In Boost to 'Dictator' Bukele, El Salvador Abolishes Presidential Term Limits

El Salvador's Legislative Assembly—which is controlled by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's New Ideas party—on Thursday approved a series of constitutional reforms, including abolition of presidential term limits, that critics warned pose a grave threat to the Central American nation's fragile democracy.

As El Faro reported, lawmakers approved measures allowing for indefinite presidential terms, expanding the current five-year presidential terms to six years, eliminating the second round of presidential elections, and advancing the end of Bukele's term from 2029 to 2027 in order to synchronize presidential, legislative, and municipal elections.

New Ideas Congresswoman Ana Figueroa, who proposed the reforms, argues that if other elected offices in El Salvador do not have term limits, why should the presidency?

"This is quite simple, Salvadoran people. Only you will be able to decide how long you support your president," Figueroa said Thursday.

Congressional Vice President Suecy Callejas, also of New Ideas, contended that "power has returned to the only place to which it truly belongs... to the Salvadoran people."

However, opposition lawmakers, journalists, human rights defenders, and others condemned the measures, which come amid an ongoing "state of emergency" that, while dramatically reducing crime in what was once the world's murder capital, has seen widespread repression of human and civil rights.

"Democracy has died in El Salvador today," said Congresswoman Marcela Villatoro of the opposition ARENA party, who argued that the reforms were "approved without consultation, in a gross and cynical way."

Thiago Süssekind, a Brazilian scholar and professor at the University of Oxford in England, called the reforms' passage "the moment when El Salvador buried its democracy."

"Nayib Bukele—the darling dictator of the Latin right—can now govern forever," Süssekind added. "The discourse, paradoxically, is about democracy—deliberately conflating it with the will of the majority."

Chilean pollster Marta Lagos argued on social media that El Salvador is being transformed into "an electoral dictatorship" that "excludes an essential element of democracy: respect for minorities, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and civic and political freedoms."

Lagos noted "the detention of thousands of people without due process," an apparent reference to prisons including the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump—an erstwhile critic-turned-ally of Bukele—is sending deported migrants, including innocent people, to face abusive and sometimes deadly imprisonment.

Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), argued that New Ideas is "following the same path as Venezuela."

HRW and other human rights groups accuse the United Socialist Party government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of grave human rights and electoral abuses, and many leftists in Venezuela and beyond feel the Bolivarian Revolution launched under former President Hugo Chávez has been betrayed.

"It starts with a leader who uses their popularity to concentrate power, and ends in dictatorship," Goebertus warned.

Like Trump, Bukele has shrugged off—and at times even embraced—the "dictator" label. He once called himself the "coolest dictator in the world."

Trump—who has himself flirted with the concept of being president for life, or at least for a third term—has remained silent about Bukele's democratic backsliding, even as his administration imposes staggering tariffs on Brazil and punitive sanctions on a leading member of its judiciary for defending democracy.

Such actions, along with the Trump administration's record of targeting certain authoritarian governments while courting and coddling others, drew stinging rebuke by social media users in El Salvador and beyond.

Comments from Latin American X users included:

• "Spending 20 years calling Hugo Chávez a dictator over the issue of indefinite reelection only to end up applauding Bukele for doing the same and calling him a democrat. They're so adorable!!!" -@ArondonFT
• "They criticize Venezuela and Cuba, but support the dictator Bukele? Hypocrisy disguised as democracy." -@zandrusky
• "To me, 'indefinite presidential reelection' sounds like a dictatorship, but since it's Bukele and not Maduro, I guess it's no big deal and just my imagination." -@BenderOfuscando
• "Bukele perpetuates himself in power, but the right will not call him a dictator as it does with Maduro. And El Salvador will not receive sanctions from the U.S., as Venezuela does. The right and the U.S. do not care that Bukele is a dictator, as long as he is one of theirs." -@andres20ad

Thursday's reforms—which must still be ratified by lawmakers—mark the second major modification of presidential term limits in El Salvador. Although the country's constitution prohibits presidential reelection, New Ideas purged the constitutional court's judges and replaced them with ones loyal to Bukele. The court subsequently ruled Bukele was eligible to run again, and he won last year's election in a landslide.

Bukele wasn't always so keen on presidential reelection. In a 2013 interview, he said that "in El Salvador, a president cannot be reelected."

"This is to ensure that he... doesn't use his power to remain in power," Bukele added.