Last Sunday, as the red carpet arrivals began at the Oscars, a scene out of a Hollywood thriller unfolded far away in the capital of El Salvador. Dozens of police officers and soldiers in full battlefield regalia, armed with assault weapons, burst into the country’s Legislative Assembly. Stunned legislators watched as President Nayib Bukele marched in and sat in the chair of the president of the assembly. “Now,” he declared, “I think it’s very clear who has control of the situation.” Outside the legislature, Bukele’s followers, summoned by their young, charismatic leader, were smashing pinatas meant to look like his [...]
In a blatant display of disregard for the country’s democratic institutions, President Nayib Bukele ordered the military to briefly occupy El Salvador’s legislature last weekend. He was apparently irritated with the slow pace of legislative negotiations over his proposal for a $109 million loan from a regional development bank to pay for new military equipment, as part of a broader crime bill. Bukele’s supporters applauded the show of force, but it provoked an outcry from critics concerned about the 38-year-old president’s disdain for the rule of law and his willingness to politicize the military. Bukele argues that the loan from [...]
MEXICO CITY—Mexico’s left-leaning president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, took office in December 2018 vowing to demilitarize his country’s war on drugs and tackle its wave of violent crime with a policy of “hugs, not bullets.” Yet his first full year in office saw 35,588 homicides committed nationwide, breaking the previous record for the third year in a row. In one of the more high-profile atrocities, nine members of a prominent Mexican-American Mormon family were massacred in November, including six children. The spiraling violence, along with AMLO’s failed promises to address it, has rekindled a long-running debate in Mexico over how [...]
