When casting their votes, Salvadorians took a leap of faith when electing Nayib Bukele as president. Strictly speaking, he was a political outsider: a millennial who had run his campaign largely over social media and offered few concrete details about how he would govern. Voters were hoping that he would establish the start of change within El Salvador, a country that hobbled on the premise of corruption, poverty and some of the world’s highest murder statistics.

However, his actions in recent months have left Salvadorans from all walks of life – lawyers, business leaders, human rights advocates, journalists and others – fearful of the idea that Bukele is reversing the country into the kind of authoritarian leadership they fought a civil war to overturn.Out with the old and in with the ‘casual’, Bukele was an image of a young, fresh intuitivist. When elected into office, two political parties that had alternated in power since El Salvador’s brutal civil war in the 1990s were pushed aside.

Accepting his victory in jeans and a leather jacket, Bukele both looked and spoke the part. He assured that the country had ‘turned a page’ on the post-war era. However, Bukele’s dependence on the military as a tool of intimidation, mimicking many that have come before him, has rattled what is left of the country’s democracy. In February, he marched soldiers into Congress to pass a bill. He ignored the pleas from the Supreme Court that ordered him to stop using the military as a means of detaining quarantine violators. “The president is relying more on the military and the police, and those forces are again playing a repressive role,” said Father Luis Coto, a Catholic priest who leads a 15,000-member parish in the centre of the country. “We are taking a step backward, regressing to the time of war.”

Bukele’s modernism is a key component of his success. On April 23^rd of this year, a single tweet enabled him to shut down the legislative body. Without scientific evidence, he declared the presence of COVID-19 on the legislative floor. Undeniably, COVID-19 has caused significant strain and burden on all governments. However, a pandemic does not excuse the abuse of human rights. Yet, Bukele seems to believe that somehow, he is above the law. “Five people won’t decide the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans,” Mr. Bukele said on Twitter of the Supreme Court judges’ ruling. “The court doesn’t have the power to implement or remove public health measures.” Bukele is evidently trying to convey the message that the only choices in this pandemic are between unquestioned loyalty to him or the deaths of Salvadorans.

In April, a surge of murders shattered the relative peace that had prevailed since the pandemic struck and threw into question one of Bukele’s signature achievements: reducing violence. In response, he authorized the police and the army to kill gang members if necessary, tweeting, “The use of lethal force is authorized in self-defense or in defense of the lives of Salvadorans.” An image that has been released has shown thousands of prisoners crammed together on a floor, pressed against each other’s bare backs with guards hovering. These guards are holding semiautomatic weapons, the entire image showcasing a complete disregard for the social distancing rules implemented everywhere else, but moreover, a disregard for basic human rights.

The Trump administration has remained quiet on the issue with people criticizing them once again for not doing enough. Michael Kozak, the acting assistant secretary in charge of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, said Mr. Bukele’s defiance of the Supreme Court amounted to “differences of opinion over how best to handle quarantine and social distancing issues in the country” and praised the president’s “extremely high popularity ratings.” Now we are left to question what is really important in today’s modern world: popularity over humanity or democracy over dictatorship.