As El Salvador has hurtled toward competitive authoritarianism, its opposition parties have been, if anything, even less effective at arresting democratic backsliding and reversing their electoral fortunes.
What is "competitive" about the authoritarianism to which El Salvador is hurtling?
For better or worse, such actions have the potential to undermine delicate negotiations between gangs and the government—possibly at a great human cost to regular Salvadorans.
I agree that we need to take a sober look at the impact - direct and indirect - of individual sanctions, the MS-13 as "terrorist" group, and the long arm of law enforcement. Do the sanctions (Engel list, Magnitsky) undermine organized crime, or does Bukele simply keep the people targeted by sanctions closer to him?
In May 2021, after Bukele and his allies packed the Supreme Court, the United States redirected some of its assistance away from government institutions and toward civil society groups. Especially as Bukele works to undermine these groups, continued international support could help shore up El Salvador’s democracy and limit abuses of state power.
Easier said than done! listen to Tom Carother's challenge here (particularly his third point): https://youtu.be/tJ3stgcP2dM?t=5913
This logic assumes that the 2024 presidential elections will be free and fair.
This deserves more attention. The procedural part of elections could be a problem - but the bigger problem is how Bukele is undermining individuals in the opposition, opposition parties, etc. Moreover, his domination of the media ecosystem is not "fair" - which undermines the entire democratic process, not just elections.
the international community, and the United States especially, can adjust its treatment of Salvadoran immigrants to be more in line with reality.
agree this is important, but it won't really have an effect inside El Salvador, will it?
Arena and the FMLN failed to provide voters with new alternatives, so voters seeking new options would have to look outside the two traditional parties.
I think this article fails to take into account the importance of the dashed hopes and public disillusionment with the Funes government, nor does it address the inability of executives to make progress on their agendas without a dominant role in the legislature. Didn't the fact that ARENA always had to negotiate with the PCN, and FMLN with Gana, make it harder for both to advance on their own terms?
widespread organized crime
that is to say: "gang violence and rule"
strong two-party system
the fact that two parties dominate does not make it a "two-party system". Because of proportional representation, it generally makes it harder for one or the other party to dominate the legislature. So should not be confused with the US "two-party" system, which makes it much more difficult for a third party to emerge.
two broader factors that challenge the conventional wisdom about democracy and democratic backsliding: the hidden long-term costs of democratic pacts and the unintended consequences of fighting corruption.
pacts that fail to evolve, that is.
In 2018, the attorney-general ordered the arrest of Mauricio Funes (2009–14), the first FMLN president, for corruption. Funes had fled to Nicaragua in 2016 to avoid prosecution. Thus by the time Bukele became president, three of his four immediate predecessors had faced serious corruption charges. Between 2014 and 2018, corruption charges were also brought against several other high-profile officials, including a president of the legislature, an attorney-general, and a first lady, as well as numerous mayors and legislators. While these investigations were not all entirely apolitical—for example, then-President Funes spurred the investigation against Flores during a highly contested presidential election—these cases showed that, beginning in 2014, the attorney-general and the courts had achieved an unprecedented level of autonomy and were not afraid to hold powerful politicians from both major parties accountable.
these entities didn't just become "independent" as part of the natural evolution of things - it required a bit of luck (as with the constitutional court of 2009-2018) and significant US pressure and backing - as in the case of the attorney general Douglas Melendez, who would not have been able to do prosecute former presidents without US technical and political support.
political institutions
using two different definitions of "institutions" here
political parties’ public campaign financing for an electoral cycle was proportional to their vote share in the previous election.
is this really the main obstacle?
These nominations were all decided by traditional FMLN elites, who had been empowered, since the pacted reforms of the early 1990s, to control the inner workings of their party.
it's worse than this, because the FMLN had long hollowed out any internal dissent, beginning almost immediately following the end of the war and their conversion to a political party.
This meant that both parties continued to nominate candidates with close ties to the civil war even as Salvadoran society moved on.
This is interesting - to what extent did lack of internal democracy contribute to democratic decay? (see Ralph Sprenkel's book)
Beginning in the late 2000s, however, this system fell victim to political decay:
FMLN took executive power in 2009, so the system fell victim only when the FMLN won at the national level?
A new 1992 Electoral Code shielded Arena and the FMLN from electoral competition by establishing relatively high barriers to entry for new parties and conditioning public campaign funding on past electoral performance.
This is a good point
circumventing traditional party-building
Although his alliance with GANA in the presidency ended up being quite important, as they did have a territorial network.
Where attempts to fight corruption and other forms of abuse go hand-in-hand with efforts to strengthen voters’ trust in the political system, democracy has a better chance of surviving.
But how?
In these countries and El Salvador, transition pacts were designed to protect and strengthen powerful elites. In the short run, these protections ensured that elites remained at least minimally committed to electoral politics; therefore the pacts were essential to democratization. But in the long run, these pacts produced unresponsive party systems that could not adapt to new political demands, undermining the same democracies that they had helped to establish.
These pacts only came about through international pressure and mediation. But the international community became too self-satisfied and complacent once the peace accords were achieved, and the parties were no longer shooting at each other.
The Salvadoran experience thus highlights an important challenge for democratic consolidation: In the long run, depoliticizing state institutions, increasing horizontal accountability, and fighting corruption almost certainly strengthen democracy. But they do so at the cost of revealing potentially damaging information about the extent of politicians’ abuses. Therefore in the short run these horizontal-accountability efforts may instead weaken democracy by undermining voters’ trust in the political system and driving them toward extremist, authoritarian, or populist candidates and parties. Paradoxically, these negative short-term consequences may be more apparent where corruption and abuse are widespread—precisely where horizontal accountability is most needed.
This is a longstanding dilemma of democratic consolidation -- for example, doing civic education about rights in a situation where those rights do not exist can easily lead to greater disillusionment with democracy.
Yet in El Salvador, these investigations—and the depoliticization of state institutions more generally—backfired.
I agree the investigations backfired - but the "depoliticizatoin of state institutions"??? which institutions? Clearly the Supreme Court - with the notable exception of the Constitutional Chamber of 2009-2018 - grew MORE political over time. The divvying up by the dominant political parties of various institutions of horizontal accountability was routine -- up until Bukele managed a complete takeover.
El Salvador’s current political crisis shows that the proponents of transition pacts were right—but so were their critics. The bargains struck in the early 1990s made El Salvador’s democratic transition possible by protecting powerful elites, just as the supporters of pacts had anticipated. But over time, these same agreements made democratic consolidation difficult because they contributed to the creation of a political system that was unable to adapt to meet changing demands. In 1990, political scientist Terry Karl warned that transition pacts “may appear to be temporary agreements” but become “persistent barriers to change, barriers that can even scar a new regime with a permanent ‘birth defect.'”18
Did the agreements themselves make democratic consolidation difficult. Was the political system unable to adapt, or was the international community too content with the peace agreements. What if the US - which clearly exerted far more leverage in the 1990s and 2000s had earlier on exerted greater leverage on the anti-corruption front, instead of essentially blowing up the system in the mid-2010s?
As a result, Salvadorans grew increasingly detached from the two major parties—and from the political system with which they were synonymous. In 2009, 50.8 percent of Salvadoran voters said they supported one of the two major parties, a figure which had shrunk to nearly 26 percent by 2018, the year before Bukele was elected president
but this wasn't entirely the result of parties not representing their base - it was the anti-corruption push that the US embraced once Douglas Melendez came into office, leading to the arrests and trials of former ARENA and FMLN presidents.
double-edged nature of depoliticizing state institutions
I'm not sure that the idea of "depoliticizing" state institutions is the correct reading of what happened in ES.