The Dreams of a Palestinian Simon Bolivar

Part 2 - Nayib Bukele embracing Central American Populism

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio meeting with President Nayib Bukele before CECOT's use by the US. Photo via the US State Department and Wikimedia Commons.

In his first term, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele put his campaign trail words into action. The first stage of his Territorial Control Plan was called “Preparation,” and it kicked off quite early, during his third week in office. This stage placed the armed forces and police in large numbers within areas where gangs still had control, and locked down all the prisons in a temporary state of emergency.

The second phase, called “Opportunity,” implemented in July, was basically the “prevention” part of his campaign promises, where he built schools and sports centers, and created scholarships while improving national healthcare. Effectively, this phase reinforced the social safety net for the people of El Salvador.

The third phase again turned to enforcement. Called “Modernization,” it involved the purchase and equipping of the police and armed forces with new arms, including helicopters and drones. Though purchases actually started earlier, this phase went into full effect in August.

As with most of the world, Bukele’s next phases of his Territorial Control Plan came to a halt with the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. During this interval, reports appeared in the national media suggesting that Bukele’s government had been conducting negotiations with MS-13, and later Barrio 18, to lower the homicide rate. Bukele’s government denied this, particularly when the Biden administration began pressuring the Salvadorans to take a tougher stand, but it would have made sense that a carrot-and-stick approach would be tried to bring down the president’s favorite metric measuring how effective crime was being contained in El Salvador.

In July 2021, after the health crisis had sufficiently diminished, President Bukele restarted his Territorial Control Plan, implementing the next phase, “Incursion.” According to its stated goal, this was where Bukele would send in rearmed security forces into neighborhoods where gang control persisted. Until the last week of March 2022, though, an apparent truce persisted.

That all changed on March 26, 2022. A total of 62 people were murdered in the streets in the single-most deadliest day since the end of the Reagan-era Civil War. The next day marked the start of the government’s actual war on the gangs. Bukele declared a 30-day “state of exception,” during which habeas corpus was suspended while security forces carried out neighborhood blockades in door-to-door searches for gang members. He also locked down the nation’s prisons and threatened to cut off food to inmates if the gangs refused to stand down.

It was during this period that construction began on a new maximum security prison about 50 kilometers east of San Salvador. Designed to house 40,000 inmates, the rapidly constructed Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), or Terrorism Confinement Center, occupied some 56 acres near a small town named Tecoluca. Its walls today are 30 feet tall, 24 inches thick, topped with barbed wire, protected inside and outside by electrified fences, and watched over by 19 guard towers. Gravel on both sides makes silent approaches very difficult.

While the construction of CECOT neared completion, the government implemented its fifth phase, “Extraction,” in November 2022. This phase normalized the March 2022 State of Exception, allowing for regular security sweeps of urban communities where gang leaders are known to hide. Many of these likely became CECOT’s first inmates when intake began in January 2023.

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Almost as a final aside, it wasn’t until September 2023 that Bukele, well into campaigning for his second term as president, finally established a National Integrational Directory as part of his sixth phase of his Territorial Control Plan. This amounted to his third, as yet unfulfilled, prong of his campaign promises, which sought to tackle unemployment, reducing the pool from which gangs could recruit. It appeared conveniently timed to blunt criticism of his election campaign, which the nation’s constitution was supposed to have prohibited.

The effort to overturn the 2014 interpretation of at least four articles of the Constitution of El Salvador that prohibited the immediate re-election of a president must have begun close to the time Bukele came to power in June 2019. It’s hard to imagine the successful overturning of such a ruling as having taken place overnight. But by September 2021, two years and one pandemic later, he had done just that.

One violent year later, Bukele announced his re-election campaign. By June 2023, he registered as the nominee for the party he started, Nuevas Ideas, rather than GANA, and began a series of maneuvers that to his opponents seemed suspicious. For instance, he had a law passed that gave Salvadoran expatriates the opportunity to vote by mail, leading some to think that this would just result in ballot stuffing. He also reduced the number of municipalities and seats in the Legislative Assembly in such a way as to create accusations of gerrymandering. As with his war against the criminal gangs, he sought here to win, no matter the cost.

The result was a landslide victory. He also maintained a three-quarters majority in the Legislative Assembly, what Bukele said was needed to ensure that the opposition wouldn’t “liberate the gang members and use them to rise to power.” All efforts to recount and delay the inevitable victory proved predictably futile.

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