After El Salvador's congress changed the Constitution last week to eliminate presidential term limits, the Trump administration this week is insisting that authoritarian President Nayib Bukele is not a dictator.
“We reject the comparison of El Salvador’s democratically based and constitutionally sound legislative process with illegitimate dictatorial regimes elsewhere in our region,” the State Department said in a statement to the Associated Press.
But a host of democracy watchdogs are answering back that the comparison is especially apt.
"The U.S. statement is absolute nonsense," Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants, a Latin America security consulting firm in Washington D.C., told WLRN.
"Bukele has dismantled the Supreme Court, he's virtually done away with any chance for the opposition to win seats in the Legislative Assembly. So now, doing away with term limits and lengthening the terms themselves — this is classic example of what other dictators in Latin America have done."
Aside from handing Bukele a pathway to indefinite re-election, El Salvador's congress also extended presidential terms from five to six years.
Legal experts say El Salvador’s Supreme Court let Bukele win a second consecutive term last year in violation of the Constitution.
Latin America experts say all that closely follows a pattern set by several of the region's autocrats, such as the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
"You can map out Bukele's movements" since he first won election to the president in 2019, Farah said, "and you'll see that he's checked every one of the [dictator] boxes."
READ MORE: Human rights leader's arrest in El Salvador casts Trump darling Bukele in a darker light
Juan Papper, Americas deputy director for Human Rights Watch, echoed Farah in an interview with the AP:
“It’s unfortunate to see the US government is defending efforts to establish an autocracy in El Salvador. This undermines the credibility of the State Department’s criticism to other authoritarian governments and dictatorships in the region," including Ortega and Venezuela's current dictator, President Nicolás Maduro.
Bukele has won hemispheric applause for neutralizing El Salvador’s powerful gangs — but critics argue the Trump administration ignores the way Bukele has trampled on democracy and civil rights in the process.
As much as 2% of El Salvador's population has been behind bars at any given time in recent years, they point out, as Bukele has done away with constitutional standards such as due process and habeas corpus, as part of a gang crackdown that also snares anti-Bukele dissidents in its dragnet.
A big reason Trump looks the other way, those critics say, is that Bukele has agreed to take migrants deported by the U.S. into his high-security prison.
“And the message that sends," said Farah, "is that the United States no longer cares about the democratic norms if you’re nice to us.”
Farah adds that, these days, that mindset has less to do with ideology than it did in the past. While Latin American caudillos like Ortega and Maduro are leftists, Bukele — who has sardonically called himself "the world's coolest dictator" — is "ideologically agnostic," Farah says, though he acknowledges Bukele's critics consider him a right-winger today.
