El Salvador's 'Bitcoin President' Pressured, Accused of Attacking Civil Liberties

The International Monetary Fund "has indicated it will not give El Salvador a much-needed loan unless it drops bitcoin" as one of the country's legal tenders, reports the Los Angeles Times. And meanwhile the "bitcoin bond" proposed by El Salvador has been "delayed indefinitely." But the government has taken other actions: After a dramatic spike in killings here over a single weekend last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's reaction was swift — and extreme. He sent soldiers into poor neighborhoods to round up thousands of people who he claimed were gang members, then paraded them in front of news cameras in their underwear and handcuffs. He tweeted pictures of detainees who had been bruised and bloodied by security forces, suggesting they "maybe fell" or "were eating fries with ketchup." And he started feeding the nation's prisoners two meals a day instead of three, warning that if violence continued, "I swear to God that they won't eat a single grain of rice." It is a distinct look for Bukele, who has been focused in recent months on presenting himself to the world as a modern tech innovator on a quest to turn El Salvador into a cryptocurrency paradise. Not only is Bukele now embracing the mano duro techniques of past Latin American leaders, he is going much further, using the homicide spree — which left 87 people dead in three days — as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and attacking the press. In recent days, Bukele and his loyalists in the Legislative Assembly ordered a state of emergency that restricts freedom of association, suspends the norm that detainees be informed of their rights at the moment of arrest and denies prisoners access to lawyers.... That Bukele would use the spate of homicides as a pretext to further consolidate power is no surprise to many of his critics, who believe he may be preparing to stay in office past 2024, when he is supposed to step down, even though El Salvador's constitution bans consecutive presidential terms. But they also say that there may be another motive for his new tough-on-crime stance: diverting attention from the deepening failure of his cryptocurrency experiment.

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