On February 9, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele deployed dozens of heavily armed soldiers and police inside San Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, a stunt designed to strong-arm legislators into cooperating on a $109 million loan for Bukele’s pet national security project, the Territorial Control Plan. After engaging in an exaggerated bout of prayer, Bukele revealed that god had told him to have “patience” — and so he gave lawmakers an additional week to get their act together.

In a subsequent op-ed for the Miami Herald — penned in response to suggestions that his antics may have been a little antidemocratic — Bukele contended that both El Salvador’s “unchecked violence” and Salvadoran migration to the United States had decreased under his enlightened rule. And things would only improve, he insisted, with his loan, which was “earmarked exclusively to purchase equipment and logistical support for the police and military, who have been neglected for more than thirty years.”

Lest anyone feel too sorry for the Salvadoran security forces, recall that these very forces have for over thirty years done more than their fair share to sustain the violent landscape in El Salvador — from the US-backed right-wing slaughter of the civil war (1980–1992) up to the present era. Consider, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent reminder that “Salvadoran security forces have . . . committed extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, enforced disappearances, and torture” — all within a context of essentially institutionalized impunity.