El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, is on a roll. At home, he enjoys an approval rating of around 83 percent, according to recent polls. His profile is rising abroad, too. Bukele’s follower count on TikTok alone—10.8 million—is much larger than El Salvador’s population, and a sizeable portion of his social media content is in English.
In the United States, right-wing figures appear to see Bukele as an inspiration—no small feat given El Salvador’s size. After Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. attended Bukele’s second-term inauguration last year, Carlson wrote on X that Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.” U.S. President Donald Trump treated Bukele as a close ally during the Salvadoran leader’s April visit to the White House, calling him “one hell of a president.”
Since Bukele first took office in 2019, he has turned El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas into one of its safest. El Salvador’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.9 per 100,000 people was lower than the United States’ rate in 2023, which was 6.8 per 100,000. But Bukele’s approach to reducing violent crime is controversial.
Bukele initially deployed police and military force against gang members, leading to mass detentions. He escalated his strategy in 2022 by imposing a state of emergency that suspended constitutional rights, which he has since extended more than 30 times. Under Bukele’s orders, security forces detained tens of thousands of people, many without criminal records. Some are sent to a new mega-prison, which is now the world’s largest.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration signed an agreement with El Salvador to send U.S. deportees to the same facility, the Terrorism Confinement Center (known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT), where human rights organization Cristosal has documented rampant abuses.
Bukele also has admirers across Latin America, where violent crime is a persistent issue in many countries. In 2022, Rafael López Aliaga, the mayor of Lima, Peru, said, “Bukele has accomplished a miracle” in reducing El Salvador’s homicide rate, promising to implement similar policies. Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich visited CECOT to better understand what she called Bukele’s “method.”
The presidents of Honduras and Ecuador have emulated parts of Bukele’s playbook by declaring states of emergency and suspending constitutional rights to crack down on crime. Policymakers from the Dominican Republic and Honduras have drawn inspiration from the Bukele administration’s approach to fighting gangs.
Despite all the hype, it is unlikely that other Latin American governments will fully implement Bukele-style policies, as some forecasted. Right-wing politicians in the region more often allude to Bukele as a talking point to burnish a tough-on-crime image than as an actual blueprint for policy. There are four main reasons why.
First, El Salvador is unique in many ways, above all due to its small size. The country’s population of 6.3 million is barely half that of the city of São Paulo. Yet according to human rights groups, Salvadoran authorities have arrested more than 85,000 people for alleged gang ties. Around 110,000 people, or 1.7 percent of El Salvador’s population, are currently held in prison—the highest incarceration rate in the world.
An incarceration rate of such magnitude is not only problematic from a human rights perspective. It would also be unviable in a country such as Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico. If Brazil were to reach El Salvador’s incarceration rate, its prisons would need to house 3.4 million people. Yet even with its current prison population of 830,000—0.4 percent of the country’s total population—Brazil’s facilities are already seriously overcrowded.
El Salvador’s small territory of just over 8,000 square miles is another reminder that the country offers limited lessons to the rest of Latin America. Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, whose security policies seem at least partially inspired by Bukele, has been dismissive when faced with comparisons to the Central American leader, pointing out that El Salvador is akin to a mid-sized province in Ecuador.
Second, a key reason that Bukele has been able to quell Salvadoran gangs for now is that they are weaker than cartels elsewhere in Latin America. Though gangs such as MS-13 have gained significant media attention in the United States, they do not compare to Brazilian cartels such as the First Capital Command, which operate across Latin America and have ties to criminal organizations in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The same is true of Mexican cartels, which boast global reach and billions of dollars in estimated revenue and sophisticated military equipment—and have penetrated the country’s government.
History shows that Bukele’s iron-fisted policies are unlikely to work against criminal organizations in other countries. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón employed an aggressive and militarized strategy, somewhat comparable to Bukele’s, when he declared war against cartels in 2006. Though Calderón did not officially suspend due process, Mexican authorities frequently ignored it, arresting and allegedly torturing thousands of people, according to human rights groups.
Calderón’s approach had serious long-term consequences for human rights and the rule of law in Mexico. The effect of his policies was the opposite of Bukele’s: Rather than quelling violence, Calderón’s crackdown led to an ongoing conflict that has worsened insecurity and claimed thousands of casualties.
Applying the Bukele strategy in countries such as Colombia or Peru could produce an outcome closer to what occurred in Mexico than in El Salvador. Policymakers in those countries know this. For now, regional leaders are happy to reap the political benefits of pro-Bukele rhetoric without facing the consequences of similar policies.
Third, Bukele’s policies have had serious ramifications for El Salvador’s democracy. To enable his sweeping crackdown, he has systematically destroyed checks and balances, eroded due process, and made agreements with gangs to influence voter turnout in crime-controlled areas. Following his unconstitutional election to a second term in 2024—El Salvador’s constitution explicitly prohibits reelection, but Bukele ran anyway—Bukele’s party now controls all three branches of government.
Criticizing the Salvadoran government is dangerous. Former National Security Advisor Alejandro Muyshondt was arrested in August 2023 after publicly accusing Bukele of corruption. When his body was handed over to his family six months later, after Muyshondt died in custody, there were signs of signs of torture. Last month, Salvadoran police arrested Ruth López, a prominent human rights lawyer and anti-corruption activist. Another Bukele critic, constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya, was arrested in early June.
Seeing this pattern of retaliation, journalists who criticized Bukele have fled the country. The country’s top investigative newspaper, El Faro, moved its headquarters to Costa Rica in 2023.
Taken as a whole, the Bukele model has transformed El Salvador into a police state—a “Cuba of the right,” as Will Freeman, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote. Bukele’s policies are only feasible if governments severely and permanently undermine democracy and individual rights, effectively converting to authoritarianism. Though some Latin American voters may be wooed by promises of iron-fisted security policies, the negative implications of Bukele’s model are becoming more visible.
Finally, predictions that Bukele’s approach will spread across Latin America are often based on the assumption that violence in the region is getting worse. Though that is true in some countries—such as Ecuador, Chile, and Peru—homicide rates in other countries have actually fallen in recent years. In Brazil, for example, the murder rate has been declining since 2017 and is today 20 percent lower than a decade ago. In Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, homicides have also fallen since 2015. Crime will undoubtedly remain an issue in Latin American politics, but it is not preordained to increase.
Beyond the viability of Bukele’s policies, his supposed success in cracking down on crime comes with a few asterisks.
Though El Salvador’s murder rate was one of the highest in the world just a decade ago—at more than 100 per 100,000 people—it had already declined dramatically to about half of that when Bukele became president in 2018. Even so, the further drop in homicides that Bukele achieved during his first years in government may not have been driven by mass incarceration, as he claims. Both El Faro and the U.S. government have alleged that shortly after Bukele came to power he secretly negotiated a truce with gangs such as MS-13 in exchange for political support and reduced violence.
A May editorial in El Faro pointed out that Bukele may have collaborated with gangs even prior to becoming president, writing that “[t]he gangs began working with Bukele during his campaign for mayor of San Salvador” in 2015. Óscar Martínez, the newspaper’s editor in chief, recently argued that it was “impossible to understand Bukele’s rise to total power without his association with gangs.” Bukele has denied that such negotiations took place.
Bukele’s government has also undercounted homicides since the state of emergency began in 2022, Jeremy Giles wrote in Foreign Policy last year. InSight Crime noted that El Salvador changed how it counts homicides in 2019, a year after Bukele took office; authorities no longer count those killed in altercations with security forces or bodies found in mass graves.
Salvadoran voters may also not admire Bukele and his policies as much as his approval rating indicates. FP’s Catherine Osborn reported last month about a recent poll in El Salvador, in which 65 percent of respondents said that they feared they could face consequences if they expressed political opinions freely. The results suggest that Bukele’s “popularity numbers could be inflated,” Osborn wrote.
While Bukele has undoubtedly been successful at reducing violence in El Salvador, there is ample reason to believe that he has not been transparent about his methods. Bukele may continue to curate his personal brand among his right-wing followers, but it is increasingly clear to the rest of the world that his hard-line approach to crime comes with serious collateral damage. No country is likely to copy El Salvador anytime soon.
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