Angry Planet - Mega Prisons and Bitcoin in El Salvador

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

It’s 2023. It’s time for authoritarian leaders to update their aesthetic. Sure a stuffy military uniform used to lend an air of authority, but today’s young leaders are looking more and more like silicon valley tech billionaires. A backwards baseball cap. Laser eyes on their Twitter profile. Plans to build a city powered by a volcano that mines bitcoin. Mega-prisons ripped from the pages of Judge Dredd. That kind of thing.This week we’re talking about El Salvador and its millennial leader Nayib Bukele. With us here to do that is Tiziano Breda, an expert on the region who has covered it for the International Crisis Group and is now with IAI, the Italian international affairs institute.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6atCMAVfEAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. It's 2023. It's time for authoritarian leaders to update their aesthetic. Sure, a stuffy military uniform used to lend an air of authority, but today's young leaders are looking more and more like Silicon Valley Tech billionaires. backwards baseball cap, laser eyes on their Twitter profile, plans to build a city powered by a volcano that mines Bitcoin, mega prisons ripped from the pages of Judge Dred, that kind of thing. Yes, this week we're talking about El Salvador and its millennial leader, Naib Buceli. With us here to do that is Tessiano Breda, an expert on the region who has covered it

for the International Crisis Group and is now with the IAI, the Italian International Affairs Institute. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet. Thanks very much to you for the invitation. It's a pleasure. So can we start up? We'd like to start off with basics on the show. Who is Buckele? Where did he come from? So Buckele is a disruptive character in the political arena of El Salvador. He became the youngest president to take power in the recent history of the country, just the age of 37 in 2019.

He comes from a PR and business background, from a quite rich family of Palestinian origins. He was introduced to politics by militasing in the left-wing FMLN party, which is statistically the remnants of the group that after 2019-92 signed a peace accord and seized the Civil War in Salvador. So under the age of that party, he became first the mayor of a small town called Antlikucuscatlan, and then he became mayor of San Salvador, the capital of the country. There it was really the trembling for him, who is social media savvy, as I said, very young president, very close to the young people and new ways to do politics through social media, Twitter,

Facebook and really managed to basically serve this wave of this content that was accumulating and was being accumulated in Salvador due to the inability of the traditional parties, the FMLN, the same in which he drew, and the other right-wing main party called Arena, to deliver, basically, to attend to the problems of the citizens. and in Salvador, you may know, was for long, one of the most violent countries in the world. In 2015, it was actually the most violent country in the world in terms of homicide rates. Four of the, actually, the four last presidents were all either investigator or tried or jailed for corruption scandals of great magnitude. So he basically used this proximity to the younger, to the youth,

and his ability to communicate to serve this wave of this content and rally around the anti-corruption campaign. That's how he became president in 2019 after actually being expelled by the FMLN and so running on his own ticket. Why was he expelled? He was expelled precisely because the leadership of a party that is not used to renewal, so to speak, and is still led by the remnants of the guerrilla commanders that fought the civil war,

saw in him initially, of course, an opportunity to capitalize on the votes. of the people in the minor town and then the main and the capital but afterwards so in his ambitions a risk a threat and and so the internal frictions started to to erupt and eventually he was kicked out allegedly to do to an episode of also sort of gender-based violence in the sense that he offended a member of the party female member of the party so he was kicked out after that episode Can you tell us what his, what does he believe? What is his political ideology? I know he was part of the left wing that doesn't mean the same thing in every country, right?

So what exactly are his politics? He has, of course, the background on progressive and left-wing ideals. But so he believes that the state should, you know, intervene, should be present, should be providing services. for the poor, for the marginal life. And that's why under his government, for example, the state, the institution has donated hundreds of thousands of, sorry, thousands of laptops and, you know, and they see to the least favored communities to reduce the digital gap,

as they say, that's why, and that's part of his ideology, he, at least at the public level, in the public speech, he has introduced Bitcoin precisely to overcome a chronic illness of the country, which is the access for the marginalized or large wealth of the population to the banking system. And so to provide them with also a sort of what can be similar to a banking, a trading account. But on the other hand, is very pro-liberal economic economy. policies, pro-capitalist investment kind of economy.

So he has a bit of a mixed record in terms of policies that he is bringing forward. So I wouldn't be able to place it in this ideological spectrum. Doesn't he sound a little bit populist? I mean, he's just reaching out to whoever he can and grabbing favor from all of them. Absolutely. I mean, he is a pragmatic populist, I would say. I mean, he does not only, you know, appeal to the least favored swathed the population, but also to abate the ways, there were initially some, some frictions. He's eventually trying to create an environment of greater foreign investment

so to try and maintain good relations with the private sector as well. So these are sort of pragmatics populace. Of course, I'm sure we'll talk about that. The accusation and evident democratic backsliding that is taking place in the country may not be so helpful in that second realm of

But it's also true that in terms of tourism and in terms of Bitcoin investment, which is, of course, a very minor, you know, part of the business community. But also the infrastructure level, there's been a lot going on and the state has, of course, try and favor some greater investment in that area. So certainly he's a populist. It doesn't seem to have a lot of care for the debt of the country, which is in a very critical situation, so in public spending in general. But he's doing so also with the aim to maintain good relations with different sectors, although, of course, not the political position. So there's a lot of reasons I wanted to talk about him

Because one of the biggest things for me And there's a lot to talk about here Was that there's this sheen On top of him that I haven't quite seen before In like an authoritarian leader where it's very modern And it's kind of playing to It feels like you're playing to this international audience That's watching on the internet as much as you are domestically

he's doing a lot of this. And I think I'll link this video in the show notes for people. But one of the big things that drew me in and made me research him and want to talk about him was this presentation from November in 2021 for Bitcoin Week. El Salvador, he announced that Bitcoin was going to be the national currency. And as part of this, they were going to build a Bitcoin city, which I believe was literally a planned city in the shape of a Bitcoin. If you were to view it from above, it's going to be attached to a volcano. In the volcano, they were going to use geothermal power to power a giant Bitcoin mine. And basically, if you were to invest in this city or live there, no payroll tax, no property taxes, no municipal taxes, tax free haven for anybody that wants to invest or live there.

The presentation is really flashy and very internet. There's like some UFO graphics and fireworks. But there's a lot written about that. But what I don't hear about as much is all of the other stuff underneath. Can we talk a little bit more about the repression of democratic norms? Why do people, I see things like millennial dictator, authoritarian. We called him an authoritarian in the beginning. What is the evidence that he is suppressing democracy in El Salvador?

Well, I mean, this has become, I think there are two watersheds in his administration that really raised the alarm bells in that regard. The first happened in 2020 and the 9th of February when, you know, against the backdrop of resistance from a legislative assembly, so that the Congress basically, who would feel control back then by the opposition parties that say, so that the traditional parties, because the, you know, he came into power with the presidential election, but for the first two years, he had to face the previously elected Congress, which still had the two main parties as having the majority of seats. So in that moment, the Congress was opposing or was hesitating towards granting the government $100 million debt loan, sorry, from I think it was the World Bank. to finance the security program, of which the government hadn't really laid out, outlined

what were the main priorities, how this loan would be spent. So there wasn't great transparency about the use of this money, but they wanted the assembly to approve it anyway. I gave this backdrop of the hesitation. Buckele basically stormed the Congress with a company and a service. surrounded by the military and set in the chair of the head of the legislative assembly. And said, you know, I guess everybody understands who's in control now. So that really was a very undemocratic, you know, showdown of force and very little willingness to, you know, settle things through dialogue.

basically with the other political forces. The second watershed took place in May 2021, when after the elections, the legislative elections this time, his party, Muevasideas, obtained a supermajorie in Congress. And on day one, they basically ousted the attorney general and five Supreme Court judges, the constitutional chamber in particular, and replaced them with government loyalists. And so you now have an attorney general, which is really close to the government.

You have a Supreme Court which is controlled by the executive, basically, and actually has ruled in favor of re-election, despite the fact that there is a clear article in the Constitution that prohibits presidents from running for two consecutive terms. And so I think now you can see that at least at the very high level, there's a great suppression of norms. Then there are also minor events. There is more subtle persecution of the free press and civil society. There's been a lot of evidence of Pegasus, this spyware, Israeli engineered spyware being used to spy on journalists, on civil society.

representatives, there have been accusations of fraud that have been arbitrarily carried out towards one of the major outlets and investigative outlets that have found actually that the government was negotiating with the gangs before the current crackdown called El Faro, which was actually obliged or felt compelled to move to Costa Rica and to, you know, keep some of its personnel out of the country in fear of persecution. So there are these also minor signs. And of course, under the current state of exception, I'm sure we'll talk about,

basically Salvador and the citizens have been living for now, more than a year with some of their basic rights being suspended, including the right to a three and fair trial, due process, and the right to a legal defense. So I think the signs are there, both at the macro level, and the minor micro level. But he's incredibly popular, right? Why is he so popular if he's doing all these things?

Well, you know, people identify or perceive democracy with the lenses of what's delivered to that, right? In particular, in these countries, have been written by a violent crime for so long, that have, you know, in any case, seeing their liberties constrained. by the presence of gangs, particularly in poorer communities and neighborhoods. The freedom of movement was anyway restricted for decades because you couldn't even cross the streets from some time. If on the one side of the street, the MS team was the gang in charge. And on the other side of the street, it was controlled by the 18th Street gang.

So I feel that the separation of powers, the constitutional guarantees, you know, all the big scheme democracy speeches are not something that most of the ones can really touch, can really, you know, feel that they are important for the lives. What they feel now is that under this current suspension of civic rights, the concentration of power in the executive, they actually feel a respite. because under the crackdown that is taking place now, it's undeniable that homicides have gone down, the gang presence has somehow subsided, and this president has actually, as I was mentioning at the beginning, done things that no present had done before, giving laptops to poor schools, building cubes.

There are basically laser centers that look like Apple stores in communities that have barely one main road parliamentary, you know. And or, for example, under the pandemic, giving a subsidy of $300 to 100,000 households that were experiencing the, you know, the effect, the consequences of the lockdowns, of the economic lockdowns. All of these things are appreciated as something that has never been done by anybody. So, you know, they put on the balance and they say, okay, my liberties may be restricted, but at the same time, I feel a respect from gang violence.

I've been granted some, I see the state somehow not only as the oppressor, as an abusive authority, which was the case beforehand, but I see the state doing actually something, not so much, maybe. I mean, the basic conditions and the poverty levels are still very severe. year in the country, but it's doing something. And it's proposing an idea of a country in its grandeur, and it's sometimes megalomani projects as the one you referred to before, like Bitcoin City, is proposing the idea to change the image of the country, instead of being just identified with gang, violence,

but actually becoming the pioneer in the Bitcoin used, or, you know, promoting two reasons for the beaches in which you can actually serve and was little known before. Now, more and more is greater to becoming a center for surfing. So all of these things that really make people sideline the issue of democratic, you know, respect for democratic and norms and rule of both. Matthew, I just had one more question. Yeah.

Okay. Where does the money come from to give these laptops to people, to build a new city if that will ever get built? Where does this money suddenly show up from? And it's a poor country, right? That's the very big question mark. And that's the $1 million question. Because one of the main problems that have been identified,

and besides the blatant violation of democratic norms and the concentration of powers that I was referring, to is the issue of transparency. Salvador had a very well-functioning, one of the few probably well-functioning institutions in the country was the Institute for the Access to Public Information that's been co-opted by the state. So we don't really know with which money,

the mega jail, the new megajail is being built. We don't really know, you know, where is the government thinking of, I mean, the proposal to build the Bitcoin City relied on the idea of selling Bitcoin-related bonds, right, like national bonds. So that was the idea. We will collect funds from the bonds, the volcano bonds, so-called, and then with us, with those we will build the Bitcoin City, which I'm not sure it will take place in it eventually. But, so that was one. But the transparency is really probably the real in which one of the realms in which this government has produced more setbacks.

And so there's really little to know about how the money is being handled. What we know, though, is that somehow, more recently, after a time of uncertainty and concerns, even the rating agencies, Moody's, Sanders and Poor's, are starting to somehow reduce the risk level of El Salvador. Also, vis-à-vis the fact that the government has been able to, for example, repurchase some of the debt that he was due to pay in January, for example, 2023, which was a big moment in which many believed that the government could go bankrupt and default. and eventually on the contrary, the government managed to repurchase some of the debt and so can appease somehow the markets.

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or $90 a year, will be worth it. Thank you very much. And we're back with more Angry Planet. Can we, all right, the other thing that May has made news from El Salvador recently, and there's been a lot of headlines and a lot of striking pictures are these mega prisons. So I want to now kind of pivot to talking about the gangs and his relationship to them. I think that's an incredibly, like, I don't think he rises to power, if not for that being kind of the milieu, right? And without doing a 30-year history lesson, can you kind of walk? through why there was such a huge gang problem? Why was violence such a problem?

And like what were the main players kind of before he comes on the scene? Right. Well, we have to, if you allow me, take a step back, a jump, a 40 years back jump, basically. So we go back to the civil war that was rocking the country in the 80s, which produced the flow of refugees and migrants that mostly relocated. to South in California, basically, to Los Angeles, mostly. And in that context, these, you know, communities from Salvador and Central Americans in general, where they settled, they faced a huge gang problem there,

of gangs that were preexisting, the Mexican mafia, some Afro gangs, some Asian gangs as well. So in order to protect themselves, they eventually started to creating the wrongs. The 18th Street gang and the MS-13 are born in Los Angeles. So this problem was then exported to Central America or back to Central America when in the 90s, particularly the Clinton administration, started this policy of massive deportation of people that are being charged with criminal offenses for violent crimes. So you have this massive influx of thousands of gang members that find a country that has just ended a 12-year civil war in 1992,

where the social fabric is completely destroyed. Families are completely destroyed. Oftentimes, the children do not have lost their parents or at least their fathers that maybe have migrated, etc. So they find that, and they're very poor, and they find a perfect further ground to recruit. So they start expanding and recruiting throughout the country with Great East. During the years, they basically came to control or to be present in more than 90% of the country municipalities

and to really control hundreds of communities, basically, completely. then there's a watershed. In 2012, the government of Mauritius Fulness tries to facilitate or mediate a dialogue between the gangs and the state and to negotiate a truce, basically, so it's called. And not only did this basically consolidate the gangs' power at the local level, but also projected them and gave them a sort of a political

political role and identity. So in the years on, every government basically had to somehow deal with the gangs also through conversations. And that was the case of Buccellu, too, when he was mayor of San Salvador and he wanted to overall the city center, which was a mess with street markets everywhere, and he wanted to build the new market and place all the street vendors there. he needed to come to agreements with the street gangs that were controlling that part of the city center. And there's evidence of that, even pictures of the same police following the gang members,

which found that they were actually meeting with some of the Kelly's closest collaborators. Then he came to power, probably without the help of gangs initially. he needed, he knew that security was the main concern of solid Orleans and he needed to bring results in that realm. So we know that some conversations were entertained between government officials and gang leaders for at least the first two or three years of government and that this contributed to bringing down the levels of homicides. Then March 2022 happened, it was a watershed. Probably something in this mechanism of conversation, not quick-procose, went wrong. And the MST team spearheaded a killing spree that left a trail of 87 death in the span of a weekend. If you just think that the average, the daily average homicides had fallen to two or three,

that marks quite an alteration of that trend. Since then, the government has made a U-turn in that regard. So as far as we know, the policy is not being that of negotiation or conversation, but actual crackdown on most of its members with the arrest of, according to the government, almost 70,000 people during the past year. mostly tied to gangs, but we know that there are also thousands of un-traded tensions. So when did they start building these prisons? Tell us about the mega-prison. Yeah. So that's something that's very curious to me because I, my, my probably we doubt is that he knew that he had to deal with gangs as long as he didn't control completely the state and didn't have enough power to crack down on that.

So you used negotiations for the first couple of years to bring down homicides rate, to ensure control of the legislative assembly, but also prepared for some other plan B or some other scenarios in which this balance would change. It's curious to me that even before March 22, he, in a period of relative peace or very low homicides, he announced that he would double the army. So not just probably something that could be useful at the political level to repress dissent at the later stage, but also to crack down on violent crime. And soon after he launched this state of emergency, I think a couple of weeks after he launched it, he presented the plan to build a new prison. And then he built it in some eight, nine months. To me, it's hard to think that, you know, you would think of mega jail in a couple of weeks.

You draw it and you start planning on it. You identify the location, you know, the providers, et cetera. So I think it's something that was in the mind before. Maybe, you know, it was accelerated. Maybe he didn't expect that that outbreak of violence would happen in March. Maybe it would expect that it could happen later. But it's something that he may have had in mind. So what we know, I mean, we know very little about the costs.

it should be as it should pose to almost up to 40,000 people the financial times with our aerial footage as estimated that if 40,000 people are put in there it means that every person has like 0.6 square meter per person which is really nothing basically but we know that from from central American experience you know jails are designed for X and then usually the overcrowding goes to more than 200%. So probably it's designed for less than half the inmates that are being announced, but then maybe at some stage it would be filled with more. We don't know if that will be the case.

We have seen a few footage that we said about the first transfers, but I think in the last few weeks, I haven't seen any follow-up video saying, we're reaching 10,000, we're reaching more. Yeah, they're being very cagey about letting journalists, especially outside press at all in to take kind of photos of the thing. Everything that we've seen is pretty staged, right? Yes. I mean, I think that what's happening in prison is really the key to understanding where the country is going because you hear testimonies of people that were unjustly detained and somehow have been released.

It's not that nobody's being released, some have been released. and they just tell horrific stories about what's happening in there, the conditions, people dying for lack of hygiene, for beatings, abuses from authorities, etc. So one of the reasons why I think the government has been wary about letting people in is precisely that they don't want to show something not as orderly as they pretend it to be with the videos that they produce. But in a sense, maybe they are happy to have people being released and having these horror stories, right? I mean, the idea of being it might have a deterrent effect on crime? Yeah, but, I mean, it's a deterrent effect also to normal civilians. I mean, don't step out a line or you'll end up in the mega prison with a bunch of MS-13 gang members, right? That sounds like an authoritarian playbook.

I mean, right. Yeah, to your point. I mean, it could be. Can you tell me, and maybe this is something that we don't have an answer to, but an important part of this, an important part of any authoritarian's playbook, and certainly Buckelis is keeping the military happy? How has he done that? Well, he's done that in two ways at least.

First of all, as I was hinting at, he's announced the doubling of the army. So it's giving them a very prominent role in dealing with public security and therefore by doubling them also in providing them with the equipment, with personnel, and with therefore funds. I mean, the security budgets have quite increased under the Dupicle administration. So, first of all, it's a matter of resources. The second way in which he is skipping the map is by shielding them from anything that's related to the truth and justice related to the armed conflict. We know that the military has committed atrocities during the civil war. The most famous one is the El Mosopje massacre that left around 1,000. people killed by the army with the accusation of being of being career members, but eventually, you know, there's evidence that it was just like basically a small village being wiped out by the ministry.

And the government has shielded the ministry from any prosecution in that case, instead of, you know, giving in the books, the registries, the, any evidence that could be used by prosecutors to, to find truth for the victims and to seek justice, he has completely impeded that from happening. So I think in these two realms is keeping them close. One thing that's really interesting to me, and just to point it out, is the extreme right wing in the United States is actually starting to look to Buckele as an example.

and these prisons has a great idea. And also kind of the weird online shit posting guys also really love him too, part because of the Bitcoin stuff, because of his style and his aesthetic. I think there was a headline in the Washington Post like maybe a day or two ago that some fans went down there to check things out and got arrested themselves. Anyway, so yeah, I think those are interesting data points that he's also. become popular in countries that are not his own, which is always great. He's a Latin American phenomenon. I mean, you can already see how this crackdown. I mean, the state of exceptions or emergencies, as you will, are not unique, not, you know,

new tools to deal with insecurity. But they usually apply to locally, you know, localized outbursts of violence and for limited period of time. With the, you know, the current year, the last year, they've been associated more and more with Buchanan because, of course, it's being prolonged many times, but also it's being producing, it's been yielding results eventually. I mean, if you look at the figures, as they'll say, I mean, there has been some twisting in some figures like, you know, gang members that are actually clashing with the police and

are shot by the police in a shootout. are not counted as omiccicides as they were before. So there's been some playing around with figures. But eventually, you know, the figures that low levels of homicides are perceivable and are real. So first of all, the results. Second of all, you know, the cinematic Hollywood-style presentation of the measures. And in general terms, the projection, the communication, Every time a day ends with no homicides, the government is there to promote it.

So it's really become actually an electoral campaign tool for politicians across the energy. You see presidential candidates in neighboring Guatemala in Chile. I mean, the most democratic state, probably one of the most developed ones, in Peru, in Colombia, everywhere. And that's becoming a phenomenon. Honduras has actually imposed similar measures. it hasn't brought them to the full extent that they are being implemented in the southern, but it's imposed a similar measure and taking on a similar discourse, just replacing war on games with war on extortion,

basically. So it's really a political electoral tool and in the States as well. Of course, this manor dula, this iron fist projection and attitude is very popular with some second. of the society, particularly the conservative ones, that think that, you know, violent crime can just be solved if the states step in with the military and arrest for even worse or criminals. So the next election is 2024. You said that he's he's not supposed to run again, but he's running again. Is that correct? Is that okay. What are you watching in 2024? What are you going to be looking for? How do you think things are going to be playing? out. Well, I mean, to be the devil's advocate is not the first to twist the Supreme Court and, you know, obtain favorable rulings to run through elections. In Central America, it's already a third. I mean, it was one of Landor-Nandes in Honduras, which we know which ties he had,

and is now being tried in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges, though. Nicaragua in, sorry, in Nicaragua. So it's not great president, but we have president. So it's, and it's, you know, understandable that he said he sought to do something similar. So he's running for reelection. I don't, I don't see any potential candidate that could challenge him, seriously. What I would watch is all the overall space being left to other people. political parties to campaign and the way in which the particularly legislative and municipal elections would be dealt with. This time, the three elections are actually, they coincide.

So the presidential level, the result is already written, in my opinion. What needs to be looked at is if the ruling party will be able to secure again, super majority on their own, or it will lose a big ground. Because of course, you had this huge level of votes for this new party because people were associated with Buckele. But particularly the municipal level, you know, where the interaction is more direct, between the citizens and the authorities, some discontent, you know, as has been played I mean, these are new people in main cases with no experience, just, you know, pressing the button for something Buckele proposes.

And at the local level, they may not be able to handle things that the president cannot handle on a database. So I would see whether that could be a slight reshuffling at the municipal and legislative level. Sir, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. It's been a great pleasure. Thanks for adding. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Nade. This is the place where we ask you for money.

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