The so-called "Bukele model", sold as a response to violence in El Salvador, gained space in the Brazilian electoral debate. Pre-candidates for the Presidency began to cite him as a reference in the fight against organized crime.
For Carlos Dada, 55, co-founder of the newspaper El Faro, the showcase of the Cecot megaprison, acronym for Terrorism Confinement Center, hides a system marked by mass detentions and restrictions on rights.
The newspaper that Dada runs documented the pact between Nayib Bukele's government and local gangs to promote a drop in homicides that made the country the record holder for murder rates in 2015, but had to leave El Salvador after suffering pressure and persecution.
Today, from exile, Dada is following the model's reception in Brazil with concern. "I was worried that so many candidates in Brazil offer the Bukele model as a solution," he told Folha. Dada also sees with apprehension the attraction of part of the Brazilian business community to the model, after the head of Public Security in El Salvador, Gustavo Villatoro, presented it to industrialists in São Paulo.
"He presented the fight against insecurity in almost biblical terms. He said he was fighting beings of darkness. This is pure demagogy," he said. "Especially taking into account that these beings of darkness were once partners of the Bukele government."
While visiting Brazil to participate in the Piauí Journalism Festival, in São Paulo, Dada spoke to Folha about the rise of Bukele, the government's pact with gangs, the concentration of power in El Salvador and the policy of mass incarceration.
With 1 in every 50 citizens in prison, if Brazil imitates El Salvador, it will produce a prison population of 4 million people. Today, the country has just under 1 million prisoners, the third largest prison population on the planet, behind the USA (1.8 million) and China (1.7 million).
Candidates for the Brazilian Presidency evoke the so-called "Bukele model" as a reference for combating organized crime. What is this model?
It is the use of security bodies, in the case of El Salvador, the police and the Army, with the capacity to carry out arbitrary and massive arrests, without the need for court orders and without the need for charges against the person.
It is enough for these authorities, for whatever reason, to say that the person is a suspect. To give an example, we reviewed detention minutes and sometimes the reason given was that the person "got nervous."
The exception regime is in its fifth year in El Salvador. Once detained, you are taken to a prison where you cannot receive visits from family or lawyers and where, as a rule, family members are not even informed about your location.
If you're lucky, you'll go to trial before an anonymous judge who will decide your legal situation along with 100 or 200 other people. In other words, your chances of getting out of this hole are nil.
The main reference of the "Bukele model" in Brazil is the Cecot superprison. Is it, in fact, a synthesis of what happens in El Salvador?
Cecot is the image that is in the heads of all those who talk about the Bukele model. It is an impeccable prison, absolutely clean, with an occupancy rate of around 60%, in which we see gang members absolutely ordered, almost geometrically, with very professional lighting and very planned images.
But this is not the prison where the majority of detainees are taken, who go to any of the other 22 prisons, to which they allow access to absolutely no one, including the journalists who were invited to take the Cecot tour.
In El Salvador, 1 in every 50 citizens is in prison. Inside prisons, systematic torture has returned, perpetrated by groups of prison officers that we have fully identified and who continue to act with total impunity. There are more than 400 people killed as a result of this torture. Many were buried in mass graves without their families being notified.
According to a recent report by Amnesty International and another, separate, from a group of independent jurists, Bukele's regime commits crimes against humanity.
How does a regime of exception to fundamental rights imposed on alleged criminals put the rights of other citizens at risk?
In addition to organized crime, Bukele's authoritarian project fulfills two other objectives. First, establish a police state in which people are afraid of protesting against the government. And, on the other hand, it precisely produces population control that allows dissenting voices to be detected and punished.
Now, for the first time since the civil war of the 1990s, El Salvador has political prisoners. Recognized as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International, they are activists, human rights defenders and critics of the regime.
The vast majority of people detained under the exception regime — and we are talking about around 100 thousand people — have no links to gangs. They fell into a raid because, at the beginning, the police received quotas of people to be detained. They had to bring in a certain number of detained people per day.
Why did the newspaper El Faro leave El Salvador?
Our revelations caused them to close all access to public information. We reveal the government's pact with gangs and the scandalous cases of corruption, which are basically a looting of the State. This turned us into one of the most uncomfortable voices for Bukele's political exercise. In the end, we all had to leave.
Can you go back to El Salvador?
I can't. Independent journalism began to suffer threats and direct attacks from the police. I was personally accused of money laundering, on national television, by Bukele. El Faro was accused of tax evasion.
Another reason is the fact that human rights defenders who did not leave were arrested. And because Bukele himself and his officials declared us public enemies.
Exactly one year ago, several El Faro journalists traveled to Costa Rica for a conference and were unable to board the plane back to the country because we received notifications from foreign intelligence agents that, at the airport, there was a police operation waiting to capture them.
With this situation, all or almost all independent journalism is outside the country.
How can we explain that the Bukele government has around 90% approval from society?
When Bukele's pact with organized crime ended in 2021, he decided to mobilize all state forces to dismantle these gangs. And that was effective. In fact, it dismantled them.
What happens is that, as the captures were not targeted, but indiscriminate, it is true that they detained a lot of gang members. But it is estimated that two-thirds of those who fell were innocent.
Still, it took the guns out of a lot of people's heads because they lived in these communities. If you combine this with what is probably the best propaganda team that exists in all of Latin America, the result, at least as far as its political ambitions are concerned, is very efficient.
Is Bukele's pact with gangs to force a more than 90% drop in homicides in the country a fact? If so, how did it operate?
The pact is absolutely documented. Bukele offered benefits in exchange for two things. They should stop killing each other to reduce homicide rates and be able to present these figures as a triumph of their security plan. And, on the other hand, that they would help him win the upcoming legislative elections because they control the populations in their territories and their votes. And also the presidential ones, which he won.
This pact began when he was still mayor of San Salvador [the country's capital]. But the pact was broken two years after he assumed the Presidency, for reasons we still cannot understand.
The day the pact was broken, we learned why the gangs killed 87 people in one weekend. And then came the entry of all security forces with the exceptional regime plan.
We documented Bukele's entire pact with the gangs, in several ways, including the illegal release of gang leaders who were in maximum security prisons, who were supposed to serve 40 years in prison. Some of them are now imprisoned in New York, awaiting trial.
It is precisely through some of the documents produced in this court case in New York that we have more details of Bukele's promises to gang members and the benefits he granted them. But we even documented gang members leaving prison. In other words, the pact, at this point, is undeniable, it is part of a judicial process.
But the government is obviously not going to accept that because it means accepting that they were partners in a terrorist organization, and that would close some doors in the United States, in particular.
How did gangs come to have this power?
When the civil war ended in 1992, mass deportations of gang members from California began. Salvadoran gangs were born in California, not El Salvador.
Close to 2000, President Francisco Flores launched the Mano Dura plan. Security forces began to enter communities, arrest and expose suspects. It was the gangs' first step towards sophistication: many abandoned tattoos and started turning to lawyers.
Then came the first left-wing government, under Mauricio Funes, who made the first pact with the gangs. First in secret; when we discovered it and published it, they turned it into a public pact. And then the gangs learned to be political.
The members understood that politics is the art of negotiation and that what they had to negotiate was the homicide rate: "If you give it to me, I'll keep the homicides closed. If you don't give it to me, I'll turn on the tap and the blood will flow."
How did Bukele concentrate so many powers?
First there was the public lynching of the opposition, which was very effective. Once the opposition, which basically no longer exists, was eliminated, he won the next legislative election.
In the first legislative session, he removed the Supreme Court judges and, in that same session, replaced them with others. He also dismissed the prosecutor who had opened corruption investigations and replaced him with another. Later, this Supreme Court, as one of its first decisions, reinterpreted the Constitution to allow re-election in El Salvador.
And then he started arresting all the critics, all the naysayers. And that sent a clear message to everyone.
What is Bukele's future?
Now I would say that I see no possibility, in the short term, of Bukele leaving power.
He has already crossed the threshold that separates wanting to stay in power from not being able to leave power. When you cross this boundary, it means that if you leave power, the rest of your life will probably be very complicated. And Bukele is already at that point. He's already committed too many crimes.
X-RAY | Carlos Dada, 55
The journalist was born in Belgium, son of Salvadoran parents, and graduated in Mexico, where he lived until the end of the civil war in El Salvador. He is the co-founder and director of El Faro, a digital newspaper created in 1998. He had to leave the country to pursue his path of investigative journalism on politics, corruption, violence and human rights. He received, among others, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, from Columbia University (USA).
