Bukele and El Salvador: which Latin American countries changed their constitution to allow indefinite presidential re -election (and what consequences did it have)

And regional evidence shows, according to experts, that the continuity permit at the will of the leaders in a presidential regime implies serious risks to democracies.

“Indefinite re -election is synonymous with self -criticization,” says Mario Torrico, a political scientist who has studied the phenomenon, BBC Mundo.

Bukele was initially elected in 2019 and reelected last year by broad margin, with an absolute majority of his party in the Legislative Assembly, based on popular support that has its hard hand security policy.

Under a state of exception, his government imprisoned tens of thousands of people accused of links with gangs, a strategy that according to human rights organizations implies different abuse of power.

The 44 -year -old president can now seek to continue in office without mandatory departure period.

Given the criticism of this reform, Bukele responded on Sunday that “90% of developed countries allow the indefinite re -election of their head of government, and nobody flinths.”

“But when a small and poor country as El Salvador tries to do the same, it is suddenly the end of democracy,” he added in the social network X.

The president included in that comment both the parliamentary government systems of developed countries and to the presidential presidentials, and said that distinguishing them is “a technicalism” and “a pretext.”

However, experts believe that this difference is crucial.

“In a parliamentary regime, the election of the prime minister or president comes from an agreement in the Parliament of diverse political forces,” says Agustín Grijalva, a former Constitutional Court of Ecuador, to BBC Mundo.

“In a presidential regime (there are) two separate and independent elections: that of Parliament on the one hand and that of the President for another, which does not depend on the election of Parliament. And each one has a fixed period,” he adds. “It is another totally different institutional structure, which demands that these fixed periods meet.”

According to this professor at the Andean University who investigated the subject, “Bukele's approach would be credible if he gave us examples of countries with presidential regimes that have indefinite re -election: there he will see that they are authoritarian, (such as) the case of Venezuela or Nicaragua.”

In fact, these two countries as well as Ecuador and Bolivia allowed the unlimited re -election of their presidents in this century, years before El Salvador.

The change remains in force in Venezuela and Nicaragua, whose governments became considered autocratic by much of the international community, while Ecuador and Bolivia later limit the permanence in power.

A paradox is that these four countries enabled re -election without limits under leftist governments, supposedly in the ideological antipodes of Bukele, star of the continental right.

And the way they also did string similarities.

The indefinite re -election in Latin America was always approved under presidents that carried more than one mandate and approached the constitutional limit that forced them to withdraw from power.

That is, it has been done with name and surname.

These presidents had majorities in the Legislative, in Justice or in both powers at the same time to change the rules of the game.

Bukele and the Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega are the first who ruled by two consecutive mandates in their countries since the 1980s, based on judicial opinions that deactivated the prohibition of immediate re -election in their constitutions.

Then, in both cases (as well as in Ecuador under the presidency of Rafael Correa) official legislative majorities changed the constitutions to allow indefinite re -election. Today Ortega governs Nicaragua for more than 18 years.

In Bolivia, the Constitutional Court authorized the then President Evo Morales to seek re -election without limits when the consecutive third party ended, although the Magna Carta said that it could only be reelected once since the citizens rejected in a referendum its attempt to change it.

The elections of that year in Bolivia ended in a major crisis, and Morales left the country denouncing a blow against him.

Just as El Salvador approved indefinite re -election with an express procedure, Venezuela also did it to counterreloj when the then President Hugo Chávez asked the most legislative at the end of 2008. “If we are going to do it, let's do it quickly,” he said.

They voted in less than two months and ratified in a referendum just over a year after this possibility was also rejected by popular vote.

Chávez argued that voters should determine whether a president must continue or not, because “the people are the owner of a country.”

It is an argument similar to that managed by Bukele's ruling.

“The power has returned to the only place to which it truly belongs … to the Salvadoran people,” said the vice president of Congress, Swedcy Callejas, when the amendment voted last week.

But Grijalva also rejects that idea.

“It's not that a right is being returned to the majority,” he says. “The majority is expressed in the Constitution and the laws so that there is a democratic regime, (and) what is happening is that that majority is invoked to have an authoritarian regime.”

The warning that El Salvador de Bukele travels “the same path” as Chávez's Venezuela was also made by Juanita Goebertus, director for America of Human Rights Watch.

“It begins with a leader who uses his popularity to concentrate power, and ends in dictatorship,” Goebertus wrote on the X network when El Salvador approved indefinite re -election last week.

Chávez presided over Venezuela for 14 consecutive years, until his death in 2013. His dolphin, Nicolás Maduro, remains in power until today.

Experts believe that approving an indefinite re -election in a country is more feasible when there is flexibility to change the constitutions or judges are subordinated to the Executive Power.

As a reverse example, they indicate the case of Colombia when the Constitutional Court closed in 2010 the possibility that the then President Álvaro Uribe aspired to a third mandate.

“It is important that the institutions build a reputation and are very professional. The Constitutional Court (Colombian) was all that and could stop Uribe,” says Torrico, a researcher in Mexico of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

Just as we do not know if the phrase about the “rhyme” of history really belongs to Twain, we do not know to what degree the Savior will seem to be more in the countries of the region that authorized the indefinite re -election of its presidents.

The cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, when reverting the rule after Morales and Correa left power, suggest that there is also back.

But experts observe enough reasons to worry about the vital signs of El Salvador's democracy.

“The consecutive re -election already puts us in trouble, because the presidents to re -elected twist rules and accumulate power,” says Torrico.

“But when you also put indefinite re -election, they try to control everything,” he adds, “and what is lived is already an autocratic regime.”

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