Staging the New City: Urban spectacles and the ecological origins of Nayib Bukele's authoritarian populism

Abstract

This paper analyzes the connections between real estate speculation and authoritarian populism in El Salvador. Focusing on president Nayib Bukele's term as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán (2012–2015), I examine the role speculative urbanism played in the crafting of his profile as a promising politician in the early years of his career. I trace how Bukele instrumentalized the ecosystem of Nuevo Cuscatlán's coffee forest as a means to fund a personalistic populist strategy whose main project called for the construction of a “New City.” This project involved the lifting of barriers to real estate investment to raise funds for social programs and municipal infrastructure. Its flipside was an aggressive process of deforestation and displacement of rural populations. Drawing on urban political ecology and critical agrarian studies, I argue that Bukele's New City project constituted a type of urban spectacle. This urban spectacle was rooted in two socio-ecological dynamics: (1) The use of land as a revenue-raising token of exchange; and (2) The fetishization of urban water infrastructure in the context of water scarcity. The paper concludes with various considerations about the destructive force of the link between authoritarian populism and urban extractivism in rural environments.