In 1980, on the heels of the last military coup in Salvadoran history, into a political atmosphere still smelling of gunpowder, with the specter of agrarian reform haunting the dreams of the landowners, and a violent and unequal society teetering on the edge of an abyss that would soon consume it, a caudillo emerged. A man who promised the Salvadoran people that he would shatter the old political logic—the logic of men he called corrupt and dangerous. That man was my maternal uncle. His name was Roberto d´Aubuisson.
My uncle Roberto was a soldier during those years in Latin America when this meant terrible things. He belonged to a generation of military men formed under the influence of the School of the Americas and trained in methods of psychological and counterinsurgent warfare. A generation characterized by the technification of repression, known for deploying brutal techniques in torture, espionage, and infiltration in their efforts to “halt” the advance of communism and persecute political enemies—techinques that had been honed over the years by national guard troops and paramilitaries, who used them to quell unruly campesinos and punish coffee thiefs.
After the 1979 golpe de estado—a coup perpetrated by disaffected soldiers, with the support of a good number of Salvadoran intellectuals as well as certain elements within the Catholic Church—the state’s repressive apparatus lost two of its key institutions: ORDEN (Organización Democrática Nacionalista), the organization that recruited working class campesinos to populate its vast network of paramilitary death squads, and ANSESAL (Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Salvadoreña), the dictatorship’s intelligence agency. My uncle Roberto, who served briefly as the director of ANSESAL, oversaw the regrouping of these paramilitary forces and extracted many government intelligence files. Working on these two fronts, and with the help of self-exiled Salvadoran expats living in Miami and Guatemala, my uncle breathed new life into the death squads.
Meanwhile, he was also building a political movement—a mass political movement that after a relatively short formative period would become known as Arena (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista). My uncle Roberto spoke in words that today might at best sound strange, but in those years, he could move whole crowds with his diatribes against the corruption of the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN), who he blamed for introducing that dreaded socialist program called agrarian reform. He could rile up hundreds of campesinos and other workers at a time, railing against the Christian Democratic Party’s corrupt complicity with communists—enemy number one for the country’s elites, and for a good part of the general population as well. This is how Arena was born: accusing party opponents of corrution and terrorism.
My uncle Roberto would pace the stage at his huge rallies, fulminating to the masses, who were tired of the old militaristic politics and terrified by that imminent, looming menace called communism—that monster bent on devouring their children, slaughtering the elderly, and robbing them of land, liberty, and future.
One of his most effective strategies—and he had many—was to create a terrible category he called (when he wasn’t using stronger words) “enemigos de la patria”—“enemies of the homeland.” In this category, my uncle included: the progressive wing of the Catholic Church, human rights advocates, the Central American University (UCA), his political opponents, Jesuits, and anyone who wasn’t on his side. One of the claims he used to justify lumping these diverse groups together was that, according to my uncle, athey were all being funded by one single source: international communism.
“The truth is this: Los pescados [“dead fish,” my uncle’s name for the Christian Democrats], la convergencia [Convergencia Democrática], los terengos [“halfwits,” his slur for the FMLN and communists in general]—it’s all the same nonsense,” my uncle said during one of his campaign stops in the central part of the country, between applause and cheers from the crowd. “It’s the same monkey with different clothes. They’re all the same. And they all hate the Salvadoran people, working people, all of you, all of us,” he said.
My uncle Roberto’s political sorcery worked well. He consolidated a political party that in 1984 would come to rule over the Legislative Assembly, and would control the executive from 1989 to 2009. This party, especially in its early stages, allowed for the political participation of certain segments of the economic elite that the military class had in large part always ignored. Many of these people were landowners, merchants, and businessmen who were very wealthy and held enormous economic power, but had limited experience in politics.
Fatigue, fear, and fresh faces. That was the formula.
I have always thought that it is a mistake to believe that my uncle’s followers simply turned a blind eye to his role as commander of the death squads, or in planning the assasination of the finest man El Salvador’s has ever known: Óscar Romero. It is also a misinterpretation, I think, to believe that those thousands of compatriots who supported Arena were also supportive of the massacres or Archbishop Romero’s assasination. Contrary to how it might appear, we are not a nation of psychopaths. I believe, instead, that people are predisposed to accept these kinds of barbarities, as long as the caudillo in charge promises to attack the structures they are tired of living under, and to protect them from the people they fear.
El Salvador spent 20 years with that party occupying both the executive and a significant part of the Legislative Assembly. During those 20 years, various state-owned businesses were privatized, the country lost its national currency, and some of the most scandalous cases of theft, embezzlement, incompetence, nepotism and waste were perpetrated by those same political elites who in 1980 were seen as “fresh faces.”
Those fresh faces would become congressmen, mayors, ministers and even, over time, presidents. Little by little they would dissociate from the word “new,” establishing themselves as firmly as statues in the political life of El Salvador.
During those same 20 years, the two largest and most powerful gangs in Mesoamerica took root and came of age. La Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18 took over virtually every poor neighborhood in El Salvador. The gangs became the only reasonable option for thousands of Salvadoran youth who had no place in a country that thought of them only as a cheap and disciplined labor force for foreign-owned sweatshops.
Salvadorans were tired. Salvadorans were afraid.
In 2009, another figure emerged—a man whose ephemeral and tragic passage through our history may or may not amount to much: Mauricio Funes. To avoid being tiresome and repetitive, I won’t go into the details, but I want to briefly point out that his approach was similar. This time, new faces were not part of the equation, since his administration was in large part composed of the same guerilla commanders who had fought in the political-military conflict of the 1980s. But the formula was similar: fatigue and fear. The same formula that served my uncle Roberto so well, and that, just like his, held sway over a population that was tired and scared.
The FMLN was in power for ten years. During that time, there were numerous cases of the same acts of corruption, embezzlement, government waste, and nepotism that had tainted previous governments—crimes that were now being perpetrated by the very political elites who had promised vengeance for the terrible offenses of Arena.
In those ten years, the gangs made a huge leap forward in their criminal development: they began to understand politics. Indeed, it was the politicians who taught them. Up to that point, the gangs had remained largely unaware of the power and territorial reach of their organizational structures. Now, they were entering the Salvadoran political scene, led by the hands of public officials. These new pandilleros, more astute than their mentors, thus discovered an infinite landscape of possibilities, which to this day they continue to explore to great success. It was like releasing cats in an aviary.
In those ten years, in what I can only understand as a strategy based on ambivalence and hypocrisy, the state developed an agenda more repressive than anything seen since the end of the war. The second FMLN administration employed hyper-violent strategies for assassinating the members, collaborators, and sympathizers of the gangs that had flourished under Arena, and whose leaders had negotiated and made deals with Arena governments. Paradoxically, to achieve their ends, the FMLN government drew upon the old techniques (new in their day) that my uncle Roberto and his fellow soldiers had used to kill and terrorize them during the early stages of the insurgency.
Fatigue accumulates, fear becomes rage.
Into a different political landscape, but with a population that holds more or less the same political values—violence as an acceptable form of conflict resolution and education, authoritarianism as a preferred form of government, among others—the figure of Nayib Bukele appeared. Forty years later, Bukele is reading from the same script as my uncle Roberto. By studying the populists of the past, he has learned the populist formula well. Fatigue and fear. A population fed up with the terrible humiliations of one or another political group, and willing to ignore atrocity in pursuit of revenge.
The Bukele era is just beginning. To my mind, only the naive, the deluded, and a few friends whom I respect and hold in high esteem, believe that this era will be over anytime soon, and that the imprint it leaves on the political history of El Salvador will not be very deep.
So far, the Bukele administration has been characterized by behavior quite similar to that of the previous two parties: scandalous cases of corruption, incompetence, nepotism, and government waste on the part of political elites—those “fresh faces” that are starting to look a lot like the old ones.
In the short time Bukele has been in power, the gangs have made significant steps forward in their criminal and political development. They have difinitively moved on from being mere street gangs—with an obsessive focus on ritual confrontation and symbols of identity—and have become hybrid structures, somewhere between organized criminal syndicates and local mafias, with the capacity not only to negotiate with the state, but even to establish alliances with it.
Power atrophies, especially when exercised the way it is in El Salvador. The Bukele administration has made enemies of everyone, on all sides, having succeeded in the extraordinary exercise of stuffing everyone into one big bag of enemies—a bag labeled “the same old suspects” (“los mismos de siempre”): The ANEP (Asociación Nacional de la Empresa Privada) and the UCA, the FMLN and Arena, El Diario de Hoy and El Faro.
Casting his attention on El Salvador’s neighbors, Bukele has railed against the governments of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras and the Ortega family in Nicaragua; he has caused hostilities with the governments of López Obrador in Mexico and Carlos Alvarado in Costa Rica; and has even leveled false accusations against the government of Italy, outright accusing Italian officials responding to the pandemic as being all but mataviejietos—murderers of old people.
Just like my uncle Roberto, who saw enemies (or rather, communists) everywhere he looked—in groups as diverse as the Christian Democrats, the Catholic Church, and even the U.S. Congress and the United Nations—Bukele sees “the same old suspects” everywhere too, whether it’s Human Rights Watch or the Francisco Gavidia University’s Institute for Technology, Science, and Innovation. At least he says he sees them.
The glue, or saliva, that Bukele uses to patch such disparate groups together into one big block is the accusation that they all share the same sources of funding. This time though, instead of international communism, the funders are a shadowy transnational group of evil millionaires, operating under the directorship of bogeyman tycoon George Soros, bent on destroying the President’s good government.
It might be a mistake, as the jurist and historian Roberto Turcios explained to me a few days ago, to say that in El Salvador our political processes are cyclical. In attempting to present distinct eras and events as versions of a single repetitive phenomenon, he told me, one runs the risk of invisibilizing the particularities of each historical moment. And he’s right. I don’t want to fall into that trap. Nevertheless, I think that even if these historical moments are indeed different, the political values of our society are hereditary and have remained very similar over time. It seems to me that our weakness for clinging to strong, authoritarian figures—men who enter the political arena, and our hearts, with promises of exacting revenge against some previous authoritarian figure—has remained intact since 1980 (and even earlier). More importantly, this weakness does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
Salvadoran society has a long way to go before the Bukele era comes to an end, and there are many things we haven’t yet had to endure. We still have not suffered what we suffered under previous regimes—the sacrifices, economic and otherwise. As 2020 comes to a close, we are beginning to see the first public demonstrations against the Bukele government; I thought it would take us longer. Nevertheless, my intuition tells me that we still have at least 15 more years of Bukelismo—hopefully I’m wrong.
The new political elites and officials who do not yet have a past will soon acquire one. They, too, will come to represent El Salvador’s “old politics,” and just as today we say Gloria Salguero Gross, Armando Calderón Sol, Óscar Ortíz or Sánchez Cerén, tomorrow we will say Pablo Anliker, Mario Durán or Suecy Callejas. Just as we say Walter Araujo... well, we’ll still say Walter Araujo. But without a doubt, just as we once said Roberto d'Aubuisson, 15 years from now we will say instead, Nayib Bukele.
At the end of those 15 years, give or take a few months, a new caudillo will appear—a man, or woman, who will find citizens that are tired and afraid. He will tell us words of love, he will tell us that he feels our pain, that he shares our past, that our wounds are his wounds too. He will detail to us each and every atrocity that so many others choose to ignore. That person, who by now is perhaps just finishing high school and could care less for the sterile wars of aging politicians, will one day be the person to remind us of that infamous February 9th, who will show us the photos of the soldiers in the Blue Room of the Legislative Assembly. Perhaps when that day comes, we will have regained our capacity to become outraged, and will shake our heads in disapproval. He will remind us of all the public officials who, during that strange year of the pandemic, were making business deals behind the scenes. He will show us the family tree of a government so inbred that it could very well have given birth to children with the tails of swine. He will promise to expel that terrible Bukelismo once and for all from Salvadoran politics. Over time, the hourglass will run out of sand, flip over, and we will find ourselves tired and afraid of this man as well.
Then another man, or woman, will rise to take his place.
Juan José Martínez d'Aubuisson is a sociocultural anthropologist and a graduate of the University of El Salvador. He has studied issues of gangs, violence, and identity in Central America since 2008. He is the author of the book Ver, oír y callar: Un año con la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (Aura 2012) and coauthor of the books El Niño de Hollywood (Debate 2018), Crónicas Negras (Prisa, 2012), Las mujeres que nadie Amó (CINDE 2011), and Violencia en tiempos de paz (Secultura 2015), among others.
*Translated by Max Granger
