El Salvador: The Safest Country in the Americas?
"El dinero alcanza cuando nadie se lo roba"
Last week I returned to El Salvador, a sunny paradise that I have come to love. El Salvador is a fascinating place that has had a dark and violent history, but to my mind is a brilliant country with a bright future. I hope this article sheds some light on the country’s past, where it finds itself today, and helps to illuminate the context for the country’s next steps moving forward.
The Bitcoin Miami Conference in 2021
For me, the El Salvador story started in 2021, when I knew next to nothing about the country. Armed with a crate of Somersby apple cider and port, I settled down in my flat in Porto to stream Miami’s 2021 Bitcoin Conference on my laptop. This was a fantastic conference to watch: with BTC bouncing around between $30k and $40k, dopamine was still running high from the bull market, and the enthusiasm was palpable.
Michael Saylor and Max Keiser took to the stage and were greeted like rock stars, with the latter swinging his arms wildly, screaming “FUCK ELON! FUCK ELON! WE’RE NOT SELLING! WE’RE NOT SELLING!” to the delight of the crowd (only months earlier Musk had stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment for Teslas, citing environmental concerns).
Ron Paul gave a fantastic speech about the right of the individual to be a sovereign, and to be protected from the exploitation of the state insofar as currency was concerned.
Even Nick Szabo decided to emerge from his life as a cypherpunk hermit savant, to give a speech about the evolution of money from precious metals to paper backed by paper debt.
Jack Mallers’ speech, however, was by the far the most important. Granted, it was pretty annoying that he cried through so much of it, but the Americans in the audience didn’t seem to find this as irritating as I did — rather, it helped to galvanise them to his message even more. Mallers, who serves as the CEO of Strike, explained the ways in which developing countries can benefit from Bitcoin, with a particular focus on the issue of remittances in El Salvador.
Towards the end of the talk, Mallers played a pre-recorded video from Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, where he announced that in the following week he’d be introducing a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender.
My first trip to El Salvador
In December of 2021, when I first arrived in El Salvador, I confess that I didn’t totally believe the propaganda about the country’s newfound safety. Having been subjected to some of the most insane and aggressive public health propaganda in the world, I’d become suspicious of just about any and every government (worth noting that El Salvador was one of the few countries in the world at this time that wasn’t imposing lockdowns, and didn’t require vaccination or testing for entry).
There aren’t direct flights from London to El Salvador, and so I spent a few weeks in CDMX en route. There, I met people from all over the place, and almost all were surprised when I explained that I wanted to go to El Salvador because I heard it was safe to visit now.
“El Salvador? Cabrón, ¡te van a decapitar! Espero que lleves tu rosario…”
However, when I arrived, I felt completely safe. The salty sea air, the sound of the waves, the fantastic food, and the politeness of the staff in Atami was a fantastic welcome. At no point did I encounter a single problem, and at no point did I feel remotely unsafe. Regularly, I’d go out until bars closed, and not once was there even a hint of any wrongdoing. In fact, some of the locals even seemed somewhat upset that I’d think safety was an issue at all: when asking a lady if it was safe to leave my belongings whilst going surfing, she appeared visibly dejected (“No te preocupes, mis manos son limpias”). Admittedly, it was a little strange walking around San Salvador and seeing soldiers still in their teens wielding machine guns, but it wasn’t intimidating.
What did surprise me was just how empty the tourist areas were. In El Zonte, as with El Tunco and Atami, there were hardly any foreigners. Keiser’s ranting on Russia Today (when he still hosted the show) had led me to believe that the new Mecca of Bitcoin would be flooded with Bitcoiners. There were some (including some of the first subscribers to The McNeill Report!), but not nearly as many as I’d imagined. Bitcoin Beach (El Zonte), for example, is a beautiful beach well-known for its surfing, and for being the circular community where Bitcoin first really gained a foothold in the country, but even there you’ll find people who’d just rather you pay them in dollars. To my mind, its better this way: I hope future of influxes of Americans don’t disturb the tranquility of the beach; El Zonte doesn’t need a McDonald’s.
The Salvadoran Civil War
Since the 1800s, a small number of oligarchs had controlled almost all of the land in El Salvador, forcing their labourers to work for next to nothing. In 1932, some indigenous farmworkers led an insurrection, but the government suppressed them heavily. Known as “La Matanza”, the government killed between 10,000-30,000 indigenous people in El Salvador at this time, followed by systematic oppression of the indigenous, who they accused of being instigators. From this point forth, successive dictatorships ruled the country, in collaboration with El Salvador’s wealthy landowners.
The wealthiest few families in the country became known as “Las Familias de los Doce Apellidos” (The Families of the 12 Surnames). The 12 wealthiest families in the country (Poma, Simán, Hill, de Sola, Regalado, Duenas, Salaverría, Kriete, Wright, Meza, Dueñas, Cristiani) held significant wealth and exerted a disproportionate influence over Salvadoran society. Their influence continued to grow through the 1960s, as the US armed the Salvadoran government with funding and weapons to suppress what they interpreted to be threats to the capitalist order.
By the 1970s, El Salvador had become a country mired in such extreme inequality that it was intolerable once more. Growing discomfort amongst the populous gave rise to repressive government practices, which sought to oppose and quash any opposition against the status quo.
One of the most remarkable examples of this suppression include the 1975 “Massacre of the Students”, when soldiers fired on a peaceful anti-government demonstration, resulting in the deaths of as many as 50 students.
Ultimately, the civil discontent became overwhelming, and spilled over into a civil war. The existing government and military, trained and funded by the United States, fought against FMLN (who received some funding from Cuba and Nicaragua), an umbrella term for five different left-wing guerrilla organisations.
Speaking out against the government at this time wasn’t an easy feat. Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was a prominent critic of the government’s human rights abuses and advocate for the poor, was known for calling on soldiers to stop enforcing government repression. In an event that shocked the country and galvanised support for the guerrilleras, he was assassinated in 1980 whilst giving Mass.
In May 1980, many Salvadorans tried to escape the country by crossing the border into Honduras. Both Salvadoran and Honduran armed forces united in an attempt to prevent the civilians crossing the border, shooting and throwing grenades. It is estimated that between 300 and 600 people (all civilians, and many children) were killed in this event. The soldiers then relied on the river’s current to wash away the bodies.
Perhaps the most shocking instance of the entire war was the El Mozote Massacre (those with fragile sensitivities may be best advised to skip this paragraph). In December 1981, in a small village called El Mozote, the Atlacatl Battalion was sent to eliminate FMLN combatants, since they believed that there were two bases and a training camp in the region. The soldiers were surprised to find that, in addition to the 20 or so houses in the village, there were circa 800 campesinos who were trying to escape the violence, and had thus congregated there. The Atlacatl Batallion was designated to be a specialist counter-insurgency wing of the Salvadoran army, and had thus received extensive training and funding directly from the United States, as well as advisory services from Mossad. All of the campesinos (the majority of whom were children) were forced to lie on their front in the square and interrogated about their suspected involvement with FMLN. They were then told to go lock themselves inside for the night, and that they’d be shot if they came out. The next day, the soldiers separated the men from the women and children. The men were systematically tortured and executed, and the women (some as young as 10) were raped before being killed with machine gun fire. Children (the youngest just three days old) had their throats cut and were hung from trees. Once everyone had been killed, all the homes were set aflame. The next day, the soldiers went to the nearby village of Los Toriles and carried out a further massacre.
The campaign of violence continued throughout the 1980s, but international opinion was changing, with pressure mounting to sign peace deals. One such catalyst for this was the Jesuit Priest Massacre in 1989, when six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were assassinated by an elite commando unit of the Salvadoran Army at the Central American University in San Salvador. The priests’ supposed crime was that they were sympathetic to FMLN and had become influential advocates for a negotiated peace settlement.
The war was marked by disappearances, torture and killings of innocent civilians en masse (by both sides). It concluded in 1992 with the Chapultepec Peace Accords, by which time over 1% (roughly ~75,000) of the population had been killed. The accords meant that FMLN was allowed to stand as a political party, but didn’t make much more progress. Neither side ever admitted to any war crimes.
The rise and fall of MS-13
In the midst of the civil war, an estimated 1-1.5 million Salvadorans left the country, amounting to roughly 25% of the population. The most popular destination for the refugees of this diaspora was the United States, where significant numbers of Salvadorans moved to areas like Houston, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Today, it is still the case that 20% of Salvadorans live abroad, largely in pursuit of a better quality of life.
A typical Salvadoran “latchkey child” living in the US may have experienced significant trauma at a young age from the war, was often raised by a single mother, had no money, and few prospects for employment. To make matters worse, they were entering a world replete with gangs that had formed on ethnic lines, and were often forced to join gangs so that they would be able to defend themselves, rather than having to fight alone.
MS-13 started as the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a group of teenagers who liked marijuana and heavy metal (some even had a penchant for Satanism, animal sacrifice, and later human sacrifice, but not the majority). As time went on, the competitive nature of gang warfare forced its members to harden, and MS-13 was born.
Once the Civil War had ended in El Salvador, the Clinton administration began mass deportations of Salvadoran criminals, but didn’t inform the Salvadoran government of the crimes that they had committed in the US.
Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), the first president to represent FMLN, signed a deal with the gangs whereby gang members would be transferred to low security prisons under their control, in exchange for lower homicide rates. Fast food and prostitutes would be brought in for the gang leaders. Both the Catholic Church and the Organisation of American States supported this deal. Some of the internecine violence (MS-13 wasn’t the only gang, but the most well-known) did decline during this period, but gangs continued to extort the civilian population. If anything, the so-called truce only exacerbated the gang issue. At least Funes didn’t embezzle $300m from one of the world’s poorest countries, like his predecessor — Funes only embezzled $700,000 before fleeing to Nicaragua.
The next president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén from the FMLN, allegedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to MS-13 in a bid for votes and support (as did the main opposition party, ARENA). After winning the election, but before being sworn in, the truce had broken down, and violence escalated once more: in 2015 El Salvador officially became the country with the highest homicide rate in the world.
2015 was also the year that Bukele was elected as Mayor of San Salvador for the FMLN. However, he was kicked out of the party in 2017 for criticising the party leaders, and formed his own party for the 2019 elections — Nuevas Ideas was born, and Bukele was elected president with 53% of the vote.
As part of Bukele’s war against the gangs, El Salvador entered a “Regime of Exception” in May 2022. The decision was made after a flare in violence resulted in 87 deaths over the course of just three days. The state of emergency granted powers to the state to surveil citizens’ communications and skip standard judicial processes. Soldiers were allowed to go from house to house in search of gang members, and arrest anyone that they deemed suspicious. Gang signs? Prison. Criminal record? Prison. Tattoos? Prison. Due process?
The video below is interesting, but for additional context: Claudia Ortiz is referred to solely as a “Lawmaker”, rather than “Leader of opposition party, VAMOS.” I’m not sure why Al Jazeera felt this an unnecessary distinction to make, but to my mind the impartiality of the source is relevant. Ortiz is usually wheeled out whenever its time for some Bukele bashing.
In the past few weeks El Salvador has officially become the safest country in the Western Hemisphere (measured by homicides per 100,000 people), the diaspora of Salvadorans is reversing, with scores of Salvadorans returning home. Not only has El Salvador become a safe country, but the economy is booming — a stark contrast to the United States, where crime in major cities has become rife and opportunities for the American Dream growing more sparse. In fact, the Salvadoran government, in an ironic twist of fate, has now issued travel warnings to its citizens warning them not to visit “no-go areas” like Los Angeles and Chicago, and to take extra caution when in New York.
My second trip to El Salvador
Last week I went back to El Tunco and El Zonte (as well as an extra splash at the waterfalls in Tamanique), and was once more entranced by the Land of Volcanoes. Coming out of the airport, I was once again hit by a wall of humidity, but this time accompanied with noticeably fewer Bitcoin adverts proclaiming El Salvador to be Bitcoin Country.
The food in El Salvador is amazing: whether it be steak or seafood that you’re interested in, everything is fresh (and usually served in coastal restaurants the same day it is caught). The fruits are massive, and for just a few cents you can find beautiful watermelons on the side of the street.
Since December 2021, Bitcoin has had a rough few years from a price perspective. From a development perspective, the story has been entirely different: the Lightning Network has grown in leaps and bounds, there are fantastic new wallets, FASB accounting has been fixed, the US has adopted ETFs, we have another halvening on the horizon, more circular economies have popped up all over the world, last years’s banking crisis showed Bitcoin to be a safe haven, Imams are designating Bitcoin as halal because it doesn’t require riba (unlike fiat), Hong Kong is lining up for ETFs… this isn’t an exhaustive list, but the scale of growth has been phenomenal.
In El Salvador, it doesn’t feel like much has changed from the Bitcoin perspective. Still a poor country, it’s easier to pay with dollars in most places. Everyone in the country has a different perspective on it: some people will simply not accept it, some will begrudgingly do so, some will do it whilst sporting an inquisitive look, and others will jump up with excitement and run off to load up their Lightning wallet.
The actual payment process is easy: scan a QR code, press send — bang. There’s nothing to think about. Its just as fast (if not faster) than paying with card, and certainly faster than figuring out change from accepting cash. Those who say that Bitcoin can’t be used as a currency for XYZ reason simply don’t know what they are talking about: it is used as a currency and it works perfectly well.
From what I could see, the main hurdle to more adoption of Bitcoin in the country isn’t one of regulatory changes, nor one of technological innovation. For Bitcoin to become as ubiquitous as it can be, and that is required is time to bridge to educational divide. A lot of this will happen organically with the younger generation being more tech savvy (particularly after Bukele bought laptops for school children), and a lot of this will happen through the experience of watching the dollar debase against Bitcoin over time. What’s important is that the ground has been laid, and the country is perfectly able to adapt when the dollar does encounter further problems. Wi-Fi in a few more places would also be useful, especially for tourists who haven’t bought a Salvadoran SIM.
It’s worth noting that some Salvadorans benefit more than others from Bitcoin, and some parts of the country are therefore adopting it faster. According to World Bank data from 2022, remittances accounted for 23.68% of El Salvador’s GDP. With so much of the population living abroad, those who wish to send and receive money abroad to family members have to pay a hefty fee to Western Union, who profiteer by taking double digit commissions from some of the poorest people in the Americas. Not only this, but after such money transmission services have taken their fees, one has to wait endlessly for the money to arrive. With Bitcoin, families can send money to one another immediately. With the specific implementation of the legal tender laws, treating Bitcoin as a currency rather than just an asset, there are no capital gains taxes to be paid on this transfer, and the Bitcoin can be spent 10 seconds later with zero friction. These savings alone will save the country from billions of dollars in waste each year.
Once again, I never felt unsafe. It’s no wonder that, after changing the constitution to allow himself to run a second term, Bukele won 85% of the vote for his reelection in February — the largest margin for any democratic presidential election in history. Many tourist shops sell t-shirts, figurines, key rings and towels adorning his image; he is extremely well-loved in the country, principally because people now feel free to walk the streets without being tortured, raped, extorted, or murdered.
The Singapore of the West?
Despite the fact that successive US administrations bore a great deal of responsibility for the role they played in the civil war (and much of the violence since then), Bukele’s approach has been to focus on making changes domestically rather than to cast shade abroad.
“We can speak blame to any other country, but what about our blame? I mean, what country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador. They fled our country. It is our fault. We haven’t been able to provide anything, not a decent job, not a decent school.”
— Nayib Bukele
However, he has also been clear that other countries shouldn’t impose their own ideas of how to run El Salvador on the country. During my first visit, he was posting a flurry of seemingly enraged Twitter posts, after Biden had described El Salvador as being in the US’ “back garden”. Similarly, he has clapped back at the IMF for their involvement in the country’s past, and most recently against a journalist from the BBC. The journalist was asking a question about the country’s human rights record and treatment of prisoners. Bukele responded by explaining that what works in one country isn’t necessarily the correct approach for another:
“Your countries have lectured us. In the 80s, you had a fight with the Soviet Union — it had nothing to do with us. What did you do? You financed El Salvador to fight a war between brothers, and we killed each other, and 85,000 Salvadorans died. After that, one million displaced. They went to the US, into ghettos. They formed the gangs, then [you] deported the gangs [back to El Salvador]. You sent us another recipe: ‘don’t arrest minors’. Okay, but all the gang members were minors at the time, so the gangs grew and then they terrorised the country. They started killing people and we became the murder capital of the world. Nobody could solve it. We took recipes from the OAS, we took recipes from the UN, we took recipes from the European Union, we took recipes from the United States. None of the recipes worked. More bloodshed, more people were dying. So what do we do? Okay, we do something and we save people, and now we’re the safest country in the Western Hemisphere … not only do we have the right to do what we think is right, and what the Salvadoran people are going to decide in free elections, but also we’ve proven it works. You haven’t proven that your system works in our country. It might work in yours — I don’t know. But it doesn’t work in ours.”
From 2001, when the country adopted the dollar to mitigate price instability, El Salvador quintessentially surrendered all economic sovereignty to the Federal Reserve. There still exist entities who could control the currency used in the country — but not the Salvadorans themselves. In such a way, this little land mass in the Pacific had endured over a decade of Civil War, only to become an economic vassal state of the US.
For the most part, I’d say that international commentators voicing their opinions on the country’s Bitcoin strategy have completely misunderstood it. It isn’t that the president is taking a wild gamble. Citizens have the choice of whether to use the currency or the dollar, the country’s national treasury is now over $100m in profits (not bad for a GDP of $32bn), and tourism is exploding. Not to mention the ways in which Bitcoin has helped the country to harness its geothermal energy from volcanoes more efficiently.
In addition to these measures, the government has introduced a series of incentives to attract more international investment. These include special tax incentives for those working in tech, removing bureaucratic red tape, and citizenship for investment. The most well-known of these is the offer of citizenship in exchange for investing 3 BTC purchasing a property.
The comparisons with Singapore don’t end with El Salvador’s weather, beaches, and newfound technological innovation. There are also fascinating similarities with Singapore’s famed “benevolent dictator”, Lee Kuan Yew…
Is Bukele a dictator?
The first time I visited, I was surprised by the news coverage of Bukele inside the country. News programmes alternated between videos Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) members being violently rounded up and thrown in prison, and clips of Bukele opening new animal hospitals in the capital, wherein free healthcare was available for those who paid in Bitcoin. When one first arrives at the airport, just before passing through passport control, one is greeted with two large pictures of Bukele and his wife between two ornate golden chairs. The mock-up recreation of the Salón Presidencial doesn’t feel typical of a Western democracy, where leaders are oft treated with suspicion rather than being placed on a pedestal. For example, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to pose and take pictures with a recreation of Sunak and his wife in Downing Street (but perhaps people simply respect you more if you’re actually elected).
Many Western journalists and news outlets have been critical of Bukele’s tactics. After all, his methods haven’t been traditional, and aren’t what one would typically expect of a Western leader. For example, in February 2020 Bukele wanted to secure a $109m loan to buy more equipment and weaponry for the armed forces. He wasn’t sure that he’d be able to get the motion to pass, so undertook a rather unorthodox tactic to ensure that his colleagues would vote alongside him. He commanded soldiers to march into the legislative assembly and oversee the voting process. It wasn’t a surprise when the vote passed. At the time, Tiziano Breda, analyst for Central America at the International Crisis Group, said:
“His government’s outstanding security achievements, with homicides plummeting by around 60% since he took office, have earned him a sustained 90% approval rating during his first eight months. This appears to have given him the confidence to engage in open confrontation with the legislative body, controlled by weakened political parties, some of whose high-ranking members have been tarnished by recent investigations over alleged negotiations with gangs for electoral gain.”
More recently, he withdrew all mattresses from prisons, removed visitation rights, and cut the food supply, promising that if violence outside the prisons continued, gang members inside would be punished and “would not see a ray of sunshine”.
“There are rumours that they want to take revenge by killing honest citizens at random. Do that and there will be no food in the prisons. Not one meal. We’ll see how long your ‘homeboys’ last on the inside. I swear to God they won’t see a single grain of rice. We will see how long they last. I don’t care what international organisations will say — let them come and take their gang members, if they care about them so much.”
However, when examining what is happening in El Salvador today in the context of its history, his methods become all the more understandable and justifiable. More importantly, these methods are working.
Since 2004, El Salvador had three separate administrations before Bukele came into power. In total, Tony Saca (2005-2009), Mauricio Funes (2009-2014) and Salvador Sánchez Cerén (2014-2019) only had five days over a period of 15 years in which there were no homicides. This is particularly remarkable when one considers that there are only six million people in the country. As of April 7th, 2024, El Salvador has had 545 days without homicides since the start of the Bukele administration, and 74 thus far in 2024 alone. In 2018, there was not a single day without homicides, and an average of 9.17 homicides per day.
I can understand why people think of Bukele as a dictator (he often jokingly refers to himself as “The World’s Coolest Dictator”), but to do so without context is unfair. He only narrowly won a majority when he first ran for president, and since then it would only be fair to say that Bukele is an elected dictator, not dissimilar from the way in which Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson were able to wield disproportionate influence thanks to their sizeable majorities. Blair may not have had the best legacy since then, but its too early to determine exactly how Bukele’s presidency will end (however, it will most likely not end with invading Iraq on false pretences).
Protecting a country from debasement
Named after Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón), the Salvadoran colón was first introduced as a currency in 1892, and was in use until 2001. At first, the colón was backed by gold, as was the case with most currencies at the end of the 19th century. However, throughout the 20th century, the currency gradually moved away from a gold standard. In 2001, after decades of economic uncertainty and difficulty battling inflation, the country decided to abandon their own currency dollarise entirely.
One of the most fascinating phenomena in the world of capital allocation is how little thought is given to what money actually is. Over the last few months I have been working for a research company catering to alternative assets (typically private debt, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, hedge funds, etc.). When denominating a company or fund’s IRR against the dollar, there are many interesting stories of fund managers that have significantly outperformed their peers.
However, the real story is that almost none of these asset managers are able to outperform the rate of monetary debasement over the longer term — their funds may produce more dollars a few years down the line, but these dollars won’t be worth what they once were. The clearest and most observable example of this is in the S&P 500, where all the gains are made by the Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, Google, Amazon), and the other companies in the index struggle to tread water. The chart below demonstrates quite clearly that if you invest in the S&P500 you can reasonably expect dollar-denominated returns, but you are unlikely to outperform the growth of the monetary base itself; its a simple observation: buying the S&P500 will preserve your wealth relative to the USD, but not increase it. Outcompeting the rate of debasement is a near impossible feat, and only the best capital allocators are able to effectively circumnavigate the theft from within the system that is stealing from them.
On a country-wide scale, seigniorage is a very serious problem. One either has to grow GDP per capita by more than the monetary inflation rate, or the value of one’s work is being redistributed elsewhere via value dilution in the currency — such are the perils of seigniorage. In other words, citizens can’t protect themselves from the whims of central bankers and can’t protect themselves from being subject such theft, unless they are able to opt into a non-elitist (real estate is inferior in this regard since it isn’t divisible), non-dilutive store of value.
“If you’re a dentist, why do you have to raise your prices by 15% per year to be successful as a dentist? I’ll tell you why: it’s because we keep expanding the currency supply by 10%, which means the price of everything you want to buy goes up by 10%, which means you have to grow your cashflows by 10%. That’s why The Magnificent Seven generate all the returns in the S&P500, and there are 493 companies that return nothing. Zero. Right? It’s not their fault: you cannot outwork inflation.”
— Michael Saylor
This makes the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in the country all the more significant: by simply allowing citizens to hold and transact in Bitcoin in the same way that they can with fiat, they can completely opt out of the theft that Keynesian economics demands, and escape US/IMF-sanctioned debt slavery. El Salvador, as a nation, can become economically sovereign, and all without trying to reestablish a corrupt central bank. Since June 9th, 2021, when Bitcoin officially became legal tender, the price has increased by over 100% in USD — although a more appropriate way to think about this may to be to say that the dollar has lost over 50% of its value in BTC terms.
Lessons from El Salvador
Insofar as Bitcoin policy is concerned, El Salvador is lightyears ahead of where we should be in the UK, but it is also what the UK should be in so many other regards. Our leadership is currently plagued by incompetent, corrupt, arrogant, useless, and outright malevolent politicians — quite frankly, I’m amazed that Matt Hancock still hasn’t been afforded the William Wallace treatment; Hancock’s schadenfreude for psychological abuse of his own countrymen during the lockdown should have him put on trial for treason.
There are some fantastic ideas that our leadership can emulate from Bukele’s El Salvador, but to do so would require taking drastic decisions that our current cohort of leaders are simply not bright/bold enough to take. What makes this more frustrating is that, for the most part, this isn’t a partisan issue in the UK: whether one supports the Conservatives, Labour, Reclaim, Reform, The Monster Raving Loonies, etc., faith is being lost in our politics, academic institutions, health service, police force, welfare state, public transport, judicial system, foreign policy… There are very few people who in the UK who will tell you with a straight face that things have improved in recent years (even with the silver platter of opportunities that our politicians were handed with Brexit! — they still fucked it up with their fear of taking responsibility and acting as a sovereign state), or that they believe things will improve after our Bolshevik-in-residence Comrade Starmer takes charge.
El Salvador, supposedly a third world country, makes the “developed Western nations” seem like nothing more than hubristic parodies of themselves. The country remains one of the poorest in Central America, and yet one can almost taste the jubilant and excited atmosphere (it tastes a bit like un cóctel de camarones en salsa rosada). One can only dream of the day when Britain has leaders that make one excited about the future.
“El dinero alcanza cuando nadie se lo roba”
Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, signing off with a fantastic showcase of effective demagoguery below :)