The Freedom They Don't See

I watched a video this morning in which a thoughtful, evidently well-informed person made a serious argument about President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. The warnings were familiar: the consolidation of power, the weakening of judicial independence, the erosion of checks and balances, the dangerous precedent of a popular leader who has decided that the rules apply to everyone except himself. The analysis was not wrong. I agreed with most of it.

And yet I found myself unable to fully inhabit the conclusion — the implicit assumption that Salvadoreans are, on balance, worse off. Not because I am sympathetic to authoritarianism. I am not. I have spent enough time close to power to be genuinely suspicious of it, and even more suspicious of those who seek to accumulate it without limit. But there was something missing from the video. Something the analyst, however well-intentioned, did not seem to have considered.

He had, I suspect, never had to negotiate with a gang to open a business. Never paid a renta to send his children to school. Never calculated which streets were safe to walk down on a given evening, or decided not to open a restaurant because the neighbourhood belonged to someone who would eventually come to collect. He had never lived in a country where the state had effectively outsourced the monopoly of violence to criminal organisations, and where the freedom to vote, to speak, and to organise meant very little if you could not walk to the corner store without fear.

The average Salvadorean feels more free today than they did under the gangs. That is not a controversial statement in El Salvador. It is the lived reality of millions of people, confirmed by approval ratings that would make any democratic leader in Europe or North America envious, and by the simple observable fact that streets that were previously ungovernable are now walkable.

This does not mean Bukele is not authoritarian. He is. It does not mean the warnings in the video are wrong. They are largely right. It means that freedom is not a single thing, and that the version of freedom whose erosion Western commentators are mourning — freedom of the press, judicial independence, institutional checks — is not the only version that matters to people who were, until recently, living under a different kind of unfreedom entirely.

I think of Lee Kuan Yew. I think of General Park Chung-hee in South Korea. Both men used a strong hand — a very strong hand — to build the institutional and economic foundations that made Singapore and South Korea what they are today. Both presided over societies that were, by the standards of contemporary Western liberal democracy, authoritarian. Both were criticised, at the time, by voices that sound remarkably similar to the one in the video I watched this morning.

Would those voices have been wrong? Not entirely. The restrictions were real. The costs were real. People suffered under both governments in ways that cannot be dismissed or romanticised. And yet the question that haunts me is this: if the critics of their time had prevailed — if the external pressure for immediate democratisation had succeeded before the institutional foundations were laid — would Singapore be Singapore? Would South Korea be South Korea? I genuinely do not know. I suspect not.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying Bukele is Lee Kuan Yew. I do not know if he is. The conditions that made Lee Kuan Yew's strong hand lead somewhere constructive were specific: a coherent long-term vision, a genuine commitment to institution-building rather than personal enrichment, an understanding that the point of power was to eventually make power less necessary. Whether Bukele has any of those qualities is a question that only time will answer, and the early signs are, at best, mixed.

What I am saying is that the framework most Western commentators apply to El Salvador is too narrow to capture what is actually happening there. It measures the loss of certain freedoms with precision and sensitivity. It does not measure, with equivalent precision and sensitivity, the freedoms that have been gained. It counts the newspapers that have been pressured and the judges who have been removed. It does not count the women who can now walk to work, the small businesses that no longer pay a renta, the children who are attending schools that the gangs no longer control.

Both sets of facts are real. Any honest accounting of Bukele's El Salvador has to hold both of them at once — which is considerably harder than holding only one.

I hope, genuinely, that Bukele uses this moment the way Lee Kuan Yew used his: to build something that outlasts him, that creates the conditions for his own eventual irrelevance, that converts the popular trust he has accumulated into institutions strong enough to survive the leader who built them. That is the only version of this story that ends well.

But I also know that the history of strongmen who used their moment to build durable institutions, rather than simply to entrench themselves, is a short one, and includes only a handful of names. There are far fewer Lee Kuan Yews than Idi Amin Dadas, Fidel Castros, and Mussolinis.

The Salvadoreans cheering today are not wrong to cheer. They are freer, in the ways that matter most to their daily lives, than they were before. Whether they will still be free — in any sense of the word — a decade from now depends on a man whose intentions none of us can fully read, operating in a country whose institutional foundations are, for now, considerably thinner than they appear.

That is the uncertainty the video I watched this morning did not sit with long enough. It is the uncertainty worth sitting with.