Term Limits Fall as Leaders Tighten Their Grip

El Salvador’s 2025 constitutional reforms removed presidential term limits, opening the way for Nayib Bukele to seek a third consecutive term. Brazil, by contrast, retains its limit on consecutive presidencies. The difference raises a blunt question: can voters meaningfully replace leaders when those in power rewrite the rules around themselves?

The ballot box and the apparatus

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term overall and his second in a row on Oct. 25, 2026. Two days later, El Salvador opened the campaign for elections in which Bukele will seek a third consecutive term. El Salvador’s 2025 reforms removed presidential term limits entirely; Brazil’s limit remains in place.

Guatemala, Mexico and Argentina are also scheduled to vote in 2027, as frustration grows across the region over insecurity and poor public services. The article contrasts leaders judged by immediate results with institutions that can outlast them. Supporters of decisive leadership say voters should be free to reward governments that deliver. Critics warn that concentrating power and weakening institutional safeguards can undermine democratic continuity. The hard question is whether electoral competition remains genuine—and whether citizens can replace those in power.

In El Salvador, the government’s crackdown on gangs coincided with a steep fall in reported homicides. InSight Crime put the rate at 51 per 100,000 residents in 2018, the year before Bukele took office, and 1.3 in 2025, the lowest in the region. Honduras recorded 23.2 and Guatemala 17.4 in 2025. In Nicaragua, where the article says authoritarian rule has eliminated government transparency, InSight Crime couldn’t find a reliable figure.

Those numbers come with a warning: delivering results isn’t the same as building institutions that can sustain them. The article proposes emergency powers that expire automatically after a fixed period, with renewals requiring a legislative vote and independent judicial review. It also proposes restoring ordinary legal procedures as conditions improve. Changes to presidential term limits, it says, could require approval by two successive legislatures or a national referendum and apply only to future presidents. These are proposed restraints within existing political structures, not reforms already adopted.

When power outlasts its promises

Guatemala’s Jorge Ubico governed from 1931 to 1944 and is remembered for public works and fiscal discipline. The article also says he concentrated political power, restricted civil liberties and maintained coercive labor practices that weighed most heavily on rural and Indigenous populations. Opposition forced him out in 1944. Public works remained, but institutions capable of building a lasting national consensus did not. The Democratic Spring rested on that weak foundation; its reversal after the 1954 coup deepened divisions that led to the internal armed conflict in 1960.

Venezuela’s record offers another warning about gains tied to a leader and a resource boom. Poverty fell from nearly half the population in 1999 to less than a quarter in 2012, according to the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. The article says an oil boom underpinned those gains, while Hugo Chávez spent the windfall and dismantled institutions that might have protected the country when the boom ended. Chávez’s allies packed the Supreme Court with loyalists in 2004, and the state oil company became an arm of his political movement. By 2024, nearly 8 million Venezuelans had emigrated, according to the U.N. refugee agency. The article attributes the ensuing collapse to several causes, including the 2014 fall in oil prices, while tracing its roots to the system Chávez built.

A summit with an election in the room

Argentina’s President Javier Milei returned to Madrid on Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, for the Ibero-American Summit after urging Spaniards to vote out Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Milei had called Sánchez a “disgraceful dictator” and told Spaniards to “kick out” his Socialists in the Nov. 29 election. Sánchez has turned Milei’s insults and sweeping cuts to public spending in Argentina into a campaign rallying cry against what he called a “reactionary international” that also includes Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sánchez trailed in most polls to the Partido Popular, which was predicted to win the most seats but fall short of a majority. Vox could become kingmaker; Milei met with Vox in October. Spanish government sources said Milei wasn’t expected to meet Sánchez privately or see King Felipe VI during the summit. Political theater crossed borders as the organizers tried to relaunch a forum whose previous gathering in Ecuador in 2024 drew four heads of state and ended without a final declaration.

Seven Latin American presidents were expected at this year’s summit, while Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazil’s newly re-elected veteran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were absent. Organizers were still negotiating the final declaration, which was expected to focus on cooperation on disasters and civil protection, as well as artificial intelligence. The article says security can give families, communities and civic organizations room to rebuild, and that lasting progress requires civic space for supporters and dissenters alike. It offers no account of direct action, mutual aid or community-led organizing at the summit or in response to these political disputes.