Nayib Bukele presents himself as a thoroughly modern leader. But his bullying tactics and the replacement of five top judges and the attorney-general with sympathisers tell a different story
In the same vein, Mr Bukele likes to emphasise his youth. At 40 he is a millennial—just. He eschews ties and wears a baseball cap backwards, as if it were still the 1990s. He tweets constantly and often furiously, sometimes pinging out pronouncements over a hundred times a day. On September 7th, after weeks of Mr Bukele’s hype, bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was made legal tender in the country of 6.5m people. This has made him an unlikely hero to some tech bros in Silicon Valley.
Even before New Ideas won a landslide victory in February’s legislative elections, giving Mr Bukele and his chums a two-thirds majority in the Legislative Assembly, he had started the process of undermining the rule of law. In 2020 he used gun-toting soldiers to bully opposition lawmakers into voting for the budget for his crime-fighting programme.
Central America is not short of autocrats. In Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, the president, has detained most of his rivals ahead of elections in November. Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of Honduras, has been named in connection with three drug-trafficking cases in America. In Guatemala hopes of tackling graft vanished in 2019 when aEl Salvador, however, is particularly worrying, as Mr Bukele is wildly popular, with approval ratings hovering at around 90%.
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