Mr Bukele is hugely popular, with an approval rating of around 85 per cent, thanks to his draconian approach to the mara gangs, which has ended their reign of terror in El Salvador.
He has locked up nearly 80,000 young men, often without evidence that they are gang members, in harsh conditions, with dozens to a cell and paraded before the cameras in their underwear.
But it’s not necessarily true that all ideas crossing synapses are going to be good ideas:
Yet the economy has long been Mr Bukele’s Achilles heel. The poverty rate, now 30 per cent of the population, and the national debt, now $30 billion or roughly 80 per cent of GDP, have surged since he took office in 2019.
Basic foodstuffs such as bread, eggs, meat, beans and fruit jumped 30% in Mr Bukele’s first four years in office. But government inspectors say some prices have tripled in recent months.
Meanwhile, his flagship economic policy, adopting Bitcoin as the national currency, has baffled ordinary citizens, failed to generate jobs or growth, and antagonised the International Monetary Fund, whose support he badly needs.
So, you know, dictators.
is increasingly associated with the hard Right
Is that how they’re doing it these days? If socialism isn’t working it becomes hsrd right populism?
Come on, every skoolboy knows those famous facists, in 1930s Germany were all hard, far right! They were members of the National S…
Bugger…
You have a point Tim.
Since the hard left is the status quo these days, any attempt to change it is the hard right.
but… but… if crime rates have gone down, why is the prison population going up?!?!?
Maybe he ought to have a word with Milei see if he has any advice.
Also, looking at the stats for food inflation in El Salvador, it peaked around 15% after COVID hit, but it has reverted back to just over 2% .
Episode 15 of Journalists, the truth and the narrative, eh?
Maybe we have something to learn from Central & South America. I certainly learned from my Costa Rican house guest. We were discussing the relative merits bank accounts in different countries & I couldn’t remember the name of the CR currency. Not surprising. It doesn’t have one. CR uses $US.
Go look at the CR growth rate. 3.1% over the past decade. Hit 5.1% for y/e 2023. Outperforming the 1.9% for the region. Even that’s something the EU can only dream about. CR spends 6% of GDP on education. La costaricana’s at university here studying pathology. Why pathology I asked her & not diversity studies, bearing in mind the CR’s history? Because there’s a shortage of pathologists she replied & it pays good money.
Europe is finished & fucked. I’m planning a considerable move south-west in the near future;. Leave you lot to arrange your own funerals.
Dictators? What’s Starmer’s approval rating? He’s in government on the votes of what proportion of those entitled to vote? (Not counting those who were told how to vote, of course. Or had their postal ballots completed for them.) Dictators are an improvement.
On dictators:
Kings & emperors, presidents, prime ministers & dictators. All rule subject to the consent of the Mum of the guard on the palace gates. The problem with democracy is the old girl gets a vote. That’s inclined to cloud her judgement
Bukele touched on this in an interview, for some reason the United States government is dead set against the restoration of law and order in El Salvador, which they describe as “concern” for “democracy and human rights”.
US Gov is an enemy of every sovereign country on Earth, but I wonder why they also want some of the most dangerous criminals in the world to be free to terrorise poor people in poor countries.
Luxury beliefs, or malice?
But pathology is haaaaaaarrrrddddd!!!!! I demand you classify Grievance Studies as STEM and gimmie a job.
they also want some of the most dangerous criminals in the world to be free to terrorise poor people in poor countries.
At least they are consistent. They also want dangerous criminals to be free to terrorise poor people in the US. Hence the ‘Soros DA’ phenomenon.
The evidence is the gang tattoos these people have – which, if you are not in the gang will get you killed for having.
But yes, being to the right of Lenin makes you a far right Nazi populist.
ES has gone from c. the most dangerous country in the world to one of the safest. It’s hard to imagine anyone being so wedded to theory that they would prefer the status quo ante, and the rule of the (often foreign) lawyers, journalists, academics, bankers, corrupt police and judges, and politicians which allowed and supported it, but then Portugal is a long way away.
@Interested
Bukele has, of course, addressed the core problem in El Salvador. You can’t have commerce and thus create the wealth to bring people out of poverty unless people have the confidence to conduct commerce. And with the gangs, they were capturing the surplus created by commerce & thus disincentivising its production. So he’s locked up 1% of El Salvador’s population. Seems a very cheap price to pay for the other 99%.
Now, when can we start locking up socialists? Although there’s always the eminently admirably (& cheaper & final) Chilean solution.
Further on dictatorship. I was coming to this country when Franco was still firmly in power. And it’s under Franco that Spain moved from being virtually a third-world country to first-world. It’s unlikely to have happened under democracy because of the endemic corruption. France wasn’t a socialist dictator. He was a traditional Catholic dictator. So the lid was at least kept on corruption sufficiently for the Spanish to benefit from there own productivity. And the result of them becoming richer was the authority of the Catholic church was undermined. And that was of course the underlying problem. Catholicism & corruption go together like hand & glove. Wherever you have Catholicism, inevitably you will have corruption. As you will with socialism.
@ bis
The punchline in that story is that Granny Weatherwax (not Nanny Ogg) gets the final vote.
The odd thing is, John, I was using that little illustration about 10 years before tPratchett wrote his book. Damned if I know where I got it. Maybe the same place he did.