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Why is El Salvador now allowing indefinite presidential re-election?
(peoplesdispatch.org)
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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No.
I am saying that a country with a functional judiciary is categorically different than one without.
Saying democratic countries with laws you dislike are the same as a country where the state is unrestrained by law is utter nonsense.
Edit: To put it very simply, in both places you could be arrested for social media posts. In El Salvador, that could be the last anyone hears of you. In the other, you have a lawyer, a fair trial and if you lose, you still have some human rights.
I know which I'd prefer.
To unsimplify it, in both places you will have your civil liberties violated when you are arrested for making bad posts. In El Salvador, that's it. Game over. In the other you have a lawyer and a trial and other various rights, so you don't disappear.
But, your civil liberties are still violated when you get arrested for posting. That doesn't go away just because there is a process to ameliorate the harm, even if you win your court case your civil liberties were still violated! You also probably won't win in court if you are guilty of bad posts, despite the fact that the law is absurd. The government letting you have your day in court after already violating your rights and then finding you guilty anyway doesn't really mean civil liberties are protected.
The country you prefer to live in is entirely irrelevant to the actual question: are civil liberties being violated?
And they clearly are.
By that logic, you are in all likelihood no better than any of the child rapists at Epstein's island. Why? Well, children mined the cobalt in your phone and you're probably wearing some sweatshop clothes.
Both the child rapists and you are harming children. Whether one is raping children or just buying stuff that comes with child harns is irrelevant, both are hurting kids.
Do you see how goddamn silly an argument you are making? Yes, neither is a utopia but there is a fundamental difference between a government acting in accordance due process enacting laws and the government disappearing people.
"No better"
You keep trying to make this relative, but that's moving the goal posts. Originally you just said that other countries have civil liberties, which makes them categorically different from El Salvador and so it's okay to have indefinite reelections.
But, the reality is that civil liberties are also being violated by those other countries, so your original argument doesn't work. The truth is that those other countries are trampling on civil liberties too, and it's getting worse over time. It's not just Trump! It's everywhere, and some are farther along the slippery slope than others.
Maybe they shouldn't have indefinite reelections either. It doesn't seem to be helping at any rate.
Or maybe indefinite reelections don't actually matter and it's not worth focusing on it.
But to just declare El Salvador as fundamentally different is clearly wrong. The difference is of degree, not kind.
Is your position that you are not categorically different than a child rapist? That difference in the harms you both cause to children is of degree, not kind? And thus should be treated or considered the same?