Nayib Bukele and the fable of the "strong man"

A group of Salvadoran gang members transferred to the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center, last weekend. El Salvador Presidency (Getty)

"Strong men create good times...".

Nayib Bukele appropriated this phrase days ago, one of the premises of a syllogism of uncertain attribution and more dubious conclusion: "Weak men create difficult times."

The president of El Salvador accumulates an avalanche of questions about his security strategy.

Thanks to the emergency regime decreed a year ago, it has managed to corner the main criminal organizations of the Central American country, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the Barrio 18. But the onslaught against crime has come at the cost of an intolerable deterioration of human rights, according to reports from various international organizations, led by the United Nations Committee against Torture and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Abuses, arbitrary arrests and episodes of repression.

That, in short, is the counterpart of a significant reduction in murders after decades marked by violence.

The strategy, despite the criticism, is liked by the majority of Salvadorans, in light of the polls that give Bukele high popularity ratings.

The president intends to be re-elected in 2024 after enabling that option through a ruling by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court that he himself appointed.

That is why the politician has parked the serenity of the debate and has made the so-called "war against the gangs" an electoral battleground.

This is how the mirage of the strong man who has been elected by the president of El Salvador works.

A common factor in this tactic is the permanent counterattack.

The images we saw last weekend, the transfer of some 2,000 gang members to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, a recently built mega-prison, aroused deep indignation, especially on an international scale.

At the same time, they respond to a political calculation just after the United States Attorney's Office endorsed all the journalistic investigations that show that Bukele wanted, in the first stage of his mandate, to agree with the gangs.

It is the same calculation that leads the president to disqualify any discrepancy or observation towards his strategy, even comparing them with a defense of criminals, regardless of whether it is an outright falsehood -either with me or against me, an argument loophole that is very popular among populist leaders of all colors-.

And the same calculation that Bukele has used to get rid of institutional counterpowers.

Security policy is now another weapon to dispute power.

The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, reminded him, after calling this confinement center for gang members a "concentration camp", that in Bogotá the homicide rates were reduced "not from prisons, but from universities, schools, spaces for dialogue, spaces for poor people to stop being poor”.

Bukele,

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