APOPA, El Salvador — Victor Barahona was grateful when soldiers started rounding up gang members who had long terrorized this working-class city. No longer would his grandchildren pass drug deals or be startled from sleep by the crack of gunfire.
But when El Salvador’s military started hauling away neighbors Barahona knew had no connection to the gangs, he spoke out, criticizing the arrests on his community radio program.
Soon after, police rapped on his door. Barahona said he was handcuffed and sent to prison, with no access to lawyers, no contact with family and no clear sense of the charges against him.
He recalls seeing inmates being tortured and guards hauling dead bodies from cells while he lived on meager portions of noodles and beans. He would later lodge a complaint with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
When he was released almost a year later — 70 pounds lighter, and with no explanation — Barahona was alarmed to see that President Nayib Bukele was winning global praise for bringing peace and prosperity to El Salvador, with his iron-fist security strategy heralded by American conservatives such as President Trump.
A 43-year-old former adman first elected in a landslide in 2019, Bukele has been largely successful in rebranding El Salvador from a poor backwater plagued by murderous gangs into an innovative and safe nation that he compares to Singapore. In prolific social media posts, he presents himself like a tech CEO: a disrupter-in-chief willing to break norms and create what he terms a “new history.”
But for all his modern trappings — his embrace of Bitcoin, TikTok and slick promotional videos — Bukele’s critics say he’s just following the playbook of previous Latin American strongmen, including the military leaders who ruled El Salvador as a dictatorship from 1931 until the early 1980s.
Bukele jails opponents, fires judges and has been been implicated in corruption. He pushed for a court decision that paved the way for his reelection even though the country’s constitution prohibits it. Last week, he launched a crackdown on nonprofits, calling for 30% of their donations to be taxed.
“He’s not a divergence,” said Noah Bullock, the director of Cristosal, a human rights group. “He governs in the same way as past dictators and uses the same instruments of power. It’s a regime that tortures and kills and disseminates fear.”
There is little doubt that Bukele’s mass arrests starting in 2022 helped dismantle the gangs that once held this country in a chokehold. And for that, most Salvadorans are thankful.
But as part of his security push — which included asking Salvadorans to denounce suspected “terrorists” via an anonymous tip line — tens of thousands of innocent people were wrongfully detained, human rights groups say.
While polls show that most Salvadorans support Bukele, they also show that a majority fear retribution if they express their views.
“We used to be afraid of the gangs,” Barahona said as he walked through Apopa, where rifle-toting soldiers are posted every few blocks. “Now,” he said, “we’re afraid of the state.”
Favorite of the American right
More and more, Bukele’s El Salvador is a model for the American right.
He got a rock-star welcome at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, where participants chanted his name and he warned U.S. leaders to fight “dark forces … taking over your country.”
“The people of El Salvador have woken up,” he said. “And so can you.”
Marco Rubio, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump Jr. have made pilgrimage to El Salvador, and Republican commentator Tucker Carlson said Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.” Elon Musk insists that El Salvador’s crackdown “needs to happen and will happen in America.”
President Trump seems eager to replicate many Bukele strategies. An ongoing state of emergency declared by Bukele has suspended civil liberties, including due process. The White House announced it is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to challenge their detention by the government.
In March, the Trump administration paid Bukele millions of dollars to house hundreds of American deportees in one of its infamous prisons. Trump and Bukele have refused to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the U.S. acknowledges was improperly deported.
Trump and Bukele share a disregard for democratic norms, with Bukele describing himself as a “philosopher king” and “world’s coolest dictator.” Trump says he has not ruled out seeking a prohibited third term and posted a quote online attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Their affinity was clear at their meeting last month in the Oval Office. Sitting next to Trump, Bukele acknowledged that while thousands of prisoners in El Salvador may have had their rights violated, “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.”
“Who gave him that line?” Trump responded. “Do you think I can use that?”
“Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate,” Bukele said. “But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works, right?”
Attracting investment, silencing critics
San Salvador, a lush city that lies in the shadow of a dormant volcano, has been buzzing in recent years with the clatter of construction.
The country’s main hospital is getting a facelift, and crews are renovating colonial buildings. A new library donated by China looms over the central square, where children splash in a fountain and boleros play from speakers hidden among trees.
Bukele has promoted the changes here and along the Pacific Coast, now a surfing mecca, as evidence that El Salvador is thriving. Last year, the country welcomed a record 3.9 million tourists, including cryptocurrency evangelists drawn by Bukele’s short-lived experiment in making Bitcoin legal tender.
But while he has spent big on cosmetic changes, Bukele has slashed budgets for health and education. Dozens of schools and community clinics have been shuttered.
Ivan Solano Leiva, the director of El Salvador’s medical association, said Bukele has emphasized “constructing an image” over meeting basic needs. As Bukele touted the purchase of state-of-the art hospital equipment, wait times to see specialists lengthened, Solano said, and doctors have been pressured not to write prescriptions because of drug shortages.
“What’s the point of having the latest technology if I don’t have enough staff to operate it?” he said.
Bukele has beefed up state-owned news outlets, which broadcast pro-Bukele content and have prominent social media influencers on their payrolls.
But behind TikToks touting improvements lie bleak statistics.
The poverty rate rose from 26.8% in 2019 to 30.3% in 2023. The country has the lowest levels of economic growth and foreign investment in of all of Central America, worse even than nearby Nicaragua, a dictatorship that has been pummeled by U.S. sanctions.
While Bukele can claim some impressive projects, like a towering new Google office in San Salvador, the shaky rule of law has spooked other investors, said an adviser to foreign companies who spoke on the condition of anonymity: “They feel too much risk.”
The perils for businesses were clear this month, after a highway renovation disrupted traffic and Bukele declared on X that transportation would be free nationwide.
When some bus companies failed to comply, Bukele ordered the arrests of 16 company owners on charges of sabotage. They remain in jail.
On a recent scorching afternoon, Erica Mendoza, 42, was waiting for a bus with her disabled husband. Mendoza, who earns about $8 a day, said she was grateful for the help with bus fare, and said she didn’t expect Bukele to solve El Salvador’s long-standing economic problems over night.
“If there’s money we eat, if there’s not, we don’t,” she said. “This is life and we’re used to it.”
Accusations of corruption
Instead of residing in the national palace, Bukele lives in a modern home in a luxury compound called Los Sueños: The Dreams.
In recent years, his government has bought up multiple lots in the neighborhood to build what government officials say will be a new presidential residence.
Enrique Anaya, a constitutional attorney who has criticized Bukele’s mass firings of judges and suspension of rights, said it’s clear that “his mission is clearly to stay in power as long as possible and to make himself scandalously rich.”
A recent investigation by the journalist Jaime Quintanilla revealed that Bukele and his family purchased 34 properties valued at more than $9 million during his first presidential term.
Bukele, who ran as an anti-corruption crusader, vowing to break with past leaders on the left and right implicated in graft, has denied insinuations that he has enriched himself in office, calling critics “imbeciles.”
But for some, the case is another example of the wide gap between the image of El Salvador that Bukele is selling and reality.
The is significant evidence that Bukele’s biggest accomplishment of all — reducing crime in El Salvador — wasn’t just the result of his punishing security strategy.
Journalists and U.S. officials say that during Bukele’s first term, his administration negotiated with gangs to bring down killings and generate votes for his party.
In 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions against Bukele’s vice minister of justice and a top presidential aide for cutting deals with leaders of the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs.
This month, the news site El Faro published a video that showed a gang member known as El Charly say he received money from Bukele’s party for votes.
It’s unclear whether everyday Salvadorans care how exactly peace was achieved.
Andrés Hernández, 50, was forced to abandon his home in Apopa 15 years ago because the gangs were trying to recruit his young son. “We suffered so much,” he said. “Finally, we can breathe.”
Hernández said he hopes to vote for Bukele for a third term. “I want him to stay — forever.”
Juan Meléndez, director of the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy in El Salvador, said many of his compatriots seem “open to exchanging their rights for security.” It’s something he attributes to the country’s long history of authoritarian rule. Democracy, he said, was an abstract concept to many Salvadorans, while safer streets was a concrete benefit.
Meanwhile, about 110,000 people, nearly 2% of El Salvador’s population, languish in jail. One of them is René Mauricio Tadeo Serrano, 37, who was arrested in 2022 while working at a factory in the coastal province of Libertad.
It has been nearly three years since his mother, María Serrano, 60, has heard from him. She has diabetes but walks the streets daily in search of work laundering clothing to pay for the $150 monthly package family members must buy so their loved ones in jail can have basic items like toilet paper and soap. On a recent morning, Serrano stood outside the prosecutor’s office begging for information on her son’s case, alongside dozens of other mothers whose children have disappeared.
She thinks it’s only a matter of time before more people see the cost of Bukele’s rule. “It’s a lie that we’re free in El Salvador,” she said. “The people who are in favor of him haven’t had their hearts broken yet.”
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