First the soldiers came for those with mohawks. Then they came for the hairdressers themselves.
“They were good kids,” quips the narrator in one of the latest tales by the Salvadorian author Michelle Recinos, “although I’d never trusted them with my hair.”
The roundup unfolds in Barberos en huelga (Barbers on Strike), a short story in Recinos’s new book, in which she chronicles a nation’s descent into repression and paranoia.
The disturbing satire is set in a fictional place called San Carlos. But her real-life inspiration is obvious to anyone who has been following the 17-month crackdown in the writer’s ever-more-authoritarian home, El Salvador.
And the critique appears to have upset the country’s government.
Recinos’s collection of short stories was due to be featured at a recent book fair in neighbouring Guatemala celebrating Salvadorian literature. But, according to the author and her publisher, her appearance was cancelled after pressure from El Salvador’s embassy.
“We want to stress our disappointment with the position of the Salvadorian government, which we believe limits freedom of expression as well as freedom of publication,” Recinos’s Guatemala-based publisher said in a statement.
“Is it a bummer? Yes, it bloody is,” the prize-winning Salvadorian author complained on Twitter. “Will they silence us? Nope.”
The literary furor comes amid mounting concern over El Salvador’s authoritarian drift under its president, Nayib Bukele, who on Sunday announced he would seek re-election next February, despite that being outlawed by the constitution.
Nearly 70,000 people have been thrown in jail since Bukele launched his controversial “war on gangs” in February 2022 – many for simply acting or looking suspicious. Human rights activists say more than 150 prisoners have died and have accused Bukele’s administration of shredding human rights and the country’s democracy in his supposed bid to obliterate the gangs.
In her diary-like yarn, Recinos paints a sinister portrait of an increasingly autocratic land, where armoured vehicles and troops occupy the streets and hardly a day goes by without reports of new arrests: bus conductors, restaurant workers, shopkeepers and athletes – all spirited into custody for falling foul of the regime.
“Today the baker didn’t come by. He was picked up in a raid … two blocks from here,” Recinos’s narrator writes on day 22 in her fictional journal, 24 hours before her barber is jailed.
“This country gets more stupid by the day,” the narrator laments after that arrest. “We are getting more stupid by the day.”
The author declined to talk more about her work and what she called the recent “dark chapter”. But in an interview last year with the Guatemalan website Agencia Ocote, Recinos said her story had been inspired by Bukele’s draconian state of emergency and was designed to expose the situation in her homeland. “Perhaps in 50 years, if El Salvador still exists, people will read it and think: ‘Hey! … These things really were happening,” she said.
Writing on Twitter, Recinos called her book a portrait “of certain realities, as painful as they are Central American … It ISN’T a pamphlet to overthrow any particular government,” she insisted.
Bukele’s clampdown has caused crime rates to plummet and made El Salvador’s president wildly popular with many of the country’s 6 million citizens, about 1% of whom have been jailed. He is widely expected to win another five-year term.
“You write DEMOCRACY from the bottom up,” Bukele, whose Twitter handle designates him El Salvador’s “Philosopher King”, tweeted after Sunday’s announcement, pointing to his sky-high popularity among violence-weary voters.
(In a previous Twitter bio, Bukele sarcastically claimed the title of “the coolest dictator in the world”.)
The crackdown has also earned Bukele foreign fans, with conservative politicians and media outlets across Latin America hailing the “Bukele effect”. Last December, Honduras declared its own Bukele-style state of exception while one of Colombia’s leading news magazines, Semana, recently published a fawning front-page tribute to “the Bukele Miracle”.
Recinos’s short story suggests such tactics are unlikely to have a happy ending.
On the 60th and final day of her chronicle, the narrator’s boss asks her to head to the barber’s for a crewcut, “because here a haircut could make you an upstanding citizen, or it could land you in jail”.
The narrator’s usual haircutter is in prison, and another has gone missing. But at a downtown barbershop called “Hope”, she finds a soldier shaving customers’ heads.
“It’s for your own good,” the serviceman murmurs.
The narrator braces: “I was up next.”
