Nayib Bukele

Monday

Nigel Jones

Chile turns rightward

Chile has joined the right-wing trend sweeping Latin America by electing the ultra-conservative candidate Jose Antonio Kast as its first rightist president since the demise of Pinochet's military dictatorship in 1990. Kast, 59, leader of the Republican party, trounced Jeannette Jara, a communist party member, and the candidate of Chile’s current ruling left-wing coalition, winning almost 58 percent of the vote in Sunday’s poll. Jara, a former Labor minister, conceded victory to Kast, saying “Democracy has spoken loud and clear” and wishing her opponent success “for the good of Chile.

Kast Chile

Monday

Juan P. Villasmil

Is Bukele a tyrant or a triumph?

El Salvador’s young and telegenic president, Nayib Bukele, has rewritten the rules. Term limits? Scrapped. Presidential terms? Extended. Runoff elections? Abolished. If all goes according to the script – penned and passed by his party in the legislature – Bukele will remain in power well into the 2030s, if not beyond. A decade ago, such a move might have sparked bipartisan alarm in Washington. Today, reactions are mixed – with many in the growing MAGA wing cheering El Salvador’s constitutional shake-up as a win of their own. This shift is a window into a deeper realignment in conservative foreign policy: one that moves closer to the unapologetic defense of national interest and drifts further from the spread-democracy-everywhere consensus.

Nayib Bukele (Getty)

Saturday

Matthew Foldi

Trump the ‘dissident’ gets hero’s welcome at CPAC

National Harbor, Maryland At the climax of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, former president Donald Trump took the stage hours late. No one seemed to care. Trump energized a mostly patient crowd of fans gathered near the nation’s capital before jetting back down to South Carolina, where he’ll likely celebrate a win over the state’s former governor Nikki Haley — who skipped CPAC this year, as did several other Republican Party mainstays. CPAC wasn’t always Trump turf — which seems unfathomable given that he just broke Ronald Reagan’s record thirteen appearances at the marquee conservative conference. But this year, attendees and sponsors were squarely behind the president.

trump cpac
cpac international
Juan P. Villasmil

Inside a very international CPAC

“I’m running to be the senator to the Romanian diaspora,” I overheard a man tell the leader of Spain’s right-wing Vox Party, Santiago Abascal. “I’m running for congress in the Dominican Republic,” Fernando Abreu told me. Argentinians, Salvadoreans, Venezuelans, Brits, Hungarians — all of them were at CPAC 2024. At times it seemed that half of attendees weren’t American. The most interesting foreigners, though, were not just there for the speeches. On the sidelines, they dined, laughed and planned. In a VIP Latin America Luncheon thrown by the Center for a Secure Free Society, a small group of leaders, Heritage Foundation fellows and experienced policymakers met to talk about what’s next for the region.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

El Salvador’s crackpot currency switch

If you’re reading this in El Salvador, you’re probably taking a break from street protests against President Nayib Bukele’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, enacted last week. This small, heavily indebted Central American republic abandoned its own currency, the colón, 20 years ago in favor of using the US dollar — and has enjoyed relative financial stability ever since. The populist right-wing president’s insistence on shifting to the unregulated, ultra-volatile virtual currency favored by gamblers and money-launderers will supposedly bring savings of $400 million a year in commissions on the remittances from expatriate workers on which his economy depends.

el salvador