Bukele’s Wonderland
The question regarding El Salvador's war on crime is this: does the end justify the means, and what end does President Bukele have in mind?
Maria Gonzalez, Mario Gomez-García and Ricardo Fuentes are made-up names to keep the interviewees’ real identities anonymous.
El Salvador is the smallest mainland country in the Americas, roughly the size of Wales. It used to have one of the highest murder rates in the world. Today, the country is the safest in the Western Hemisphere, at least according to its president, the 43-year-old Nayib Bukele.
Since taking office in 2019, Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas party have successfully managed to reduce crime in El Salvador by cracking down on gang activity, leaving the streets safer and people more secure. These policies have also resulted in the arrest of between 80,000 and 100,000 Salvadorans and seen the suspension of constitutional rights to keep the detained in jail permanently. The government admits it has wrongfully arrested 7,000 people but maintains that in “every war, there are innocent victims and collateral damage”. The question is: does the end justify the means, and what end does Bukele have in mind?
“When the government decided to put all gang members in jail, this was something we all applauded because it benefited us. Now we live in a pretty good security environment,” Maria Gonzalez, a small business owner living in San Salvador, the capital, told me.
She says the gangs used to force business owners to pay a monthly extortion fee—“rent”—ranging from around $100 to several thousand, depending on location and the type of enterprise. The stakes for not paying were high. As Maria told me: “In the end, the police got involved because I could not pay. I had to leave my house and hide somewhere safe and all that.”
With stories like this commonplace, Bukele, once elected, wasted no time starting secret negotiations with the two main gangs in the country, MS13 and Barrio 18, to decrease violence—a tactic also employed by previous administrations. The strategy initially proved effective, with murders per 100,000 people falling from 38 in 2019 to 18 in 2021.
However, following an unprecedented weekend of bloodshed in March 2022, where 87 people were killed by MS13, the government declared a state of emergency. The measure, among other things, suspends Salvadoran’s constitutional freedoms, lets the police arrest individuals without cause and allows suspects to be jailed indefinitely without a lawyer. In 2023, El Salvador reported that the murder rate had dropped by 70% from the year before. As of March 2024, up to 102,000 individuals—1.6% of the population—sit behind bars, according to a local civil rights group.
The state of emergency was supposed to be temporary but has been extended 28 times and remains in effect. Moreover, El Salvador now has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Nonetheless, Bukele enjoys strong popular support, in large part because his policies have indeed made El Salvador safer; the gangs do not act for fear of government retribution, and sentences for convicted gang members and collaborators are harsh.
On the back of his victory against the gangs, Bukele was re-elected president in February 2024, securing almost 85% of the vote and 54 of 60 seats in the legislative assembly. In March, his approval rating stood at over 90%, and his tough-on-crime governance model has inspired imitators in Ecuador and Honduras.
Yet, El Salvador’s government has been criticised for the appalling conditions inside its prisons, which are overcrowded and violent—a total of 235 people have died in state custody. The state of emergency also gives enormous power to the security forces.
Once detained by the police or military, even evidence of innocence might not be enough to get out, as in the case of Maria’s friend, who worked at the local church: “The police, when she was detained, sent a letter saying that the arrest was incorrect because she was innocent. She previously worked in the community to stop gang violence. Even so, the authorities said she had to go to jail.”
To lock those jailed up in prison as quickly as possible, the state’s solution is to forgo due process, using group trials—some of which are held virtually—for hundreds of people at a time.
Although the government has freed 7,000 innocent people, independent estimates place the number of wrongfully arrested at over 26,000, Maria’s friend among them. As of the time of writing, she has not been released.
It is true that, for now, the crackdown has made El Salvador safer, which is good. The country is not, however, the safest in the Western Hemisphere. Jeremy Giles, a former commander in the US Army Special Forces, showed in an article for Foreign Policy how El Salvador has changed its methodology to skew the number of murders committed by gangs—leading to an undercount of 47% in 2023. He concludes in the same piece: “El Salvador, in its most generous reading, would only be the safest country in Central America.”
Meanwhile, Bukele has exploited his popularity to persecute the political opposition, non-governmental organisations and the media. For instance, in 2021, several Salvadoran human rights organisations reported that advocates were frequently abused online, perpetrated by officials close to Bukele. The government in 2022 passed a law stipulating that journalists can be put in jail for 15 years for covering gang activity, with at least 22 reporters having their phones tapped with the Israeli spyware Pegasus. Most of them worked for El Faro, a publication that has conducted several investigations into the Bukele administration and relocated to Costa Rica in 2023 to avoid “fabricated accusations.”
As for the opposition, Bukele has used his social media machine to target politicians and in January 2024 El Salvador issued seemingly political arrest warrants for four former directors of the legislative assembly—a decision criticised by the US. There are also plans to build a prison designated for those charged with corruption. It remains to be seen how a corrupt act is defined, though, given the litany of scandals the current government is involved in.
El Salvador has quickly turned into a country where it’s dangerous to voice negative opinions of those in charge and their policies. “I [criticise] knowing that they might jail me. In our country, everyone who thinks differently than the authorities are turned into enemies and tormented,” Mario Gomez-García, a local politician in a rural area outside San Salvador, told me.
In fact, Bukele’s harassment of critics and repeated extension of the state of emergency is part of an authoritarian takeover. He reshaped the country’s judiciary in 2021, ousting over a third of all judges—including those of the Supreme Court—replacing them with loyalists. The same was done with the prosecutors, ending any illusion of an independent judiciary and thus placing all three of El Salvador’s branches of government in the hands of the executive.
Dominion over state institutions allowed Bukele to run for re-election in 2024, previously prohibited by the constitution, and to ensure favourable results in the local elections, the number of municipalities was decreased from 262 to 44. The government justified its decision by saying it would save money. The opposition condemned it as a power grab. Mario lost his elected position due to the reduction. For him, it’s obvious: “The aim of this government since coming into office has been to centralise political and economic power to get more control over the population.”
On issues beyond crime, Bukele does not have universal support. Some 74% of Salvadorans name the economy as the country’s biggest challenge. Indeed, poverty has increased in El Salvador since Bukele was elected—from 22.8% to 26.7%—mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic and a cost of living crisis. Food prices, in particular, have soared: a basic basket of goods cost $250 in June 2024, almost 70% of the monthly average minimum wage and 900,000 people in the country suffer severe food insecurity.
The government also needs to deal with El Salvador’s costly external debt, a task made more difficult because the administration introduced Bitcoin as a legal tender, complicating the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout. The IMF also expressed concerns over a decrease in budget transparency.
Bukele’s growth strategy is to attract foreign investment by scrapping taxes on money from abroad and presenting El Salvador as safe and modern. He has seen some success—Google will build a new office in the country, and Turkish firm Yilport committed to investing $1.6 billion in port infrastructure.
The jury is still out on these policies, but what’s becoming increasingly clear is that they are shifting priority away from domestic solutions. For example, the government has passed laws lowering the funds available for municipal infrastructure projects, a cut amounting to $506 million for 2022–2023. Since the changes, in Mario’s municipality, there has not been “a single project, not a single one. The communities are abandoned, but on social media, it says otherwise.” Where this money goes instead is unknown.
On social media and elsewhere, Bukele boasts that migration from El Salvador to the United States has decreased significantly thanks to his war against the gangs. He’s right in one respect—people fleeing because of gang violence have probably decreased. However: “A new cause for migration has been generated, which was almost zero before, which is migration out of fear or harassment from the police or the armed forces,” Ricardo Fuentes, who works for an immigrant civil rights organisation in El Salvador, told me.
The data is consistent with Ricardo’s assertion. El Salvador’s migration trends to the US largely mirror Honduras and Guatemala, and the number of Salvadorans petitioning for asylum in Mexico is unchanged.
El Salvador’s economic predicament is also surely impacting the flow of migrants. If things do not improve materially, people might not care that the streets are safer. Ricardo told me: “There will be a moment when we won’t know how we’ll feed our children and loved ones. Although the government wants to maintain their [security] rhetoric, it will not work. What good is security if there is nothing to eat?” El Salvador has a bloody history of insurgencies and civil wars, the last raging from 1979 to 1992. Let’s hope the echoes of history remain distant sounds.
What does one find when peeling back the curtain on a state controlled by the World’s Coolest Dictator, the Philosopher King—as Bukele has called himself in the past? Not surprisingly, a dictatorship which treats its people not as fellow citizens but as subjects without rights. And, as we have seen, power abuses and corruption on the part of the government are common, and economic hardship is extensive due to lacklustre policy.
This governance model should not be praised or implemented, partly or in full, in other places, regardless of what some “tough-on-crime” advocates may have you believe. One person’s rule over the many can never be justified, no matter how it’s spun.
// Adrian
Really interesting read !!
So many problems with this story. Where to begin. 1) judiciary. Before the crack down the government tried to go the normal routes, but the gangs would threaten, kill or bribe the judges. Many of the judges sacked were corrupt judges in the pocket of the gangs, 2) if people can’t afford to eat (which is happening throughout south and Central America and in the US) how is paying money to gangs going to help them? High prices are not isolated to El Salvador and only helped by ridding extortion helps. 3) before the crack down there was no foreign investment in Sl Salvador. 4) migration from El Salvador is down significantly from before Bukele. Many El Salvadoran Expats are moving back and/or building second homes in El Salvador. I saw this first hand on a recent trip to San Salvador. 5) tourism is a thing there now. Before Bukele, a trip to El Salvador was considered Extreme Tourism. 6) there isn’t enough background on how things were before he came to power, nothing to compare the present to.
To end the control of gangs, there has to be an economy to give people opportunities outside of crime. The can’t be economic growth with gangs running the streets. Do you really think Google (and the other German, South Korean and South American companies) would have made a huge investment in El Salvador without Bukele’s policy?
Is the El Salvador government perfect? No government is. I agree that there should be better mechanisms to let innocent people out faster, they used to go through the normal judicial channels but the gangs had corrupted the judicial system and it was impossible to have true trials.
I wish you would write a story about how life was before Bukele was in power. Speak to random people and not just a group of people who don’t like Bukele to see what it was really like. I did and it sounded like a hellscape. Say whatever you want about Bukele, but he has made life much better for the average El Salvadoran; isn’t that what governments are supposed to do?