When Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who was comfortably reelected this week, fired members of the Supreme Court and replaced them with judges who agreed with his plans for total political dominance in 2021, Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, the third-eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, celebrated the decision on his social media.
“Judges decide cases, if they want to dictate policy, they should be elected,” Eduardo tweeted. Throughout his father’s four-year term, he and other Bolsonaristas never hid their intentions to dissolve Brazil’s Supreme Court.
But the parallels between the Bolsonaros and Mr. Bukele go beyond their intentions to change the Supreme Court (although only the Salvadoran leader actually managed to do so).
Mr. Bukele deliberately became famous as “the man who declared war on the gangs” and crushed crime in his country, regardless of human rights violations, accusations of shaking hands with criminals under the table, and even manipulating crime statistics.
Yet overall security actually increased, which was enough for Salvadorans to massively support the one leader who “got rid of the bandits,” ignoring the side effects and how it was achieved. Today, many voters throughout Latin America would like to see this model replicated in their own countries.
Needless to say, this is something that Jair Bolsonaro would like to be credited with.
There’s another thing the former Brazilian leader would appreciate: full control of Congress — something Mr. Bukele already had, but increased even further in this month’s election. With that kind of power, the president’s party has been able to approve a state of emergency more than 20 times, giving the government all the tools it needs to confront the gangs — or do whatever it wants — without any counterweight.
But Brazil is not El Salvador. And for Mr. Bolsonaro, who is no longer in office and has problems with the judicial system, this is all a very distant dream…
Check out the creation of this cartoon on The Brazilian Report’s TikTok account (@brazilianreport).
Search
