[neither_color]

He's also cut the homicide down to below some major US cities. The homicide rate fell from 38 per 100,000 to 18 per 100,000. Most people have only heard of him because of Bitcoin and so their own biases of Bitcoin cloud their judgment of Bukele. Locally he's a legend. He objectively handled Covid better than many countries around him(bested only by Costa Rica and Panama, which are already considered comparatively more developed than El Salvador). His foray into Bitcoin is considered a mistake of ambition not one of corruption. To put that into context the previous administration of El Salvador is accused of embezzling $300,000,000 USD. I wish more schadenfreude articles about El Salvador would include that fact.

[peoplefromibiza]

> He's also cut the homicide down to below some major US cities.

that's not a great benchmark

US homicide rate is 10 times worse than my country and my country is just average...

Los Angeles alone in a year had more homicides than my entire country (303 vs 279) but my country has 60 million people living in it, LA only 4 million.

> To put that into context the previous administration of El Salvador is accused of embezzling $300,000,000 USD

small potatoes

and who accuses them?

is this president liked by the US?

because Lula is only the last one of a long line of former south american presidents destroyed by US propaganda to put there someone more "friendly"

Lula was innocent BTW

[ReadTheLicense]

> that's not a great benchmark

> US homicide rate is 10 times worse than my country and my country is just average...

Cool, but you have to compare El Salvador to its peers. How much money and continuity does your state have compared to ES? Even the poorest [GDP per capita] European Union states have literally multiple orders of magnitude bigger state budgets than ES. Getting homicide rate in Americas under the US average is a huge achievement, especially given how quick it was and how hopeless it seemed just a few years ago.

> small potatoes

Hahahahahah, maybe for you. It's the entire yearly budget deficit for El Salvador. These 700 million were the difference between life and death for many El Salvadorans who couldn't get their pensions or healthcare payouts raised with the inflation. Perhaps you could donate some "small potatoes", they really need it and it seems like you have more than enough.

> Lula was innocent BTW

I guess your investigation has turned up a new suspect?

[peoplefromibiza]

> Cool, but you have to compare El Salvador to its peers.

Why?

He literally compared El Salvador with "major US cities"?

Anyway, El Salvador have worse statistics than many major US cities, they are in the middle of the ranking in central America, they are far off countries like Chile or Perù or Argentina that are not western countries.

Secondly: in El Salvador homicide rates went down during COVID-19, like it happened in most of the Planet, notable exception the US.

But Amnesty International (June 2022) wrote:

Amnesty International found that thousands of people are being detained without the legal requirements being met – there was no administrative or judicial arrest warrant and the person was not apprehended in flagrante delicto – purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele’s government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state.

> How much money and continuity does your state have compared to ES?

How much more money USA have compared to ES?

> Hahahahahah, maybe for you. It's the entire yearly budget deficit for El Salvador

Still small potatoes.

The Central American country's total public debt was about $24 billion in March, according to central bank data.

> These 700 million were the difference between life and death for many El Salvadorans

700 million is more than 2 time the 300 million mentioned originally.

Are you spouting off random numbers?

The assumption that it's money that would go in Salvadorans pockets is frankly silly, MOST OF ALL, because these are your allegations, not facts!

> Perhaps you could donate some "small potatoes", they really need it and it seems like you have more than enough.

I've been doing it for the past 30 years, my cousin is Salvadoran.

> I guess your investigation has turned up a new suspect?

I just trust international institutions more than a random supporter of a wannabe who wanna make El Salvador a free heaven for international criminals.

Maybe he's loved by BTC enthusiast simply because most of them are bros who love money but hate other humans and their rights...

That's why the downvotes, truth should not be told.

---

El Salvador, in Brief: El Salvador joined Nicaragua in abstaining from the U.N. General Assembly’s condemnation of the invasion of Ukraine. A top U.S. official suggests international Russia sanctions will choke off cash even to Nicaragua. As El Salvador prepares to issue a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin Bonds, Bukele implies the Russia clampdown underscores a key use-case for the cryptocurrency: sanctions evasion.

---

Other figures with links to the El Salvador government have instead been looking to play down their ties with or support for Russia and President Vladimir Putin. These include the American millionaire bitcoiner Max Keiser.

Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert were both in El Salvador earlier this month, where they have launched an investment fund named El Zonte Capital.

Keiser is an exceptionally divisive figure in the bitcoin (BTC) community. He has amassed a considerable BTC fortune, but has drawn flak from critics in the past for his appearances on the Russian state-run English-language broadcaster RT (aka Russia Today), where he has repeatedly blasted conventional Western financial institutions as “financial terrorists” and spoken out in favor of Putin.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-p...

https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/latin-america-erupts...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/16/el-salvador-critics-bloc...

[neither_color]

El Salvador(central america) was in a bloody civil war between socialist rebels and the US-backed government in the 80s. The tactics taught to the Salvadorian forces by the US are considered controversial and some "incidents" may have happened.

Thousands of refugees fled into poor neighborhoods in the US where Mexican and other American gangs already existed and this led to the formation of MS-13, a notorious organization. Over the years thousands of MS-13 gang members were deported or traveled back to El Salvador and became prolific throughout the country. When the civil war ended, the rebels became a political party(FMLN). Both parties traded presidencies over the years but due to poverty and post-war devastation were very ineffective at combatting gang violence, running the economy, and maintaining public order.

Bukele, a descendant of Palestinian immigrants from the former Ottoman empire -an ethnic group long discriminated against and held back from holding public office in El Salvador- is part of a new party called Nuevas Ideas.

This new democratically elected third party won a majority of its government seats and the presidency but is not well liked by the Biden administration. It has been accused of "subverting democracy" for replacing judges accused of corruption and of violating the human rights of gangsters who by definition have to commit a violent crime to initiate into the gang and are pledged to it for life. He's achieved this by doing broad roundups of hundreds of gangsters at a time. This is considered controversial by first worlders who aren't familiar with having a crime syndicate in every town and nearly every street and what kind of wartime-like operation it would take to address that. Violence is at a historic low, below what can be attributed to a downtrend. The Salvadorian response to COVID was also exceptional among its neighbors, far beyond what can be attributed to accidentally getting it right. Anyways that's my perspective. It's a bit biased but not one I see regularly so I'm just doing my part to show how central Americans might see it.

[jinpa_zangpo]

If you only follow the US press, you haven't heard of the following scandal surrounding the US Embassy in El Salvador.

Last year (2021) two deputies of Bukele's New Ideas party, José García and Gerardo Aguilar, were caught on audio tape discussing with Roy Garcia, a representative of some El Salvadoreans living abroad who was trying to form a new party, how the United States embassy was offering money to induce 20 members of the New Ideas party to leave and join his new party. The US embassy denied the plan existed, but the two deputies were expelled from El Salvador's assembly. The US ambassador to El Salvador, Jean Manes, left her position shortly after the scandal became known.