GOOD INTENTIONS AND IGNORANCE: HOW WE AMERICANS CREATED "THE WORLD'S COOLEST DICTATOR"

For many American liberals - many of them veterans of the 1980s opposition to Reagan’s Central American wars - El Salvador is the site of a startling, disturbing, political project.

Few, however, are willing to admit that one of the things they should be most disturbed about is the fact that the United States created the situation in the country that led to everything they find startling and disturbing now. That they themselves may have been complicit.

The United States created modern El Salvador on the streets of Los Angeles back in the late 1980s and 1990s, when East, Central and South LA became the battlefields of the gang wars between 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha (better known in the past 25 years as MS-13) - Salvadoran gangs whose original purpose was the defense of their newly-arrived refugee communities - against the Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13, Temple Street and White Fence. The flood of drugs - particularly cocaine - turned the streets alleys of the City of Angels into war zones. Politicians, who found themselves powerless to deal with the gangs using the tools they had, responded finally by making certain that those arrested who were not citizens were returned to their home countries.

I lived on Mount Washington at the time, a white bohemian enclave at the eastern end of the Santa Monicas, south of Glendale; the surrounding community at the base of the mountain, El Sereno, was the teritory of The Avenues Gang, and I drove through it quickly on my way to the nearby Pasadena Freeway and my movie meetings on the West Side. When my neighbors and I heard about the deportation plan, we didn’t complain. Not one word.

The result was that over 30 years, the worst of the worst of the Salvadoran gangs - gang members who knew no other way to live - were sent back to El Salvador. There they created their version of “heaven,” a vision of hell to everyone else, with organized crime becoming the main employer of Salvadoran youth, with the organized criminals protected by the political leaders.

President Nayib Bukele is the logical answer to that desire of the middle and upper-class white people of Los Angeles to rid themselves of The Gang Problem - moving it out of sight, and thus out of mind.

This past weekend, President Bukele won reelection in a crushing landslide, despite there having been a law that Salvadoran presidents could only serve on five-year term. Under his control over the past five years he held office in his first term, the country shifted from what was a functional multiparty democracy that grew like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s - the reason so many Salvadorans fled to Los Angeles to begin with, to get away from the Army death squads - to a de facto one-party state that now stands revealed in its armored reality, backed by a parliamentary supermajority. Bukele loyalists with whom he packed the country’s constitutional court had issued a ruling allowing him to ignore the law against presidents holding office longer than one term.

Bukele’s second five year term will see his power paramount, the legislature now a rubber stamp for his agenda; the opposition a shadow of what they were, and an enfeebled one at that.

And the Salvadoran people are ecstatic, overjoyed by Bukele’s victory. He owns some of the highest approval ratings of any leader in the world, winning Sunday’s presidential vote by close to a 90 percent margin that observers recognize as real.

Bukele’s astonishing popularity hinges on one critical event: since entering office in 2019, he masterminded a sweeping crackdown on the gangs and cartels that proliferated for years throughout El Salvador and across the region in neighboring countries. Through his tough approach, El Salvador’s once world-leading homicide rates have dropped significantly, bringing a degree of safety to Salvadoran neighborhoods terrorized for years by the Americanized gangsters.

Across Latin America, Bukele’s success has also inspired right wing politicians to try to replicate The Bukele Model.

The Model is based in heavy-handed police state overreach. After his election, the legislature granted Bukele emergency powers to carry out his anti-crime war. The government has used these emergency powers to jail more than 72,000 suspects, giving El Salvador the world’s highest imprisonment rate. Mass trials of up to 900 defendants, with many arrested arbitrarily, have been held. The situation got so bad that the government was forced to acknowledge the more egregious errors, freeing around 7,000 of those convicted.

The Biden administration has said the 2021 court ruling that paved the way for Bukele’s second term “undermines democracy.” The 42-year old Bukele scoffed at his American critics and jokingly rebranded his bio on Twitter, now known as Xitter, to “the coolest dictator in the world.”

The majority of Salvadorans are like my neighbors and I on Mount Washington; they don’t complain about the disappearance of the gangsters. They are instead drawn to the populist promise in Bukele’s campaign to smash the failed status quo that presided over stagnation, corruption and poverty. Bukele exulted to his cheering supporters in Sn Salvador Sunday night that “It will be the first time in a country that just one party exists in a completely democratic system. The entire opposition together was pulverized.”

The opposition is composed of the opponents in the civil war 40 years ago. The conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), dominated back then by the Salvadoran Army’s death squads who assassinated Archbishop Romero on the steps of the national cathedral in San Salvador where he preached in daylight in 1984, whose death squad gunmen raped and murdered the nine American Jesuits and nuns in 1985, was opposed in the war by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerilla ally of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who were accused of supplying the guerilla rebels. Over the 30 years since the end of the war, the two partiesalternated in power, every year more thoroughly discredited by their own corruption and ineffectiveness, with more than a few of their leaders actively collaborating with the gangsters.

The only surprising thing in all this was that it took until 2019 for a demagogue to tap into the national mortification of what El Salvador had become.

Bukele cast this month’s election as a referendum on his way of doing things in a society traumatized by decades of violence, official and otherwise. He told his supporters that the reason so many were - finally! - paying attention to what happened in El Salvador was because “They’re afraid of the power of example.”

Bukele’s bio on Xitter has no mention now about a dictator. He identifies as a “philosopher king.”

Bukele’s success in El Salvador reflects the truth that for many in the global south - in both developing and developed countries - for young people particularly democracy is facing historic tests, as voters become more apathetic in their support of a system they don’t see delivering the life that is supposed to go with political democracy. After years of being the ones oppressed by the criminals in El Salvador, people are willing to reject the principles of democracy and human rights they believe have failed them, in favor of supporting authoritarian populism that makes their neighborhoods peaceful for the first time many can ever remember.

From all of this, Bukele is now a cause célèbre to the U.S. right. American Conservative magazine recently declared, “The American liberal media cannot comprehend that enforcing hard authority might make a society better, and counterintuitively, more free and liberal.” They went on to state that Bukele “provides a time-tested, successful alternative to the liberal model of governance.”

Bukele’s anti-gang measures are wildly popular, but El Salvador’s economy remains fraught by increasing inflation in a society that still has high rates of poverty and unemployment. Food insecurity is rising while exports decline. In his second term, Bukele will have to have to address El Savador’s socioeconomic problems with policies more effective than his stalled Bitcoin initiative to make it legal tender in the country, which has done little to address deeper problems.

If prices continue to rise and Buikele’s government proves itself unable to respond, his five years of strong popularity may end before his second term does. Given the failure of the political opposition and the erosion of political checks and balances, there is little likelihood that a serious challenger will emerge.

Graham Greene wrote the novel “The Quiet American” about the role of Americans in the First Indochinese War of Independence, against the French. The novel’s protagonist, cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler - a stand-in for Greene - wrote of the title character, Alden Pyle: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused, impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”

Pyle’s faults are America’s. Rather than campaign for better treatment of the political refugees who were here in Los Angeles as the collateral damage to Reagan’s “good intentions and ignorance” in his Central American wars, we didn’t say anything about how Darryl Gates’ LAPD was treating people. There were no complaints about the Vikings, the gang of Sheriff’s Deputies who were as bad if not worse than their opponents - definitely worse since they wore badges - who ripped off the drug dealers, murdering more than a few before they finally put the Sheriff in a bad light for re-election and he cleaned them up and tossed out the most obvious criminals on his way to electoral victory.

Indeed, when a Salvadoran tagger was shot in North Hollywood in 1986 by a failed Hollywood actor who was out playing “neighorhood warrior” while he searched for an appropriate victim, and the jury bought his claim of self-defense, we were telling the Salvadorans that 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha were necessary. And when they became a problem for the rest of us, no one complained when they “disappeared.”

And the result of all that was celebrated Sunday night in San Salvador.

Good intentions and ignorance. It’s a deadly combination.

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