In May 2020, during the height of Covid, El Salvador was under a military-enforced lockdown. At a news conference, I asked President Nayib Bukele a straightforward question about meeting with the business community about reopening the economy. Mr. Bukele bristled and criticized the founder of El Faro, the news outlet where I work.
Afterward, I received death threats from Mr. Bukele’s supporters. One that still stands out was written on Twitter by someone outside the country: “I want to go back to El Salvador so badly and shoot you 3 times in the head so you stop being a fool.”
The reaction was typical of a certain strain of Mr. Bukele’s followers, who treat criticism of the president as an unforgivable sin. After six years, he is still wildly popular, with a national approval rating of over 80 percent. Much of the diaspora is devoted to him as well. While the idealized version of him — an efficient, eloquent leader who has reduced crime in the country and is committed to fighting corruption — sounds great, the reality is that he is a mercurial and unrestrained politician who controls every institution at the expense of the country’s democracy.
Now he has become President Trump’s jailer, welcoming deportees from the United States to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s brutal prison system. Venezuelan and American families, whose loved ones have been sent to these prisons, are now going through what many families here have gone through since Mr. Bukele came to power — feeling the terrifying arbitrariness of his regime, his self-interested way of ruling, his cruelty. Many are now realizing what some of us have warned people about for years: that even if Mr. Bukele has ironically called himself the “coolest dictator in the world,” he’s a dictator nonetheless.
The so-called Bukele model of national security is built on thousands of cases like that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was improperly expelled to El Salvador in March. In 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a state of exception — still in effect — to weaken the country’s powerful gangs and lower the soaring crime and murder rate.
It has also eroded Salvadorans’ constitutional rights, and thousands of people with no criminal records have been arrested in a sweeping operation that eventually dismantled the gangs’ territorial control and drastically reduced homicides. Since the state of exception began, around 80,000 people have been arrested and imprisoned in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele admitted last year that 8,000 innocent people were arrested and released in the sweep, but civil society groups say the number is much higher.
Mr. Bukele has been a prominent figure in El Salvador’s political scene since 2012, when he became the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a town roughly the size of the Los Angeles International Airport. As mayor, he donated his salary for college scholarships and promised he would attract a billion dollars of investment to the town. (He didn’t.) In 2015 he was elected mayor of San Salvador, the capital, where he endeared himself to voters by criticizing both his own political party and the opposition for the country’s endemic violence and corruption. In 2019 he ran for president on an anticorruption platform and was elected with 53 percent of the vote — over 20 percentage points more than his closest opponent.
One of the first things Mr. Bukele did after taking office was start a security plan to send members of the police and military to gang-controlled neighborhoods. Eight months into his presidency, he stormed the Legislative Assembly, surrounded by armed troops, to pressure opposition lawmakers into approving a loan for his administration to buy surveillance cameras, tactical gear and a helicopter for the plan. The loan wasn’t approved, but after Mr. Bukele’s party secured a legislative supermajority in 2021 midterms, lawmakers gave it the green light.
He also took aim at the judiciary: After the midterms, lawmakers replaced five Supreme Court justices with justices favorable to him, and in August 2021 the legislature approved changes to purge one-third of El Salvador’s judges, helping him consolidate control over the three branches of government.
Then Mr. Bukele declared the countrywide state of exception. Key constitutional rights, including the right to an attorney and the need for a warrant to tap personal communications, were quickly disregarded. The government arrested thousands of people in ways that at times seemed random. But the crackdown caused homicides to plummet to just under 500 that year from 2,398 deaths in 2019. People who lived under the gangs’ control for almost two decades were relieved to get their lives back — to be able to get home from work safely or take their kids to the playground.
Though more than 36 percent of Salvadorans knew someone who had been imprisoned unfairly, most people didn’t push back. They exchanged theoretical rights — like due process — for immediate results, like personal safety. And so after Mr. Bukele’s appointed justices interpreted the Constitution to allow him to run for a second term, he won the 2024 presidential elections in a landslide with 85 percent of the vote.
Today Mr. Bukele’s broken promises are everywhere. During his first presidential campaign, he vowed to protest alongside the students of the University of El Salvador — the country’s only publicly funded university — to reform the education system. Instead his administration has withheld over $30 million budgeted for the institution. In 2022 he promised to renovate 5,000 schools in five years, but as of October 2024, only 424 schools have been completed. He also proposed that El Salvador build a new, prosperous economy based on Bitcoin, but this year Bitcoin was eliminated as a form of legal tender because of a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
Now Mr. Bukele’s transgressions are no longer confined to El Salvador’s borders. He’s mocked U.S. court orders and trolled American politicians. “Oopsie … Too late,” he quipped on X after a judge ordered a halt to the first deportation flights of Venezuelans to El Salvador. He also recently published pictures of Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland visiting Mr. Abrego Garcia in a Salvadoran prison, saying the two sipped margaritas during their meeting. Mr. Van Hollen said that the drinks on the table had been placed there and that neither he nor Mr. Abrego Garcia had drunk them.
The Trump administration has reportedly agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million for the deportees to be sent to Salvadoran prisons. Mr. Bukele said the money would help make the country’s prison system, which he says costs $200 million a year, self-sustainable. Besides the money, it’s unclear what El Salvador gets from becoming a global punchline and a place of punishment in American politics. The country is not exempt from Mr. Trump’s tariffs, nor has he introduced any immigration relief measures for Salvadorans.
But Mr. Bukele seems to be getting something out of this. The U.S. State Department recently improved El Salvador’s travel advisory to Level 1 — the same as Norway’s and New Zealand’s — despite its admission that several U.S. and other foreign citizens have been detained under the state of exception. The State Department also certified in April that the Salvadoran government is strengthening the rule of law, improving transparency and protecting human rights defenders and journalists.
Mr. Bukele’s administration has also been accused of secretly negotiating with the gang MS-13. According to a federal U.S. indictment, the gang agreed to kill fewer people on the streets in exchange for various promises, including financial benefits and less restrictive prison conditions from his government. At least one witness, whose testimony could have implicated Mr. Bukele, was among those returned to El Salvador on a deportation flight.
Mr. Bukele has repeatedly denied these allegations, but in 2021 the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on two officials in his administration, including the director of prisons, for the roles they reportedly had in the negotiations. On Thursday, El Faro published an interview with a gang leader from Barrio 18, an MS-13 rival, about the negotiations that Mr. Bukele was accused of having with gangs. The gang leader said officials from Mr. Bukele’s administration asked for political support and took him inside a maximum-security prison to meet with jailed gang leaders.
Before Mr. Bukele’s party replaced El Salvador’s attorney general in 2021, members of his administration were under criminal investigation by the attorney general’s office in connection with allegations of pacts with the gangs and other cases of corruption. After Mr. Bukele’s administration shut down the investigation, a senior official who headed an anticorruption unit in the office went into self-imposed exile, as did other prosecutors who had been investigating government corruption.
Today there are no judicial orders, no legislative inquiries and no criminal investigations in El Salvador that pose a real threat to the president. He made sure of that, stacking the Supreme Court with judges who support him and interpret the Constitution according to his will.
Mr. Bukele remains a popular figure, but he has set everything in place for the moment that changes. It’s too late for Salvadorans to worry about checks and balances. But Americans still have time.
Nelson Rauda Zablah is the digital content editor for the investigative site El Faro. He has covered politics in El Salvador since 2013.
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