Dear Friends and Colleagues,
“The government of a tiny Latin American nation is once again enthralling an outsized number of foreign fans, using them to scrub its international image, and encouraging them to take bits and pieces of its authoritarian model home to their own countries.”
That’s the opener to my latest piece, recently published in El País in English and Spanish, which argues Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador is to the new right what Cuba once was to much of the old left—a deceptive beacon.
Just as there was always another side to Cuba that its leftist foreign fan club tried to obscure—hunger, political prisoners, and exiles—there’s also another side to El Salvador: unexplained disappearances, increased extreme poverty, numerous reports of torture in the prisons, and a history of secret deals between the Bukele government and the gangs, at least if you believe U.S. federal prosecutors.
With time, I think we’ll see more of this other side of El Salvador come to light. Those eager to partner with Bukele or treat his government as a model for the region might want to keep that in mind.
Thanks, as always, for reading and don’t hesitate to get in touch.
