A Thursday evening tweet of the Chill Guy meme by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele pumped the price of a Solana memecoin by 65% in 90 minutes.

While Bitcoiners interpreted the tweet as a reaction to bitcoin’s rally above $96,000, memecoin traders interpreted the tweet literally.

Although dozens of Chill Guy-named memecoins exist, the largest and most liquid version exists on Solana. Starting at a market capitalization of $300 million as of 9:09pm in El Salvador when Bukele tweeted, crypto traders immediately ran up the coin to a $500 million market cap.

As of publication time, the tweet has earned over 1.4 million views and the associated memecoin has generated over $350 million in 24-hour volume.

Bukele claims that El Salvador became a sovereign bitcoin investor on September 6, 2021. After years of acquisitions, the country now claims to possess 5,940 bitcoin worth over $550 million. With bitcoin at all-time highs, Salvadoran purchases have accreted hundreds of millions of dollars to the country’s treasury.

Historically, Bukele has only spoken publicly about bitcoin and tether, suggesting that his pumping of this small memecoin might have been inadvertent.

Read more: Solana pre-sale meme coin founders abandon their crashing projects

Phillip Banks created the Just A Chill Guy meme in October 2023 and it spread virally on social media, especially TikTok where it enjoys a phrasal template. Chill Guy’s nonchalant smirk, casual attire, and serenity portray an indifferent equanimity amid a variety of otherwise stressful situations.

Earlier today, the meme’s creator Phillip Banks threatened to issue takedown notices for assets or applications that used the character.

Speaking via X, Banks said, “Chill guy has been copyrighted. like, legally. I’ll be issuing takedowns on for-profit-related things over the next few days.”

He clarified, “Not like brand accounts using him as a trend, that’s kinda something I don’t really care about (I do just ask for credit. Or Xboxes), mainly unauthorized merchandise and shitcoins.”

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News has been spreading across X (formerly Twitter), claiming that zero homicides have been reported in El Salvador so far in 2024. This sounds like an incredible feat — unfortunately, it’s also completely untrue.

But, surprisingly, this time, it’s not the country’s controversial pro-Bitcoin president Nayib Bukele or his government that’s to blame for the outlandish claim. Rather, it appears to be down to poor reading skills on the part of a popular ‘anti-woke’ X account.

X account @EndWokeness claimed, “0 homicides in El Salvador this year so far. Until recently, El Salvador had the highest homicide rate on earth.”

It then added, “Incarceration works.”

The claim prompted numerous X users to voice their support for Bukele’s no-nonsense, tough-on-crime leadership style.

However, it turns out that official figures don’t back up the claims of a homicide-free 2024. Indeed, according to figures released by the Salvadoran National Police, there have been seven homicides reported in the country since the start of the year.

This is two fewer murders than the nine recorded in the same period last year. This rate could see El Salvador finish the year with 95 homicides or 1.5 per every 100,000 inhabitants.

Read more: Salvadoran newspaper relocates after threats from pro-Bitcoin Bukele

Violent crime rates dropping in El Salvador

Reuters reports that murders in El Salvador plummeted 70% from 2022 to 2023. If these numbers are accurate, then murders per 100,000 citizens in 2024 have fallen another 37%.

For comparison, this means El Salvador is averaging 1.5 homicides per 100,000 residents which is nearly identical to Santa Clarita, California — which is regularly named one of the safest cities in America.

It’s likely that violent crime rates have significantly dropped since Bukele took office in 2019, but the safety has come at a steep price: tens of thousands of individuals being imprisoned without being granted adequate human rights, and democracy itself being tested by the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator.”

El Salvador’s homicide statistics don’t include murders conducted by government officials against suspected criminals or individuals who are killed while detained.

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El Salvador president Nayib Bukele recently announced on X that his country’s bitcoin investments “are in the black!” However, the unofficial tracker he relied on was not accurately reporting the holdings.

In the tweet, Bukele includes a picture of a graph from ‘nayibtracker.com,’ an unofficial website that has attempted to track the value of El Salvador’s bitcoin portfolio. This website makes it clear that it is not affiliated with the Salvadoran government and that “the data is based on estimates and probably not 100% correct.”

This was demonstrated when X user Pledditor pointed out that the website was double-counting Bukele’s daily bitcoin purchases. 

Read more: This Bukele lobbyist now works for Tether too

The creator of the tool responded to acknowledge that it was mistaken and corrected it. This sent Bukele’s portfolio briefly back into the red before the continuing increase in bitcoin’s price pushed it back into the black.

The more troubling implication of this reveal is that Bukele apparently doesn’t have access to a more accurate accounting of the quantity and value of bitcoin that El Salvador has purchased and is instead relying on third-party tools like this.

Compounding this problem, Bukele and the Salvadoran government have yet to provide public verification of its bitcoin portfolio. 

Protos has reached out to the office of the Presidency of the Republic of El Salvador to ask why Bukele was relying on this tool and to ask for disclosure of current bitcoin holdings and the acquisition price.

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Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, has paid $60,000 to hire lobbying firm DMM Consulting, according to Senate disclosure forms.

DMM Consulting is led by Damian Merlo, an advisor to self-described dictator Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador. Information on OpenSecrets shows that Tether is the only firm that has retained the company for lobbying services. 

Merlo is also behind another lobbying firm, Latin America Advisory Group, which lobbies on behalf of the Office of the President of El Salvador. The updated contract filed with the Department of Justice (DoJ) earlier this year discloses that El Salvador is paying this firm $390,000 over six months for its to lobby on behalf of Bukele.

Elsewhere in El Salvador, municipal workers have been arrested by the regime for striking and demanding long-delayed back pay. 

Tether’s sister company Bitfinex, has recently been granted a digital assets license in El Salvador that will allow it to issue and sell tokenized securities. This could potentially include the much-promoted ‘Volcano Bond.’

Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto lobbying legacy haunts Washington

Tether has maintained relationships with other lobbying firms, including FTI Government Affairs, which received $240,000 from the company in 2023 and $480,000 in 2022. It also retains the assistance of Continental Strategy, a business run by Carlos Trujillo, a former American ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Tether has paid the firm approximately $300,000 and it has also lobbied on behalf of the Chamber of Industry of Guatemala. 

These lobbying efforts in the United States come as Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief technical officer and face of the company, continues to insist that “Tether is not a US company and does not operate in the US, nor solicit US users.”

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A major Salvadoran news outlet that has previously published negative stories about the country’s pro-Bitcoin president Nayib Bukele says it’s shifted much of its operation to Costa Rica following a government-led campaign of harassment, surveillance, and defamation.

In a statement issued Thursday, El Faro (The Lighthouse) explained the move and detailed what it called “the culmination of a months-long process driven by the lack of conditions for our company to remain in El Salvador.”

According to the outlet, which operated from its base in El Salvador for more than 25 years: “Under the government of Nayib Bukele, campaigns originating in Casa Presidencial have sought to defame and discredit El Faro and its employees.

“We have faced physical surveillance and threats, Pegasus spyware attacks, harassment of advertisers, and defamation from public officials and ruling-party legislators.”

Read more: El Salvador president Bukele down 15% on Bitcoin, despite buying the dip

The outlet also claims that Bukele used state television and radio to falsely accuse it of money laundering and that it is currently appealing “multiple Treasury Ministry audits and fabricated criminal accusations.”

El Faro says its newsroom will remain in El Salvador but as of April 1, its legal and administrative operations are based in San José. 

Bukele banned reporting on deals made with gang leaders

The outlet has, unsurprisingly, previously reported on Bukele’s various plans to transform El Salvador into a Bitcoin hub. However, also unsurprisingly, this coverage hasn’t always been favorable.

For example, recent articles have questioned the motives behind Bukele’s so-called Bitcoin Office and detailed how the Bitcoin project has cost the country nearly $60 million in taxpayer money.

But this isn’t the only coverage that has prompted Bukele to target the outlet. According to El Faro’s statement, in April last year, the Legislative Assembly approved a law threatening to imprison anybody responsible for publishing material replicating gang messages. This is apparently an effort to stop journalists from reporting on negotiations between Bukele and the country’s three main gangs.

During these talks, the government promised not to extradite gang leaders to the United States in exchange for their support in upcoming elections.

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Last week, El Salvador moved one step closer to issuing its contentious bitcoin-backed ‘Volcano Bonds.’ The country’s Legislative Assembly passed a legal framework for issuing blockchain-based digital securities, including provisions that allow businesses to deal in digital assets other than bitcoin.

62 of its members voted in favor of this new Digital Assets Issuance Law on January 11. However, El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele initially planned to issue the bonds as early as March 2022.

Bukele’s regime has postponed the bonds’ issuance several times, partly due to last year’s poor digital asset markets, but also because of more pressing issues, such as a nationwide crackdown on gangs — by September, mass arrests had incarcerated a staggering 2% of all adult males residing in the country.

Since the president made bitcoin legal tender in 2021, he’s struggled to prove the move makes any kind of sense for the country — El Salvador has sparred with major international players in the financial industry, like the International Monetary Fund.

Indeed, the country holds 2,300 bitcoin and is significantly underwater on its average purchase price. In November, Bukele was estimated to have lost $65 million on bitcoin purchases — a loss of 61%. That same month, he announced a plan to buy one bitcoin a day for an indeterminate amount of time.

With the passage of the country’s new Digital Assets Issuance Law, El Salvador is one step closer toward finally being ready to sell its Volcano Bonds for some bitcoin and USD — but especially, Tether.

Here’s what you need to know.

Volcano Bonds are coming, whether Salvadorans want them or not

Bukele has a way of getting what he wants. He unilaterally altered the constitution so that he could remain president longer than was previously legal. The military has been deployed by Bukele to force legislators to pass his laws.

El Salvador didn’t have a solid legal framework for issuing debt with digital assets until the legislative branch introduced a bill in November. It passed earlier this week.

The bill adds a National Digital Assets Commission to Bukele’s previously established National Bitcoin Office, in order to manage regulation of private participants in the digital asset industry. It also creates a Bitcoin Fund Management Agency to manage funds raised through El Salvador’s public offerings of digital assets.

Bukele plans to raise up to $1 billion with the Volcano Bond. He says his administration will use the proceeds to pay down sovereign debt, invest in bitcoin mining infrastructure, buy bitcoin, and build ‘Bitcoin City.’

Read more: El Salvador may be broke but it’s still throwing $200M at Bitcoin Beach

Bitcoin City: Waypoint along China’s Belt and Road

If ever realized, Bitcoin City will reside on the Gulf of Fonseca on the southern coast of El Salvador. The entire project is a recycled version of a Chinese ZEDES project. The city will feature a friendly regulatory and tax regime for digital asset businesses interested in doing business in El Salvador.

Renderings for Bitcoin City were carelessly plagiarized without attribution. They were redrawn over maps of Central City from the manga series Fullmetal Alchemist.

The Bukele administration plans to use the nearby Conchagua volcano to power bitcoin mining with geothermal energy. Proceeds from the volcanic mining will back the new bonds, hence the name, ‘Volcano Bonds.’

That said, geothermal experts have expressed doubt regarding the economic viability of the Conchagua volcano for geothermal power production. Despite years of the volcano’s existence with every opportunity for power infrastructure development, as of December 2019, El Salvador still imported one-fifth of its electricity.

Moreover, industrial electricity in El Salvador is still prohibitively expensive for bitcoin mining, averaging 13-15 cents per kWh. For years, China and Kazakhstan sold industrial electricity contracts for bitcoin mining below 5 cents per kWh.

Bitfinex ensures that Tether will be accepted as a funding source

In Bitfinex’s statement on the Digital Assets Issuance Law, it expected the use of renewable geothermal energy to attract investors interested in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing. Environmentalists have frequently criticized Bitcoin’s energy usage despite a report indicating that more than half the energy used for bitcoin mining comes from sustainable sources.

Read more: Opinion: Bitfinex goes full fascist

Controversial digital asset exchange Bitfinex will provide infrastructure services for the Volcano Bond. It refers to the bond as a ‘Volcano Token,’ indicating that it expects the bond to exist as a digital token on a blockchain. Volcano Bonds will accept funding denominations in bitcoin, USD, and — critically — Tether.

It looks as if El Salvador’s Volcano Bonds will be a great way to whitewash Tethers by swapping them for a government-approved debt issuance.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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Two weeks ago the infamous “Volcano Bitcoin Bond” finally made its way to the El Salvador legislature for final approval — a legislature completely controlled by Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas Party.

While final rubber-stamping occurs through an economic commission, also made up almost exclusively of New Ideas party members, it’s worth talking about more than just why the Volcano Bitcoin Bond has been widely mocked by financial experts. Specifically, why two companies deeply intertwined in the crypto industry — Bitfinex and Blockstream — are supporting a fascist.

The Bitcoin Volcano Bond

At face value, while naive and not properly incentivized for anyone who understands bonds, the concept of the bond and de-dollarization for El Salvador isn’t necessarily a bad one. After numerous horrendous, violent, and often US-incited civil wars, El Salvador found itself with a currency pegged to the US dollar, and in 2001 finally decided to simply dollarize.

Dollarization, while great for having a stable currency (USD), isn’t in a non-US territory’s best interests because these countries don’t have access to the US Treasury or Federal Reserve banks. In other words, they can’t request more dollars when they run out.

This is a particular problem for a country like El Salvador, which depends heavily on remittances so citizens can earn enough to survive and has always had more imports than exports.

So, in a sense, the Bitcoin Volcano Bond (and making bitcoin legal tender) has been viewed as the first step toward “de-dollarization” — an attempt to wean El Salvador off the US dollar, establish its own currency (perhaps backed by an asset like bitcoin), and reverse the economic conditions that have been prevalent for decades.

Read more: Bitcoin trackers reveal Saylor and El Salvador both rekt

Why the bond doesn’t work

There are much better explanations for why the Bitcoin Volcano Bond is silly, the best I’ve read being Matt Levine’s over at Bloomberg: “Is this a good investment? I don’t know; it depends on whether (1) El Salvador pays you back and (2) bitcoin goes up over the next 10 years. Helpfully there are other investments that depend on the same factors. For instance, you can just buy Bitcoin. Or El Salvador has other international bonds; you can buy them.”

Basically, the main issue with the bond is that its main benefit — that it exposes purchasers to bitcoin — can be wholly substituted by simply purchasing bitcoin. Meanwhile, the alternative bonds that Levine mentioned have been struggling, selling at discounts and getting offered to Chinese investors and the Chinese government as a nice purchase.

Front-facing fascism

On every other scale besides simply economic, Nayib Bukele has, while embracing the title dictator supposedly ironically, pretty much actually gone full fascist.

Indeed, he altered the constitution so he could run for president again, moved the army into the legislature to have bills that he’d proposed passed, and uses the military to target anyone he decides is an enemy of the state.

“It brings back memories of the [violence of] the 70s and 80s,” said Oscar Salguero, a Salvadoran-American software engineer who has decades of experience in finance. “History is repeating again and it’s really sad.” In the past, said Salguero, Salvadorans, “had some human rights, had Miranda rights… but now, with the Bukele regime, all of that went away.“

There is nothing cute or funny about Nayib Bukele being an authoritarian, fascist dictator. Really, it’s bad for almost everyone, especially the people of El Salvador.

So what’s in it for Bitfinex and Blockstream?

Recently, as troops have surrounded the suburb of Soyapango and indiscriminately murdered and arrested many individuals, Bitfinex and Blockstream executives have been taking cute pictures with the dictator-in-chief.

Read more: Nayib Bukele takes Bitcoin to the United Nations General Assembly

Seen front and center with Bukele are Bitfinex and Tether CFO Giancarlo Devasini and Bitfinex and Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino. Also featured on the far left is dictator enjoyer Max Keiser.

Which leaves many people — including those who are crypto industry proponents — scratching their heads and wondering “Why? Why are Bitfinex and Blockstream becoming bosom buddies with a fascist government?” 

The answer might be simpler than it seems.

99 problems but citizenship ain’t one

One of the alterations to the Bitcoin Volcano Bond that hasn’t been called out as a glaring red flag is, through buying enough of the bonds, an individual can acquire El Salvadoran citizenship. 

While El Salvador maintains extradition treaties with countries like the US currently, its move toward allying with China and its rift with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) makes it easy to wonder how tightly extradition policies will be enforced with Bukele at the helm in the future.

“Bukele needs strong allies internationally,” said Salguero, “strongmen have always sought allies in the private sector.”

And it appears that, in exchange for a promise of citizenship and an always welcoming country, the Bitfinex, Blockstream, and Tether teams are happy to oblige the technofascist dream.

“What you see now is the same as in previous regimes,” said Mario Gómez, a Salvadoran software engineer who was forced to flee El Salvador after being arrested for criticizing the bitcoin legal tender law. “It’s called ‘Mano Dura,’ essentially the ‘hard hand on crime.’”

Gómez continued, “It’s kind of natural that Bukele is finding allies on this spectrum of political ideologies. It’s not that surprising to me… that it involves Bitfinex, Tether, and Blockstream.”

Blockstream doesn’t want to be mentioned

Blockstream marketing and communications director Fernando Nikolić reached out to me to ask me to “remove Blockstream from this piece entirely.”

I let him know there is zero chance that will happen.

The bonds that are supporting Nayib Bukele will be hosted on the Liquid Network, a Blockstream platform. Besides this, Samson Mow, who was CSO at Blockstream regularly made appearances in El Salvador, with Nayib.

The levels of separation are minimal and CEO Adam Back along with former CSO Samson Mow admit to how much they’ve helped move the bond forward and have supported Nayib.

Sad state of affairs

The Bitcoin Volcano Bond, which still hasn’t begun trading or been fully approved, is likely to save a regime that’s quickly running short on cash. “Bukele needs it for his image and for the possible liquidity he can get to help the government function,” said Salguero, “and, obviously, for the electoral campaign in 2024.”

“All of these corrupt cryptocurrency companies are eager to go to El Salvador,” he added.

And there’s little room to deny Salguero’s claims. Bukele, who has lost heaps of money on his bitcoin purchases (there’s actually no verification that he bought any at all), parted ways with many NGOs, simply ignores the constitution, and used military force to maintain control of the population, has done everything in his power to openly express that he is a dictator.

Salguero ended the interview tonally defeated. “As a tech guy with knowledge of finance,” he said, “I feel powerless.”

Update 15:03 UTC, Dec 9: Added section “Blockstream doesn’t want to be mentioned” to provide further context.

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The post Opinion: Bitfinex goes full fascist appeared first on Protos.

According to two investment tracking websites, a pair of bitcoin’s most vociferous supporters, MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor and president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, are a combined $1.75 billion down on their well-publicized investments.

Numbers published by saylortracker.com and nayibtracker.com show that Saylor, who bought 129,999 bitcoins at a dollar cost average of $30,634, is down nearly $1.7 billion while Bukele, who bought more than 2,000 bitcoins at an average of $45,000 is out nearly $65 million. This represents a loss of 42.27% and 60.58% respectively.

Currently, Saylor’s stash is worth nearly $2.3 billion, while Bukele is sitting on just over $42 million worth of the currency.

The websites say that their figures come from social media and publicly available information, and that “where no average purchase price is known or implied, the average market price for that day is used.”

This means that there’s a margin for error as far as exact losses are concerned but even with this taken into account, the numbers are eye-watering.

Saylor and Bukele’s bitcoin hyping looks to have failed

Saylor is famous for his permanently bullish outlook on the world’s leading crypto, and has made waves on a number of occasions for his sometimes outlandish statements.

Indeed, he once called bitcoin “a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple and secure savings account to billions of people that don’t have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund.”

And if that sounds more optimistic than outlandish, he also once called bitcoin “a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom,” (our emphasis).

Read more: This tool suggests Bitcoin was the wrong bet for Michael Saylor

Bukele, on the other hand, has been touting the currency as his country’s future, “referring to El Salvador in a speech to the United Nations as, “the land of surf, volcanoes, coffee, peace, bitcoin, and freedom.”

The idea was that Bukele would kickstart the country’s economy, grow its GDP, and grant his people financial freedom by making bitcoin legal tender.

However, despite hyping bitcoin at every possible opportunity, Bukele and Saylor have been unable to halt the currency’s slide from the all-time-high of nearly $69,000 it hit a year ago.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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Controversial Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele has taken a swipe at the Bank of England and mocked the plummeting price of the pound, less than a year after the institution questioned El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender.

Earlier this week, Bukele simply tweeted “Told you so,” a follow-up to an earlier message from November 2021 in which he said he was concerned about the Bank of England “printing money out of thin air.”

This original message was itself a response to comments from Bank of England chief, Andrew Bailey, who said he was concerned about El Salvador’s bitcoin adoption because users might not be prepared for just how volatile its price could be.

“It concerns me that a country would choose it as its national currency,” Bailey said. “What would worry me most of all is, do the citizens of El Salvador understand the nature and volatility of the currency they have.

He added, “There is a strong case for digital currencies, but in our view it has to be stable, particularly if it’s being used for payments. That is not true for crypto assets.”

However, it appears, for the moment at least, that Bukele is having the last laugh as it’s the UK’s currency that’s currently tanking, falling to historic lows in the wake of prime minister Liz Truss’s sweeping tax cuts.

Bukele’s bitcoin experiment hasn’t been a massive success

Despite Bukele reveling in Bank of England’s woes, there’s still a lot of work for him to do to prove once and for all that his bitcoin experiment has been the success he claims.

When he announced his ambitious plans, he claimed that making bitcoin legal tender would attract investment, create jobs, and “push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction.”

There was even talk about creating a “Bitcoin City” using $1 billion in government bonds.

Read more: Nayib Bukele takes Bitcoin to the United Nations General Assembly

However, a national survey from earlier this year showed that just 20% of El Salvador’s population was using the much-hyped Chivo wallet to make bitcoin payments and around the same percentage of businesses were accepting crypto payments.

Not to mention, despite Bukele’s boasting about “buying the dip,” it’s estimated that coins he spent more than $100 million on are now worth around half that figure.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

The post Told you so: Crypto-loving Bukele rips BoE over struggling pound appeared first on Protos.

“I bring you greetings from the land of surf, volcanoes, coffee, peace, Bitcoin, and freedom.” This is how Nayib Bukele began his speech at United Nations General Assembly, held annually in New York.

Bukele dedicated his speech to “freedom” and used it to invoke the principle of a country’s sovereignty while criticizing rich and strong countries that interfere in the affairs of their smaller and poorer neighbors.

Bukele made his point by likening a poor country to somebody attempting to change the leaking roof of a house while more powerful neighbors pressured them to keep it. This euphemism is likely directed at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the US, as El Salvador struggles to find ways to pay its debt while negotiating for aid.

El Salvador’s government currently owes up to $24 billion in debt, an amount that’s been accumulating exponentially since the military junta seized power in 1979. The IMF is projecting that the country’s debt will grow to $38 billion by 2027, and although it’s praised El Salvador’s recent economic rebound after the Covid pandemic, it has severely crticized  Bukele’s Bitcoin strategy.

Last year, El Salvador introduced legislation that made bitcoin legal tender and has since spent $104 million on 2,301 bitcoin at an aggregate price of around $45,100 per coin. The IMF has criticized these purchases saying that “relying on leverage and thus increasing public debt to invest in bitcoin with the expectations of its continuous rise in price, while also timing the market to acquire bitcoin, is not a permanent solution to ease financing constraints.”

The country also recently announced that it will be using $360 million of its foreign-currency reserves to buy back government bonds at a discount in an attempt to stall fears of default.

Following his speech at the UNGA, Bukele also appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show where the host lauded Bukele’s seemingly-successful war against crime. El Salvador, with a population of only 6.5 million people, was previously considered to be one of the most dangerous places in the world, seeing more than 6,650 murders in 2015 alone.

The murder rate has decreased substantially since then with a total of 1,140 people killed last year. Today, the capital city, San Salvador, ranks as the 24^th most dangerous city in the world just behind Baltimore in the US.

Read more: El Salvador may be broke but it’s still throwing $200M at Bitcoin Beach

Among other things, Bukele discussed with Carlson his threat to stop feeding imprisoned gang members if they continue to order murders from behind bars. He described prisons as headquarters of crime.

What Carlson didn’t mention is that murder rates in El Salvador have been decreasing since 2016 and Bukele came to power in 2019 when the trend in crime was already down. Bukele has ruffled feathers as he announced he’ll be seeking re-election in 2024 despite the constitution saying that the president cannot serve consecutive terms.

Local opposition parties, groups, and human rights organizations have repeatedly criticized and accused Bukele’s government of human rights violations. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos) has criticized the Bukele government for militarizing the state and the police, pointed to the increased cases of disappearances of people, and also noted a serious problem of misogyny, sexism, and discrimination against women and LGBT people throughout society.

Bukele has also instituted emergency powers which he used to incarcerate up to 49,000 people, but despite this, it’s said that he enjoys high approval ratings in his country.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

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