El Salvador Is a Terrorized State Under Nayib Bukele
His brutal authoritarianism is a threat to innocent civilians just like the gangs it is allegedly fighting
El Salvador became the bloodiest country in the Western world in 2015. Its murder rate eclipsed 100 homicides for every 100,000 inhabitants, a figure more characteristic of a failed state than a modern democracy. Not since the mid-1990s had the country been this violent, and the principal reason for the spike was the gangs, namely, MS-13, originally founded in the U.S. in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants, and Barrio 18, or 18th Street, its equally barbaric rival. The two had effectively turned much of the country into a war zone.
Nearly a decade later, Nayib Bukele, the 43-year-old, twice-elected sitting president of El Salvador, has all but neutralized the gangs’ public violence. In 2023, El Salvador recorded 2.4 homicides for every 100,000 individuals, a stunning 2,213% decline seemingly. (More on this later.) Bukele’s anti-gang crackdowns have won him unprecedented support at home, and admirers and imitators abroad, including culture warriors and crypto boosters on the American right.
But these gains have come at a cost: he has defied Supreme Court rulings, ousted justices and officials who stood in his way, reconstituted the judiciary with loyalists, deployed the military to pressure lawmakers, enacted changes to the legislative assembly to consolidate his power, circumvented constitutional constraints on presidential term limits so that he can remain in office, engaged in politically motivated prosecutions of rivals, invoked emergency powers to dispense with due process and weaken accountability measures that would otherwise keep the police and military in check, maintained these emergency powers active indefinitely, eroded press freedoms, facilitated human rights abuses, turned prisons into torture chambers, detained untold scores of innocents, and turned El Salvador into the most aggressive carceral state in the world.
In short, Bukele’s government has toppled El Salvador’s gangs by functionally becoming one itself.
El Salvador On the Brink
Not too long ago, the whole of El Salvador was engulfed in gang warfare. Not just in urban centers, even in rural areas gangs would collect their “tax” from business owners. But in cities, going out at night in San Salvador, the nation’s capital, could mean risking life and limb. Young women feared being claimed as a gang member’s “girlfriend,” a fate from which there was little hope of escape. A San Salvador priest who works with at-risk youth described the gangs’ treatment of women this way: “I wouldn’t even call it sexist. … [I]t’s neolithic. Women are objects to be used and discarded. A gang member can kill his woman for the smallest detail or suspicion. He can easily beat her to death and pick another girl.”
Young men, for their part, understood that refusing to join a gang could be a death sentence. A New York Times dispatch in August of 2015 described the gangs’ stranglehold on the country this way:
Their presence is everywhere in the neighborhoods where they sow fear. They extort shopkeepers and delivery trucks, they sell drugs, they drive those suspected of being informants from their homes and protect turf so fiercely that children living in one gang’s territory cannot cross into a rival’s to go to school.
In addition, corruption ran deep in the police and government, and the two relevant political parties, ARENA (the conservatives) and FMLN (the leftists), did little to curb it. A truce among the gangs negotiated by the Minister of Public Security with the help of the Catholic Church in 2012 lasted two years, but by mid-2014 the truce had lapsed, and the gangs quickly made up for lost time by more than doubling the murder rate.
The Bukele Era Begins
Then, in 2019, Bukele, a young, internet-savvy mayor of San Salvador of mixed religious and ethnic ancestry—his mother, a Catholic native Salvadoran; his father, a Muslim first-generation Palestinian-Salvadoran whose parents emigrated from Bethlehem—ran for president and won. At first, Bukele did not make anti-gang crackdowns his central pitch to voters. Instead, he appealed to young people and corruption-weary Salvadorans with an anti-establishment message. El Salvador’s previous four presidents—all from the two major parties ARENA and FMLN—had been investigated for stealing from the public. Deftly adopting the slogan, “There’s enough money when no one steals,” Bukele ran on a strong anti-corruption platform, promised economic revitalization, and vowed to end the gangs’ reign of terror. The message resonated. Bukele won in a first-round landslide, securing 53% of the vote, a majority, which obviated the need for a runoff.
Many believe he has delivered on those promises. Although El Salvador’s murder rate had dwindled to just over 50 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 before Bukele took over, a 50% drop from the high point three years prior, it has utterly plummeted under Bukele, by 2022 going down into the single digits or just under 8 homicides per 100,000 individuals. In 2023, after four years of fighting the gangs, the country recorded only 154 homicides or 2.4 per 100,000, a third of the American murder rate and a figure nearly equivalent to Canada’s.
But these are official numbers. Jeremy Giles documented in Foreign Policy last month that El Salvador has intentionally—but quietly—undercounted its homicides during Bukele’s tenure.
In exchange for secretly negotiated perks, gang leaders reduced their “public” killings and instead killed and disposed of bodies more inconspicuously, switching public spectacles of violence for buried bodies in unmarked graves. This matters because the Bukele administration, Giles notes, “began excluding the discovery of clandestine or unmarked graves from its counts.”
A year later, the government began excluding persons killed in police or military encounters from the homicide statistics. If these killings counted, it would increase the murder rate by 19-20% for each of Bukele’s last two full years in office. The government also began excluding killings that occur in prisons. What makes this especially troubling is that, under Bukele, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world—and it’s not particularly close. As of January 2024, El Salvador incarcerates a staggering 1,086 out of 100,000 of its people; by contrast, the legendarily carceral Cuba, a distant second on the list, incarcerates just shy of 800 out of 100,000. All in all, that’s an undercounting of 316 homicides in 2022 and 2023, combined; El Salvador officially reported 495 murders in 2022 and 154 in 2023.
Still, the initial ebb in violence paved the way for a burst of construction in the capital. The new Hospital El Salvador claims to give San Salvador “the largest and most modern hospital in Latin America.” A $56 million expansion to the San Salvador airport terminal greets tourists and businesspeople. Then there are the projects funded by China after El Salvador’s 2023 pivot away from Taiwan: A new water treatment plant for the capital has boosted confidence in a country long plagued by water quality problems, a massive new national library opened in November across from the national cathedral, and a $100 million soccer stadium is slated to open in 2027.
And that, Bukele promises Salvadoran voters, is just the beginning. A dangerous section of the Pan-American highway will get modernized and aging hospitals replaced. A new international airport in the east will turbocharge the economy of a largely depressed region. Most striking of all, a promised $700 million initiative will create the Pacific Train, a Salvadoran rail system linking San Salvador to other countries in the region. No wonder his popularity often polls north of 90%.
‘World’s Coolest Dictator’
Bukele, a former leftist turned right-wing culture warrior, has drawn praise and admiration from prominent conservatives—and not just in El Salvador. That’s not accidental. Bukele has skillfully used social media and internet platforms to actively court international support and to catapult himself toward the vanguard of the new global right.
Bukele’s decision to designate Bitcoin a national currency in 2021 and his promise to construct a “Bitcoin City” in the country’s east led to great fanfare among crypto-enthusiasts like Jack Kruse, who has repeatedly referred to him as “George Washington on steroids.” The lack of interest for Bitcoin among Salvadorans hardly mattered to Bukele. As the Salvadoran journalist Nelson Rauda Zablah explained in The New York Times: “A large number of the president’s messages about Bitcoin are in English because they are designed for Bitcoin believers, not the Salvadoran people, even though the project is funded by taxpayer money.” Last month, in an interview with Time magazine, Bukele admitted that Bitcoin “has not had the widespread adoption we hoped.”
That has done nothing to dampen the right’s enthusiasm. Tucker Carlson declared that Bukele has “saved El Salvador.” Elon Musk has approvingly replied to Bukele’s ideas with comments like “awesome” and “based.” Ian Miles Cheong was positively giddy over Bukele’s announcement that he would eliminate “every use or trace” of queer theory from Salvadoran schools and universities. Charlie Kirk called him a “transformative, once in a generation leader,” and right-wing X persona Raw Egg Nationalist heralded Bukele’s “miracle,” chiding the post-liberal publication Compact for criticizing Ecuador’s embrace of Bukele’s model, averring that America needs its own Bukele. Blaze TV commentator and Russian propaganda peddler Lauren Chen asked, “Can we clone you?” Right-wing quackumentarian Dinesh D’Souza offered that “Bukele is proving to be a model for leaders everywhere.”
And this isn’t just one-way traffic: acutely aware of the audience he’s cultivating, Bukele regularly shares the fawning comments MAGA conservatives shower on him while boosting the who’s who of American reactionaries: Donald Trump Jr., End Wokeness, Benny Johnson, Catturd, Alex Bruesewitz, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, among many others. Bukele even received a rapturous reception at CPAC this year.
Bukele’s online presence and self-presentation are meticulously managed. After the top U.S. diplomat in El Salvador voiced concerns in 2021 over what she saw as a “decline in democracy,” Bukele sarcastically changed his X (then Twitter) bio to read, “world’s coolest dictator.” Now it simply reads: “Philosopher king.”
But even as the philosopher king’s team carefully manicure the image of this new El Salvador through social media, behind the scenes his Nuevas Ideas party has advanced its agenda by using a rather old authoritarian playbook: declare a state of emergency, suspend civil rights, and bring out the army.
Authoritarian Crackdown
On February 9, 2020, Bukele convened an unusual legislative session with only half the assemblymembers present. He wanted a $109 million loan to carry out his “Territorial Control Plan,” a sweeping attempt to bring MS-13 and Barrio 18 to heel. With the legislature in session, Bukele burst into the room accompanied by 40 soldiers. He told his supporters that if legislators failed to approve the loan, he would order them back in session the following week.
Bukele’s anti-gang initiatives have faced their share of setbacks. On March 26, 2022, 62 homicides were committed across El Salvador in a horrifying spike in gang violence. The vast majority of the victims were citizens with no criminal records. The point was to send a public message that the gangs, and not Bukele and his soldiers, were in control.
Later El Faro reported that, despite his public denials, Bukele had been secretly negotiating with the gangs for years, just like past administrations had done—and, just like with past administrations, Bukele’s negotiations had broken down.
Bukele then asked the legislature to implement a state of emergency, which was authorized under the constitution as long as it lapsed or was renewed after 30 days. In April 2022 the Nuevas Ideas-dominated legislature complied. Freedom of assembly was curtailed. In a dramatic annulment of due process, the police and military were given authority to arrest anyone they thought was “suspicious” and hold them for 15 days without charges. Police and military arrested 5,000 people within the week. By August, that number had grown to 50,000, and 25,000 more would be rounded up by early 2024. Very few were released after 15 days. In a PBS News Hour segment on Bukele’s crackdowns, Amna Nawaz reported that of “the tens of thousands arrested, the majority have not yet faced trial.” Though Bukele has acknowledged this policy is not supposed to be permanent, after being renewed for 29 consecutive months as of August of this year, the estado de excepción has become a régimen (regime) de excepción.
Many of the detained have no known connections to the gangs. A tattoo has become enough to label someone suspicious. In one case, an autistic young man with serious asthma was taken while washing dishes. In another reported on by Human Rights Watch, police told a detained man’s mother, “We can arrest anyone we want.” Bukele began filling up what he called the largest prison in the Americas, El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, threatening to starve prisoners if the gangs lashed out. The parents of the disappeared, however, received few answers, and some cannot locate their children at all.
With young Salvadorans vanishing by the thousands, Bukele has sought to control the narrative through social media. Traditional news outlets have sometimes threatened that control—for instance, when officials offered little information and conflicting stories after a mass grave was found behind the house of an ex-police officer in Chalchuapa. Bukele responded with an authoritarian-style crackdown on press freedom. Journalists’ phones are being tapped using Pegasus spyware. The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto observed a Pegasus operator focused almost entirely on El Salvador that they believe to be the Salvadoran government, and they identified 35 journalists whose phones were compromised. After a 2022 law made anxiety-provoking coverage of gang activity punishable by up to 15 years in prison, even many hard-bitten veterans fled the country.
“The situation is very complicated,” Maria, a young professional, said in a phone interview. (We are withholding last names for the safety of our sources.) “A lot of people were mistaken. Unfortunately, some young people who voted for him are now the ones in prison.” Gabriela, a grandmother and business owner, said that her area was indeed safer but “at a great cost.”
By contrast, Inez, a middle-aged woman, praised Bukele during a conversation I had with her, saying that “certain parts [of what he has done in office] are necessary” and that, regarding corruption, the president needed to “squelch that.” But even Inez was unnerved by Bukele’s brazenness when last year he ran for president again—and to do it, effectively changed the constitution, which forbid consecutive presidential terms.
Circumventing the Constitution
At first Bukele ignored the law and the courts when his pandemic-era security measures were ruled unconstitutional. But when Nuevas Ideas won two-thirds of the seats in the legislature in the 2021 elections, he had lawmakers oust the offending section of the Supreme Court and the attorney general and replaced them with his own people.
Six months later these hand-picked judges ruled that Bukele could run for another five-year term to consecutively follow his first one. To comply with the constitution, he only had to take a six-month leave of absence, which he supposedly did earlier this year. The implications of this move can hardly be overstated: Bukele could stay in office for life.
After February’s election, Bukele cemented his power by slashing the number of municipalities in El Salvador from 262 to 44 and cutting the number of representatives in the legislature from 84 to 60. Both moves allow for more centralized control. The former removes local control from rural areas—for example, areas of Cabañas associated with leftist activism and environmental organizing. It also allows San Salvador to syphon money from those areas. Additionally, cutting the number of legislatures offers Bukele greater control over the legislative agenda. With Nuevas Ideas holding 54 out of 60 seats in the reorganized legislature, Bukele can make almost any law he likes—including laws that pertain to his own job as executive.
If the Salvadoran populace ever wishes to move on from the “coolest dictator in the world,” they may find it difficult.
El Salvador’s New Gang: The Bukele Regime
Salvadorans have endured decades of terrifying gang violence. That they would accept authoritarianism in exchange for an end to out-in-the-open gang warfare is perhaps understandable. Yet it’s increasingly clear that the new Bukelean order shares some similarities with the old El Salvador: the government has essentially become the new gang given the shared willingness of both to deploy intimidation and violence to get their way. Residents of Cabañas, an agricultural region in El Salvador’s north, have seen this side of Bukele’s regime up close.
In July 2023, the army suddenly arrived in Cabañas, saying it intended to trap the gangs up in the mountains. Locals found that explanation implausible; no gang was holed up there. Rather, they felt their community was being intimidated because of their resistance to mining.
A few months prior, five elderly men had been arrested for the murder of a woman during El Salvador’s civil war 40 years ago. Locals thought the charges preposterous. The men had been a part of ADES (Asociación de Distribuidores de El Salvador), and that organization’s anti-mining lobbying efforts had pushed out the multinational company Pacific Rim and got a national ban instituted in 2017. Bukele wants that ban reversed—and, some in Cabañas fear, he will do it by any means necessary.
Perhaps, Bukele supporters might counter, that is a price Salvadorans must pay. The gangs had become so deeply rooted in the structures of Salvadoran society that only a multi-year régimen de excepción and unprecedented military and police actions could have dislodged them. Few within the new Western right seem worried for El Salvador. Instead, they want to import Bukelismo—especially its “unlimited authority.”
But while making gains in public security in a country as ravaged by gang warfare as El Salvador is no small matter, Salvadorans might one day regret empowering an authoritarian who, just like the gangs, trampled over innocents and waged unaccountable violence.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that a presidential term in El Salvador lasts six years; it lasts five. We regret the error.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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"empowering an authoritarian who trampled over innocents and waged unaccountable violence of its own" -- Sounds like US policy from the 1930s (and episodically before) until . . . NOW, throughout Central America. Viva United Fruit Co.! Viva La Escuela de Americas! Abajo land reform, campesinos, Indios, constitutions, independent judiciary, due process and other civil rights, etc.Of course I mean to express no sympathy for MS-13 or Barrio 18, except that so many of their "associates" had no choice in the matter. The cops and National Guard are as brutal and uncontrollable as the gangs.
This substack never say nothing about the dictatorship running right now in Brazil, by the liberal president and Supreme Court, also liberal. The brazilian Supreme Court has been destroying democracy in Brazil, by not give the legal process to the charged. And, for example, the judge Alexandre de Moraes (Xandão) is, at same time, the judge, the prosecutor and the victim; all this with the consent of the drunk and corrupt president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. I now why this substack is silence about this: its because the writers of this substack have a false concept of democracy: to they, democracy is a regime under baton of totalitarian progressive regimes that imposes by force "democracy", silence conservatives, justify that this imposition is a protection of democracy. These celerated was never will talking nothing about El Salvador if, conterfactually, today the old elite of this country, that celebrate "democracy" - like this substack -, would be in the power, "preservating" the "democracy". Because to this substack is more importante the formal democracy rather the actual democracy: if the formal democracy was preservating today in El Salvador, even with the population slave of crime, this substack was clapping the "democracy". I challenging some of the writers of this substack go to El Salvador and talking all this things in the face of a citizen of El Salvador that was enslaved by crime in the past, in the "democracy". Really, people in El Salvador thanks God that one "dictator" is destroying crime, rather preservating "democracy". If it were done from your perspective, population going to suffer with crime. That's why that the perspective of this site, the progressive democracy, is going bankrupt; and just a damned elite believe in this; the population, ostracized and oppressed by this elite - for example, censor conservative ideas against the evil Theory of Gender, labeling conservatives of "fascists". This elite, like Christopher Lasch agues in his book, The Revolt of Elites, its traitor of his people, getting away from them, try to imposes progressives ideas by force - because the liberals and progressives today thinking they are the "lights of civilization" and the conservatives, the people are brutes and rabbles. But, in the end of the day, the people are opressive by this liberal elite - who only think about themselves -: have your convictions desrespected and lost your jobs in a society even more inequal. And, equal El Salvador, the elite of El Salvador have the same think of this substack: they never fought against the crime of the manner that have to combate, because they was a great preocupation with "democracy". But its very easy to an elite preserving "democracy" while they have a great security in theirs fortresses. In the same time, however, the people was devasted by the crime. Nevertheless, if was this the case - the liberal elite preserving "democracy" on top of their fortresses, while the people were ravaged by crime - this substack would be celebrating the vigorous "democracy". Its very ease, in the armchair of the writers of this substack, criticize the El Salvador, without see, in fact, the complexity and suffer of the people of El Salvador.