He has swept away checks and balances. His government has made mass arrests. And his lawmakers just rewrote the Constitution to let him lead indefinitely, raising fears that the man who once jokingly called himself the world’s “coolest dictator” isn’t kidding anymore.
But for many Salvadorans, President Nayib Bukele has been a godsend.
By cracking down on gangs, which not long ago gave El Salvador a reputation as the world’s murder capital, Mr. Bukele has instead made his country one of the hemisphere’s safest. Average Salvadorans can walk the streets without fear, let their children play outdoors and run businesses without threats of extortion.
Homicides have dropped from several thousand a year to just over 100, according to the government — a rate lower than Canada’s.
So when lawmakers in Mr. Bukele’s party abolished presidential term limits late last week, Salvadorans were far from uniformly opposed. Mr. Bukele’s success in restoring safety has made him enormously popular, even as his tactics have raised alarms among human rights groups. But the question he seems to face, experts say, is how long that support can last as problems mount beyond the gangs.
“Maybe I’ll feel differently if you ask me in 10 years, I don’t know,” said Cecilia Lemus, who runs a nail salon in San Salvador. “But for today, I have no problem with him being re-elected.”
She added: “I don’t know if this is going to be like Venezuela; I don’t think we’re headed toward being Cuba, though I don’t know.”
Mr. Bukele may have chosen to solidify his power now for several reasons, experts said. His approval ratings are still soaring, his slow economy is humming along, albeit by borrowing heavily from the nation’s pension fund. And President Trump is in office — happy to praise Mr. Bukele after sending him deportees and to dismiss human rights concerns.
A leader who solves a major crisis can “become wildly popular and the population will give you a blank check, for a time,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who studies Latin America.
“Bukele is a smart guy, and he knows that a blank check isn’t forever. He’s had an incredible run, he has so much support, but no leader’s popularity in the history of world has lasted forever,” he added. The electoral overhaul “will protect him for the day that the electorate moves against him.”
Mr. Bukele has sharply criticized Nicaragua and Venezuela for similar moves, but on Sunday, he defended El Salvador’s constitutional overhaul.
Most “developed countries allow the indefinite re-election of their head of government, and no one bats an eye,” he said on social media, drawing a comparison to European parliamentary systems, where in fact lawmakers have the power to remove leaders. “But when a small, poor country like El Salvador tries to do the same, suddenly it’s the end of democracy.”
Mr. Bukele’s security strategy has won him admirers in the region — and a degree of imitation by other leaders battling drug gangs, like those in Costa Rica and Ecuador. But El Salvador’s neighbors largely remained silent after his latest move.
And some Salvadorans are starting to ask for more from Mr. Bukele, including economic growth, basic social programs and help dealing with rising costs.
Mr. Bukele has struggled to make changes economically in particular, experts say, and has not released a comprehensive plan to do so beyond efforts to attract more tourists. Since he came to power in 2019, El Salvador’s growth has lagged behind its neighbors Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Last year, growth slipped to 2.6 percent from 3.5 percent in 2023, and it is expected to stall again this year, at 2.2 percent, according to the World Bank. About a third of the country lives in poverty.
Mr. Bukele may have solidified his power before things could slip further, Mr. Levitsky and other analysts said.
Another factor may be the occupant of the White House.
During the Biden administration, the State Department denounced “significant human rights issues” in El Salvador, spotlighting abuses in prisons following Mr. Bukele’s mass arrests, which have left more than 80,000 people behind bars.
But Mr. Trump has made clear he is not interested in policing human rights abroad, cutting State Department entities that work on those issues. This spring, Mr. Trump sent deportees accused of being gang members to Mr. Bukele’s prison system.
Along with abolishing term limits, the constitutional changes eliminate runoff elections, extend presidential terms to six years from five, and move up the presidential election by two years, to coincide with legislative elections in 2027. If Mr. Bukele is re-elected that year, he will have served for at least 14 years.
A spate of protests this year may have been another driver in cementing Mr. Bukele’s power sooner rather than later. His government has “lost control of the narrative” in recent months, said Noah Bullock, the executive director of Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group whose employees recently fled the country.
First, the government ended a ban on metal mining. The decision, made despite strong public opposition, led to a rare reproach from Catholic bishops, who gathered 250,000 signatures asking for the ban’s reinstatement.
The bishops were ignored, creating what Mr. Bullock called “the sense that this government does what it wants and it imposes its model of development on the population without listening.”
Then a Salvadoran investigative outlet, El Faro, posted video interviews with gang leaders talking about a secret pact with Mr. Bukele’s government to lower the murder rate. Mr. Bukele has long denied any such pact, but the interviews were broadly shared in El Salvador. The government issued arrest warrants for El Faro journalists, who fled the country.
And in May, an agricultural cooperative held a peaceful vigil outside Mr. Bukele’s residence to protest an eviction order that would affect dozens of farming families. Security forces arrested protesters, whom Mr. Bukele accused of being influenced by “globalist NGOs” bent on undermining his government.
“That sequence of events leads to a repressive crackdown that just fundamentally changes the relationship between the regime and the country,” said Mr. Bullock, who said it had created an environment of “fear and self-censorship.”
For the families of young men swept up in the mass arrests, the move to end term limits was particularly worrying.
“It means that now he’ll never give up the presidency,” Reyna Isabel Cornejo said of Mr. Bukele. Her son was arrested at church a year ago for unknown reasons, she said, and she has not heard from him since. Two of her nephews have been imprisoned, too.
She acknowledged that under Mr. Bukele more people visit her pupusa restaurant and that it’s safe to send orders out for delivery. But safety has come at a steep cost, she said.
“He’s done a good job,” Ms. Cornejo said. “But at the same time, behind the good things he’s doing, there’s a lot of evil.”
Mr. Bukele’s move to stay in power should serve as a warning to people in other countries clamoring for a hard-line leader to bring down crime, said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations
“If your government is kind of weak and can’t get things done, and you face these big challenges, maybe you want someone to be a Bukele for a couple years and then return things to normal,” he said. “But the problem is that, often, that’s just not what the Bukeles of the world are interested in doing.”
Annie Correal reports from the U.S. and Latin America for The Times.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
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