This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade.Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-StaceTranscriptNayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he&#39;s an unusual leader for the country in that he&#39;s young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I&#39;m recording this—and in that he&#39;s incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019.He&#39;s also unusual, though, for his policies.He has, for instance, made the crypto-asset Bitcoin legal tender in the country, buying up a bunch of them using government funds, developing a crypto wallet for citizens to use for storing and paying for things with their own digital assets, and he even announced the construction of what he called a bitcoin city, which would be built at the base of a volcano and would use geothermal energy to mine bitcoin, which basically means powering a bunch of powerful computers using the energy produced by the geothermal activity in that region.That gamble hasn&#39;t turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC&#39;s recent decision to allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs to everyday investors in the US—but he bought into the asset when the prices were high and lost a lot of the government&#39;s money on the gamble; it was estimated in late 2023 that El Salvador has lost something like 37% of the money it invested in this way, equivalent to around $45 million; though that&#39;s based on external estimates as the country doesn&#39;t provide transparent figures on this matter, so it could be more or less than that.Bukele has also caused a stir with his freewheeling approach to politics, which some local and international organizations have labeled authoritarian, as he&#39;s shown no compunction about trampling democratic norms in order to get things he wants done, done, and that has included sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to pressure them into approving a loan necessary to militarize the National Civil Police force, he and his party booted the Supreme Court&#39;s justices and the country&#39;s attorney general in an act that has been described as an autogolpe, or self-coup, a move by which the president takes full authoritarian control of his country while in power, he instigated widespread arrests and allowed all sorts of police abuses during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and he and his party have been accused of all manners of corruption—though the attorney general who was investigating twenty such instances of corruption was fired, as I mentioned, so there&#39;s no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that&#39;s led to a shift in the country&#39;s corruption perception in

Ecuador State of Emergency

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