The Salvadoran elections were fraudulent and we knew it would be
My take on Bukele’s unconstitutional reelection.
El Salvador has declared Nayib Bukele the winner of the 2024 Presidential election, which is unconstitutional because presidents in El Salvador cannot do back-to-back terms. Presidential terms in El Salvador are only five years. So, essentially El Salvador will have at least decade of Bukele. The reason we have these limits on back-to-back presidential terms is to avoid dictatorships because in the decades leading up the Civil War (1980-1992), El Salvador was ruled by oppressive military dictatorships that lead to massacres like the La Matanza of 1932 ,which was a genocide of tens of thousands of Indigenous Nahua people and the 1980 El Mozote massacre that killed nearly 1,000 people. There have been many instances of massacres and human rights violations, but those stand out as the bloodiest of the last 100 years. So in order to avoid such concentration of absolute power, El Salvador added term limits when the constitution was rewritten after the war ended. Having back-to-back term limits is part of our “never again,” or at least it should’ve been. And if a president is really popular, they can run again, but in five years. These term limits were one of El Salvador’s hard-won victories and a step to becoming a democracy, but that’s all been dismantled.
The dismantling of El Salvador’s democracy under Nayib Bukele did not start with this election. It happened shortly after he came into power, constitutionally and legitimately I might add, in 2019 and he started randomly firing government officials because he simply did not like them. It was dismantled when he and his storm troopers rushed the Asamblea Nacional to pressure lawmakers to approve a police/military funding in February 2020. It was dismantled when he dismissed Salvadoran Supreme Court judges and installed his yes-men instead. It happened at the start of the pandemic when he was arbitrarily detaining people who broke COVID curfews. It happened when the state of exception was installed two years ago, which has resulted in 78,000 people arrested and imprisoned without trial and 200 prison-related deaths. So, maybe now the global press can feel that calling him a dictator is justified, now that he won an election he wasn’t suppose to be in, but El Salvador’s been stewing in it’s Bukele’s fascist shit for the last five years. And if you follow me closely, you know. And if you didn’t know, the screams of the families of those detained, the feminists, queers and grassroots organizers who have been protesting since day one, have been efficiently drowned out by a sophisticated misinformation and propaganda campaign on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook ect.
On election night, there were reports of voter irregularities at many voting centers in El Salvador and in the diaspora. Long wait lines, ballots gone missing, mishaps with the electronic voting – it all looks very fraudulent. He didn’t even need to rely on fraud, he would’ve won anyway because he’s popular (did I mention his robust misinformation and propaganda campaign?). Which kind of shows how much Bukele does not give a fuck about even the facade of legitimacy, because it doesn’t matter – he has all the power. And up until me writing this, the votes have not been all counted especially for diputados. There are massive irregularities. When I observed the 2019 election, the one Bukele legitimately won, this was not the case. Also, this year’s election gave us a new political prisoner: Salvadoran-Canadian poet Carlos Borjas was detained for reading aloud the constitution outloud at a voting center. Since when is reading the constitution against the law?
El Salvador is relatively safer for now, but its at the cost of 78,000 people without trial and 200 dead in prison without trial. You get snatched up by the police in El Salvador and they throw away the key because you never have a day in court to prove your innocence. El Salvador has followed in the United States footsteps with mass incarceration and surpassed it. El Salvador is the most incarcerated country per capita in the world – it’s the only thing El Salvador is actually number one in and it’s all thanks to Bukele! In the U.S., mass incarceration is a remnant of slavery and a racist and massive societal failure. So it’s really funny (tragic) seeing Salvadoran diaspora take principled stances against cops and mass incarceration in the U.S., yet turn around and support a pro-military pro-cop dictator. No discernment. No critical thinking. No sense of our collective Salvadoran historical memory.
At the end of the day though, locking people up will not solve the root causes of crime and violence in El Salvador, one of which is poverty and mass inequity. Have you talked to Salvadorans in El Salvador lately? (Not your creepy uncle who watches Bukele propaganda on YouTube) Groceries are super expensive right now, people can’t afford housing, the economy is just not doing good, yet the government has been using public money to attract crypto gentrifiers to invest and settle. None of this is sustainable and the shit will eventually hit the fan.
My mama always told me El Salvador revolts roughly every 50 years-ish because conditions don’t really change. 1935 was an Indigenous uprising, then in the 1980s it was a full blown war on the people, so by the time Bukele’s next term ends, we’ll be right on time for another revolution. And I can’t imagine the pent up anger of the kids who will have spent 10 years under a dictator (or more if we don’t wake the fuck up) and how that will look when it bubbles to the surface. Dictator’s rarely last forever. And I’m here for the long haul, are you?
PS Can’t leave you all without some educational material to share. I had the opportunity to contribute to this very relevant report on Bukele’s El Salvador by Bianca Graulau, you may know her from her appearance in Bad Bunny’s video for El Apagón and her excellent TikTok’s covering Puerto Rico: