The Mask Is Off

For four decades​ El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under President Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. The members of the pandillas – the two main gangs were Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or have scattered. In the mid-2010s the level of violence in El Salvador was at times comparable with Iraq and Syria; by 2024, the murder rate had dropped by 98 per cent. The blunt tool responsible for this transformation was the imprisonment of three out of every hundred adult men. By this method, Bukele said last year, ‘we turned the world’s murder capital into the safest country in the Western hemisphere.’

Relieving the country of its reputation for lawlessness, and gaining for it the title of the world’s highest per capita prison population, meant dispensing with the rule of law. Under the State of Exception declared by Bukele in 2022, constitutional rights were suspended. Those arrested didn’t have to be taken before a judge or even given a reason for their arrest. Bukele didn’t stop there. Political opponents have been jailed or driven into exile and Bukele has embraced his extemporary powers. Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s expanded prison system as an offshore gulag has made him a darling of the American right. They praise him as a visionary leader, but his appeal lies in something more primordial: the assertion that a broken country can be fixed with sufficient state violence.

At first, Bukele’s rise appears to follow a familiar pattern: a privileged member of the ruling class opportunistically breaks with it and poses as an anti-establishment force. Born in 1981 to a millionaire father with sprawling business interests and a taste for wives, Bukele isn’t an outsider. He attended the elite bilingual Escuela Panamericana. When he dropped out of university it was to work for the family businesses: first a nightclub called Mario’s, then a motorcycle dealership. He became involved in politics through the family advertising company, which had a contract with the former paramilitary organisation, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). It was in this role (in Eastern Europe he would have been called a ‘political technologist’) that Bukele found his métier. A brilliant publicist, a master of spin and image, he was too talented to remain behind the scenes.

The coming of Bukele is incomprehensible without considering the duopoly that preceded him. Since the days of President Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who executed a violent coup in 1931, El Salvador had been run as a joint project by the army and a small landowning oligarchy. In 1979, that system collapsed when the US-backed junta and its paramilitaries launched a vicious war against the communist and socialist guerrillas and peasant movements that grouped together as the FMLN. The junta was responsible for the vast majority of deaths in the conflict, but didn’t win a clear victory: though the fledgling democratic social forces were damaged, the junta’s custody of the state was undermined too. The war ended with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico in 1992. For the next three decades, the domesticated FMLN and the moderated oligarchic party of the right, the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA), swapped tight election victories for the legislature (ARENA comfortably held the presidency). The war had destroyed the country’s economy, and with a large surplus population of young men, El Salvador became a country defined by its corrupt political superstructure and gang violence.

‘Historically, politics meant the presidency in this country – as it does now,’ according to Rubén Zamora, one of the signatories of the 1992 peace accords, a presidential candidate in the 1994 elections and an elder statesman of Salvadoran politics. In the postwar years, however, no single president became dominant in the way Bukele is now. His political party, Nuevas Ideas, boasts of social transformation but the country is run as a traditional fiefdom. Zamora met Bukele early in his political career. ‘He spoke so well, and he seemed like someone who wanted to do something new,’ Zamora told me. ‘Yet now we can say that the great dictators of this country’s history are Martínez and Bukele, and they have a lot in common.’

In San Salvador, the country’s capital, I met Óscar Picardo, who has known Bukele since he was a student at the Escuela Panamericana, where Picardo taught. ‘He was an introverted kid. Nothing exceptional academically,’ Picardo said. ‘But he was always ambitious – his was a character in continuous evolution.’ In 2012, when he was thirty, Bukele was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small suburb of San Salvador. He stood as the FMLN candidate: ‘Back then he presented himself as a casual guy, he wore his baseball cap backwards and had all the progressive talking points,’ Picardo said. ‘Now he likes to wear embroidered jackets and play the sophisticate.’ Nuevo Cuscatlán was a sleepy area on the edge of the capital, but Bukele was able to present what he did there as being of national significance. Minor municipal projects came to stand for an energetic programme of rejuvenation. Some felt Bukele was a classic example of a vendedor de humo – a ‘smoke seller’.

Bukele’s rise to the presidency began in earnest in 2015, when he ran for mayor of San Salvador. Victory gave him a truly national profile and he soon distanced himself from the FMLN, which had only ever been a ladder to the top. In 2017, when he finally left the party, he invited Picardo for lunch. ‘He wanted to explain his new political party,’ Picardo said, ‘how it would be neither left-wing nor right-wing’ but a movement that would transcend old politics. Picardo said he was not convinced of the project’s novelty, or that the people involved in Nuevas Ideas were more than empty suits, many of them plucked from small business. With so many decisions taken personally by the president there isn’t much for the party to do. ‘One thing you must understand about Bukele is that almost everything he does is improvised,’ he told me. ‘Nothing is planned and anything can happen.’

Bukele won the presidency in 2019. ‘At that moment all of us believed in him,’ according to Ronal Umaña, a former member of the legislative assembly and an old friend of Bukele’s vice president, Félix Ulloa. ‘The country had for so many years been under the two-party dynamic, and society was tired of it. Bukele seemed like an outsider. He came with promises that he would change the dynamic of the rich on top and the majority in poverty below.’ For many former supporters, 9 February 2020, when Bukele marched into the legislative assembly flanked by soldiers to demand approval for one of his projects, was an inflection point. Umaña continued to meet Ulloa every Saturday to play poker. But in March 2022, the businessman Catalino Miranda, another regular, was arrested. ‘They spoke very powerfully about the need for democracy,’ Umaña said. ‘The truth is Bukele fooled us. He knew from the beginning what he wanted and in which direction he was going.’

In the first years of his presidency, Bukele gave interviews freely. Now most of his international media appearances are managed by a Trump lackey in Florida (on trips to the US, Bukele employs the services of MAGA’s top make-up artist). His circle has grown smaller in the six years he has been president. He still has a house in Residencial Los Sueños, near Nuevo Cuscatlán. He likes to hold social events at the President Hotel in the Zona Rosa district, a dolled-up area infected with American restaurant brands. His closest advisers are family members, with his three full brothers – Karim and the twins Yusef and Ibrajim – forming a fraternal cabinet. For a time Karim ran the legislative assembly and organised Bukele’s international meetings; Yusuf still liaises with domestic and international business; Ibrajim screens public appointments from the family’s Yamaha showroom. Bukele’s cousin Xavier Zablah is the president of Nuevas Ideas and Zablah’s wife, Sofía Medina, is communications secretary. Two of Bukele’s old schoolmates are government ministers.

For his national address on 1 June this year, Bukele wore a black tunic with pharaonic gold embroidery and a sash in the national colours, a self-conscious caricature of el presidente. ‘Bukele now is like a messianic figure,’ Picardo said. ‘Every event must have a red carpet. Ministers must stand when he enters a room. In their speeches, they always say “as President Bukele said”, or “according to President Bukele”.’ He is free to be vain; to declaim about Western civilisation and keep peacocks at the Casa Presidencial.

Bukele describes his success in suppressing the pandillas as a ‘miracle’. Unlike the more familiar Latin American drug cartels, which made their profits from smuggling cocaine to the US or Europe, El Salvador’s gangs were essentially modest street operations. Their mode was territorial control, not control of trade. They extorted small businesses, taxed minibus routes, charged rent to purveyors of vice and carried out turf wars. Both MS-13 and Barrio 18 have their roots in Los Angeles gang culture. Refugees of the Salvadoran civil war fled north to find themselves living in an LA underworld run by the Mexican mafia and formed their own gangs to survive. From the 1990s onwards, Salvadorans were deported from the US in great numbers (150,000 were sent back to El Salvador during Obama’s two terms alone). The gangs brought back with them the system of neighbourhood control they had refined in southern California and imposed it on a weak state still riven by war.

In El Salvador the gangs were first and foremost a phenomenon of the comunidades. Extortion went on in the more middle-class quarters of the city, but the gangs were embedded in the slums and dense working-class neighbourhoods. There, they could exercise enormous pressure. In Plaza Libertad, Barrio 18 charged shoe-shiners to work the square. Along Bulevar Venezuela, a street lined with shanties painted a faded turquoise and terra di siena, gang territory shifted so often that the road couldn’t be used after dark. In the east of the city, where most of the population lives, many neighbourhoods were taken over, even though one of them, La Chacra, was next to a special forces base. Bodies were regularly dumped in the drainage ditches beside the Autopista de Oro, or hastily buried in the nearby hills. In effect, the gangs became a form of local government, brutally enforcing order in places the state couldn’t or wouldn’t run.

I visited La Campanera, a social housing project on the far north-east edge of the city that became an MS-13 stronghold, almost a company town. From the central street, roads of terraced bungalows built from breeze blocks and corrugated tin branched out, like the skeleton of a fish. There were no street signs or house numbers, making it easier to disappear into the warren. The authorities claim that almost everyone who lives in La Campanera was a gang member or had one in the family. When MS-13 ran the neighbourhood, no non-resident could enter without special dispensation from the pandilla. Trucks with supplies for local shops had to leave their wares at the end of the main street, which is the only way in to the area. When the State of Exception was declared in 2022, La Campanera was raided in a military-style operation. The security forces rounded up hundreds of people and took them away – no one knew where. They seized houses they claimed were gang hideouts (casas destroyer) and removed the roofs to prevent anyone moving back in.

The government now wants to present La Campanera as an example of successful rehabilitation. The police outpost that once stood outside the entrance to the area has been moved inside, though when I visited it wasn’t yet open. The houses and alleys to the right of the main street had begun to be renovated, which seemed to mean a new coat of paint. Gang graffiti had been covered over with murals, and a small park had been cleaned up. Along the street there are a few small shops, one of which was advertising chocolate-covered watermelon slices. The woman running it had been there on the night of the first raid. She said it was terrifying: in the middle of the night she heard screams and the sound of doors being battered down. Police and soldiers were suddenly everywhere. She used to pay $10 a week to the gang (up from $5 when she opened her shop). Now that the gang had gone, her sister was thinking about visiting from the US – before, she had been too scared to come. Business wasn’t great, but what else could she do? With a La Campanera address on her ID card she would never get a job in the city centre.

La Campanera was, and still is, a reservation of the poor. The open rubbish tip where the houses meet the trees remains. The main government project in the community was the renovation of the local school. They seemed to have done a good job: a new roof, ramps, air conditioning. The headmistress had been working there for twelve years. She said the gang had never really interfered, but now families felt more comfortable sending their children to school. The big problem, she said, was that there was still no good transport out of the area, just a bus that sometimes runs to Soyapango, from where you can get to other parts of the city.

The​ improvement in basic security in El Salvador is undeniable. The government’s story, loyally repeated by the American media, is that this was a straightforward example of manodurismo. True, strong-arm tactics had been tried before, but Bukele was more determined and more ferocious. (Call it the Duterte theory: long-standing social malaise is really a result of an insufficient commitment to state violence.) There are serious problems with this account. By the time Bukele became president, the murder rate had already halved from the highs it reached during the last gang war in 2015. For the first three years, Bukele’s attitude to the gangs differed little from that of past governments: talking tough but co-existing with them. The level of violence continued to drop between 2019 and the introduction of the State of Exception in 2022. Bukele ascribes these successes to the Territorial Control Plan, his first anti-gang policy. But that plan, which was limited in geographical scope, doesn’t account for the reduction in murders, which was nationwide.

At first, Bukele’s government made targeted arrests while negotiating behind the scenes in an attempt to keep the violence contained in the slums. Bukele now denies that any such negotiations took place, but this can’t be taken seriously. He must have dealt with the gangs while mayor of San Salvador: how else could he have got anything done in the areas they controlled? Earlier this year, investigative reporting by the Salvadoran media outlet El Faro showed that Bukele’s ties with Barrio 18 Sureños went back at least to 2014. One palabrero described a deal in which Bukele’s team paid $250,000 to Barrio 18 to secure their support for his mayoral run. While the FMLN and the gangs were at war, Bukele’s main fixer, the former football hooligan Carlos Marroquín, continued to receive local gang leaders in the nightclubs of San Salvador. The gangs called Bukele ‘Batman’. On his election as president, MS-13 issued a statement saying ‘we trust in God and in the new president, Nayib.’ During his first years in power, Bukele allowed gang members to visit their bosses in Zacatecoluca prison. The gangs supported him again in the 2021 legislative elections.

It was only in 2022 that Bukele broke with them. In response to three massacres that March, probably a result of the breakdown of the pact with the government, Bukele declared the State of Exception and switched to a policy of mass arrests. Both the Policía Nacional Civil and the military were brought out in full force to arrest anyone who might be involved with the pandillas. More than sixty thousand people were detained in the first year (a few thousand people were subsequently released). Relative to population size, more than ten times as many people were imprisoned as in the Mexican crackdown of the mid-2000s. Under the State of Exception there was no due process, no right to legal representation and little chance of redress. The default sentence was life imprisonment. Thousands of gang members remain in hiding in rural areas, but the territorial system of the pandillas was destroyed. El Salvador’s neighbours observed all this with interest (I spotted the Costa Rican minister of justice in the lobby of my hotel in San Salvador, taking pictures with his security guard). In Honduras, Xiomara Castro has used similar techniques, though less effectively. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa claims Bukele as an inspiration. But it’s unlikely that any neighbouring state has the prerequisites for success. Bukele had already hollowed out the judiciary and arrested or intimidated opposition politicians, and the gangs’ senior leadership had been imprisoned years before. Almost all of the MS-13 bosses were in Zacatecoluca prison (some senior figures who were living abroad have been rounded up by the US and are due to be tried in New York) and ran the gang’s operations from there. By 2022 the gangs no longer had multiple layers of organisation to fall back on. Perhaps they had also been lulled into the belief that waves of violence would always result in a new pact and a return to business as usual.

Bukele had understood, however, that there was an enormous public desire for the gangs’ brutal and public defeat. The symbol of the new era is the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a megaprison 75 kilometres outside San Salvador, surrounded by rings of nine-metre-high concrete walls, with seven watchtowers on the outer perimeter and twelve on the inner. Like the immigration detention centres scattered across the southern US, it looks like one of Amazon’s distribution centres from above. Inside there are eight prison blocks, each containing 32 cells. Each cell can hold up to eighty inmates. Very few of the fifteen thousand prisoners have had a trial. They sleep on metal bunks. They are allowed out of the cells once a day for half an hour, always in shackles. Their heads are shaved every five days. Prison guards walk on the perforated metal ceilings above the cells. Once they’ve arrived at CECOT, transported in silver buses, the inmates have no contact with the outside world. Phone signals are jammed in the surrounding area.

El Salvador is not unique in having prisons into which people disappear. The essential difference between the Bukele prison state and, say, the Egyptian one is its visibility. In Egypt, as in Assad’s Syria, the brutality is meant to take place in secret, and even to inquire into it is dangerous. Bukele’s government likes to give tours of CECOT to social media grifters. The US secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, had herself filmed posing in front of caged prisoners. Videos on YouTube, in Spanish, Arabic and English, all show the same basic tour of the same two blocks of crowded but clean cells. Dozens of men in one cell stare out from behind the bars, their faces covered in tattoos; in the next cell the prisoners have glasses and paunches. The armoury and the solitary confinement cell always feature, and many of the videos include an interview with the same prisoner, a man identified as ‘Psycho’, who discusses his violent past.

CECOT’s purpose, as its name suggests, is to treat gang members as terrorists, in a way obviously influenced by Guantánamo. The stage-managed tours reveal little about the way prison violence is suppressed or about the conditions in the blocks visitors aren’t shown. One problem with mass incarceration is that it can make gangs stronger: prisons are good for recruitment. El Salvador has plenty of older prisons like Zacatecoluca in which gangs have operated for decades; CECOT may be an attempt to make this harder, but however well-contained they are, the gangs have not gone.

Many​ of Bukele’s preoccupations are common to putschists eager to mark a new dawn. Street hawkers have been expelled from the historic centre of San Salvador because they looked messy. Grand construction projects of uncertain merit have been announced, and some started. The construction of a new ‘airport of the Pacific’ near the eastern city of La Unión is underway. A pledge to bring back rail travel has not yet been fulfilled. The vaunted adoption of bitcoin as legal tender appears to be largely fictional: it wasn’t accepted anywhere I went. Being attracted most of all to power, Bukele is supportive of Israel. His brief flirtation with China – in return for a donation to the new National Library, he cut El Salvador’s ties with Taiwan – has come to an end thanks to his wish to keep in with Trump.

At home, Bukele is smart enough to make popular gestures: there is a government programme to provide laptops to children in state schools, for example. In San Salvador I went to El Mágico football stadium, where the government had laid on an event to announce some university scholarships. Coaches had brought in thousands of uniformed schoolchildren, who held up blue and white cards to form the national flag. Advertising boards around the ground showed the slogan ‘Una Generación que Florece’; a banner in English read ‘Tourism contributes to the rebirth of El Salvador.’ Everything was filmed from above by quadcopter drones, while a DJ hopped around shouting and encouraging the kids to post on social media. Every couple of minutes she would tell the crowd to ‘scream for President Nayib Bukele!’

I travelled south to Surf City, a project opened by the government in 2019 to boost tourism. The city is really a small beach town with a mud and pebble beach and a pig-shaped sea stack called ‘El Tunco’. The waves were good (the town has hosted the world surfing games twice and will again next month) and a dozen or so surfers were making use of them. There were surf shops, places selling bao, juice bars, burger shops and a pizzeria. One café offered the presidential coffee brand, Bean of Fire, a personal ‘passion project’ launched by Bukele last year to showcase Salvadoran excellence (the company is fully owned by him and registered in Miami). I saw only a handful of tourists: a few sandy gringos hanging around with their sun-bleached children. Young Americans clutching water bottles. Two German women discussing their allergies. Like so many Bukele projects, Surf City felt like a place built for social media.

I approached various members of the government, who were at first enthusiastic about giving me an interview, only to report that they had been denied permission by Bukele’s office. The only person willing to meet without permission was Alejandro Gutman, head of the newest government department, the Directorate of Integration. I went to his office in Mejicanos, a working-class district of San Salvador where, in 2010, Barrio 18 set fire to one minibus and shot at another, killing nineteen people. The directorate was set up in 2022 and the building was still under construction, but in the reception area there were two portraits, one of the president and another of his wife.

Gutman, who is Argentinian, first came to El Salvador in 2004 with the idea of running football projects in areas afflicted by gang violence. ‘The idea was to use sport as a way of learning lessons for life,’ he told me. The project was a success, ‘but at the end of the day, people’s lives didn’t change much. The reality around them was misery and violence which takes away everything else.’ Still, he stayed and continued to run social programmes in the comunidades. The charity he founded was one of the few willing to work in the gang areas. Gutman’s theory is that the gangs thrived because of a fracture in Salvadoran society. ‘In El Salvador there are really two worlds,’ he said. ‘There are the people who have access to education, health, employment, entertainment, cultural things, a political and emotional life, and then there are the people who live in communities that no one wants to be in for one hour, let alone a day, and the only people who go there are those who live there and the police.’ The purpose of the Department of Integration, which he had named himself, was to end that bifurcation.

Gutman said that Bukele, who invited him to join the government three years ago, was the first political leader to understand his ideas. ‘From the beginning we had an incredible relationship – I cannot describe it. We meet late at night and for long hours,’ he said. ‘I’ve met with all the presidents and vice presidents of this country and I never met anyone with a real interest in transformation until him.’ Rhetoric about transformation and healing social fractures is exactly what Bukele likes. But poverty in El Salvador has increased during his presidency. Gutman argued that UN and World Bank data ‘don’t make a proper assessment of the situation: integration is about feeling that you are part of this world, and that others receive you as part of this world.’ On this qualitative basis, he was confident that the country was going in the right direction.

It’s true that international institutions have questionable records in assessing poverty, but if poverty was the condition that allowed the rise of the gangs, a quantifiable improvement would surely be welcome. I saw no sign of the kind of development that Gutman advocates. Anyone who visits San Salvador will spend a good deal of time stuck in traffic. Yet like his predecessors, Bukele has failed to establish a public bus system. The last public transportation project was terminated by him in 2022. While sitting in traffic you have plenty of time to contemplate the old bus stops along Alameda Juan Pablo II, which were meant to connect Plaza Salvador del Mundo in the city centre with Soyapango to the east. A homeless couple with three lively dogs seemed to be living in one of them.

Gutman remains widely respected in El Salvador, even among critics of the government. But some feel that the Department of Integration is just a fig leaf for Bukele. It was Gutman who had put on the event at the football stadium and come up with the slogan ‘Una Generación que Florece’. I asked him whether it’s possible for people to flourish under a dictatorship. He became visibly uncomfortable. ‘Look, I will tell you about this authoritarian thing,’ he said, before tailing off. ‘I live in the short term. I only will say that the fight of my life was the transformation of the people, and of course I see some things I don’t like … but how can I say something bad about the first guy I really think is giving me the opportunity to transform the country?’

Outside the Department of Integration was an example of one of the government’s most interesting social programmes: small, two-storey glass cubes built in run-down areas. From the outside they look like tech offices inexplicably dropped in a slum, but the cubos are in essence miniature public libraries. Inside this one was a meeting area with a couple of tables, a children’s play area, books and a dozen computers. It was clean and air-conditioned. The staff said it had opened four years ago and was one of eleven in the country. The bookshelves held a small selection of Latin American classics, including a chunky collection of Roque Dalton. It seemed to me that this was a fine project, and that eleven cubos weren’t nearly enough.

Earlier this year,​ Bukele launched a fresh campaign of intimidation against human rights groups. On 18 May, Ruth López, possibly the country’s most prominent civil dissident and a member of the Central American human rights monitor Cristosal, was arrested and charged with embezzlement. I had planned to meet the constitutional lawyer Enrique Anaya, but he had just been arrested by plainclothes police. Ingrid Escobar, the director of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, an NGO that provides legal advice and humanitarian assistance to the families of the detained, went into hiding shortly before our scheduled meeting. The costs of opposing the president can be high. Bukele’s successor as mayor of San Salvador, the ARENA politician Ernesto Muyshondt, was placed under house arrest in June 2021, beaten in prison and transferred to a psychiatric hospital the day before his scheduled release. His cousin Alejandro Muyshondt, a former Bukele adviser who had fallen out of favour, was imprisoned and died soon afterwards of pulmonary oedema. His family claims he was tortured. Many of Bukele’s opponents seem to have given up on democratic means of dissent; many have given up entirely.

In 2021, after packing the Supreme Court with loyalist judges, Bukele secured a ruling that allowed him to stand for a second consecutive five-year term. He won re-election in February last year, with Nuevas Ideas winning 54 of the 60 seats in parliament. Three of the other seats went to small parties connected to Bukele. When I visited the assembly building, known as the Salón Azul, it looked deserted, apart from what seemed to be dozens of suited parking attendants. I was meeting Marcela Villatoro, one of the three remaining opposition parliamentarians and a deputy for what is left of ARENA. ‘Bukele runs everything, all the institutions – he has kidnapped the state,’ she said. ‘He needs an opposition to pretend it isn’t a dictatorship, that’s the reason he has us.’ Villatoro claimed that the head of Nuevas Ideas, Bukele’s cousin Xavier Zablah, was trying to put pressure on her. ‘If I get up from the assembly to go to the bathroom he takes a photo and posts it online, very obviously and openly,’ she said. She had no confidence that Bukele would agree to leave office in 2029, and she was proved right on 31 July, when the assembly passed a law permitting an indefinite number of presidential terms, with each term extended from five years to six. The measure passed, as all measures tend to, by 57 votes to 3.

Claudia Ortiz, another opposition deputy in the assembly, asked to meet me at a health food restaurant in the city centre. She said her office was probably bugged. Ortiz is the leader of Vamos, a new party which describes itself as Christian Democratic. She said that Bukele had built his reputation on defeating the gangs, but his method of government was not sustainable. ‘People now feel safer, but we are experiencing massive violations of human rights due to the State of Exception.’ A former employee of Transparency International, she spoke of her commitment to pluralistic government, accountability, limits to state power and human rights. In Brussels she would be a star; in El Salvador these principles are not in play. She rejected the idea that the existence of a tiny opposition was useful to Bukele. ‘We are not a comfortable opposition,’ she said. ‘We want power and we want to govern.’

In a small café with a lockable front gate, I met Lourdes Palacios, a member of the FMLN turned activist for the Committee of the Families of Political Prisoners in El Salvador. COFAPPES was founded in 2021 in response to the arrest of five members of the previous government. (Of the three most recent former presidents of El Salvador, Antonio Saca is in prison, Mauricio Funes is dead and Salvador Sánchez Cerén is in exile in Nicaragua.) Although it began its work by protesting against the arrest of politicians, COFAPPES has now extended its remit: Bukele has used the State of Exception to go after everyone from gang members to environmental protesters and farming co-operatives. Once someone is in jail, there is rarely proof of life. COFAPPES has documented 412 deaths in custody, but the organisation believes there are more. ‘The families of prisoners who die in custody often have no idea what happened to them: they just receive the corpses,’ Palacios said. ‘The situation is now worse here than in any other place in Latin America.’

Many of Bukele’s​ critics are reluctant to accept that he remains very popular. On 5 June, the front page of Diario El Salvador ran a headline boasting of his 90 per cent approval rating above a story about a gang member who had been sentenced to a hundred years in prison. Bukele’s opponents are often sceptical of these polls because they are commissioned by firms with ties to the government. His resounding victory in the 2024 elections is chalked up, at least in part, to the fact the elections were far from fair. It seems implausible that so many still support him. Extreme poverty has doubled since he became president. There has been no peace dividend from the defeat of the gangs. Economic growth remains low, below even that of Nicaragua. But Edwin Segura, a specialist in polling and data analysis at La Prensa Gráfica, the leading opposition newspaper, told me that ‘those in the opposition have to face the fact that Bukele remains very popular.’ At the beginning of June, his newspaper published its own poll, which showed 85.2 per cent support for Bukele. ‘People still very highly value the security improvement,’ Segura told me. The country’s problems are not blamed on the government. ‘The thinking seems to be that the economy is something we all contribute to, but security is not something you can do anything about as an ordinary citizen. That’s the government’s responsibility – if it fails it takes the blame and when it succeeds it is rewarded.’

An underappreciated aspect of support for Bukele may be that he set the traditional criollo oligarchy on its toes. By background, Bukele belonged to a peripheral part of the capital class (as Palestinian ‘Turks’ who had emigrated to El Salvador in the 1920s, his father’s family was prevented on ethnic grounds from joining the Club Campestre). One of the first targets for political repression was the former president Alfredo Cristiani, who as owner of one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical concerns had always prevailed over Bukele’s father in the scrimmage for state contracts. Cristiani’s properties were expropriated and he was forced into exile. Bukele has found new supporters among the wealthy: the aviation magnate Roberto Kriete publicly backs him and the foreign minister, Alexandra Hill-Tinoco, comes from another dynastic family. But most of the capital class is cowed. Meanwhile the Bukele family’s own interests have grown to include a coffee plantation, the classic symbol of the Salvadoran oligarchy.

On 20 May, the legislative assembly passed a Foreign Agents Law, intended to suppress the government’s critics. Under the law, the state will establish a database of individuals and groups that receive funding from abroad, which in a country dependent on remittances from relatives in the US could be almost anyone. Bukele and his ministers have not been shy about naming the intended targets – the civil opposition and the human rights movement, which it claims is a tool of undefined ‘foreign interests’. Many countries have registers of foreign agents and lobbying outfits, but the idea that the human rights movement in El Salvador – which Bukele himself describes as marginal – is being used by an external power to destabilise the state isn’t plausible and it’s hard to see why Bukele felt the need to launch this attack. Perhaps it’s just that he’s running short of enemies, and it’s still useful to have them.

The only foreign interest to interfere in El Salvador is the US. For years, the US supported Salvadoran special forces and their fondness for extrajudicial executions. The American embassy in the Santa Elena district on the edge of the capital covers 25 acres: it’s the largest in the region. During Trump’s first term, the US ambassador, Ronald Johnson, a former CIA man who had been involved in the brutal US meddling in the civil war, developed a close relationship with Bukele, who visited Johnson’s house in Miami, where the two men went out to dine on lobster. American scrutiny of Bukele’s dealings with the gangs was mysteriously suspended. ‘Put simply, Johnson had Bukele’s back,’ one insider told me. Bukele subsequently awarded Johnson the Grand Cross Silver Plate and the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán – designed specifically for him.

Bukele, like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile, is more than merely a collateral political phenomenon of the age of Trump, even if he is more closely tied to the US than any other Latin American leader. His relationship with Trump cost him during the Biden years, when there was a Justice Department investigation into the links between his government and the gangs, and the US briefly redirected some of its aid to civil society. The US military has a ‘co-operative security location’ – an airfield from which surveillance flights operate – at Comalapa, near the border with Honduras. On a tour of Central America earlier this year, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, claimed that ‘American leadership is back in the Western hemisphere.’ Trump’s second term seems to have brought a rhetorical return to the junta-first Latin America policy of the 1980s. And Bukele takes pride of place.

Rubio visited San Salvador during his tour and announced that Bukele had agreed to take deportees of any nationality off US hands and imprison them in El Salvador. ‘We have offered the US the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,’ Bukele said. A month later, Rubio reported that hundreds of ‘alien enemy members’ of the Venezuelan criminal organisation Tren de Aragua had been sent to El Salvador to be imprisoned indefinitely in CECOT. He said Bukele was ‘the strongest security leader in our region’ and ‘a great friend of the US’. The Venezuelans, along with some Salvadorans (at least one of whom had been included because of an ‘administrative error’), had been deported in secret by executive order and identified as gang members on the basis of a shoddy analysis of their tattoos. ‘There’s a saying in El Salvador,’ Alex Kravetz, a former ambassador to the UN and the WTO in Geneva, told me. ‘“Trying to block out the sun with a finger.” Anyone who denies this is a dictatorial regime is trying to block out the sun with a finger. The mask is off.’ For Bukele, the relationship with the US is now vital. ‘He has hitched his wagon to Trump and the MAGA movement. Trump is behind him, and he’s emboldened as a result,’ Kravetz said. ‘Of course we’ve seen how getting too close to Trump can mean getting burned.’

Bukele will be credited with the defeat of the gangs, whatever else his legacy may be. Yet it was because the Salvadoran gangs were peripheral to pan-American organised crime that their defeat was possible. Bukele cut out that little slice – to the enormous benefit of Salvadorans – but the gangs survive in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Mexico and in the US. El Salvador is now faced with the question of what kind of society can be built in a country whose young men are in prison. Bukele’s answer seems to be to make El Salvador an offshore holding facility for the US, a national Alcatraz. It’s hardly an inspiring vision.

I visited Comunidad Iberia in the east of San Salvador, an old MS-13 neighbourhood behind the Mercado La Tiendona. People were going about their business, delivering canisters of water and fixing beaten-up motorbikes. There were fewer young men than one would normally expect to see. Near the entrance to the area, I found people playing Lotería, a form of bingo, and stayed to gamble some quarter-dollars with the locals. In front of each person were piles of dried corn kernels to place on boards with stylised illustrations on them. ‘El Borracho!’ the caller shouted out. ‘El Negrito!’ I had both on my board and placed a kernel on the illustrations. ‘El Gorrito!’ I didn’t know the word, which made it difficult to beat the regulars (it means ‘little bonnet’). The owner came over to check my board. He said that it was good that outsiders could come to the area now. Not long ago, if you walked in down the road, as I just had, there was a good chance you wouldn’t walk back out. The gangs used to hang out here, he said. It was a dangerous place, but fortunately he had never had to pay them ‘rent’. He put one of my kernels on the symbol for gourd, which I had also missed. He said business was much worse than in the time of the gangs, and a lot worse than in the 1980s, when the place was always packed. ‘El Valiente!’ ‘And then, of course, a lot of people have been arrested and that’s fewer customers,’ he said. ‘You know, there are a lot of innocent people in prison.’ ‘El Apache!’