Die erschreckende Popularität von El Salvadors Autoritarismus von Nayib Bukele

**From Adam Isacson, works on security and migration issues at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA):**

Bukele is one of the more successful examples of the global wave of elected authoritarians eroding democratic norms. Few other practitioners of this authoritarian playbook are as popular at home. Not Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, not Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not Argentina’s Javier Milei, not Trump.

But can this popularity last? Weakening El Salvador’s gangs was the easy part for Bukele. Though savagely brutal, by organized crime standards, El Salvador’s gangs are poor. Big cartels had kept them out of more lucrative criminal income streams, such as shipping cocaine and fentanyl internationally, or mining precious metals. Instead, MS-13 and Barrio 18 made money mostly by extorting and selling drugs to people in their own neighborhoods, which made them especially hated. But it also meant they didn’t have a lot of resources to take on the security forces or to corrupt the government from within. They were easy to knock down.

Read more: [https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-popularity-gangs-rcna201335](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-popularity-gangs-rcna201335)

An impressive 1.5% imprisonment rate going by the wiki of imprisonment rate. Hopefully by the end of his indeterminate term, he’ll double that number. As someone once said, „he who gives up someone else’s freedom for his own temporary security deserve both“. I’m sure I’m paraphrasing that quote correctly.