{"code":"24933","sect":"Columnas","sect_slug":"columnas","hits":"808","link":"https:\/\/elfaro.net\/en\/202010\/columnas\/24933","link_edit":"","name":"The Caudillo\u2019s Eternal Return: Reflections on El Salvador\u2019s Past, Present, and Future Demagogues","slug":"the-caudillo-rsquo-s-eternal-return-reflections-on-el-salvador-rsquo-s-past-present-and-future-demagogues","info":"","mtag":"Corruption","noun":{"html":"Juan Mart\u00ednez d'Aubuisson","data":{"juan-martinez-daubuisson":{"sort":"","slug":"juan-martinez-daubuisson","path":"juan_martinez_daubuisson","name":"Juan Mart\u00ednez d'Aubuisson","edge":"0","init":"0"}}},"view":"808","pict":{"cms-image-000033894-jpg":{"feat":"1","sort":"33894","name":"cms-image-000033894.jpg","link":"https:\/\/elfaro.net\/images\/cms-image-000033894.jpg","path":"https:\/\/elfaro.net\/images\/cms-image-000033894.jpg","back":"","slug":"cms-image-000033894-jpg","text":"<p><em>Juan Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez d'Aubuisson es antrop\u00f3logo sociocultural, graduado de la Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. Desde 2008 estudia temas de pandillas, violencia e identidad en Centroam\u00e9rica. Es autor del libro \"Ver, o\u00edr y callar. Un a\u00f1o con la Mara Salvatrucha 13\" (aura 2012) y co autor de los libros \"El Ni\u00f1o de Hollywood\" (Debate 2018), \"Cr\u00f3nicas Negras\" (Prisa, 2012), \"Las mujeres que nadie Am\u00f3\" (CINDE 2011) \"Violencia en tiempos de paz\" ( Secultura 2015) entre otros.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>","capt":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EJuan Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez d'Aubuisson es antrop\u00f3logo sociocultural, graduado de la Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. Desde 2008 estudia temas de pandillas, violencia e identidad en Centroam\u00e9rica. Es autor del libro \"Ver, o\u00edr y callar. Un a\u00f1o con la Mara Salvatrucha 13\" (aura 2012) y co autor de los libros \"El Ni\u00f1o de Hollywood\" (Debate 2018), \"Cr\u00f3nicas Negras\" (Prisa, 2012), \"Las mujeres que nadie Am\u00f3\" (CINDE 2011) \"Violencia en tiempos de paz\" ( Secultura 2015) entre otros.\u00a0\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E"}},"pict_main__sort":33894,"date":{"live":"2020\/10\/23"},"data_post_dateLive_YY":"2020","data_post_dateLive_MM":"10","data_post_dateLive_DD":"23","text":"\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EIn 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\u2014the logic of men he called corrupt and dangerous. That man was my maternal uncle. His name was Roberto d\u00b4Aubuisson.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EMy 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 \u201chalt\u201d the advance of communism and persecute political enemies\u2014techinques that had been honed over the years by national guard troops and paramilitaries, who used them to quell unruly campesinos and punish coffee thiefs.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAfter the 1979 golpe de estado\u2014a coup perpetrated by disaffected soldiers, with the support of a good number of Salvadoran intellectuals as well as certain elements within the Catholic Church\u2014the state\u2019s repressive apparatus lost two of its key institutions: ORDEN (Organizaci\u00f3n Democr\u00e1tica Nacionalista), the organization that recruited working class campesinos to populate its vast network of paramilitary death squads, and ANSESAL (Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Salvadore\u00f1a), the dictatorship\u2019s 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMeanwhile, he was also building a political movement\u2014a 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 Conciliaci\u00f3n 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\u2019s corrupt complicity with communists\u2014enemy number one for the country\u2019s 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EMy 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\u2014that monster bent on devouring their children, slaughtering the elderly, and robbing them of land, liberty, and future.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EOne of his most effective strategies\u2014and he had many\u2014was to create a terrible category he called (when he wasn\u2019t using stronger words) \u201cenemigos de la patria\u201d\u2014\u201cenemies of the homeland.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u201cThe truth is this: Los pescados [\u201cdead fish,\u201d my uncle\u2019s name for the Christian Democrats], la convergencia [Convergencia Democr\u00e1tica], los terengos [\u201chalfwits,\u201d his slur for the FMLN and communists in general]\u2014it\u2019s all the same nonsense,\u201d my uncle said during one of his campaign stops in the central part of the country, between applause and cheers from the crowd. \u201cIt\u2019s the same monkey with different clothes. They\u2019re all the same. And they all hate the Salvadoran people, working people, all of you, all of us,\u201d he said.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EMy uncle Roberto\u2019s 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EFatigue, fear, and fresh faces. That was the formula.\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EI have always thought that it is a mistake to believe that my uncle\u2019s 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\u2019s has ever known: \u00d3scar 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\u2019s 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EEl 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 \u201cfresh faces.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EThose fresh faces would become congressmen, mayors, ministers and even, over time, presidents. Little by little they would dissociate from the word \u201cnew,\u201d establishing themselves as firmly as statues in the political life of El Salvador.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EDuring 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ESalvadorans were tired. Salvadorans were afraid.\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EIn 2009, another figure emerged\u2014a 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EThe 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\u2014crimes that were now being perpetrated by the very political elites who had promised vengeance for the terrible offenses of Arena.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EIn 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EFatigue accumulates, fear becomes rage.\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EInto a different political landscape, but with a population that holds more or less the same political values\u2014violence as an acceptable form of conflict resolution and education, authoritarianism as a preferred form of government, among others\u2014the 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESo 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\u2014those \u201cfresh faces\u201d that are starting to look a lot like the old ones.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EIn 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\u2014with an obsessive focus on ritual confrontation and symbols of identity\u2014and 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 \u003Ca href=\"\/es\/202009\/el_salvador\/24781\/Gobierno-de-Bukele-lleva-un-a%C3%B1o-negociando-con-la-MS-13-reducci%C3%B3n-de-homicidios-y-apoyo-electoral.htm\"\u003Eestablish alliances with it\u003C\/a\u003E.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EPower 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\u2014a bag labeled \u201cthe same old suspects\u201d (\u201clos mismos de siempre\u201d): The ANEP (Asociaci\u00f3n Nacional de la Empresa Privada) and the UCA, the FMLN and Arena, El Diario de Hoy and El Faro.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003ECasting his attention on El Salvador\u2019s neighbors, Bukele has railed against the governments of Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez in Honduras and the Ortega family in Nicaragua; he has caused hostilities with the governments of L\u00f3pez 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\u2014murderers of old people.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EJust like my uncle Roberto, who saw enemies (or rather, communists) everywhere he looked\u2014in groups as diverse as the Christian Democrats, the Catholic Church, and even the U.S. Congress and the United Nations\u2014Bukele sees \u201cthe same old suspects\u201d everywhere too, whether it\u2019s Human Rights Watch or the Francisco Gavidia University\u2019s Institute for Technology, Science, and Innovation. At least he says he sees them.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe 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\u2019s good government.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EIt 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\u2019s right. I don\u2019t 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\u2014men who enter the political arena, and our hearts, with promises of exacting revenge against some previous authoritarian figure\u2014has remained intact since 1980 (and even earlier). More importantly, this weakness does not appear to be going away anytime soon.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003ESalvadoran society has a long way to go before the Bukele era comes to an end, and there are many things we haven\u2019t yet had to endure. We still have not suffered what we suffered under previous regimes\u2014the 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\u2014hopefully I\u2019m wrong.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe new political elites and officials who do not yet have a past will soon acquire one. They, too, will come to represent El Salvador\u2019s \u201cold politics,\u201d and just as today we say Gloria Salguero Gross, Armando Calder\u00f3n Sol, \u00d3scar Ort\u00edz or S\u00e1nchez Cer\u00e9n, tomorrow we will say Pablo Anliker, Mario Dur\u00e1n or Suecy Callejas. Just as we say Walter Araujo... well, we\u2019ll 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EAt the end of those 15 years, give or take a few months, a new caudillo will appear\u2014a 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.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003EThen another man, or woman, will rise to take his place.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cimg src=\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/fCmiCoT57_ptjffy-80-FhYElyErn_qyEC-rPERoD7-B0xra4veVXXehT6OwD8zxCAYLmqJc8vwgBJ7KUC5hHY8RqvTpn9GBgt7jLJzeutuIDXHpYRTP5XuN94BTxgVqlKEaXw_H\" alt=\"Juan Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez d'Aubuisson es antrop\u00f3logo sociocultural, graduado de la Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. Desde 2008 estudia temas de pandillas, violencia e identidad en Centroam\u00e9rica. Es autor del libro \" width=\"624\" height=\"764\" \/\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cem\u003EJuan Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ednez 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, o\u00edr y callar: Un a\u00f1o con la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (Aura 2012) and coauthor of the books El Ni\u00f1o de Hollywood (Debate 2018), Cr\u00f3nicas Negras (Prisa, 2012), Las mujeres que nadie Am\u00f3 (CINDE 2011), and Violencia en tiempos de paz (Secultura 2015), among others.\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cbr\/\u003E\u003Cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003E\u003Cem\u003E*\u003C\/em\u003ETranslated by Max Granger\u003C\/p\u003E"}