Nayib Bukele is the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator", and he has managed to do what many people thought was impossible in El Salvador.
In this episode, we'll learn about his rise to power, his controversial treatment of gang members, and explore what comes next for the small Central American nation.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the country of El Salvador, and more specifically, its latest and controversial president, Nayib Bukele.
[00:00:31] To some, he is a harsh and dangerous disciplinarian with authoritarian tendencies, a man who is behaving in an utterly irresponsible way with the country’s legal system and already precarious finances.
[00:00:46] To others, he is a voice of reason, a true leader who has made brave decisions that have made his country a safer and more prosperous nation.
[00:00:56] OK then, let’s get right into it, and learn about Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:01:06] On the 5th of June 2021, the president of El Salvador stood in front of a podium, ready to make an announcement.
[00:01:16] Nayib Bukele, who was then a few weeks away from celebrating his 40th birthday, stood up and proudly announced that El Salvador would become the first country in the world to recognise Bitcoin as legal currency.
[00:01:33] Not just this, but El Salvador was setting aside $150 million of its budget to buy Bitcoin.
[00:01:42] It was a big move, to say the least, and it was immediately all over the global news.
[00:01:50] What was he doing, commentators asked? Who was this young man who was playing Russian roulette with his country’s finances?
[00:01:59] These commentators were quick to pat themselves on the back when the very same day that Bukele made this announcement, the price of Bitcoin crashed from $52,000 to US$43,000.
[00:02:14] This decision was emblematic of Bukele, and the direction in which he has been taking El Salvador: controversial, unusual and unexpected, and most likely one which the full impact of which will take many years to be shown.
[00:02:33] Now, to understand how Bukele became president, we need to talk a bit more about El Salvador before he was elected.
[00:02:42] As you may know, El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America. Guatemala is to the north, Honduras to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the south and west.
[00:02:56] In economic terms, it is not a prosperous part of the world, and the region has suffered from high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
[00:03:07] El Salvador, like neighbouring Honduras, has also suffered from high levels of gang violence and murder, and for much of the 2010s had the highest murder rate in the world.
[00:03:22] In 2015, the murder rate in the country rose to 103 per 100,000, meaning that more than 1 in every 1,000 people in El Salvador was violently killed that year.
[00:03:38] It was, it's perhaps no exaggeration to say, the most dangerous place in the world.
[00:03:45] As a point of comparison, the murder rate in the UK is around 1 per 100,000, so in 2015 you were 100 times more likely to be killed in El Salvador than you were in the UK.
[00:04:00] Those odds don’t sound like much fun to me, and they clearly weren’t much fun for the citizens of El Salvador.
[00:04:09] And there didn’t seem to be much of an end in sight.
[00:04:13] The murder rate and violence had been high for several years. A truce between two major gangs, a peace agreement, had been brokered in 2012, but when the agreement broke down, the bullets started to fly again, and the murder rate soared.
[00:04:33] And, as you might expect, given this huge level of violence and real danger, there was minimal foreign investment in the country. It was dangerous, there was a very real chance of getting shot, the rule of law was weak, and this was a huge deterrent for potential foreign investors.
[00:04:54] There were two main political parties in El Salvador, one left wing and one right wing. The left wing party, the FMLN, had been in power since 2009, and the gang violence and deaths had exploded under its watch, and the right wing party hadn’t shown any particular signs that it would be able to do any better.
[00:05:19] Life in El Salvador was pretty bleak.
[00:05:23] So when it came to the presidential elections in 2019, there was an understandable appetite for change.
[00:05:32] Not just superficial change, a polished career politician who goes on TV and talks about how they really care about the average citizen, and how they truly understand the country.
[00:05:45] No. There was appetite for someone who was a breath of fresh air, who spoke differently, looked different, and had a very different vision for the future.
[00:05:57] This person was, of course, Nayib Bukele.
[00:06:02] Perhaps you can tell from his name that he was a little different from everyone else. His father was a Palestinian immigrant who opened the first McDonald’s franchise in El Salvador, and went on to have a wide-ranging and successful business career.
[00:06:19] Bukele’s background was in business, working first for his father’s advertising agency before setting out on his own.
[00:06:28] And when he turned 30, he announced that he would pack it all in, he would close the door on his business career, and enter politics.
[00:06:39] He took the traditional route to begin with, joining the major left-wing party, the FMLN, and became the mayor first of a small town before being elected mayor of the capital city, San Salvador, in 2015.
[00:06:55] And he was exceptionally popular. He launched a programme to install street lights in the capital to deter crime, he donated his salary to social initiatives to stop children joining gangs, he cracked down on violence and corruption and was generally seen as a man who could get stuff done.
[00:07:17] He was also a keen and adept user of social media, and he was only in his early 30s at the time, so he was seen as much more approachable than the often grey-haired men and women who Salvadorans–people from El Salvador–were used to seeing in positions of power.
[00:07:36] He had a sort of boy-wonder status, and this ruffled the feathers of some colleagues within his party, the FMLN. In 2017, Bukele ended up being kicked out of the party, and shortly after he announced that he would start his own political movement, and ultimately run for the presidency in 2019.
[00:08:02] Fast forward a couple of years, and he won the 2019 election by a landslide, winning 53% of the vote, while the other two main parties got 32% and 14% respectively.
[00:08:17] His message was a simple one: I am the only person who can fix corruption, get rid of the gangs, and can make your lives safer and better.
[00:08:29] Or to quote his campaign slogan, ‘There’s enough money as long as no one steals it’.
[00:08:36] He was young, charismatic, and could be found just as often in a black leather jacket as in a formal business suit.
[00:08:45] More importantly, he seemed to bridge the left-right divide. He had traditionally been aligned with the left, but he positioned himself as neither right nor left. He was the man who would crack down on gang violence and crime, and that was an issue that affected everyone, regardless of political views.
[00:09:09] And you may know what came next.
[00:09:12] In 2019, El Salvador had an estimated 67,000 citizens who were members of criminal gangs, and this is out of a population of just over 6 million. In other words, more than 1% of the country’s population was an active gang member.
[00:09:34] Bukele’s plan to eradicate gang violence was, on one level, blissfully simple: round up the gang members and remove them from society. If they are off the streets, imprisoned, they cannot commit crimes.
[00:09:51] Shortly after his election, he announced something called the Territorial Control Plan, which was a seven-part plan to eradicate gang violence from the streets of El Salvador.
[00:10:04] This was in 2019, and between then and now, more than 80,000 suspected gang members have been rounded up and sent to prison. And we must put an emphasis on “suspected” there, as these were not 80,000 people who had been proved guilty in a court of law.
[00:10:27] Fortunately, the fact that many gang members had very visible tattoos made tracking them down relatively easy, but human rights campaigners have raised alarm bells that many people have been wrongly imprisoned.
[00:10:42] Indeed, over 10% of those arrested and imprisoned have been released, but for the remaining 90%, they are now behind bars.
[00:10:53] And Bukele has wasted no time sharing videos of the miserable conditions in which these gang members have to live. Their heads shaved, no mattresses to sleep on, minimal food, and mixed up completely so they are not with their old friends or fellow gang members.
[00:11:12] Bukele’s intention is twofold. First, remove the dangerous criminals from the streets, and secondly make it abundantly clear to anyone who might consider joining a gang that you will end up in prison, living in awful conditions, that gang life is anything but glamorous.
[00:11:34] It seems to have worked, so far at least.
[00:11:38] Every year since Bukele has been in power, the murder rate has reduced.
[00:11:44] And earlier this year, he proudly announced that the murder rate in 2023 was 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants.
[00:11:55] Remember, it was 103 in 2015 at the most recent height of the violence, and even 38 when he was elected president in 2019, so in the course of 4 years, he managed to reduce it by 94%, a reduction of 98% from the bloody days of 2015.
[00:12:18] The plan worked.
[00:12:20] The gang members are behind bars, so they cannot terrorise the streets and kill hard-working citizens or each other any more.
[00:12:29] And, as you might expect, in El Salvador this policy is incredibly popular.
[00:12:36] According to polls taken at the height of the crackdowns, between 80 and 90% of Salvadorans approved of them, saying ‘yes, lock up these men, we do not want them on our streets’.
[00:12:50] Abroad, however, his methods and agenda have come under greater scrutiny.
[00:12:57] Human rights campaigners and democracy advocates have accused him of striking deals with gang leaders to stop the violence and of not having a long-term solution to the reality that almost 2% of his country’s population is now incarcerated.
[00:13:14] The New York Times ran an article with the headline ‘El Salvador Decimated Its Ruthless Gangs. But at What Cost?’.
[00:13:23] The article began with a lot of what can only be described as positive outcomes:
[00:13:29] “Now, children play soccer late into the evening on fields that were gang turf. Ms. Inglés gathers soil for her plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings.
[00:13:41] Homicides plunged. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined, analysts said.
[00:13:52] “You can walk freely,” Ms. Inglés said. “So much has changed.”
[00:13:56] End quote.
[00:13:58] All good so far, but the article, and many more like it, goes on to criticise the authoritarian tendencies of Bukele and his government. Mass arrests, filling the jails, the establishment of something not far off a police state, and the maltreatment of the prisoners locked up in jails.
[00:14:22] And they also criticise the long term plan, or rather the lack of one.
[00:14:28] What does he do, commentators ask? There is no public plan to release or rehabilitate the gang members, so do they simply rot in jail forever? If so, that is hardly a humane way to treat people who are still, at the end of the day, your citizens.
[00:14:48] He has also been criticised for subverting the democratic process. The constitution of El Salvador doesn’t allow for a president to serve a consequent second term in office, but when Bukele’s time as president was nearly up, he appointed new judges who reinterpreted the constitution to mean that a president could run for a second term if they stepped back from the job for 6 months, which Bukele claimed he did, becoming “interim president” rather than full “president”.
[00:15:25] By brushing aside the constitution, he was subverting democracy and dragging the country towards becoming a dictatorship, so his critics said.
[00:15:37] These criticisms tend to come from outside the borders of El Salvador, from abroad.
[00:15:44] Of course, ultimately, he is only answerable to his domestic audience, the people of El Salvador.
[00:15:52] And, after having supposedly stepped back from the Presidency for 6 months and reinterpreted the constitution, he was free to run again, to run for re-election.
[00:16:05] The people of El Salvador did have the chance to have their say. There was another presidential election earlier this year, in February of 2024, and Bukele won by an even greater margin than in 2019, claiming 85% of the vote, while the traditionally two largest parties got 6% each.
[00:16:29] In his home country, where it actually matters, Bukele is phenomenally popular.
[00:16:35] He has one of the highest approval ratings of a leader in the entire world, with between 90 and 95% of people in El Salvador approving of his leadership.
[00:16:47] And to give you a point of comparison, the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, as of the time of recording has a popularity rating of a miserly 16%.
[00:16:59] For the foreign commentator who prides the democratic process above anything else, this is somewhat difficult to reconcile, as the people of El Salvador are evidently happy to support a more authoritarian government in exchange for public safety.
[00:17:18] And who can blame them?
[00:17:21] Most people listening to this show are fortunate enough to not live in a country where 1 in every 1,000 people are murdered every year.
[00:17:29] But, if you did, and if finally someone managed to lock up the men who had terrorised, brutalised, extorted and freely murdered in their communities for decades, would your primary concern be their well-being?
[00:17:45] I imagine not.
[00:17:47] For the average voter in El Salvador, these gang members do not deserve any kind of favourable treatment, let them rot away behind bars, that’s preferable to releasing them and hoping that they will have somehow learned their lesson and will become upstanding and honest citizens.
[00:18:05] Bukele has proven that he can make the country safer for the average citizen, and if that is the primary concern for the people of the country, the most important thing is the outcome, not the way in which it is achieved.
[00:18:20] We started this episode by talking about Bukele’s decision to introduce Bitcoin as an official currency of El Salvador. This might be one of the things that he is best known for outside of the country, but according to most polls, whether El Salvador accepts Bitcoin or not, or whether Bukele chooses to buy some Bitcoin with national funds, is kind of immaterial to the average person in El Salvador.
[00:18:49] It is not a major concern.
[00:18:51] What regular voters want is security, they want the freedom to walk the streets without fearing being hit by a bullet or without being exploited by gangs for protection money, they want their communities back.
[00:19:06] And that is precisely what Bukele has done.
[00:19:10] But this is just the first step.
[00:19:12] With the gangs off the streets, it is time to build. And there is a lot of work to be done. The economy of El Salvador is still in poor shape, and growth has been slow while the government focussed on locking up gangs.
[00:19:29] But there is little doubt that, with approval ratings of over 90% and freshly voted back in for another 5 years, the people of El Salvador feel that Nayib Bukele is their best chance of prosperity and security.
[00:19:45] Time will only tell if he remains as popular in 2029.
[00:19:51] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:19:58] As a quick reminder, this was part three of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of Latin America.
[00:20:05] In part one, we talked about the collapse of Venezuela, and in part two, which was one of our member-only episodes, we talked about the battle between Wall Street and the country of Argentina.
[00:20:16] Of course, you can listen to all of them independently, but hopefully they are a nice little trio on a similar but unrelated theme.
[00:20:24] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:30] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the country of El Salvador, and more specifically, its latest and controversial president, Nayib Bukele.
[00:00:31] To some, he is a harsh and dangerous disciplinarian with authoritarian tendencies, a man who is behaving in an utterly irresponsible way with the country’s legal system and already precarious finances.
[00:00:46] To others, he is a voice of reason, a true leader who has made brave decisions that have made his country a safer and more prosperous nation.
[00:00:56] OK then, let’s get right into it, and learn about Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:01:06] On the 5th of June 2021, the president of El Salvador stood in front of a podium, ready to make an announcement.
[00:01:16] Nayib Bukele, who was then a few weeks away from celebrating his 40th birthday, stood up and proudly announced that El Salvador would become the first country in the world to recognise Bitcoin as legal currency.
[00:01:33] Not just this, but El Salvador was setting aside $150 million of its budget to buy Bitcoin.
[00:01:42] It was a big move, to say the least, and it was immediately all over the global news.
[00:01:50] What was he doing, commentators asked? Who was this young man who was playing Russian roulette with his country’s finances?
[00:01:59] These commentators were quick to pat themselves on the back when the very same day that Bukele made this announcement, the price of Bitcoin crashed from $52,000 to US$43,000.
[00:02:14] This decision was emblematic of Bukele, and the direction in which he has been taking El Salvador: controversial, unusual and unexpected, and most likely one which the full impact of which will take many years to be shown.
[00:02:33] Now, to understand how Bukele became president, we need to talk a bit more about El Salvador before he was elected.
[00:02:42] As you may know, El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America. Guatemala is to the north, Honduras to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the south and west.
[00:02:56] In economic terms, it is not a prosperous part of the world, and the region has suffered from high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
[00:03:07] El Salvador, like neighbouring Honduras, has also suffered from high levels of gang violence and murder, and for much of the 2010s had the highest murder rate in the world.
[00:03:22] In 2015, the murder rate in the country rose to 103 per 100,000, meaning that more than 1 in every 1,000 people in El Salvador was violently killed that year.
[00:03:38] It was, it's perhaps no exaggeration to say, the most dangerous place in the world.
[00:03:45] As a point of comparison, the murder rate in the UK is around 1 per 100,000, so in 2015 you were 100 times more likely to be killed in El Salvador than you were in the UK.
[00:04:00] Those odds don’t sound like much fun to me, and they clearly weren’t much fun for the citizens of El Salvador.
[00:04:09] And there didn’t seem to be much of an end in sight.
[00:04:13] The murder rate and violence had been high for several years. A truce between two major gangs, a peace agreement, had been brokered in 2012, but when the agreement broke down, the bullets started to fly again, and the murder rate soared.
[00:04:33] And, as you might expect, given this huge level of violence and real danger, there was minimal foreign investment in the country. It was dangerous, there was a very real chance of getting shot, the rule of law was weak, and this was a huge deterrent for potential foreign investors.
[00:04:54] There were two main political parties in El Salvador, one left wing and one right wing. The left wing party, the FMLN, had been in power since 2009, and the gang violence and deaths had exploded under its watch, and the right wing party hadn’t shown any particular signs that it would be able to do any better.
[00:05:19] Life in El Salvador was pretty bleak.
[00:05:23] So when it came to the presidential elections in 2019, there was an understandable appetite for change.
[00:05:32] Not just superficial change, a polished career politician who goes on TV and talks about how they really care about the average citizen, and how they truly understand the country.
[00:05:45] No. There was appetite for someone who was a breath of fresh air, who spoke differently, looked different, and had a very different vision for the future.
[00:05:57] This person was, of course, Nayib Bukele.
[00:06:02] Perhaps you can tell from his name that he was a little different from everyone else. His father was a Palestinian immigrant who opened the first McDonald’s franchise in El Salvador, and went on to have a wide-ranging and successful business career.
[00:06:19] Bukele’s background was in business, working first for his father’s advertising agency before setting out on his own.
[00:06:28] And when he turned 30, he announced that he would pack it all in, he would close the door on his business career, and enter politics.
[00:06:39] He took the traditional route to begin with, joining the major left-wing party, the FMLN, and became the mayor first of a small town before being elected mayor of the capital city, San Salvador, in 2015.
[00:06:55] And he was exceptionally popular. He launched a programme to install street lights in the capital to deter crime, he donated his salary to social initiatives to stop children joining gangs, he cracked down on violence and corruption and was generally seen as a man who could get stuff done.
[00:07:17] He was also a keen and adept user of social media, and he was only in his early 30s at the time, so he was seen as much more approachable than the often grey-haired men and women who Salvadorans–people from El Salvador–were used to seeing in positions of power.
[00:07:36] He had a sort of boy-wonder status, and this ruffled the feathers of some colleagues within his party, the FMLN. In 2017, Bukele ended up being kicked out of the party, and shortly after he announced that he would start his own political movement, and ultimately run for the presidency in 2019.
[00:08:02] Fast forward a couple of years, and he won the 2019 election by a landslide, winning 53% of the vote, while the other two main parties got 32% and 14% respectively.
[00:08:17] His message was a simple one: I am the only person who can fix corruption, get rid of the gangs, and can make your lives safer and better.
[00:08:29] Or to quote his campaign slogan, ‘There’s enough money as long as no one steals it’.
[00:08:36] He was young, charismatic, and could be found just as often in a black leather jacket as in a formal business suit.
[00:08:45] More importantly, he seemed to bridge the left-right divide. He had traditionally been aligned with the left, but he positioned himself as neither right nor left. He was the man who would crack down on gang violence and crime, and that was an issue that affected everyone, regardless of political views.
[00:09:09] And you may know what came next.
[00:09:12] In 2019, El Salvador had an estimated 67,000 citizens who were members of criminal gangs, and this is out of a population of just over 6 million. In other words, more than 1% of the country’s population was an active gang member.
[00:09:34] Bukele’s plan to eradicate gang violence was, on one level, blissfully simple: round up the gang members and remove them from society. If they are off the streets, imprisoned, they cannot commit crimes.
[00:09:51] Shortly after his election, he announced something called the Territorial Control Plan, which was a seven-part plan to eradicate gang violence from the streets of El Salvador.
[00:10:04] This was in 2019, and between then and now, more than 80,000 suspected gang members have been rounded up and sent to prison. And we must put an emphasis on “suspected” there, as these were not 80,000 people who had been proved guilty in a court of law.
[00:10:27] Fortunately, the fact that many gang members had very visible tattoos made tracking them down relatively easy, but human rights campaigners have raised alarm bells that many people have been wrongly imprisoned.
[00:10:42] Indeed, over 10% of those arrested and imprisoned have been released, but for the remaining 90%, they are now behind bars.
[00:10:53] And Bukele has wasted no time sharing videos of the miserable conditions in which these gang members have to live. Their heads shaved, no mattresses to sleep on, minimal food, and mixed up completely so they are not with their old friends or fellow gang members.
[00:11:12] Bukele’s intention is twofold. First, remove the dangerous criminals from the streets, and secondly make it abundantly clear to anyone who might consider joining a gang that you will end up in prison, living in awful conditions, that gang life is anything but glamorous.
[00:11:34] It seems to have worked, so far at least.
[00:11:38] Every year since Bukele has been in power, the murder rate has reduced.
[00:11:44] And earlier this year, he proudly announced that the murder rate in 2023 was 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants.
[00:11:55] Remember, it was 103 in 2015 at the most recent height of the violence, and even 38 when he was elected president in 2019, so in the course of 4 years, he managed to reduce it by 94%, a reduction of 98% from the bloody days of 2015.
[00:12:18] The plan worked.
[00:12:20] The gang members are behind bars, so they cannot terrorise the streets and kill hard-working citizens or each other any more.
[00:12:29] And, as you might expect, in El Salvador this policy is incredibly popular.
[00:12:36] According to polls taken at the height of the crackdowns, between 80 and 90% of Salvadorans approved of them, saying ‘yes, lock up these men, we do not want them on our streets’.
[00:12:50] Abroad, however, his methods and agenda have come under greater scrutiny.
[00:12:57] Human rights campaigners and democracy advocates have accused him of striking deals with gang leaders to stop the violence and of not having a long-term solution to the reality that almost 2% of his country’s population is now incarcerated.
[00:13:14] The New York Times ran an article with the headline ‘El Salvador Decimated Its Ruthless Gangs. But at What Cost?’.
[00:13:23] The article began with a lot of what can only be described as positive outcomes:
[00:13:29] “Now, children play soccer late into the evening on fields that were gang turf. Ms. Inglés gathers soil for her plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings.
[00:13:41] Homicides plunged. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined, analysts said.
[00:13:52] “You can walk freely,” Ms. Inglés said. “So much has changed.”
[00:13:56] End quote.
[00:13:58] All good so far, but the article, and many more like it, goes on to criticise the authoritarian tendencies of Bukele and his government. Mass arrests, filling the jails, the establishment of something not far off a police state, and the maltreatment of the prisoners locked up in jails.
[00:14:22] And they also criticise the long term plan, or rather the lack of one.
[00:14:28] What does he do, commentators ask? There is no public plan to release or rehabilitate the gang members, so do they simply rot in jail forever? If so, that is hardly a humane way to treat people who are still, at the end of the day, your citizens.
[00:14:48] He has also been criticised for subverting the democratic process. The constitution of El Salvador doesn’t allow for a president to serve a consequent second term in office, but when Bukele’s time as president was nearly up, he appointed new judges who reinterpreted the constitution to mean that a president could run for a second term if they stepped back from the job for 6 months, which Bukele claimed he did, becoming “interim president” rather than full “president”.
[00:15:25] By brushing aside the constitution, he was subverting democracy and dragging the country towards becoming a dictatorship, so his critics said.
[00:15:37] These criticisms tend to come from outside the borders of El Salvador, from abroad.
[00:15:44] Of course, ultimately, he is only answerable to his domestic audience, the people of El Salvador.
[00:15:52] And, after having supposedly stepped back from the Presidency for 6 months and reinterpreted the constitution, he was free to run again, to run for re-election.
[00:16:05] The people of El Salvador did have the chance to have their say. There was another presidential election earlier this year, in February of 2024, and Bukele won by an even greater margin than in 2019, claiming 85% of the vote, while the traditionally two largest parties got 6% each.
[00:16:29] In his home country, where it actually matters, Bukele is phenomenally popular.
[00:16:35] He has one of the highest approval ratings of a leader in the entire world, with between 90 and 95% of people in El Salvador approving of his leadership.
[00:16:47] And to give you a point of comparison, the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, as of the time of recording has a popularity rating of a miserly 16%.
[00:16:59] For the foreign commentator who prides the democratic process above anything else, this is somewhat difficult to reconcile, as the people of El Salvador are evidently happy to support a more authoritarian government in exchange for public safety.
[00:17:18] And who can blame them?
[00:17:21] Most people listening to this show are fortunate enough to not live in a country where 1 in every 1,000 people are murdered every year.
[00:17:29] But, if you did, and if finally someone managed to lock up the men who had terrorised, brutalised, extorted and freely murdered in their communities for decades, would your primary concern be their well-being?
[00:17:45] I imagine not.
[00:17:47] For the average voter in El Salvador, these gang members do not deserve any kind of favourable treatment, let them rot away behind bars, that’s preferable to releasing them and hoping that they will have somehow learned their lesson and will become upstanding and honest citizens.
[00:18:05] Bukele has proven that he can make the country safer for the average citizen, and if that is the primary concern for the people of the country, the most important thing is the outcome, not the way in which it is achieved.
[00:18:20] We started this episode by talking about Bukele’s decision to introduce Bitcoin as an official currency of El Salvador. This might be one of the things that he is best known for outside of the country, but according to most polls, whether El Salvador accepts Bitcoin or not, or whether Bukele chooses to buy some Bitcoin with national funds, is kind of immaterial to the average person in El Salvador.
[00:18:49] It is not a major concern.
[00:18:51] What regular voters want is security, they want the freedom to walk the streets without fearing being hit by a bullet or without being exploited by gangs for protection money, they want their communities back.
[00:19:06] And that is precisely what Bukele has done.
[00:19:10] But this is just the first step.
[00:19:12] With the gangs off the streets, it is time to build. And there is a lot of work to be done. The economy of El Salvador is still in poor shape, and growth has been slow while the government focussed on locking up gangs.
[00:19:29] But there is little doubt that, with approval ratings of over 90% and freshly voted back in for another 5 years, the people of El Salvador feel that Nayib Bukele is their best chance of prosperity and security.
[00:19:45] Time will only tell if he remains as popular in 2029.
[00:19:51] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:19:58] As a quick reminder, this was part three of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of Latin America.
[00:20:05] In part one, we talked about the collapse of Venezuela, and in part two, which was one of our member-only episodes, we talked about the battle between Wall Street and the country of Argentina.
[00:20:16] Of course, you can listen to all of them independently, but hopefully they are a nice little trio on a similar but unrelated theme.
[00:20:24] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:30] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the country of El Salvador, and more specifically, its latest and controversial president, Nayib Bukele.
[00:00:31] To some, he is a harsh and dangerous disciplinarian with authoritarian tendencies, a man who is behaving in an utterly irresponsible way with the country’s legal system and already precarious finances.
[00:00:46] To others, he is a voice of reason, a true leader who has made brave decisions that have made his country a safer and more prosperous nation.
[00:00:56] OK then, let’s get right into it, and learn about Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:01:06] On the 5th of June 2021, the president of El Salvador stood in front of a podium, ready to make an announcement.
[00:01:16] Nayib Bukele, who was then a few weeks away from celebrating his 40th birthday, stood up and proudly announced that El Salvador would become the first country in the world to recognise Bitcoin as legal currency.
[00:01:33] Not just this, but El Salvador was setting aside $150 million of its budget to buy Bitcoin.
[00:01:42] It was a big move, to say the least, and it was immediately all over the global news.
[00:01:50] What was he doing, commentators asked? Who was this young man who was playing Russian roulette with his country’s finances?
[00:01:59] These commentators were quick to pat themselves on the back when the very same day that Bukele made this announcement, the price of Bitcoin crashed from $52,000 to US$43,000.
[00:02:14] This decision was emblematic of Bukele, and the direction in which he has been taking El Salvador: controversial, unusual and unexpected, and most likely one which the full impact of which will take many years to be shown.
[00:02:33] Now, to understand how Bukele became president, we need to talk a bit more about El Salvador before he was elected.
[00:02:42] As you may know, El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America. Guatemala is to the north, Honduras to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the south and west.
[00:02:56] In economic terms, it is not a prosperous part of the world, and the region has suffered from high levels of poverty, unemployment and inequality.
[00:03:07] El Salvador, like neighbouring Honduras, has also suffered from high levels of gang violence and murder, and for much of the 2010s had the highest murder rate in the world.
[00:03:22] In 2015, the murder rate in the country rose to 103 per 100,000, meaning that more than 1 in every 1,000 people in El Salvador was violently killed that year.
[00:03:38] It was, it's perhaps no exaggeration to say, the most dangerous place in the world.
[00:03:45] As a point of comparison, the murder rate in the UK is around 1 per 100,000, so in 2015 you were 100 times more likely to be killed in El Salvador than you were in the UK.
[00:04:00] Those odds don’t sound like much fun to me, and they clearly weren’t much fun for the citizens of El Salvador.
[00:04:09] And there didn’t seem to be much of an end in sight.
[00:04:13] The murder rate and violence had been high for several years. A truce between two major gangs, a peace agreement, had been brokered in 2012, but when the agreement broke down, the bullets started to fly again, and the murder rate soared.
[00:04:33] And, as you might expect, given this huge level of violence and real danger, there was minimal foreign investment in the country. It was dangerous, there was a very real chance of getting shot, the rule of law was weak, and this was a huge deterrent for potential foreign investors.
[00:04:54] There were two main political parties in El Salvador, one left wing and one right wing. The left wing party, the FMLN, had been in power since 2009, and the gang violence and deaths had exploded under its watch, and the right wing party hadn’t shown any particular signs that it would be able to do any better.
[00:05:19] Life in El Salvador was pretty bleak.
[00:05:23] So when it came to the presidential elections in 2019, there was an understandable appetite for change.
[00:05:32] Not just superficial change, a polished career politician who goes on TV and talks about how they really care about the average citizen, and how they truly understand the country.
[00:05:45] No. There was appetite for someone who was a breath of fresh air, who spoke differently, looked different, and had a very different vision for the future.
[00:05:57] This person was, of course, Nayib Bukele.
[00:06:02] Perhaps you can tell from his name that he was a little different from everyone else. His father was a Palestinian immigrant who opened the first McDonald’s franchise in El Salvador, and went on to have a wide-ranging and successful business career.
[00:06:19] Bukele’s background was in business, working first for his father’s advertising agency before setting out on his own.
[00:06:28] And when he turned 30, he announced that he would pack it all in, he would close the door on his business career, and enter politics.
[00:06:39] He took the traditional route to begin with, joining the major left-wing party, the FMLN, and became the mayor first of a small town before being elected mayor of the capital city, San Salvador, in 2015.
[00:06:55] And he was exceptionally popular. He launched a programme to install street lights in the capital to deter crime, he donated his salary to social initiatives to stop children joining gangs, he cracked down on violence and corruption and was generally seen as a man who could get stuff done.
[00:07:17] He was also a keen and adept user of social media, and he was only in his early 30s at the time, so he was seen as much more approachable than the often grey-haired men and women who Salvadorans–people from El Salvador–were used to seeing in positions of power.
[00:07:36] He had a sort of boy-wonder status, and this ruffled the feathers of some colleagues within his party, the FMLN. In 2017, Bukele ended up being kicked out of the party, and shortly after he announced that he would start his own political movement, and ultimately run for the presidency in 2019.
[00:08:02] Fast forward a couple of years, and he won the 2019 election by a landslide, winning 53% of the vote, while the other two main parties got 32% and 14% respectively.
[00:08:17] His message was a simple one: I am the only person who can fix corruption, get rid of the gangs, and can make your lives safer and better.
[00:08:29] Or to quote his campaign slogan, ‘There’s enough money as long as no one steals it’.
[00:08:36] He was young, charismatic, and could be found just as often in a black leather jacket as in a formal business suit.
[00:08:45] More importantly, he seemed to bridge the left-right divide. He had traditionally been aligned with the left, but he positioned himself as neither right nor left. He was the man who would crack down on gang violence and crime, and that was an issue that affected everyone, regardless of political views.
[00:09:09] And you may know what came next.
[00:09:12] In 2019, El Salvador had an estimated 67,000 citizens who were members of criminal gangs, and this is out of a population of just over 6 million. In other words, more than 1% of the country’s population was an active gang member.
[00:09:34] Bukele’s plan to eradicate gang violence was, on one level, blissfully simple: round up the gang members and remove them from society. If they are off the streets, imprisoned, they cannot commit crimes.
[00:09:51] Shortly after his election, he announced something called the Territorial Control Plan, which was a seven-part plan to eradicate gang violence from the streets of El Salvador.
[00:10:04] This was in 2019, and between then and now, more than 80,000 suspected gang members have been rounded up and sent to prison. And we must put an emphasis on “suspected” there, as these were not 80,000 people who had been proved guilty in a court of law.
[00:10:27] Fortunately, the fact that many gang members had very visible tattoos made tracking them down relatively easy, but human rights campaigners have raised alarm bells that many people have been wrongly imprisoned.
[00:10:42] Indeed, over 10% of those arrested and imprisoned have been released, but for the remaining 90%, they are now behind bars.
[00:10:53] And Bukele has wasted no time sharing videos of the miserable conditions in which these gang members have to live. Their heads shaved, no mattresses to sleep on, minimal food, and mixed up completely so they are not with their old friends or fellow gang members.
[00:11:12] Bukele’s intention is twofold. First, remove the dangerous criminals from the streets, and secondly make it abundantly clear to anyone who might consider joining a gang that you will end up in prison, living in awful conditions, that gang life is anything but glamorous.
[00:11:34] It seems to have worked, so far at least.
[00:11:38] Every year since Bukele has been in power, the murder rate has reduced.
[00:11:44] And earlier this year, he proudly announced that the murder rate in 2023 was 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants.
[00:11:55] Remember, it was 103 in 2015 at the most recent height of the violence, and even 38 when he was elected president in 2019, so in the course of 4 years, he managed to reduce it by 94%, a reduction of 98% from the bloody days of 2015.
[00:12:18] The plan worked.
[00:12:20] The gang members are behind bars, so they cannot terrorise the streets and kill hard-working citizens or each other any more.
[00:12:29] And, as you might expect, in El Salvador this policy is incredibly popular.
[00:12:36] According to polls taken at the height of the crackdowns, between 80 and 90% of Salvadorans approved of them, saying ‘yes, lock up these men, we do not want them on our streets’.
[00:12:50] Abroad, however, his methods and agenda have come under greater scrutiny.
[00:12:57] Human rights campaigners and democracy advocates have accused him of striking deals with gang leaders to stop the violence and of not having a long-term solution to the reality that almost 2% of his country’s population is now incarcerated.
[00:13:14] The New York Times ran an article with the headline ‘El Salvador Decimated Its Ruthless Gangs. But at What Cost?’.
[00:13:23] The article began with a lot of what can only be described as positive outcomes:
[00:13:29] “Now, children play soccer late into the evening on fields that were gang turf. Ms. Inglés gathers soil for her plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings.
[00:13:41] Homicides plunged. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents, once an economy unto itself, also declined, analysts said.
[00:13:52] “You can walk freely,” Ms. Inglés said. “So much has changed.”
[00:13:56] End quote.
[00:13:58] All good so far, but the article, and many more like it, goes on to criticise the authoritarian tendencies of Bukele and his government. Mass arrests, filling the jails, the establishment of something not far off a police state, and the maltreatment of the prisoners locked up in jails.
[00:14:22] And they also criticise the long term plan, or rather the lack of one.
[00:14:28] What does he do, commentators ask? There is no public plan to release or rehabilitate the gang members, so do they simply rot in jail forever? If so, that is hardly a humane way to treat people who are still, at the end of the day, your citizens.
[00:14:48] He has also been criticised for subverting the democratic process. The constitution of El Salvador doesn’t allow for a president to serve a consequent second term in office, but when Bukele’s time as president was nearly up, he appointed new judges who reinterpreted the constitution to mean that a president could run for a second term if they stepped back from the job for 6 months, which Bukele claimed he did, becoming “interim president” rather than full “president”.
[00:15:25] By brushing aside the constitution, he was subverting democracy and dragging the country towards becoming a dictatorship, so his critics said.
[00:15:37] These criticisms tend to come from outside the borders of El Salvador, from abroad.
[00:15:44] Of course, ultimately, he is only answerable to his domestic audience, the people of El Salvador.
[00:15:52] And, after having supposedly stepped back from the Presidency for 6 months and reinterpreted the constitution, he was free to run again, to run for re-election.
[00:16:05] The people of El Salvador did have the chance to have their say. There was another presidential election earlier this year, in February of 2024, and Bukele won by an even greater margin than in 2019, claiming 85% of the vote, while the traditionally two largest parties got 6% each.
[00:16:29] In his home country, where it actually matters, Bukele is phenomenally popular.
[00:16:35] He has one of the highest approval ratings of a leader in the entire world, with between 90 and 95% of people in El Salvador approving of his leadership.
[00:16:47] And to give you a point of comparison, the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, as of the time of recording has a popularity rating of a miserly 16%.
[00:16:59] For the foreign commentator who prides the democratic process above anything else, this is somewhat difficult to reconcile, as the people of El Salvador are evidently happy to support a more authoritarian government in exchange for public safety.
[00:17:18] And who can blame them?
[00:17:21] Most people listening to this show are fortunate enough to not live in a country where 1 in every 1,000 people are murdered every year.
[00:17:29] But, if you did, and if finally someone managed to lock up the men who had terrorised, brutalised, extorted and freely murdered in their communities for decades, would your primary concern be their well-being?
[00:17:45] I imagine not.
[00:17:47] For the average voter in El Salvador, these gang members do not deserve any kind of favourable treatment, let them rot away behind bars, that’s preferable to releasing them and hoping that they will have somehow learned their lesson and will become upstanding and honest citizens.
[00:18:05] Bukele has proven that he can make the country safer for the average citizen, and if that is the primary concern for the people of the country, the most important thing is the outcome, not the way in which it is achieved.
[00:18:20] We started this episode by talking about Bukele’s decision to introduce Bitcoin as an official currency of El Salvador. This might be one of the things that he is best known for outside of the country, but according to most polls, whether El Salvador accepts Bitcoin or not, or whether Bukele chooses to buy some Bitcoin with national funds, is kind of immaterial to the average person in El Salvador.
[00:18:49] It is not a major concern.
[00:18:51] What regular voters want is security, they want the freedom to walk the streets without fearing being hit by a bullet or without being exploited by gangs for protection money, they want their communities back.
[00:19:06] And that is precisely what Bukele has done.
[00:19:10] But this is just the first step.
[00:19:12] With the gangs off the streets, it is time to build. And there is a lot of work to be done. The economy of El Salvador is still in poor shape, and growth has been slow while the government focussed on locking up gangs.
[00:19:29] But there is little doubt that, with approval ratings of over 90% and freshly voted back in for another 5 years, the people of El Salvador feel that Nayib Bukele is their best chance of prosperity and security.
[00:19:45] Time will only tell if he remains as popular in 2029.
[00:19:51] Ok then, that is it for this episode on Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”.
[00:19:58] As a quick reminder, this was part three of a three-part mini-series on the loose theme of Latin America.
[00:20:05] In part one, we talked about the collapse of Venezuela, and in part two, which was one of our member-only episodes, we talked about the battle between Wall Street and the country of Argentina.
[00:20:16] Of course, you can listen to all of them independently, but hopefully they are a nice little trio on a similar but unrelated theme.
[00:20:24] You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:30] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
