Tag: Warm

  • A warm rapport with the “world’s coolest dictator”

    A warm rapport with the “world’s coolest dictator”

    The answer is not yet in. But since 2023, Bukele has doubled down on his project as the “world’s coolest dictator,” to quote a phrase he once used on his X profile. And he has won some high-profile admirers in the United States.

    Bukele has repeatedly renewed his March 2022 state of emergency, which suspended constitutional guarantees and by definition is temporary. It has now been extended 39 times over three continuous years since inception. Bukele’s arrest tally, according to a report by human-rights watchdog Cristosal, is now up to at least 87,000 people — more than the death toll of the country’s 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992. 

    Bukele, who is still just 44, won re-election last year after sweeping aside term-limit restraints. A constitutional reform, approved by a pliant legislature, now empowers him to seek as many future terms as he wants.  

    A new kind of leader or more of the same?

    Bukele’s embrace of digital public services, bitcoin and his tech-bro demeanor seems to suggest he wants to be thought of as a new, modern kind of leader. For all that, he is still following the path of many old-fashioned Latin American caudillos or strongmen before him.

    State surveillance and pressure on human rights groups, corruption watchdogs and journalists have ramped up this year to such an extent that Cristosal has pulled its staff out of the country. Everyone, that is, except Ruth López, its lead anti-corruption investigator, who was arrested in May and is still being held on alleged embezzlement charges.

    The Salvadoran Journalists Association has closed its offices too, and will operate from outside the country, following passage of a controversial “foreign agents” law in May which targets the finances of nongovernmental organizations receiving funds from abroad. Bukele’s government accuses many such groups of supporting MS-13. Since April 2023, the independent Salvadoran news outlet El Faro has been legally based in Costa Rica because of what it calls campaigns by the Bukele government to silence its voice.

    “Autocrats don’t tolerate alternative narratives,” it said at the time. And still, the Trump administration likes what it sees.

    Prisons and deportations

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on a February visit to El Salvador that Bukele had agreed to use his CECOT mega-prison to house criminals of any nationality deported from the United States — and even to take in convicted U.S. citizens and legal residents, too.

    This proposed offshoring of part of the U.S. incarcerated population would be for a fee, Bukele clarified, that would help fund his own country’s prisons like the CECOT. 

    The United States then deported more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members as well as a group of alleged Salvadoran mareros to El Salvador. The Venezuelans were held at the CECOT until being sent home in a prisoner swap deal for a group of Americans held in Venezuela.

    It would be illegal to deport a U.S. citizen for a crime, as Rubio seemed to acknowledge. “We have a constitution,” he observed. That didn’t stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from visiting the CECOT in person and using the social media platform X to threaten “criminal illegal aliens” in the United States with being sent there:

    “I toured the CECOT, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center,” she posted. “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadoran prison.”

    A visit to the White House

    Bukele got to make a coveted visit to the White House in April. Trump praised Bukele’s mass imprisonment program, suggesting it could hold U.S. citizens next. Trump was captured telling Bukele on a live feed this: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.” 

    The question is, how much of that was just grandstanding?

    Like Bukele, Trump has made clear his disdain for constitutional limitations on his power, used government resources to go after his enemies, derided the freedom of the press and talked up domestic security threats to justify heavy-handed, authoritarian policing. The United States has a stronger tradition of democracy than El Salvador, to be sure.

    Checks and balances exist. But the strongman playbook does not have too many variations. Ask Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. 

    It is not the first time El Salvador has darkly mirrored the fears and internal conflicts of the United States, be they about communism, immigrant crime or democracy. As I wrote in 2023, a straight line can be drawn from the Salvadoran military’s anticommunist violence against impoverished peasants in 1932 to the country’s bloody civil war, in which the United States backed a still atrocity-prone Salvadoran army against leftist rebels.

    The line continues from that conflict to the emergence of MS-13, whose presence in the United States drives so much of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric today.

    The birth of a global gang

    MS-13 members are far from being innocent victims here, though Trump and his supporters have used their crimes to smear immigrants of all kinds. But it’s important to remember that the MS-13 gang, or mara, was formed by young Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles. As their home country spiraled toward civil war in the late 1970s, Salvadorans who fled to the United States found themselves threatened by Mexican and other gangs.

    What started out as a weed-smoking, heavy-metal listening self-defense clique morphed in time into hardened criminals. 

    Their power grew when the U.S. government, making a highly visible statement about immigrant crime, deported members of MS-13 and other gangs to El Salvador in the mid 1990s, after the end of the civil war. Within a few years, the gangs ruled the Salvadoran streets. Violence soared in turf wars and government crackdowns. By 2015, gang-related violence made El Salvador the murder capital of the world.

    From leading the world’s murder stats, it has now gone to leading the world’s incarceration stats under Bukele. El Salvador’s proportion of the population in prison is now three times that of the United States, which is no slouch when it comes to incarcerating its people (it ranks fifth).

    Of course, Salvadorans are entitled to freely elect whomever they want as president, as are U.S. citizens. Both Bukele and Trump won their elections and are doing in office exactly what they said they would do. Yet populist authoritarians have a way of clinging to power and confusing their own needs and egos with the state. 

    They brook less contradiction and dissent over time. I, for one, hope the increasingly dystopian utopia Bukele is building in his homeland remains just a cautionary tale in El Salvador’s fraught and symbiotic relationship with the United States.

    It should not be an inspiration.

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why might some a majority of people in a country accept rule by a dictator?

    2. What is one example of the close relationship between El Salvador and the United States?

    3. Do you think that eliminating basic judicial rights can be justified in fighting crime?

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  • Warm words from ministers to Universities UK, but a noticeable absence of buttered parsnips

    Warm words from ministers to Universities UK, but a noticeable absence of buttered parsnips

    No fewer than three government ministers showed up to Universities UK annual conference – if you count science minister Patrick Vallance dialling in – all with only nice things to say about the importance of higher education.

    From Patrick Vallance:

    The work that you do now and your researchers and others do in the students at universities will, of course, define the shape of much of the country over the next several decades, and indeed probably for the next century.

    From minister for skills, Jacqui Smith:

    Thank you to those of you who are leading the sector and delivering all of that benefit in making our country richer, not just economically, important though that is, but socially and culturally as well.

    And from (now, following a reshuffle over the weekend, former) Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle:

    When I talk about being a champion in your corner, it comes from a place that is very deep, and very personal, and very conviction-oriented. It’s because a university education wasn’t a given for me – because I fought for it – that means that I always valued it so extremely highly.

    As one vice chancellor commented to me privately, it’s like being briefly in a warm bath, or basking in the glow of a sunny morning to attend events where ministers say things like these – only to step back into the chilly reality of trying to deal with all the difficulties facing higher education institutions right now.

    The weekend’s reshuffle saw Peter Kyle take the helm at the Department for Business and Trade, with Liz Kendall stepping in to replace him at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Jacqui Smith retains her role as minister for skills, working across the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions – either signalling a welcome opportunity for strategic join-up in a cross-government policy agenda, or a dog’s dinner waiting to happen.

    Neither seems unlikely to materially change the policy agenda for higher education in England (no, not because there isn’t one, don’t be mean) – but it could slow it down even further while ministers get to grips with their new responsibilities and reporting lines. As MP for Leicester West, Kendall has been supportive of and engaged with the higher education institutions in her constituency, so there is no immediate cause for alarm in the appointment. But everything that follows gleaned from Universities UK should probably carry the caveat that we’ll need to see how much the world has changed in the interim before drawing any firm conclusions.

    Yes, we are all individuals

    Current policy in the mix includes work across DfE and DSIT to look at the sustainability of the higher education sector. Jacqui Smith hinted that there will be more clarity on future fee levels at the same time as the publication of the post-16 education and skills white paper, but was not able to speak in much more than broad strokes about the themes of the government’s plans for higher education – collaboration, coordination, economic growth and skills, and so on. Similarly, Vallance hinted without explicitly saying it that there is a view within government that the research budget is being spread too thinly and that the presumption of broad-based research taking place in most institutions may be in the cross-hairs.

    Patrick Vallance, on the inadvisability of universities attempting to maintain a broad research base without the funding to support it:

    We can’t end up with a very, very broad range of research going on everywhere. It speaks to the question of how you get specialisation behind this and it speaks to the question of how we deal with this full economic costing versus volume [of research].

    “Specialisation” popped up elsewhere, too; witness Jacqui Smith:

    We need a post-16 system that is more able to benefit from specialisation to really drive quality, where there is a bigger focus on collaboration – within the higher education sector, but also between the higher education sector and further education partnerships at at a civic and local level, with employers, with local government, with mayors…

    And Peter Kyle:

    One of the problems is that too many universities are competing for the same pool of students at the expense of playing to their relative strengths, or truly specialising to become the go-to authority in their field rather than a bit player. In many, this is having a real effect on how resources are being prioritised.

    The theory is sound in the abstract – each institution focuses on doing the things they are already good at, and letting others do different things that they are good at, creating the space for a healthy diversity of mission, subject portfolio, and learning modality. You can even imagine the policies that might support such a shift: opening up bids for institutions to build on key specialisms or create consortia to grow demand for particular kinds of provision, for example. You could also take a stick-based approach, focusing on raising the bar to being allowed to provide in areas where the government thinks there is already over-provision.

    But you would need deep policy focus, deeper pockets, and the metaphorical political hide of a rhinoceros to pull something like that off, not least because it goes strongly against the grain of the sector and would probably cause some institutions to fall over in the process.

    Under financial pressure, vice chancellors are more likely to be thinking in terms of diversifying their offer to hedge against market instability, monitoring any signs of growth in market share among their competitors so they can do their best to grab some of it and, within course and subject areas, streamlining the offer to reduce overheads. Highly specialist provision is expensive and demand can be uncertain. And, as one vice chancellor noted privately, you don’t get the best from academics by not letting them do research, even if teaching might be considered your main strength.

    Quid pro quo or true partnership

    What strikes me in all this is that despite the warmth with which ministers talk about, and to, the sector, there is still quite a way to go to achieve the kind of partnership with government that is grounded in the will to find a common agenda and shared sense of purpose. Both sides can agree at a high level that higher education is terribly important for the country. Both, I think, can pretty much agree that while higher education as a sector continues to deliver some essential stuff for individuals, society and the economy, it would be much more optimal if the downsides of the marketised system – institutions on the financial brink, subject loss, aggressive (and sometimes predatory) recruitment behaviours, a greater degree of homogeneity of offer than might be desirable, (arguably) insufficient sensitivity of the demand-led system to the labour market – were to be reduced or disappear altogether.

    But while the framing remains transactional ie “this is the deal we will give you in return for permission to raise fees” the prospect of a deeper alliance seems remote. This may in one sense be entirely appropriate – higher education institutions are autonomous from government for a reason. But in a time of crisis there might be a case to at the very least define some shared missions or priorities.

    Jacqui Smith said that the forthcoming white paper will enact “a shift from that assumption of competition to an assumption of collaboration…[one that] requires us to think about where we put the incentives in order to promote collaboration rather than competition.” She added, in response to a question put to her by a vice chancellor, “without reverting to a sort of Soviet style planned model, the idea that there is some sort of market understanding, you described it as a “guiding mind” is something that I think we need to think hard about, and we will say more about in and post the white paper.”

    If asked how to steer a path between adopting a “Soviet style planned model” and just trying to poke the market to see if it can be moved, I’d argue that you could do worse than defining some critical areas that would benefit from collaboration in the sector, and that would require some coordination with government to move forward, and setting up some “mission boards” to drive those forward. My list would include provision of information, advice and guidance about the relationship between HE choices and future career options; student health and wellbeing; credit transfer; HE cold spots and subject gaps, for starters.

    Collaboration and coordination doesn’t come about because the government says we would like to see more of this; it happens because there is a value(s)-based rationale for it and some meaningful convening of activity. So maybe the forthcoming white paper could set out some of those agendas as a way of setting the government free from what is obviously a very difficult policy quandary. Or maybe, on the assumption the government probably doesn’t have the scale of will and bandwidth it might need to drive the changes it might, in principle like to see, the sector needs to take the lead and get on and do it anyway.

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