Nayib Bukele's bad press

In 2018, Nayib Bukele tweeted out a link to an article in The Economist which labeled him "El Salvador's Rising Political Star."   Bukele has not, however, been retweeting this week's articles from The Economist, or several other articles in the international press:

My tweet is your command: Nayib Bukele may want to become Latin America’s first millennial dictator, The Economist.  "[I]n his 11 months as president he has done more to wreck El Salvador's democracy than to reform it. In February he entered the Legislative Assembly with soldiers to bully it into financing his crime-fighting program. With the outbreak of covid-19 his contempt for democratic norms has only grown. Mr. Bukele may be on course to become Latin America's first millennial dictator."

Nayib Bukele’s power grab in El Salvador, The Economist.  "Mr. Bukele's pre-pandemic ambitions are slipping away. A five-year plan drafted by consultants 'fell apart' says an insider. No progress has been made on pledges to raise the minimum income tax threshold and to spruce up 50 town centres. A Commission Against Impunity created in September, never looked like a serious effort to fight graft. it lacks the money and legal structure to do its job. The pandemic has helped to extend Mr. Bukele's honeymoon. It may not last much longer."

Using coronavirus crisis, President Bukele is a threat to democracy in El Salvador, Former US Ambassador to El Salvador Mari Carmen Aponte in an op-ed in the Miami Herald.  "In less than a year in office, this popular president has placed himself above the law. In the process, he has managed to tread on two hard-earned Salvadoran achievements: democracy and the delicate peace accords that concluded the bloody Salvadoran civil war less than three decades ago."

Young Leader Vowed Change in El Salvador but Wields Same Heavy Hand, New York Times. "Elected as a transformative leader who would propel the country forward, Nayib Bukele is now reminding critics of the country’s past autocrats, with his reliance on the military."

El Salvador’s Two Pandemics: Maximum Insecurity -- Jorge Cuellar in ReVista.  "COVID-19 has enabled the Salvadoran government to advance its strategy of total security and to field-test techniques of surveillance and social control. The recent increase in gang-related homicides has made it possible to convince the public about the indispensable urgency and necessity of these security measures, guaranteeing that stricter enforcement techniques are the vaccine to what is, in effect, a protracted structural crisis. Whether it expresses itself as repression against prisoners or in illegal arrests of citizens who violate quarantine, punitive control mechanisms are a dominant feature of Bukele’s narrow, short-sighted and naïve sense of law and order."

Who's Afraid of Coronavirus? -- Carlos Dada. "The alarmist messages that come out of the president’s mouth or Twitter are immediately reproduced by his propagandists on social networks and have been successful: a large part of the population is panicking. This panic has passed from social networks to neighborhood or community meetings. And it is beginning to have serious repercussions."