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El Salvador’s ‘cool dictator’ boasts country would be ‘a one-party system’ after election win
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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I fully expect to get downvoted for this but as much as im anti-dictator (like any normal person) you cannot deny he has objectively been a good thing for the country so far. He has decimated the gangs which has caused a 70% decrease in the homicide rate, going from the highest in the world to the lowest in Latin America. And him being talked as a "dictator" isnt really accurate either. He was elected Mayor of the capital at fist, was extremely popular so ran for president and won, democratically, in a landslide. And his policies, specifically with that gangs has kept him at a mind-boggling 90% approval rating, making him the most popular leader of any country, and he is running for re-election fairly and democratically, because why would he even need to rig the results when hes so insanely popular?
Yes there is Plenty you can criticise him for (being anti-aborition and anti-gay marriage for example) but in that regard he is no worse than any previous leader of the country.
You can deny it. He has been arresting thousands of people with zero evidence they are involved in gangs. Police have quotas on how many “gang members” they have to arrest to make him look good so they arrest random people to fulfill the quotas.
He’s a fascist and the fact he gets so much support because he’s “arresting the criminals” with so little pushback is scary
Here’s a story on it by a really great journalist https://youtu.be/jQcTYgOuEzA
No, you really cant. You can do what you're doing which is criticising the method and thats very fair, but the results are undeniable.
Thats an unsubstantiated claim and the couple of reports thats based off claims its orders from specific regional police chiefs, not the government, you can argue his government should do a better job monitoring those things, but you cant pin that on him personally.
This claim has more evidence but independent organisation (HRW and Cristosal) only had 200 complaints in the first couple months after 25,000 arrests (its difficult to find more recent figures). So even if we assume all those complaints are valid and those people were wrongfully arrested then thats <1% of arrests being innocent, which is pretty good honestly.
Because you dont have the context. Its easy to think of it as scary when you live in a relatively peaceful developed country, but for the people actually from El Salvador that had to deal with extremely violent gangs that could murder you for basically any reason at any time with no consequence and a government that was making deals with those gangs to keep the citizens organised, its an incredible relief, and yes he is actually arresting criminals and massively reducing the homicide rate. The fact that any time he is brought up, even on that Youtube video you linked Salvadorian people come out universally in support of him and point out how your "journalist" can only go around the country making her documentary without being murdered is because his policies, just goes to show how much good his policies are doing.
and again, dont get me wrong, im opposed to a lot of right wing populist policies and im against undemocratic dictators (which I think he is only on the borderline of) but human lives are more important to me than political principles.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/jQcTYgOuEzA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
He's not a dictator yet, but he'll have the opportunity to rewrite the constitution with the numbers his party will get in the next election. He seems to have signalled this is what he plans to do. Given his economic policies and the fact that he runs a police state (even if it was temporarily needed to get rid of gangs I doubt it will stop), he looks a lot like Pinochet which gives some people pause.
That said it's up to the people of El Salvador to decide if it's worth the risk to hand one party all the power.
Imagine the opposition was inviting gang leaders to decide what to do with the country.
That's what happened and it's documented in video.
Why would anybody vote for them?
Bunch of people in this comment thread have no idea what they are talking about. I have family in various parts of el Salvador and ever since bukele came into office politics is all they fucking talk about. It's actually quite annoying but the people there absolutely love him and his party. Maybe I am biased as I also have family that hold positions in nuevas ideas. Either way I don't think I've ever heard of a Salvadorean that didn't love the direction the country is going.
People on this site insist that we need to eliminate the Republican Party in the US, effectively making it a one-party system in a democracy.
Doesn't sound so bad now, does it?
We do need to eliminate the Republican party but that's far from the only problem with US politics. Honestly, moving away from a first past the post voting system would force both Democrats and Republicans to do better, or get replaced by parties that better represent their constituency.
Research the Weimar Republic. Getting rid of first past the post, can have the opposite effect, giving the crazies more power than they would under first past. Fringe groups, especially left leaning, always want transferrable vote or proportional because that way they'd get more representation but they always seem to ignore it can backfire.
Protip: Your argument has more weight if you use modern examples if you can find them, rather than the Weimar republic. Sounding like you are escalating to the end of Godwin's law does not help your point.
Which is annoying because I agree that it can backfire if done wrong.
Oh look, the socialist doesn't like a working knowledge of recent history. Transferable vote systems and proportional aren't all that that common. and an example of the possible results less than a hundred years ago isn't irrelevant. I've looked at the systems before, and quite often the result of the formulas used is a majority of someone no one really wanted.
Not for me. The GOP wants to wipe out the Democrats so it all evens out.
Multi-party, new party...maybe...but single party, I'm not sure I've heard anyone advocate for that, certainly not a lot of people.
We don't need to eliminate the Republican party, we just need to let it eliminate itself from a plethora of choice.