Opinion | A CPAC Hero Threatens a Latin Democracy

opinion | a cpac hero threatens a latin democracy

Far-left congressional Democrats, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, want to add four seats to the U.S. Supreme Court so they can pack the bench with justices who favor their politics. President Biden has proclaimed a federal bailout for student borrowers, even though the executive has no such authority. Prosecutors, judges and politicians who dislike Donald Trump are using their offices to persecute him.

Supporters of Mr. Trump rightly object to the politicization of independent institutions. Yet at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month, many from the same crowd cheered wildly for Nayib Bukele. He is the El Salvador president who has used his power to pack his country’s high court, eliminate due process, do away with transparency in public contracts, and go after political enemies.

The U.S. may be strong enough to withstand the aspirations of Democrats who resent checks on their power. But Mr. Bukele is steamrolling El Salvador’s frail democracy while many Americans who claim to revere the rule of law egg him on. Florida Sen. Marco Rubiois a big fan.

The Salvadoran president is a former member of the leftist FMLN party, formed by Marxist guerrillas after the 1992 peace accords. His political career was launched by its highest leadership, and in 2015 he rose to become mayor of San Salvador.

Mr. Bukele was elected president in 2019 on the ticket of the Grand Alliance for National Unity party, or GANA, which was founded by former President Tony Saca when he was kicked out of the center-right Arena party for corruption allegations. In 2021 Mr. Bukele’s New Ideas party and its smaller allies won a supermajority in congress. On the same day that the new legislature was sworn in, it removed four of five justices of the Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber who were less than halfway through their nine-year terms. The new legislature also prematurely removed the independent attorney general and replaced him with a malleable prosecutor.

Mr. Bukele’s handpicked court gave him the green light to run for re-election even though the constitution bars a president from serving consecutive terms. This isn’t the only reason critics are snickering about his Feb. 4 victory. An electoral tribunal submissive to the president gave him 82% of the vote. Turnout was only 48%, a fact missing from most news stories.

Salvadorans voted for congress the same day. One extremely troubling development was the gerrymandering of the districts to ensure two-thirds control of the lawmaking body. Congress is now expected to rubber-stamp constitutional reforms that will lock up the one-party state. Celebrating the effectiveness of the gerrymandering, Mr. Bukele said, “It will be the first time in a country that just one party exists in a completely democratic system.”

His vice president is less careful. “To these people who say that democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes; we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new,” Félix Ulloa said ahead of voting day.

The last two years provide more than a hint of what Mr. Ulloa has in mind. In March 2022 Mr. Bukele suspended civil liberties under a state of emergency. Two years later the emergency remains in place. Police and soldiers have used extraordinary powers to round up more than 75,000 mostly poor young men who, because of their economic status, fit the stereotype of gang members. Under a law passed last summer by the Bukele-controlled congress, up to 900 defendants can be convicted in a single trial. In August the minister of justice cited the release of some 7,000 prisoners held in “pretrial detention” as proof of a fair system. Those who say they were arbitrarily held for months in overcrowded dungeons and beaten by guards dispute that claim.

Law-and-order sweeps have created a climate of intimidation, fear and self-censorship among government critics and journalists, many of whom now live outside the country. It isn’t even clear that the repression explains the reduction in the number of murders. The Bukele high court has been denying U.S. extradition requests for gang leaders, adding to allegations last year by Washington that the drop in homicide rates is part of a government negotiation with gang honchos.

People feel safer, which has boosted Mr. Bukele’s popularity. But he isn’t the world’s first politician to brand majoritarianism as democracy. Nor is he the first permitted to trample a constitution in exchange for promises of a better future. Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega come to mind.

If El Salvador’s president is exceedingly popular, as he claims, he could use his political capital to build independent institutions supporting pluralism, the market economy and civil liberties. Instead he is engaged in an authoritarian crackdown designed to annihilate his political opposition and secure absolute power. It won’t end well.

Write to O’[email protected].

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