Salvadoran leader’s illegal bid for reelection a sign of region’s spreading authoritarian virus | Opinion

Nobody should be surprised that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced he will run for reelection in 2024 — despite the fact that his country’s constitution prohibits consecutive terms. But, Latin America’s growing tolerance for power grabs encouraged him to do so.

Indeed, Latin American countries largely have looked the other way in recent years when the leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, among others, circumvented their countries’ constitutions to stay in power beyond their terms. And Washington, especially under former President Trump, also deserves blame for often ignoring the erosion of the rule of law in the region.

“I’m announcing to the Salvadoran people that I’ve decided to run as a candidate for president of the republic,” Bukele, proclaimed in a Sept. 15 Independence Day address.

Never mind that El Salvador’s constitution explicitly prohibits sitting presidents from running for consecutive terms. Last year, after the president’s party won legislative elections by a landslide, the Bukele-controlled Congress fired five members of the Constitutional Court and replaced them with loyalists, who later issued a ruling allowing a president to be elected to consecutive terms.

The Biden administration strongly criticized Bukele for tampering with the justice system, but it drew little public condemnation in Latin America.

“Latin American presidents’ reelection fever is nothing new, but it’s getting worse with recent failure by the international community to condemn unconstitutional moves,” says Santiago Cantón, head of the rule-of-law program at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. “El Salvador is just the latest example of this trend.”

In Nicaragua, dictator Daniel Ortega had his government-controlled National Assembly change the constitution in 2014 to allow indefinite consecutive reelections, after he had previously reformed the constitution to allow him to run for a first-reelection in 2011. Ortega now is in his fourth consecutive term.

In Venezuela, late dictator Hugo Chavez changed the constitution to allow indefinite reelections in 2009. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, reelected himself in a sham election in 2018, and is still in power.

In Bolivia, former ruler Evo Morales had the Supreme Electoral Tribunal approve his petition to run for a fourth consecutive term in 2019, despite a constitutional prohibition to do so. Years earlier, Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, Argentina’s late President Carlos Menem, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Peru’s former President Alberto Fujimori had also changed their constitutions so that they could be reelected.

Legal experts say there are three stages in Latin America’s reelection fever. In the 1990s, several right-of-center leaders changed their constitutions to be allowed to run for one consecutive term. Then, in the 2000s, leftist leaders started changing their countries’ laws to allow indefinite reelections.

More recently, Bukele and Nicaragua’s Ortega have introduced a new twist: instead of changing their constitutions, they are changing their constitutional tribunals, filling them with loyalists and having them “interpret” the constitution in a way that allows them to stay in power indefinitely.

Most outrageous is that some of these democratically elected authoritarian rulers are greeted with state honors in some countries.

Last week, Mexico’s populist president Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador hosted Bolivia’s former ruler Morales as a guest of honor at Mexico’s Sept. 16 Independence Day celebrations. It was shameful.

Bukele’s authoritarian traits already are hurting El Salvador’s economy. He made the disastrous decision of declaring Bitcoin legal tender in his country and has used Salvadoran taxpayers’ money to buy $100 million worth of the crypto-currency since September 2021. The price of Bitcoin was about $47,000 a coin at the time, and has since plummeted to about $19,000.

Bukele’s reelection, with near absolute powers, in 2024 would further allow him to make further bad decisions at home and would set a bad precedent abroad.

Daniel Zovatto, regional director of the Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), told me that would be tragic, because each new authoritarian leader in the region enables others.

“If [Nicaragua’s] Ortega can change his constitution, massacre more than 300 protesters, jail all top opposition leaders, steal elections and nothing happens to him, it’s clear that Bukele will say, ‘I can do that, too,’” Zovatto told me.

That’s true. Unless Latin American governments start treating aspiring dictators as political pariahs, the region’s authoritarian virus will continue to spread.

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