What Happened After El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Adopted Bitcoin as the Country’s Legal Currency? With bitcoin prices down more than 50 percent this year, some believe the investment in El Salvador has pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy. Yet blaming the country’s default risk on crypto enthusiasm is wrong: the economic turmoil preceded the investment, and on a much bigger scale. El Salvador’s economy is stretched thin. Total debt is about 90% of GDP, much of which has been accumulated by previous governments or due to pandemic-related spending. But what’s missing from our focus on Bitcoin ? Mr. Bukele has used bitcoin as a weapon to whitewash his government’s growing authoritarianism on the world stage. By spreading his propaganda, Bitcoin believers sell a product and make a fortune at the expense of the rights and livelihoods of the people of El Salvador. The government has regularly used states of emergency to detain 40,000 people in the past three months. Mr. Bukele began a crackdown on press freedom , banning the reproduction of information from gangs through a decree restricting freedom of speech, and his government did not investigate the illegal use of Pegasus spyware to spy on dozens of journalists from independent news outlets covering El Salvador between 2020 and 2021 Behavior. Journalists have fled the country, fearing reprisals for their work. As anyone who has ever been anywhere other than the beaches of El Salvador will clearly see, Mr. Bukele is not building a techno-utopia; he’s building an ordinary authoritarian state in the name of technology. Bitcoin supporters do well to remember that when they cheer Mr. Bukele, they are not leading the technology of the future; they are fueling a regime that violates the human rights of its citizens. If the economic freedom that Bitcoin promises is the only freedom Salvadorans can hope to have, it is worthless to them.
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