LETTER FROM SAN SALVADOR
This is one of the achievements that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has most promoted on his social networks with a lot of drone images. However, this is not the Terrorism Containment Center (Cecot), the largest prison in Central America, reserved for gang members, which he has also shown many times on video, but a cultural work.
In November 2023, the Head of State inaugurated a new national library, the Binaes, also defined as “the largest and most modern in Central America”, open twenty-four hours a day and every day of the year. Nayib Bukele hastened to clarify that this continuous opening was possible “thanks to the security that now reigns in the country” after the incarceration of nearly seventy-five thousand pandilleros (gang members).
Re-elected on February 4, the ultra-popular Nayib Bukele, during his campaign, made this library a valuable tool for promoting his image as a “coolest president in the world”. The building is one of four projects offered to El Salvador by China. Under the mandate of former Salvadoran President Salvador Sánchez Cerén (2014-2019), El Salvador severed relations with Taiwan in 2018 and recognized People’s China as “one and indivisible”.
The following year, after the election of Nayib Bukele, China financed four pieces of infrastructure in El Salvador: a football stadium, a port, a water treatment plant and a national library – projects chosen by the brand new president, then aged 37. “China is thus showing El Salvador, but also countries in the region which continue to recognize Taiwan, such as Guatemala and Belize, that they can count on its help. These gifts respond to purely political interests to weaken Taiwan,” recalls researcher Marisela Connelly, a China specialist at the Africa and Asia Studies Center at Colmex University in Mexico.
Video games, ball pits and “Star Wars”
Located in the heart of the historic center of San Salvador, the capital, the national library with its seven floors punctuated by strips of light, stands out alongside the National Theater,
the National Palace and the cathedral. Beijing entrusted this $54 million project to the Chinese construction company Yanjian Group, which has already carried out twenty-eight cooperation projects for its government around the world. According to Salvadoran Deputy Minister of Culture, Eric Doradea, heritage services collaborated on the plan and the library presents “a certain number of elements of our culture, in particular its pyramidal shape which evokes the mounds of pre-Columbian ceremonial centers”.
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