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Fred Ramos is a Salvadoran photographer based in Mexico City. From 2013-2010, he worked as a staff photographer for the online newspaper El Faro, one of the most important investigative news outlets in Latin America. In 2014, he won first prize in the World Press Photo’s “Daily Life” category for coverage of the thousands of disappeared people in El Salvador. Since moving to Mexico City in 2020, he has covered migration, politics and environmental conflict, among a myriad of topics. He has worked across the Americas, from Ecuador to the U.S., while continuing to regularly visit El Salvador to document the ongoing impact of President Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs.
Instagram: @ramos_fred
Another Authoritarianism Rises in Latin America
By: Óscar Martínez
El Salvador has stopped pursuing its long-awaited democracy. It is, for the moment, a country that stopped believing in due process, in the division of powers; a country that, once again, opts for one man and repression.
To understand this present where a single man, President Nayib Bukele, has all the power and has built a police state, it is necessary to remember how we got here. It’s a violent story.
The 20th century left the smallest country in Central America skinned to its bones. El Salvador was coming out of an economic crisis caused by the discovery of synthetic dyes at the end of the 19th century. At that point, the indigo industry, working with natural plant-based processes, lost its value, and the country fell into an economic collapse that it tried to resolve by changing production: it opted for coffee for export. The State was reformed so that the landowners had all the power and indigenous people and peasants lived in conditions of virtual slavery. The popular revolts of the 1930s ended with massacres of thousands of indigenous people by the army and paved the beginning of the military dictatorships that would continue intermittently throughout the century.
Popular indignation grew in response to the nation’s military repression, which included murders, torture, and rape. In the mountains of the country, different guerrilla groups were organized during the Cold War–fought as a proxy war in Central America–with the complicity of the Soviet Union and the fear of the United States. With the increasing repression, and after the military’s assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in 1980, civil war broke out. At this point, the five guerrilla organizations joined together. The United States, with the fresh wound of the triumph of the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, invested up to a million dollars a day in the Salvadoran Army, a military that had already perpetrated human rights violations.
El Salvador entered the dark night of the U.S.-backed war that lasted 12 years.
After having left more than 75,000 dead and hundreds of migrants who fled to the United States, the guerrillas and the military both were convinced that it was impossible to win the war by armed means. Both sides agreed to end the conflict, and in 1992, the Peace Accords were signed. With El Salvador no longer in the eye of the world’s media, the country gave birth to one of its worst lessons: the end of a war can be decreed, the beginning of peace cannot be. Peace is built. And in El Salvador that did not happen. The 1990s were a decade of extreme violence. Guerillas and demobilized national soldiers who had no other option to survive took up the weapons with which they waged unofficial war and became criminals.
And something else happened. Something that changed everything. Between 1989 and 1994, just as Salvadorans were grappling with the end of the war, the United States injected a lethal change into the country: it deported nearly 4,000 migrants who had joined one of the many southern California street gangs, primarily La Mara Salvatrucha -13, known as MS13, and Barrio 18. These gang members, who had become experts in recruiting children, arrived in a country that had become full of orphans as a result of the more than a decade of the conflict, precisely when there were no solid institutions to care for these abandoned children. Those 4,000 deported gang members grew the gangs to more than 70,000, in just twenty years. In the two decades that followed, MS-13 went from having a presence only in southern California to their current situation, where they are in 39 other states.
El Salvador, little by little, found itself involved in another war that it did not fully understand. The two gangs, Barrio 18 and MS13, began to compete for control of territory. Extortion became their way of subsistence and in 2009, El Salvador would become the most violent country on the planet, with 70 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. That figure would be surpassed by El Salvador itself in 2015 when the national rate reached 106 per 100,000.
In the midst of this new war, the two right-wing politicians who governed between 1999 and 2009 were accused of corruption. Then the left took power from 2009 to 2019, to complete the post-war cycle and take the presidency for the first time. But those left-wing Salvadoran politicians abandoned their country and took refuge in the Nicaraguan dictatorship of Daniel Ortega to avoid accusations of corruption. They chose to fill their pockets instead of rescuing the weak democracy of El Salvador.
The population could not have been more abandoned. The left and the right had looted the country and the promised peace was anything but peaceful.
Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, a politician in his thirties, who had previously worked in his father’s advertising firm and had emerged from the ranks of the left-wing party, arrived at the Mayor’s Office of the capital San Salvador in 2015. From there, he built the image of himself as the redeemer of the country. He sold himself as an outsider and labeled everyone else as “los mismos de siempre”– “the same old ones.” The Salvadorans, without knowing much about this young politician, and to punish the betrayal of the post-war parties, awarded the presidency to 38-year-old Bukele in 2019.
Once president, Bukele stopped behaving democratically and articulated a unique political vision: to solve the country’s problems, he suggested, I need all the power. He mocked criticism from organizations defending democracy and the international community, and named himself on his social media networks as “the coolest dictator in the world.” Since then he has not stopped, and won’t until he achieves his dream: total power.
To maintain his popularity, he made a pact with the Salvadoran gangs. He offered prison benefits to their leaders and protection from extradition requests by the United States. The homicides decreased and Bukele, through his officials, ordered a rereading of the Constitution so that he would be allowed to be re-elected as president. That had not happened since the 1930s, when the general/dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, was re-elected. This is the same person responsible for the aforementioned massacres of the indigenous people who were revolting against their miserable living conditions.
In the midst of all this, MS-13 felt betrayed by the president leading to the largest massacre of the entire postwar period, with 62 murdered in just 24 hours on the weekend of March 26, 2022.
Bukele understood that it was time to change strategy. He ordered a police state called the “regime [or state] of exception.” The streets were once again filled with soldiers. The military and police capture whomever they want, without the need for evidence. About 4% of the population would end up behind bars after two years, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Hundreds of “arrests” or abductions have occurred because the police or military detected “nervousness” in the person detained. Systematic torture of unconvicted people detained in prisons is abundant and relatives of prisoners have reported more than 260 deaths of people inside prison cells: corpses that, in many cases, have been returned to their families with lacerations on the body.
As a result, after the civil war and during the rise of gang violence, exile, torture, and extensive military dominance, which were thought to be relics of the eighties, returned a militaristic rule to El Salvador. According to polls, a majority of Salvadorans support an authoritarian regime that takes away their rights, as long as it makes the streets safe from gang violence. Of course, less in favor of Bukele’s methods are those who have suffered unjust imprisonment personally or to family members, of which there are more and more.
In these photos, Fred Ramos shows the marked bodies of gang members and the idolatry of a country to its authoritarian president, as well as what the supposedly coolest dictator has tried to hide. Bukele has chosen to show perfectly filmed montages of hundreds of tattooed gang members subdued in his mega prison, the so-called Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. This is the other side, the one that the state apparatus hides: young farmers who were arrested for no reason, old women who line up in front of a detention center to find out where their sons are, entire families who shake off their fear and take to the streets to protest for their detainees. These are the effects of a fragile democracy that has been broken down, giving way to a twenty-first-century authoritarianism.
Óscar Martínez is the editor-in-chief of El Faro and the author and co-author of numerous books including Los migrantes que no importan (latest edition, Debolsillo, 2021), Una historia de violencia (Debate, 2017), and Los muertos y el periodista (Anagrama, 2021). He has been awarded the National Human Rights Prize by José Simeón Cañas University of El Salvador, the Hillman Prize in 2018, and the Premio Rey de España in 2019. In 2016, he received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, awarded by Columbia University, and the International Press Freedom Award, given by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). He was a Gallatin Global Fellow and visiting professor at New York University, where he taught the class “Covering Violence.”
Samson Otieno | Jit Chattopadhyay | Hannah Reyes Morales | Fred Ramos | Agata Szymanska-Medina