El Salvador’s hardline president has threatened to treat shopkeepers accused of price gouging like the gangsters he rounded up in sweeping reforms at the start of his controversial presidency.
President Nayib Bukele, the millennial leader who once styled himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” was responding to recent steep rises for food and other basics in the troubled Central American nation.
The president warned shopkeepers and suppliers that he was “not playing around,” stressing: “I expect the prices to come down by tomorrow or there are going to be problems.”
“I am going to issue a call, like we did to the gangs at the start of 2019… to the importers, distributors and food wholesalers: stop abusing the people of El Salvador, or don’t complain about what happens afterward.”
Mr Bukele is hugely popular, with an approval rating of around 85 per cent, thanks to his draconian approach to the mara gangs, which has ended their reign of terror in El Salvador.
He has locked up nearly 80,000 young men, often without evidence that they are gang members, in harsh conditions, with dozens to a cell and paraded before the cameras in their underwear.
Yet the economy has long been Mr Bukele’s Achilles heel. The poverty rate, now 30 per cent of the population, and the national debt, now $30 billion or roughly 80 per cent of GDP, have surged since he took office in 2019.
Basic foodstuffs such as bread, eggs, meat, beans and fruit jumped 30% in Mr Bukele’s first four years in office. But government inspectors say some prices have tripled in recent months.
Meanwhile, his flagship economic policy, adopting Bitcoin as the national currency, has baffled ordinary citizens, failed to generate jobs or growth, and antagonised the International Monetary Fund, whose support he badly needs.
Mr Bukele’s New Ideas party, which claims to be pragmatic and centrist but is increasingly associated with the hard Right, dominates both houses of congress and has given the president wide-ranging emergency powers to tackle the gang crisis.
But those powers would not authorise him to jail price speculators. Meanwhile, establishing price controls would be widely seen as both attacking the free market and repeating the mistakes that have ravaged other Latin American economies from Argentina to Cuba.
Yet Mr Bukele has shown himself willing to ride roughshod over both basic freedoms and the constitution – including running for re-election despite a constitutional ban.
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