was shocking the amount and even the that other main voting station that I just mentioned then you on the other side, you had this whole crew of people with Bukhari shirts on cheering. And like yelling and setting off fireworks and this was all this was all like institutional, you know, it was all crazy. I was like I was shocked at the level of that, that I just didn’t even realize like.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, it was, It was really similar in the voting centers that I was in. You had, it was kind of there was a sort of four to one ratio in terms of, you know, the cyan and blue people and then the rest of the other parties. That’s sort of what I more or less calculated as as I was walking through them. There was that there was an overwhelming presence of that. And yeah, you’re right there. Everybody was wearing their their party’s colors and because of Nuevas Ideas popularity, most of what you saw was cyan and white, right. And so it’s it’s exactly right. I think that wasn’t the case in other elections passed where you couldn’t sort of campaign inside a voting center, right. You couldn’t be wearing these overwhelming like very visible colors. I remember people would wear pins of their party, but that was sort of subtle. You know, there wasn’t this kind of block of color that really singled you out as being a sympathizer of one party or the other. And so you had that.
Michael Fox: And, and and that was from, I mean, that was like a legacy coming out of the Civil War, right? To ensure that this democratic system was going to work for everybody and nobody was going to try and step on other people, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, exactly. So that people wouldn’t be influenced, unduly influenced the day of the election. Right. This is why you couldn’t, you know, you couldn’t have You know, the representation of a party right outside chanting or yelling, you know, slogans and things like that. It was to ensure the integrity of the vote that it didn’t wasn’t cast in a kind of manipulative way. But now it’s a sort of a free for all. It’s sort of a free for all. And because of the resources of the state and the sort of the re-election. This is why you have like you mentioned, right, the Flyers that were supposed to be guiding people and helping them to their ballot box. But, you know when I see that, it’s there’s no sort of Monogram on the on the piece of paper and so this this is this is something new before those papers that guided people to their polling place and to their ballot box were actually tribunal Supremo electoral. So they’re tribunal papers they weren’t party right and so this that even even at that level you can see. That the image of Nuevas Ideas and of Bukele’s party and its people moves through the electoral process in a way that we haven’t seen before.
Michael Fox: Right, right. And when you say party, it’s like it’s not any party, it is only Nuevas Ideas. I think it’s also important to remember that they were like the other parties didn’t get any of the the the the financial state funding, right. Right.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. They weren’t funded to a degree that they could have representation right at the voting centers in the way that Nuevas Ideas did. And so I wasn’t at a a place that had a a municipality that may have been one, let’s say by the FMLN and I don’t know what that looked like, maybe it was slightly different.
But I I’m I’m almost sure that it wasn’t because the resources that were given for you know, sort of the tabling activity outside of the voting centers was coming straight from from from the party. And since the party has an, you know, large amount of representation within all all bodies of government, right. Clearly they, you know, the state purse was sort of used for for, for that activity.
Michael Fox: So I guess the question Jorges, is like, why is Why are we talking about this so much? Why is that important?
Jorge Cuéllar: The reason why it’s so important because. If let’s say you’re plugged out of politics in El Salvador and you’re going to the ballot box that day, you would think that it’s only when I see that as running, that only bouquet is running, right. And that the other politicians are kind of non entities are a weak opposition. That, you know, this is, this is the kind of experience that you have as a voter when you’re going to a voting center. Because all you see is cyan and blue, right. That light, the light blue sky, blue and and white, right. That’s all you see. And you you say Siam, cyan, cyan that’s that’s the, that’s the name of it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact. They call themselves Bancada Cyan, which is like the cyan block right within the legislative assembly. They call themselves the Cyan Bloc and they use that and they had a hashtag and the whole thing. And they use that as a way to show the kind of collectivity, the power of that voting bloc against the other representatives in the legislative assembly.
And so they use that as a tool to to galvanized people to support them. So yeah, they definitely love the color, Mike.
Michael Fox: They love the color. And we saw it everywhere yesterday.
Jorge Cuéllar: Saw it everywhere. What I was going to say is that another thing is that even beyond the sort of perimeters of the voting centre. You rarely saw any political advertisements.
Flags. Political graffiti on on light posts, you didn’t see that and that was a characteristic of Salvadoran elections past that is no longer.
And this may be because of the state of exception, right. People are voting in a state of exception where that kind of political graffiti could be possibly misconstrued, you know as a violation of public property or something and could be a reason for arbitrary tension or whatever, right. Or just being harassed and by police or military. So it’s it’s, it’s important to not only because we’re going into a different political terrain that Salvadorans have never been into or never entered into, but because this was all happening under already exceptional conditions, right, with this state of exception, which is basically, you know, an emergency moment, a political emergency moment that Bukele has continually prolonged it.
Michael Fox: one of these days, last week, I went up to Cabanas. It’s a state nearby. And in San Salvador, you barely see any of those kind of billboards with like the pictures of different candidates once you get outside there. I started to see some, they were almost all from Nuevas Ideas, almost all and there was none from like the traditional like Frente, Arena parties obviously.
But I thought that was interesting once you got outside of San Salvador, like Bukele is still important. But here’s the importance of these other candidates.
Jorge Cuéllar: When I was over in San Martin, going towards Suchitoto in those areas you see some of the, you know, sort of smaller billboards with legislative assembly members faces on on them as well as the mayor’s. El Salvador is going into a mayoral election in March as well And so you saw some of that but it wasn’t to the to the level that it was before.
The kind of it was everywhere like any wall that had nothing on it had a political had the flag of a political party had something on it right. It was in a in a color that would make you think of a political party but that’s no longer the case.
Michael Fox: Right and I think just the context, we kind of mentioned the beginning, but like this goes back to 2019, Bukele comes in and completely breaks. There was this two party kind of system, right? There were other parties but it was like always back and forth from Frente and Arena which is the right wing party. And then 2019 Bukele breaks this and just rolls in and continues to steamroll till today. There was something that I thought it was interesting interviewing a ton of people at the different voting centers yesterday. Every single person like we talked about, like you mentioned that I spoke with, said security was their top thing. I mean it was like the it was like a model. And it’s true because it’s changed people’s lives. This is, I think, really important context that, you know, we might be concerned about what Bukele has done or is doing authoritarianism. What is he creating like the the gutting of democratic systems, the taking over of the different branches of government. But he has changed people’s lives like they have never seen before. Literally, suddenly people can walk the street at night. Like, how many people have repeated this to me so many different times, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. That’s exactly right, Mike. When you, when you live, you know, sort of 20 or so years, right, of gang violence, extortion, right. Having to, you know, by for the sake of survival, having to deal with the presence of gang members, with high homicide rates, with bodies showing up in the middle of roads, you know, these. This is the reality that Salvadorans were living for such a long time.
So if someone comes to you and says, hey, Mike, we’re going to clear that up for you. That’s a compelling argument, right? And and people are. People have totally bought into that because the guy has delivered. And we can’t discount that, right? We can’t discount the sort of material shift that has happened in the in the popular, you know, vulnerable and poor, marginalized Salvadoran community, People are really living that safety. And so one of the things that I heard often was we now can breathe tranquility. Respirar tranquilidade. And that to me is such a powerful, you know, sort of formulation of that it’s kind of a political emotion, right. It’s a political emotion that people are communicating through this sense of now being able to, like you said, walk the street, go to the store, not be looked at in a in a certain kind of way that might be suspicious or whatever.
So it’s this that people are are really drawn to, right, Because that has been delivered. But alongside that right you have this like you’re mentioning the dismantling of democracy, the abuse of human rights, the mass detention and mass incarceration emerging as a kind of industry in El Salvador as well. And so you have this other stuff happening. You have a one party state right at this point, but this reality, right, those are sort of abstractions for the regular Salvadoran because the regular Salvadoran only cares about whether or not they’re going to make it to the next day, which was the problem before Bukele, right.
And that is what for Salvadorans was the result of the two party system that predates him, right? It was, it was it was shared blame amongst Frente and Arena as being sort of you know two sides of the same coin, right? And the two sides of the same coin that also utilized in their own way the gang problem as a as a fear tactic to to garner votes.
Michael Fox: Walk me through. I want to walk. Polls close, right? And then people start to make their way to downtown. Walk me. We were there together. But walk me through kind of what what you saw. And kind of the feeling on the ground. Being there in like the minutes and the hours before Bukele is just about to speak.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. So I mean first of all I would like to see the photographs to compare the the size of the crowds because I’m not sure if they were the same, but people were in a celebratory mood, they’re really happy. They were, they were crowded in the sense that they were being funneled through a checkpoint, a security checkpoint with military, you know, with high caliber weapons and and police as well. But in general people were, you know, they were, they were there.
It was an orderly performance of the civic duty. You know they were walking through and gathering in front of the you know prepared stage by Bukele that was set up really early that morning. So the guy knew he was going to win and and and people were there. There was joy there was joy there and and that’s that’s important like it’s it’s it’s tough to to be critical of it but what you see is that you know folks are really excited about this. They were they were very happy about this. There were people with flags. There are people with, you know, masks on of Bukele.
There were all sorts of, you know, pirated shirts with Bukele his face on it. You know, all this kind of stuff was there and and and the sense was that, you know, this is, this is something that they felt was actually, even if some people didn’t vote for Bukele, was something that they were doing for their fellow Salvadoran. Right. So there was a sense of of of of compromiso, right of commitment from the Salvadoran that’s pro bugle to the one that isn’t because in the end they feel that they’re doing, they’re doing the right thing. They’re on the right side of history in a sense.
And so that sense of the people as a kind of historical actor was really was felt in that crowd and especially as we inched closer and closer to Buckele coming to the stage and speak, right? So that to me was one of the the kind of swelling emotion of the crowd again. But they were very much primed for it, right? They were, they were being they they they entered the discotheque, right. All the music was playing, you know, Daft Punk one more time. All these kind of stuff in order to prime people, to to sort of accept right what there was going to be presented before then.
Michael Fox: I think it was really interesting. I mean for me, obviously I’ve covered, I’ve covered a lot of elections. And there were major, major similarities between, I mean almost word for word when I heard from some of the folks last night and when I heard from a lot of Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil 2018-2019. You know, this is the first time I feel like I voted. You know, I feel like this is like the first time we actually have a president, Like we are free now. There are all these kind of layers of feelings and just, you know ecstasy, right? Like so much ecstasy, not the drug but the excitement, you know, like because people like it was it was on fire and I, you know, I want to get into a little bit this image of Bukele.. the marketing, right, Because I think this is so important to understand, I mean in terms of understanding like what is the most important thing like how did Bukele win? You know, we talked about security, but the other thing that he is so good at right is, is, is is the image, it’s the story, it’s the social media, it’s the selfie. Like how does he, what is his spin? But it’s not a spin. It’s like it’s literally he is kind of like a marketing like in the same way that the like you said, the music’s playing, it’s excitement. We want to bring people in in the same way like evangelical churches oftentimes play music that’s going to get people excited and youth excited to be part of something. And and there was so much of that happening, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. I mean, I think the evangelical comparison is so apartment. There’s a cult like experience of Bukele, right. When Bukele speaks, it seems like, you know, the anointed one. The enlightened leader, right, Is speaking to you directly as a vessel, as a vessel of God, right. And you can feel it in the crowd too, especially the way he was moving, you know, different sectors to to sort of cheer. When he was saying one thing versus another.
So he has those constituencies really, really well defined and articulated in his discourse in the way that he speaks to crowds, right. So that’s one way but this, but this kind of pleasure of belonging, which I think is really critical to the Bukele phenomenon, is not one that just happens in the sort of crowd phenomenon, but it’s one that has been cultivated for the last five years, right. And this is where you have the social media, this is where you have the the, the newspaper, the audio, El Salvador. This where this where the propaganda machine has like done its work right. It’s prime people for these moments.
It’s almost like… it’s just like leading you up to these climactic or the climax moments, right, of which the the elections, you know, really, really are that kind of peak, right? But so for many people, they’ve been hearing these things for for such a long time in different ways. Packaged through YouTube, packaged through the newspapers packaged through, you know clips of Bukele, packaged through his tweets, right. And through that ensemble of stuff right is, is the the marketing plan, right?
But one that people have been you know drip fed for the last five years. And even before that as a candidate Bukele.
Michael Fox: Yeah. So I want to I want to bring in two things that I noticed over the last week and then dive into his speech. Because you were there. I had to leave. You were there.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. I endured it. Mike.
Michael Fox: But I want to I want to dive into bringing two things that I thought were fascinating over the last week. One of the things we did not see as we mentioned in the lead up to the elections was kind of people in the streets getting the vote out, You know, oftentimes we’d seen the past in this election or another elections elsewhere, as you’re used to seeing people with flags and banners, whatever time I saw that was right before the in in El Salvador. There’s a specific time like two or three days beforehand when there’s no campaigning after that.
And it was that afternoon when this group called Poder Popular, which is a Bukele group, Popular Power. But it has a whole kind of left progressive discourse, right? And they came out, they came in from different areas and they kind of bust in and they did kind of an hour and a half right in front of Metro Centro in in San Salvador, this big kind of big mall and they had this huge banner up for Bukale.And they were handing out calendars and they’ve got flags and stuff. And what was really fascinating though is they weren’t necessarily there to engage the people that were around there, right?
They were there for the social media TikTok videos that they were shooting really fast. And and the director was just taking one after another, after another. He must have taken maybe 20 or 25. And then he said he was sending them all to Bukele and to social media so they could spread them out to their through their networks.
So the idea is to show kind of this.
Jorge Cuéllar: Organic popularity
Michael Fox: This organic popularity of all these people were in the streets and they’re all there, but it wasn’t necessarily for the people that were there. It’s like this image over social media.
It’s the same thing that Bukele talks about. I don’t have to go out and knock on doors and campaign. I’m going to send some tweets, man. Like that’s just the way it is. And we saw that also actually during the day of the vote with this crew that was outside of the of the main voting center where like the director of these guys is like at one point I was there filming and he there’s this whole line of Bukele supporters kind of in the shade. And he’s like, “You guys, I’m sorry, I know the sun’s hot, but you guys can’t be there because it doesn’t look like there’s enough of you guys. You guys go to the other side where it shows that we have like a we have a mass of people.” You know, and like, we’ve got it like, so it was all about the image. How are we going to lift this image through social media, right, ’cause that’s all that’s that’s all it’s about.
And then of course, you know, that was right after that they pulled out these, you know, there’s obviously they shot off the fireworks, but they actually had, you know, the smoked fire. So you like, you light it and it like it sends off this blue smoke. You see this in like protests a lot of times. This is one of the first times I’ve ever seen this like during an electoral campaign for a really positive thing.
And the entire box and everybody had these like these little smoke firework things that were like firing it off and they’re all in rows and they weren’t sure exactly what to do with it. They were kind of holding it up. Like this is really cool, but there was no real chanting. There wasn’t like because it’s all about the pictures and the image and it was also it’s not just about their own pictures and image but they know that by doing that, they’re attracting the attention of the press and the international press. And all the international press was at this specific spot because they knew Bukele was going to vote there. So part of this is like, oh, wow, there’s people doing stuff. Oh, wow. There’s people cheering. Oh, wow. There’s drums playing. Oh, there’s smoke going on. Sweet. And so, you know, the press, including myself, goes there, ’cause it’s the money shot, you know. And so this is just a couple of examples of, like, how we saw it just over the last couple days. But this is, I think, so important understanding like the image that Bukele is and how important that is for like his administration, his government and his persona, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right, Mike. Like, I mean you. I also one of the things that I, I do want to mention here because I think it’s part of the sort of media image that Bukele is and the sort of illusion of of of of being a generous leader is also that he offered free transportation to many people to go to their voting centres, right. He also the Nuevas Ideas party paid for Ubers and taxis to take people from places to voting centers and so that and all that stuff was branded, right. So there was a piece of paper that said, you know… The El Salvador and Gobierno de El Salvador government of El Salvador is also part of the rebranding.
One of the things that he first did when he came into power in 2019 was rebrand all the sort of imagery of the government. So even even Gobierno de El Salvador is a new formulation, that kind of dark blue, with the sort of text, that’s a Bukele invention. And so there’s all these ways that his his image, right… the persona around the image appears in different places and to the Salvadoran who’s using that public transportation to get to the voting center right.
There’s influence there, right? Oh wow. How generous oof the president to help me get to the voting center to vote for him like so this is this is sort of the the part of the part of that that brand. That Bukele has cultivated not only through Nuevas Ideas, but through the image of the government itself.
Michael Fox: Not even to mention the the food baskets that were handed out in recent weeks.
Jorge Cuéllar: Right, Exactly. And those food baskets had the the brand too. They said go. We had to know that El Salvador Paquette Telementario, you know and so this is, this is all and that’s only possible because he has all the state apparatus to do that stuff right to really kind of go to every door, go to every neighborhood and touch people, you know, with this box and deliver it like it’s so that in itself is part of the inequality, right? And I think one of the reasons why having an incumbent run in El Salvador was also disallowed because that allows for just an overwhelming amount of influence and presence that would not be afforded another candidate.
Michael Fox: Yeah, I I want to get into his speech, but just a second. There’s… I mean there’s an amazing podcast I’ve been listening to. Everybody has been listening to recently… Bukele what is it? Senor de Los Sueños, by Radio Ambulante and El Hilo, and this new I think what their joint podcasting company. This is the first one from them is, like, El Central. So it’s a Spanish language podcast — 6 episodes — that walks from the very beginning of Bukele up till now. It’s fantastic. It’s amazing. If you speak Spanish you should be listening to it.
Jorge Cuéllar: Check it out.
Michael Fox: But I mention that, because part of what they get into that is his marketing and his image around, saying yes, building hope, committing to stuff, promising lots of things, but then not necessarily fulfilling, you know? And that’s what we’ve seen like when he was at Nuevo Cuscatlán, then later on the mayor and then obviously I was interviewing folks just a few days ago and there’s been all these promises to redo all these parks and in many parks around the city of San Salvador. it’s like halfway done.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, they’re boarded up, right.
Michael Fox: And so like, how, how does that fit within all of this where like all these promises, all this image, getting everybody super hyped up, getting really excited about, but not necessarily following through, except, of course, in cases like, for instance, security, which is so huge, you know?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, I mean, and I think there are other things, right? Like another thing that I think he delivered on that people are grateful for are, for example, some improvements in roads, right, Surf City. Right. All these kinds of things. But if one looks really closely at those things, they’re not geared for the ordinary Salvadorans. They’re not, they’re not kind of, they’re not focused on them. They’re focused on tourists. They’re focused on, you know, kind of income coming from abroad. And so there’s. So those things have been also part of what he’s been successful at and what he’s delivered on.
Michael Fox: I’m sorry to cut you off that, but all that has also been the image, right? Because I did a story last year in in what was on Bitcoin, What was it? Bitcoin City, which is down. Oh, God. I don’t remember the name of the town, but it’s right along the coast. Right. And and it was the, like the first spot where there was supposed to be the pilot project and it was going to be amazing and it was going to bring all this Bitcoin money. And you go down there now and you talk to so many people and they’re like, look, yeah, there are places that accept it. And it’s brought in some tourism because there’s people that come in from abroad, but it hasn’t done almost anything for us and we don’t even use it, you know? So it’s like that’s part of the marketing. Not necessarily has it even really worked or not necessarily do people use Bitcoin all over the place? But that’s like a marketing tool, more like you said, for folks from abroad, ’cause now El Salvador is Ground Zero for, like the libertarian dream or goal of a libertarian paradise, right in El Salvador?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, no, exactly. I think Bitcoin is a perfect example of the the promise right of transformation that these ideas, these new ideas will bring to the country, but the lukewarm effect that they have on society. And so I think it’s really clear with the Bitcoin thing, but you know, so sort of going back to these other. You know, things that he’s clearly done, part of the part of the marketing that, you know, the marketing effect of Bukele has also been the media machine that like lets you see these things from perspectives that you don’t usually. Right. And so this is the drone imagery. This is the very kind of curated shots of the development and the bustling activity at them, very kind of manicured sort of images that again, just add to the mystique of how Bukele can get these things done right. And so this is what he’s doing with those projects. And there are many unfulfilled promises. Sure, right? There are many.
But when you talk to people, when you approach them about this, they’re like, I don’t care. What I care about is the fact that I’m feeling safe now because they also see that the unfulfilled promises part, which you know is a problem, right? Because there’s so many of them. And that in some ways it’s a really unsustainable rate at which he’s promising these things. Salvadorans actually see that as very similar to what other governments did. So in that sense, he’s not that different, right? Because there’s always promises that governments passed have given people: Fix this bridge. Help with the sewer system. Increase the water pressure in our home so that we actually can get some out of our tap, right? All these kinds of things that are still a problem, and Bukele has simply kind of promised them again.
Michael Fox: Plus, he’s so cool.
Jorge Cuéllar: So cool.
Michael Fox: Like, I mean aviator glasses and his hat backwards and so, I mean that that’s part of the the the mystique, right, that he’s like, he’s young, he’s hip, he’s religious. Like, he, he, like, checks all the boxes, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, he’s super cool. You know? Like, why wouldn’t you like him? Yeah. I mean, the guy, like, you want to be his friend, right? You want to be his friend. You want to hang out with him. You want to go to the club with him. You know, you want to have a beer with the guy. Like, he’s got that sort of effect on people. And I mean, what another thing that he’s also really been deliberate in in in doing is presenting his family as the model family, as the model Salvadoran family, right?
Like you said: Christian. Young. Innovative. Innovative. Innovative. Dynamic. Right? Brave. Right. This. This kind of family. And where the woman is playing a very supportive role to his leadership, the way that he’s also used that sort of familial narrative that he’s cultivated through social media is also part of this, right? And that’s how, you know, he’s able to reach older folks. That’s how he’s able to reach people with more traditional sensibilities with religious backgrounds, right? This is the way through the family. The family is just another instrument in the media toolkit of the Buckele project.
Michael Fox: And informality to like everyone of his like ads his lives. He’s like sitting on his couch with pictures of his family in the background, you know, wearing jeans and like a long a tight long sleeve shirt and just like as if you’re like looking into his house. When you when you get off the International Airport and you walk out of the main gate.
Jorge Cuéllar: It’s so weird.
Michael Fox: You walk into this like it’s like you’re in there like living room and it’s like there’s a big seat for Bukele on one side and then there’s a big you know seat with his wife on the other and it’s like the presidential family and you can almost you can almost feel like you’d walk up there and sit down with him. You know?
Jorge Cuéllar: Exactly. And I think that you know that sort of intimacy that they’re trying to curate around the family is also part of what people are be are drawn to that that’s I feel like that’s part of the populist approach that Bukele has taken right to to really reach people where they are. Even though it’s very it’s an empty thing like they’re you know ordinary folks aren’t going to Casa presidencial to you know make claims on the state and ask for things like that’s not happening but he’s but he’s really cultivating that proximity to people which people have you know sort of really fallen for.
Michael Fox: OK. We’re gonna have to wrap things up here, Jorge, Walk us to Bukele arrives.
What’s the scene on the ground and and and talk about his speech?
Jorge Cuéllar: So Bukele gets to, I mean he really milks the crowd for a long time. So he’s just he, you know, it’s people are saying, you know the reports are coming in that he’s gonna pop out at 10, that he’s gonna, you know sort of walk down the the red carpet to this balcony at the National Palace to speak to the crowd at 10. He milks it a little bit and he makes people way, you know, to the so crescendos a little bit.
Michael Fox: Just like he did with the elections, right? He didn’t, he didn’t vote. Most most presidents you were first in the morning. Exactly get it done. He does it 20 minutes beforehand and people are waiting for him all day long.
Jorge Cuéllar: And so he does this right to the last moment, just to kind of, you know, juice it, to juice it a bit and when he comes out, you know it’s that’s when you have the smoke machines going nuts, you got the the spotlights kind of you know, going on a kind of crazy erratic pattern and the crowd is going wild, right. This is what you hear people saying and it’s also… I think the sound is really important at this thing in the sense that like his microphone is so loud, it’s just you can’t ignore it. I’m wearing noise cancelling headphones trying to sort of like protect my ear drums and I could still hear the guy crystal clear. It’s just so intense the the the level of sound. But the people are simply like they’ve been, they’ve been waiting for this, you know, they’ve been waiting for this. He pops out with Gabriella, his wife and and he just, he, he just waving at the crowd, you know, giving a thumbs up, you know, pretending that he knows somebody in the crowd. Hey, I see you, you know, doing all these kinds of things.
And the people are just soaking it up, right? This is, this is the this is the moment, right? This is the sort of climax. This is what we’ve we’ve campaigned for, right? This is what we want. And and it’s and it’s really, really clear.
And so what I will say, too, about like the way that Bukele begins to talk about his speech the the the crowd goes quiet. The crowd it’s really still it’s really still and and and he begins to, you know, begins his speech, which is really kind of rehashing of many of his tweets that are against the opposition, against the journalists such as yourself, Mike. Against these people who are the naysayers of the Bukele project. And it’s almost as if the guy hasn’t won like he’s a, he’s a sore winner and it’s super clear in the ways you know, he’s going after these people even before he begins to talk about the positive things about his government that the people voted him in for, right.
And so it’s kind of strange that it really begins in the negative, right. So you have a good kind of 15 minutes of him just railing against the different oppositions who doubted. Who said that you know he’s a human rights abuser, journalists that are coming to the country only to to criticize and misunderstand and misrepresent right, As well as even drawing in these weird concepts about colonialism and imperialism, which is part of the the thing that he does right and why he’s so savvy and dangerous in many ways. Right in in pulling metaphors, mixing metaphors from different political traditions and you know and ideas and synthesizing them in a way that gets the crowd going right and makes makes the crowd feel like they’re the protagonist in all of this, right?
Michael Fox: Talk about what he said about democracy because he brings it up several times. He brought up during his his press conference, right. And then he brought it up again because obviously there’s been a huge number of critiques and major concerns about weakening democracy in El Salvador. And he kind of takes it and and and spins it, which I think is really important for us to understand the way that he’s seeing it and the way that he’s trying to kind of connect with the the Salvadoran population about what this means, right?
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, he spends a good amount of time breaking down the concept of democracy in the speech by actually splitting the word to a sort of Greek origin. Right. Demos and Kratos. And he says that Demos is the people and Kratos is power. Yes. So power to the people and this is where he again doubles down and that sort of messianic you know millenarian kind of thing where he’s that vessel of God and the people you know illuminated by God as well are are are pushing him to do these wonderful things to El Salvador.
And so he’s he’s actually splitting the democracy conversation and and and putting and kind of putting it upside down in a way where like this is if this is a dictatorship it’s sort of I think this is the the continuation of what he what is the subtext of what he said: If this is a dictatorship, as the journalist will say, then it’s a dictatorship of the people. And so and even that has a sort of Marxian thing there, but he’s using it as a way to justify right what what he’s doing and also to dismiss the critiques that have been happening and have been taking place and the ones that are to come. And so he’s trying to kind of anticipate where the the conversation will go, right, And trying to nip it right at the beginning. And so he’s using, you know, even these terms like democracy and just imploding them and rebuilding them and recomposing them in a way that suits, you know, what his what is, what he’s doing.
Michael Fox: I thought it was really interesting the way that he, I think in his speech he’s talking about how he was responding to a Spanish journalist who had said, aren’t you like, why are you trying to destroy democracy in El Salvador? And that’s the point in which he says, no, no, no. The democracy that we’ve had is actually a colonial like implantation. It’s failed, right? And so, what we’re building is our own from below Salvadoran democracy, and it’s going to be different, but it’s ours.
And he’s able to play with that… Like exactly what we were just talking about Jorge. He’s able to play with that because he comes back to this, oh, power to the people. Well, look, you guys just voted me in with 85 percent of the vote. The country with the highest vote percentage ever in the history of the world, according to him, so far. We don’t know the final results, but that, you know, we know that he had a huge amount of support. And so that is obviously a major mandate for us to do it ourselves, you know? Of course, when he says us, he really means him.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Michael Fox: And then, like, people are gonna support him because, hey, look what I’ve done with security, you know, But I think it is, it is this fascinating twist on how he’s trying to, in a way, Co opt the, the, the language of democracy in in a different way for his own means.
Jorge Cuéllar: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not only does he do the Spanish, but he also does the Americans, right? He says that the Americans were part of the way that this democracy unfolded and that led to the last, you know, 20 years of ARENA and FMLN. Right. So he does that as well. He goes back to the colonial period with the Spanish and the Spanish journalist. But then he ends up saying, you know, we love these guys. You know, they’re great. We appreciate them. And so he kind of moves back and forth the harsh critique. And then this present stuff.
At the end of it what, you know you said this that he’s trying to assemble in the discourse a Salvadoran democracy from below. And he and the way that he that he sells that is by saying that you know this is a path that we’ve never been allowed to take, right? A path that we’ve been never allowed to take because the NGOs, because of the US, because of you know all these sort of legal systems right of which democracy is a part have encumbered the true El Salvador from coming through. And so now you know, being that he is this vessel of transformation, right, he’s going to be the one that breaks through this, right?
And that is is such a seductive thing. And that seduction is so clear in the way that people respond to that. That’s when you have Bu-ke-le, Bu-ke-le again and again and again, right when those lines are delivered in this kind of really kind of incredible cadence that the guy has this, this sort of rhythm by which he speaks right where the repetition sort of line up maybe kind of, you know, as if he’s like actually there’s an underlying beat to to his music, to the to the to the speech that he’s making.
And leads to the line where people just go nuts, right? And so this is really powerful stuff. And also in the way that that getting those powerful lines actually are addressing the problem of the Salvadoran self esteem, right? That’s the reason why it’s also seductive. It’s not only because it’s really well presented, it’s really well curated. You got the light show and the drone show and the fireworks that are forthcoming. No, it’s also because Salvadoran and self esteem has been historically low, right, because of the way they’ve been presented in world media. You know, gang members caged and things like this that he’s offering this new vision, right?
And that new vision is obviously engineered and manufactured, but it’s nonetheless very compelling and remains compelling.
Michael Fox: And dangerous.
Jorge Cuéllar: And dangerous.
Michael Fox: Let’s look at the future where like where are we at now, right? That was yesterday. We still don’t have I guess where we at now, but then where we headed, right, because You know, where is this going? We still don’t have the full results. So we don’t know in particular about Congress, legislative assembly, but where do you see this taking in this in his second administration here.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah. I always tell people that I’m not in the business of predicting the future, you know, or even really talking about the future because you because you never know, because you never know and it’s not it’s not safe to do so.
But what we can see from this, this moment right now is that, I mean, we know for certain actually where we’re going, five years of Bukele. That means more state of exception, that means more presence of the military and police. That might also mean the construction boom that El Salvador has been going through, which might mean actually more prisons, right? It might mean other these kinds of experimental projects like Bitcoin, right? Things like this.
So you might have more of that, kind of sort of quasi innovative populism that he’s prototyped in his first five years. So we’ll have a continuation of that. We’ll have more promises, right, that are likely to be unfulfilled, but this is unsustainable, right? So I think the breaking point may come in the next five years. I don’t want to say for certain, but I do hope right, that sincere hope, that there there is an increasing awareness of, that the dismantling of the democratic state is a problem that needs to be addressed and that a one party state is not a solution to these really deeply rooted and historical problems with this country that no single politician on his own, even with right loyalist all over the state will really be able to fully address.
So that’s kind of what I see in the next five years. But I mean you saw Félix Ulloa speaking in The New York Times saying that like you know maybe there’s five more after that, maybe there’s five more after that, right.
Michael Fox: Félix Ulloa, Vice President.
Jorge Cuéllar: Félix Ulloa, Vice President. And so maybe we’re going to a sort of Ortega kind of situation where you have perpetual re-election with you know phony Mickey Mouse opposition that he’s going to knock down every time, right? And maybe the FMLN, as I think there were 7% the last time I checked in the presidential tallies, might be the only opposition, the real opposition left, I mean even not in and and some of these other parties were already sort of doing this. They actually represented this kind of weak opposition that Bukele will just very easily tumble down. But it maintains the image, the semblance of a democratic system because an opposition is allowed to exist, right?
And so that is precisely what for sure is going to be the case moving forward. But I think people and social movements will emerge to in response, as well, as we saw with some of these crazy memes that were circulating on the Internet.
Michael Fox: I want to just go really fast, to the bigger international perspective thing. I was fascinated that I was out near one of the polling stations where Bukele was about to vote. And these guys come up to me and like, oh your press, we’re from Peru. One guy’s a right wing politician, another guy’s the head of the municipal police —50,000 police officers — and hey’re like, “we’re here to learn the Bukele model and we want to bring it back to Peru and it’s going to be happening more and more around the country.
Bukele even mentioned yesterday he’s been in conversations to help Javier Milei in Argentina learn the Bukele model or the state of exception model, maybe around economic stuff, maybe not so much security but around other layers of this stuff.
So he is an inspiration for many right-wing leaders and and will probably be increasingly so.
Jorge Cuéllar: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean it’s not just not now, as well, like after the state of exception… even before, Bukele’s team was doing delegations to places like the Dominican Republic, to places like Colombia, to think about security policy in those specific contexts.
So this has been, you know, kind of an ongoing thing sort of missions, this punitive missions that these that this government has taken to spread some of the ideas that they’ve prototyped and sort of field tested in El Salvador, right? So, then I think that’s part of it, part of the seduction for other leaders that are also experiencing high levels of crime narcotrafficking, right? All these kinds of issues and and human rights abuses as well.
So that’s part of the seduction and the other one being that like going back to him being so cool right is that how do we sort of craft a figure within you know our our national context that has the staying power and this incredible amount of popularity that will then allow us to do these other kinds of technical changes in constitutions and legal frameworks that then will make possible even will open up new new vistas for Right politics.
And so that is part of the danger of of Bukele and he leans into this too like even in the speech, right? He highlights Argentina. He highlights Ecuador. Ecuador is the first country that he mentions in the string of countries that he that he speaks about and that’s Noboa state of exception, right. And also Honduras, as well, with a state of exception next door. And so he’s really kind of savvy in this in that as well in the way he’s he’s recognizing the the folks who are also paying him some level of adoration right from from abroad, yeah.
Michael Fox: Anything else to add, Jorge?
Jorge Cuéllar: You always ask me this and I never know what to say, because I feel like we’ve covered everything. I mean, I think that like part of the challenge moving forward with all of this is what what is an opposition in a perpetual state of exception, in an authoritarian, consolidated, authoritarian political reality? Like what is an opposition? And that’s a question that we don’t have an answer for yet.
I don’t have an answer for that. Because of the exhaustion of other political experiments past and the residues of political errors of the past cast a really long shadow on politics in El Salvador and on social movements and so that that is really the question if even an opposition, a real opposition is possible right in this new political reality. We don’t know, because we’ve never been here. And that’s I hope an answer that you know that we find by experiencing what these next five years will bring.
Michael Fox: Jorge Cuéllar, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Fantastic.
Jorge Cuéllar: Let’s do it, Mike
Michael Fox: It’s been a pleasure.
[MUSIC]
I just have one more thing to say before I go…
All of that was the situation the day after the election — Monday, February 5th. And as of right now, there is still no official result from the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections. On the court’s website, the presidential vote count is stuck at 70 percent of the ballots counted. On Monday afternoon, the members of the court held a press conference to announce that there was a problem with the uploading of the data of the remaining votes and that they were going to have to doublecheck everything manually. I’m seeing reports that that could take at least a week.
Opposition parties and electoral experts have denounced the situation. It is not normal. We’ve also heard many stories of problems with the vote abroad.
All of that said, Bukele did clearly win the election. With 70 percent of the ballots counted so far, he has a resounding lead with 83 percent. But, there is an even more concerning situation with the legislative assembly. Only 5 percent of those votes have been counted so far. And it’s an important battleground. Remember…. All 60 seats are up for grabs. Bukele says he’s picked up most of them. But, several people I spoke with in San Salvador over the last week, said they were going to vote for Bukele, but not for his party in Congress. Like this taxi driver, I met a few days before the vote.
Taxi Driver: Never, in history, have you seen one person with all the power and do everything well. We need a counterweight.
Michael Fox: We won’t know until those votes are counted.
[MUSIC]
That is all for Under the Shadow. Next week, we go to 1980s Honduras. To the center of U.S. operations in Central America and the people fighting brutal repression.
That’s next, on Under the Shadow.
If you like what you hear, you can check out my Patreon page. That’s Patreon.com forward slash mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America.
This is Michael Fox. Many thanks. See you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
