Regardless of your feelings about Bitcoin, it was really exciting to see the president of El Salvador himself pop into a Twitter Space last night, as the bill was being voted on, to chat with bitcoiners about the implications of the new law. This is exactly the appeal of Twitter, if you think about it: it's a kind of "direct democracy" where the leader of a country can chat casually with everyday people -- and not in some scripted townhall photo-op, but within a space moderated by the people themselves!
Sorry if this is not on your sensibilities, but that assembly was very corrupt so much so that people wanted them out as soon as possible, he did not command the military to do what they did, the military showed up in support for the people who were also there.
He has 90% approval rate on the opposition owned polls, and he has supermajority of the assembly for a reason, 30 years of pure corruption without any consequences by the previous governments, you'll not find enough people to oppose him to fill a boulevard.
The new assembly just passed a bill finally allowing Salvadorans in other countries to vote in all future elections, if that's not democracy I don't know what is, if the opposition is against the overwhelming support he has, maybe they should've done things right by the people in those 30 years, but they didn't and they're finally out.
And it was done democratically, by the people without a single protest.
Read into what the traditional parties did to try to block Bukele for running for president, they closed a political party overnight with a congressman from that party still in the assembly, which was unconstitutional, but nobody said a word there.
These are the same arguments people used to defend Hugo Chávez back in the day. He’s very popular, the military loves him, other politicians are so corrupt, he’s just doing what he has to do in face of American imperialist manipulation, etc.
They are both tapping the same deep vein of authoritarian populism, although nominally at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
El Salvador is not Venezuela as much as you'd like to think we're all the same, it's a totally different political landscape, we had a civil war where 80k people died in a cold war proxy and the guerrillas were consolidated into FMLN and death squad members formed ARENA, nowhere else in Latin America did a communist/capitalist conflict had this outcome, guerillas never became a party anywhere else as a means to end the war, all these deaths, for the very same people who formed political parties and for what?
Endless corruption when they got to power, we're sick of it.
check how the former ARENA candidate for presidency Javier Siman, who's also a high ranking member of ANEP and ARENA's party leader lobbies in the US for support of his own interests, it's not a secret except for the vast majority of people in El Salvador who are not educated enough to research on that, oh btw, who didn't prioritize education for 30 years? You guessed it ARENA and FMLN,
you might call giving most kids in school a populist move by Bukele, but he's actually closing a technological gap by doing that.
