Nayib Bukele, Latin Americaâs youngest president, doesnât much like venturing into the street, or indigenous people, or wandering around markets, or being photographed with other peopleâs babies. The 39-year-old leader of El Salvador instead enjoys his cellphone, public image polls and âimplementing, implementing, implementing.â This has proven sufficient to sweep away three decades of bipartisanism and drastically transform the political landscape of a country still marked by the wounds of a bloody civil war (1980-1992) that ended when Bukele was barely 10.
In the view of his biographer and advisor, Geovani Galeas, Bukele is a multi-tasker capable of shaping the destiny of his people from the computer screens in his office, and is a leader with a political persona comparable to that of Fidel Castro or Mao Zedong. According to his former attorney and current political adversary Bertha Deleón, Bukele is âan adolescent with power, incapable of maintaining a conversation about the most important matters without permanently checking his cellphone.â Between one portrait and the other are the face masks and t-shirts bearing his image that go for $12 a time in the center of San Salvador and that paint Bukele as a messiah who cuts ribbons at hospital openings and tackles the dark forces of the National Assembly. On February 28 his political party, Nuevas Ideas (NI), standing in legislative elections for the first time, scored an unprecedented landslide victory that delivered an absolute majority and effectively wiped the traditional parties, the Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front (FMLN) and Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), from the political map.