In May 2020, amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, El Salvador was under a military-enforced quarantine. During a press conference, I questioned President Nayib Bukele about a meeting he had held with the business community regarding reopening the economy. Bukele reacted angrily and criticized the founder of El Faro, the media outlet where I work.
Following that, I received death threats from Bukele supporters. One particularly disturbing message came from a Twitter user outside the country, stating: “I can’t wait to return to El Salvador and put three bullets in your head so you stop being foolish.”
This reaction typified a faction of Bukele’s followers who treat any criticism of the president as unforgivable. After six years in power, Bukele remains highly popular, boasting national approval ratings exceeding 80 percent. Much of the Salvadoran diaspora also holds him in high regard. While his idealized image as an efficient and eloquent leader who has reduced crime and vowed to fight corruption sounds appealing, the reality is that he is an unpredictable and unchecked politician who dominates all institutions at the expense of El Salvador’s democracy.
Bukele has now assumed the role of a jailer for former U.S. President Donald Trump by accepting deportees from the United States to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s harsh penitentiary system. Families from Venezuela and the U.S., whose loved ones have been sent to these prisons, are experiencing the frightening arbitrariness of his regime—his self-serving governance and cruelty. Many are beginning to recognize what some of us have warned for years: despite Bukele’s ironic self-labeling as the “coolest dictator in the world,” he remains a dictator.
Bukele’s national security approach relies on cases like that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March. In 2022, Bukele declared a state of emergency—which remains in effect—to weaken the country’s powerful gangs and curb rising crime and homicide rates.
This measure has also eroded constitutional rights, with thousands of people without criminal records detained in a vast operation that dismantled gang territorial control and drastically reduced murders. Since the state of emergency began, approximately 80,000 people have been arrested and jailed in El Salvador. Bukele admitted last year that 8,000 innocent individuals were detained and later released, though civil society groups believe the number is significantly higher.
Bukele entered Salvadoran politics in 2012 as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a town roughly the size of Los Angeles International Airport. As mayor, he donated his salary to university scholarships and pledged to attract $1 billion in investment to the city—a promise he did not fulfill. In 2015, he was elected mayor of San Salvador, the capital, where he gained support by criticizing both his own party and the opposition for endemic violence and corruption. In 2019, running on an anti-corruption platform, he won the presidency with 53 percent of the vote, more than 20 points ahead of his closest rival.
Shortly after taking office, Bukele launched a security plan deploying police and military forces to gang-controlled neighborhoods. Eight months into his presidency, he stormed the Legislative Assembly surrounded by armed soldiers to pressure opposition lawmakers into approving a loan for surveillance cameras, tactical gear, and a helicopter for the plan. Although the loan was initially rejected, Bukele’s party secured a supermajority in the 2021 legislative elections, enabling the eventual approval of the funding.
Bukele also targeted the judiciary. After the elections, lawmakers replaced five Supreme Court justices with allies and, in August 2021, passed reforms purging a third of the country’s judges. These moves helped him consolidate control over all three branches of government.
The state of emergency led to rapid suspension of fundamental constitutional rights such as access to lawyers and the requirement for judicial warrants to intercept personal communications. Thousands were detained, sometimes seemingly at random. However, homicides plunged dramatically from 2,398 in 2019 to just under 500 in the following year. Residents who had lived under gang control for nearly two decades felt relief in regaining their freedom to walk safely home from work or take their children to parks.
Although over 36 percent of Salvadorans knew someone unjustly imprisoned, the majority did not oppose the crackdown. They traded theoretical rights like due process for immediate personal security. Subsequently, after Bukele’s appointed magistrates interpreted the constitution to allow him a second term, he won the 2024 presidential election overwhelmingly with 85 percent of the vote.
Broken promises now permeate Bukele’s tenure. During his first presidential campaign, he vowed to protest alongside students at the University of El Salvador—the nation’s only public university—to reform education. Instead, his government withheld more than $30 million in budgeted funds from the institution. In 2022, he pledged to renovate 5,000 schools within five years, but by October 2024, only 424 had been completed. He also proposed building a new, prosperous economy based on Bitcoin, but this year the cryptocurrency was removed as legal tender following a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
Bukele’s transgressions have extended beyond El Salvador’s borders. He has openly mocked U.S. court orders and trolled American politicians. After a judge blocked initial deportation flights of Venezuelans to El Salvador, Bukele joked on social media, “Oops… too late.” He recently posted photos of Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen visiting Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a Salvadoran prison, claiming they drank margaritas together. Van Hollen clarified that the drinks were placed on the table and neither had consumed them.
Reportedly, the Trump administration agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to incarcerate deportees in Salvadoran prisons. Bukele said the funds would help make the prison system self-sustaining, which he claims costs $200 million annually. Aside from the money, it remains unclear what El Salvador gains by becoming a global political pariah and a punitive site in U.S. migration policy. The country remains subject to Trump-era tariffs, and no immigration relief measures have been offered to Salvadorans.
Yet Bukele appears to be benefiting. The U.S. State Department recently upgraded El Salvador’s travel advisory to Level 1—the same as Norway and New Zealand—even while acknowledging that several U.S. citizens and others have been detained under the state of emergency. In April, the State Department certified that the Salvadoran government is strengthening the rule of law, improving transparency, and protecting human rights defenders and journalists.
Bukele’s administration has also faced accusations of secretly negotiating with the MS-13 gang. According to a U.S. federal indictment, the gang agreed to reduce street killings in exchange for economic benefits and less restrictive prison conditions from the government. At least one witness whose testimony could implicate Bukele was among those deported back to El Salvador.
Bukele has consistently denied these allegations, but in 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned two government officials, including the prisons director, for their alleged roles in the negotiations. Recently, a media outlet published an interview with a Barrio 18 gang leader, MS-13’s rival, who confirmed that Bukele’s officials sought political support from gangs and facilitated meetings with imprisoned gang leaders inside maximum-security prisons.
Before Bukele’s party replaced the Salvadoran attorney general in 2021, his government officials were under criminal investigation for alleged gang pacts and corruption. After the investigations were shut down, a senior anti-corruption prosecutor fled into exile, along with other prosecutors probing government corruption.
Currently, there are no judicial orders, legislative inquiries, or criminal investigations posing a real threat to Bukele. He secured this by filling the Supreme Court with compliant judges who interpret the constitution to suit his agenda.
Bukele remains popular, but he has systematically prepared for the day when that wanes. For Salvadorans, it may be too late to safeguard the separation of powers. However, Americans still have an opportunity to respond.
