“Our country is an example to the world of peace, confidence and optimism,” proclaimed El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele in an end-of-year message posted on social media. “Nobody can deny it.”
The president had reasons to feel good. Formerly one of the world’s most violent countries, El Salvador went 24 straight days without a single murder in December. The price of bitcoin, which Bukele adopted as legal tender in 2021 and has made part of the country’s reserves, had broken though $100,000. Best of all, the IMF had agreed to lend his government $1.4bn, paving the way for another $2.2bn of international funding.
Now serving a second five-year term after a landslide re-election victory last February, Bukele’s ambitions stretch far beyond making El Salvador safe. The 43-year-old president is using skills he learnt as an advertising executive to woo international investors by rebranding a small, impoverished country that lacks natural resources as a surfing haven and cryptocurrency paradise.
Projecting himself to his 6.9mn followers on X as a “Philosopher King”, Bukele has become a role model for global conservatives. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world,” gushed TV host Tucker Carlson in a tweet last summer.
Following news early in January that murder rates in El Salvador had fallen to a historic low in 2024, Elon Musk weighed in on X: “Needs to happen and will happen in America”. A large US delegation, including Donald Trump Jr, were among the guests at Bukele’s reinauguration in June.
Many Latin Americans admire Bukele’s methods, as they battle a surge in violent crime in their own countries. Western governments who initially shunned Bukele because of his authoritarian leanings are now embracing a president who has become one of the world’s most popular leaders.
“Bukele is the best ally for the United States,” claims one Salvadoran presidential aide. “He has confiscated illegal drugs, reduced migration, jailed criminal gangs and improved the economy.”
But this makeover has come at a steep price. Since March 2022, according to the government, Bukele has thrown over 83,000 people into prison under state of emergency laws; an estimated three out of every 100 adult men are now in jail, most yet to be tried. He has also concentrated power in his own hands, sending armed troops into congress in his first term to secure funds for a security initiative, then firing supreme court judges who opposed his re-election.
Activists have sounded the alarm about torture, deaths in custody, the suspension of basic rights and forced disappearances. But Bukele is unrepentant: “Some say that we have imprisoned thousands, but in reality we have liberated millions,” he said at the UN in September.
Yet is the west right to engage with a government that has brought dramatic improvements in security — or is it enabling El Salvador’s drift towards dictatorship?
“Unfortunately, for all its egregious problems, the method appears to have succeeded, for now, in reducing crime in the streets,” says José Miguel Vivanco, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Which makes it difficult to argue against.”
Plaza Gerardo Barrios in the centre of the capital, San Salvador, is a microcosm of the country Bukele wants to build. Once too dangerous to walk by night, the square is now thronged by crowds of all ages who come to pray at the cathedral, admire the restored presidential palace or visit the new National Library, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Donated by China after El Salvador cut relations with Taiwan, the library, in imposing steel and glass, rears high above older buildings nearby. Inside, the seven floors are organised by reading age, with special provision for disabled people, and both books and signage in Spanish, English and the indigenous Nahuatl language.
The changes Bukele has wrought are visible across San Salvador. Shining new office towers dot the skyline — one of the most prominent is for Google, which opened premises here in 2024 — and swanky new shopping centres have sprouted up. To many of the city’s residents, the razor wire that festoons many buildings suddenly seems redundant.
“I was held up at gunpoint 25 times in the space of eight years,” says delivery driver José Antonio Gómez. “Look at that community over there — you couldn’t go in there by day or night a few years ago because it was too dangerous. See it now? People are walking around calmly with prams.”
Bukele has also invested heavily in infrastructure, building highways and bypasses, starting a new airport in the east of the country and finishing a road to a planned development called Surf City 2. Located 180km from San Salvador, it is intended to build on the success of the original Surf City — in reality a branding concept connecting several beaches — which has drawn international tourists.
The intention is to boost economic growth, which was relatively weak during Bukele’s first term, and attract foreign investment. The IMF expects growth in El Salvador of 3.0 per cent this year, slightly below its neighbours.
Some commentators and officials agree, saying Bukele inherited a nation in dire economic straits in a region blighted by huge social problems and has given it hope.
A development banker explains just how bad the country’s position used to be. “A quarter of GDP came from remittances,” he says. “The average remittance payment was $400 a month and after an average of six years, migrants stopped sending remittances. So the only business model El Salvador had was to keep exporting its people to the US.”
“The real question,” he adds, “is whether the country is viable economically.”
Bukele’s approval ratings top 90 per cent, making him one of the world’s most popular politicians. “There is no political opposition to speak of,” one diplomat comments. “Bukele holds all the levers of power.”
Re-elected with nearly 85 per cent of the vote, the president’s Nuevas Ideas party has all but six seats in congress, and he controls the judiciary and the security forces using a state of emergency that has been extended 34 times. This allows the suspension of civil rights such as freedom of association, a suspect’s right to a defence lawyer, or the right to be informed of charges after arrest.
The president’s social media feeds are filled with slick drone-shot videos showing off gleaming new buildings and highways, along with regular updates on the price of bitcoin. Plenty of the content — and the music — is in English, a signal that Bukele is performing for an international audience.
But despite the embrace between Bukele and the international hard right, an aide insists that the president, who began his political career in the leftwing FMLN, is at heart a pragmatist.
“Culture wars don’t interest him,” the aide says. “He is someone who would hand out food parcels one day and privatise the presidential palace the next day, if necessary. He will do what is required. His model is Singapore or South Korea.”
Just over an hour’s drive from San Salvador, on the outskirts of the town of Zacatecoluca, is a prison farm close to a maximum security jail. A heap of clear plastic sacks lie outside the perimeter wall, guarded by two soldiers. They contain basics such as powdered milk, dry biscuits, white T-shirts and toilet paper — and a piece of paper bearing a handwritten name.
These packages are the only link between the estimated 107,000 Salvadoreans who are in prison — the country’s population is about 6.3mn — and their families. Although most of those incarcerated have yet to be convicted of a crime, they are not allowed visits or phone calls and relatives must pay as much as $250 (more than two weeks’ work at the minimum wage) to send supplies, with no guarantee that they will be delivered.
The centrepiece of Bukele’s law enforcement drive is a maximum-security jail near the town of Tecoluca that opened in January 2023. Perhaps as many as 18,000 people are currently being held there. The government claims it is the biggest jail in the Americas and has publicised its harsh conditions: inmates sleep on flat metal bunk beds with no mattresses or bedding under 24-hour illumination, and are only released for one hour’s exercise per day. It is known as CECOT (the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorists).
“I still have nightmares of my visit to CECOT,” says one foreign official. (The government declined a request from the FT to visit.)
Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights organisation, has studied a sample of 1,200 of the 83,000 people detained since the state of emergency. All were described as arrested while committing a crime, but were held on a broadly defined charge of “conspiracy”, rather than for a specific offence. For conspiracy charges, pre-trial detention is mandatory.
“It’s a huge system of arbitrary arrest built on a base of legal changes, which allow the government to arrest whoever they want and suspend their rights so they can’t defend themselves,” concludes Noah Bullock, Cristosal’s executive director.
Salvadoran government officials reject that characterisation, saying the state of emergency was justified and has delivered extraordinary results with the overwhelming support of the population.
“There’s a lot of talk about the human rights of prisoners,” says one presidential aide. “But what rights do you have if you’re dead? . . . Bukele is so popular that even some of those in prison are people who voted for him.”
Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said the government had so far released 8,000 of that 83,000, but added that it was “very difficult, if not impossible” to know how many innocent people were still being held.
Even so, some western governments are coming around to the idea that it is better to engage with Bukele than to shun him. High-level officials from the Biden administration, which snubbed Bukele in 2021 when he visited Washington and placed sanctions on officials close to him for alleged corruption, were among those at his reinauguration.
One western diplomat insists that, despite the doubts about Bukele’s approach, there can be a “virtuous path” for him, “based on building a positive legacy with the rule of law, transformative sound policies and leaving power early enough”.
One of the few presidential aides to publicly criticise the government was Alejandro Muyshondt, Bukele’s former national security adviser. In August 2023, the day after he publicly accused officials close to Bukele of corruption and links to drug trafficking, he was arrested; hours later, nearly 20 police arrived to search the family home. The president claimed on X that Muyshondt had leaked confidential information and was working as a “double agent” on behalf of an unnamed foreign government.
His family never saw or heard from Muyshondt again. Six months later, Agentes Azules, an X account used by El Salvador’s police, announced his death in hospital “after three brain haemorrhages, the result of a metastasising cancer”.
When his body was handed over to his family, they immediately noticed that his head and chest had been crudely stitched after what the authorities claimed was emergency surgery.
“[The body] had puncture wounds all over it, the nose was broken, the wrists were broken, the feet were broken and he had had eight or 10 surgeries on his head, which were so crude they looked like they had been stitched up by a shoemaker,” says a source close to the family.
When the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, a global network of civil society organisations, analysed Muyshondt’s medical records, they found a lack of evidence supporting official diagnoses, and a failure to conduct a transparent investigation into his death.
“These findings fit within a much broader pattern of human rights violations and abuse of power in El Salvador,” says Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, the organisation that commissioned the study.
These abuses have included the alleged extensive use of Pegasus spyware to monitor journalists, human rights defenders and politicians. Eighteen current and former members of the independent El Faro news website have filed a lawsuit in the US against NSO, the Israeli maker of Pegasus, alleging that it was used to hack their phones.
Nearly a year on, El Salvador’s government has not commented publicly on Muyshondt’s death.
In December, the IMF announced a preliminary agreement to lend El Salvador $1.4bn. Thanking the country’s authorities for “excellent collaboration” in developing economic reform plans, the fund said they “[aim] to strengthen fiscal and external stability and help create the conditions for stronger and more inclusive growth”.
Bukele reposted the announcement on X with a winking emoji blowing a kiss, but not everyone is happy. “While human rights violations as such are not within the IMF’s mandate, Bukele’s open disregard of the rule of law and of his government’s human-rights obligations makes him an unreliable bedfellow,” says Pappier of HRW.
An IMF spokesperson insists that the fund “sees the achievement of human rights, including socio-economic rights, as important,” but adds, “When a member country requests a programme from the IMF, the IMF has an obligation to help . . . so long as the proposed economic programme is deemed adequate to address the underlying balance of payments issue.”
The dilemma over whether to engage is felt by many governments and international organisations. “The natural answer is to say one could achieve the ends through different means, more democratic means, with regard for basic norms and due process,” says Michael Shifter, senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank in Washington. “I still believe that’s possible, but it’s very hard to point to any examples.”
Another question vexes El Salvador watchers, too: will Bukele lift the state of emergency this year and step down in 2029 after his second term, as his aides insist? Or will he become a strongman who endures for decades?
At San Salvador’s international airport, arriving passengers can pose for selfies in gilt armchairs decorated with the presidential seal, flanked by portraits of Bukele and his wife — a format repeated at the National Library.
The set-up, Shifter says, “is very evocative” of 20th-century Latin American dictators such as Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner or the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo, both in power for more than three decades. “The ambition that Bukele has is to rule his country for a long period of time, and to be remembered as the saviour of El Salvador.”
Muyshondt’s grieving family, however, has a different fate in mind for the president. “We hope that Alejandro died for a reason,” the source close to them says. “Let’s hope it’s the beginning of the end of that man.”
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