Latin America has Bukele-fever

The bad news is his key success may not be replicable

The only genuinely interesting part of Donald Trump’s Republican nomination acceptance speech back at the RNC was when he detoured to take some shots at El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele.

Bukele is an interesting guy. He got his start in politics as a leftist, a member of the FMLN political party founded by El Salvador’s leftist guerrilla rebels in the 1980s. He won election as Mayor of San Salvador in 2015, and was seen as the FMLN’s rising star — a millennial leader schooled in practical politics and social media, a contrast to the country’s then-president Salvador Sánchez Cerén who was an actual military commandant. But as mayor, Bukele sort of pivoted to the center, promoting urban renewal projects and distancing himself from Cerén’s administration, which was becoming unpopular. But he was still clearly on the left. Early in Trump’s term, he came to visit DC, which has a large Salvadoran population, talked with our moderate Democratic mayor about urban renewal projects, and published a joint op-ed calling for an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Salvadoran emigrés in the United States.

Bukele was kicked out of the FMLN for his criticisms of the incumbent president. He then ran and won his own presidential campaign on a third-party ticket and, after obtaining office, became an icon of the internet right with his promotion of Bitcoin and mass incarceration.

Trump, interestingly, said he doesn’t buy the theory that Bukele’s crime crackdown has worked. Instead, according to Trump, Bukele is “sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job.”

Because conservative media is basically non-functional at this point, I couldn’t really find any coverage on the right of this. Do they think Trump is right and the Bukele-boosterism is a mistake? Is Trump just making stuff up?

El Salvador is a small country and not a huge player on the global stage. But sky-high crime is a problem across huge swathes of Latin America and Bukele’s apparent success at re-establishing a state monopoly on the use of force has attracted a lot of attention from leaders around the region who are interested in replicating it. So I think it’s important to try to understand exactly what’s happening in El Salvador and why there’s considerable skepticism about exporting the model.

Mano dura has been tried and failed

Despite Bukele’s success as a hype man, it’s not like he’s the first person to try really cracking down on gangs. It’s a policy that’s ricocheted around Latin American politics for long enough that there’s a special Spanish term for it — “mano dura” or “iron fist” — and there was a whole pre-Bukele conventional wisdom about why these policies repeatedly failed.