How Nayib Bukele turned a country into an audience
Nayib Bukele assumed the presidency in 2019 as a self-styled political outsider, but within weeks it became clear that his outsider status would not translate into humility. Almost immediately, he clashed with the Legislative Assembly, going so far as to storm the chamber in February 2020 with armed soldiers in an attempt to pressure lawmakers into approving a security loan. The display was blatantly militaristic and broadcast live to El Salvador, making it clear to the public what was to come. This stunt was condemned both domestically and abroad, but Bukele remained unapologetic. He prayed theatrically from the president’s chair and later claimed divine sanction for his actions. It was a warning shot, not just to legislators but to the democratic framework itself. The executive is no longer bound by decorum or constraint.
The full scope of that message became evident in 2021, when his party, Nuevas Ideas, secured a supermajority in the Legislative Assembly. With unchecked legislative control, Bukele wasted no time dismantling the country’s institutional independence. Within hours of his party’s victory, the Assembly voted to remove the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General. No credible investigation or constitutional process preceded the purge. Replacements were rushed in, many with direct affiliations to the executive, including former legal advisors and political allies. The court that had once ruled consecutive presidential terms unconstitutional now reversed that very decision, conveniently clearing the way for Bukele to seek reelection in 2024. Bukele packed the courts, and rewrote the constitution for his own vainglorious quest for ultimate power. No wonder he and Trump are such close friends.
The Attorney General’s removal followed the same pattern. The newly installed official suspended investigations into high-profile corruption cases implicating the administration, while ramping up cases against critics, opposition leaders, and journalists. Institutions once designed to serve as democratic guardrails became tools of political utility, offering legal cover for the consolidation of power. As watchdogs were silenced, Bukele began to intensify his grip. His government increasingly relied on secrecy, executive decrees, and weaponized legalism, hollowing out the already fragile rule of law. By the end of his first term, Bukele had repurposed them; stagecraft in his broader performance of unchallengeable authority. And half of America loves the show.
In March 2022, following a surge in gang-related homicides that left over 80 dead in a single weekend, Nayib Bukele’s government declared a national “state of exception.” On paper, it was a temporary constitutional suspension meant to stem the violence. In practice, it opened the door to mass arbitrary arrests, warrantless searches, and indefinite detention without trial. Key rights such as freedom of association, the right to legal counsel, and the presumption of innocence were effectively nullified overnight. The Salvadoran military deployed alongside police, patrolling streets, conducting raids, and detaining anyone suspected of gang affiliation. “Suspicion” was often based on vague and superficial markers: youth, tattoos, a prior address in a high-crime area, or simply the wrong look at the wrong time.
Within the first twelve months, over 65,000 Salvadorans, (more than 1% of the country’s population) had been detained. Many were never formally charged. Among them are the Niños de Chalatenango. They were a group of 10 minors, ranging from 12 to 17, arrested for appearing in a 10 second video. The kids were hanging out in the video, most unaware they were being filmed, and one signaled to the camera. The video was sent in a whatsapp chat accidentally, but was then deleted. However, someone managed to download the video, edited in music associated with gang activity, and the boys were arrested. In another case, police arrested a 45 year old taxi owner at his shop in San Salvador. Officers forced him to kneel on the ground for about two hours in the hot sun and forced him to squat 25 times while naked. “Welcome to hell,” prison guards allegedly said.
In the cells, the prisoners sleep in bunk beds with four tiers (Lissette
Limus/BBC)
Human rights organizations, both domestic and international, have documented hundreds of cases of abuse. People tortured during interrogation, denied access to lawyers, or crammed into overcrowded prisons without charges. In some instances, detainees were held incommunicado for weeks, their families only learning of their status through lists posted outside detention centers. Several have died behind bars, their bodies returned with signs of trauma. Yet despite the cruelty, the Salvadoran public remains firmly supportive. Polls show Bukele's approval ratings soaring above 80%, with the majority of respondents claiming to feel safer. In a country traumatized by decades of gang extortion and impunity, even those who know someone wrongly imprisoned still back the policy. Fear has proven more durable than empathy.
This dissonance is not unique to El Salvador. In the United States, the Trump administration employs similar rhetorical tools. They cast immigrants as criminals, depict cities as lawless, and elevate “law and order” above civil liberties. Even now, Trump uses these tried and true excuses to justify sending the national guard to California, and painting the protests there as extreme riots. Trump praises police who rough up suspects, labels judicial oversight as weakness, and flirts openly with the idea of suspending norms when politically convenient. While the U.S. possesses stronger institutional guardrails, the authoritarian impulse is not exclusive to one nation. Bukele’s state of exception is simply a more concentrated version of a playbook visible across democratic backslides worldwide.
The danger lies not just in the suspension of rights but in the normalization of their absence. By framing civil liberties as luxuries afforded only in times of peace, Bukele has redefined the legal baseline of governance. The longer the state of exception endures, (extended monthly by a corrupt legislature) the harder it becomes to remember what ordinary law looked like. What began as a response to the crisis is now the new status quo. And as mass imprisonment is celebrated as victory, the distinction between order and oppression collapses. In this framework, justice is not blind, but deferential.
In early 2023, Nayib Bukele unveiled his most grotesque symbol of authoritarian pride: the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a mega prison built to house 40,000 alleged gang members. Announced with dramatic flair and presented as the ultimate solution to decades of insecurity, CECOT was constructed in under seven months on a remote stretch of land in Tecoluca, San Vicente. Surveillance drones buzz overhead. Guard towers loom over concrete perimeters laced with barbed wire. Military barracks line the entrance. The message was unmistakable: this is not a rehabilitation center. It is a holding pen designed to inspire fear.
Inside, conditions resemble a carceral dystopia. Inmates are packed shoulder-to-shoulder in concrete cells, often without beds or access to daylight. Sanitation is minimal. Water is rationed. There is no contact with families or legal counsel. Prisoners are shaved bald, forced to squat in rows, and marched barefoot in chains. These are images that Bukele’s government proudly disseminates on official channels, a practice eerily similar to the public throwing rotten fruit at people in stockades. The prison has no outdoor recreation area, no rehabilitative programming, and virtually no medical infrastructure. Human rights monitors have been barred entry, and court access is functionally nonexistent. For most detainees, the presumption is not guilt or innocence, it is invisibility. Once inside CECOT, a person simply disappears.
CECOT is more than a prison. It is a monument to the spectacle of state violence. Its launch was accompanied by dramatic footage of the first 2,000 inmates being transferred in the dead of night, shirtless and shackled, heads down and hands behind their backs. The images went viral. They were not meant for domestic reassurance alone, but for international admiration. In February 2024, Donald Trump praised Bukele’s prison in a Truth Social post, declaring he would like to send American “MS-13 thugs” there, describing it as “the kind of strength we need.” The suggestion was absurd and legally incoherent, but it underscored something real: CECOT is less a correctional facility than a global avatar of punitive power, fetishized by authoritarians and hardliners as a fantasy of zero-tolerance governance. It is a place designed not only to hold bodies, but to project dominance.
Inmates are lined up during a security operation under the watch of police
at Izalco prison in San Salvador, El Salvador, on April 25, 2020.© 2020 El
Salvador presidential press office via AP
What makes CECOT particularly chilling is not just its cruelty, but its popularity. Polls suggest Salvadorans overwhelmingly support its existence. For many, the prison stands as proof that the government is finally doing something. The pain of incarceration is someone else’s problem, until it isn’t. By mid-2024, families of inmates had formed quiet support networks, sharing stories of relatives who vanished into the system for minor offenses or none at all. Several former detainees, later released without charges, described brutal beatings and psychological torture. But dissent remains muted. To question CECOT is to appear soft on crime. In this atmosphere, due process becomes a liability, and the prison a totem of national pride.
From the earliest months of his presidency, Nayib Bukele made it clear that independent journalism would not be tolerated as a check on power. Framing the press as an enemy of progress, he adopted a familiar strategy: delegitimize critics, amplify loyalists, and weaponize state power to silence dissenting voices. On Twitter he often accused journalists of being “paid by foreign interests,” “propaganda machines,” or worse, “accomplices to gangs.” What began as rhetorical skirmishes soon hardened into a campaign of repression. Independent newsrooms were surveilled, raided, and smeared. Reporters were harassed online and in person, and investigative journalism became not just inconvenient, but dangerous.
One of the clearest cases of intimidation was the targeting of El Faro, El Salvador’s leading investigative outlet. In 2020, Bukele publicly accused El Faro of money laundering without evidence. The next year, the government launched a financial audit of the paper, spanning more than a decade of transactions—a move widely condemned as politically motivated. In 2022, it was revealed that Pegasus spyware, sold only to governments, had been covertly installed on the phones of more than twenty-five El Faro journalists. The spyware granted access to their cameras, microphones, and private communications. Rather than deny involvement, Bukele’s administration refused to comment. Surely though, they would’ve mumbled something about gangs and security for their cheap excuses.
Other newsrooms met similar fates. Revista Factum reported being followed and harassed by security agents. Anonymous Telegram channels with ties to Nuevas Ideas began leaking private information about reporters’ families. The Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) documented a sharp rise in threats, digital surveillance, and physical aggression against the press. Meanwhile, Bukele expanded the role of state media, flooding the digital space with stylized propaganda pieces glorifying his leadership. Those sympathetic to the government were granted exclusive access. Those critical were blocked from press briefings or had their accreditation revoked, chillingly echoing the AP’s ban from the White House newsroom over their coverage of the Gulf of Mexico. Over time, Bukele transformed the information landscape into a stage-managed performance where only approved narratives could breathe.
The parallels to Donald Trump’s media war are not coincidental. Like Trump, Bukele painted the press as corrupt and unpatriotic, casting inconvenient stories as “fake news” and journalists as political operatives. Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric emboldened his base to view criticism as treason; Bukele’s followers operate on the same logic. Both men understood that control over media narratives is as crucial as control over institutions. But Bukele has gone further. Where Trump was often stymied by courts or norms, Bukele dismantled those norms entirely. It wasn’t just demonizing independent media. He surveilled it, criminalized it, and sought to eliminate its very infrastructure. What Trump gestured toward, Bukele realized with clinical efficiency.
In Bukele’s El Salvador, the erosion of press freedom is foundational to his regime. Without a vibrant press, state abuses go unrecorded, opposition voices are muted, and the public is fed a steady diet of triumphalist fiction. This blackout is not just literal, it is epistemological. Truth itself becomes subject to executive approval. And as Bukele eyes reelection under a constitutional interpretation engineered by his own judges, the silencing of the press is not just about narrative control. It is about eliminating the last remaining threat to total power: accountability.
While Nayib Bukele rose to power denouncing the gangs as domestic terrorists and vowing their total eradication, the public crackdown masked a secret alliance beneath the surface. Beginning as early as 2019, mere months into his Presidency, evidence emerged suggesting Bukele’s administration had entered into covert negotiations with MS-13 and Barrio 18, the very groups he was publicly condemning. These negotiations were not small-scale backchannels; they involved top-level figures in his administration meeting with gang leaders inside prison facilities. In exchange for reduced homicide rates, better prison conditions, and the transfer of certain inmates to more lenient facilities, the gangs allegedly agreed to a “truce”, not unlike those struck by Bukele’s predecessors, which he had once condemned as morally bankrupt.
Journalistic investigations by El Faro and others revealed that government officials facilitated the talks through the prison system’s directorate, with meetings occurring in facilities like Zacatecoluca and Izalco. The inmates were rewarded not just with amenities, some of which were televisions, cell phones, and access to conjugal visits, but with the kind of informal political power that made prison walls permeable. When these stories first surfaced in 2020, Bukele responded not with denial but with fury against the press. His administration accused El Faro of fabricating evidence and launched audits and tax probes against its journalists. Meanwhile, internal government documents and visitor logs from the prison authority began quietly disappearing. The Attorney General’s office, which had been actively investigating the allegations, was abruptly gutted in 2021 when Bukele’s newly installed supermajority in the Legislative Assembly removed Attorney General Raúl Melara and replaced him with a loyalist. The investigation was promptly buried.
This was more than just political maneuvering. It was a coordinated suppression of accountability at every level: legislative, judicial, and informational. In the same year Bukele began rounding up tens of thousands under the state of exception, he was still benefiting from the gang pacts that had artificially lowered the homicide rate in his first two years. The deal had bought him breathing room. It was time to consolidate control, purge institutions, and stage-manage the narrative of transformation. The gangs were no longer just enemies of the state; they were unwitting collaborators in the creation of a myth. Their existence justified repression, while their compliance enabled calm. Bukele’s promise to eliminate gangs, then, was never about principle. It was simply a stage prop, to be bargained with in private, then to be publicly sacrificed for applause.
The hypocrisy is stark. The man who railed against previous administrations for "negotiating with killers" did exactly that, only more secretly, and with greater impunity. While opposition figures faced criminal charges for earlier pacts, Bukele rewrote the script so that his own arrangement could masquerade as victory. In doing so, he created a dangerous precedent: that state legitimacy can be traded for optics, and that justice is secondary to control. The result is a regime that punishes the powerless with sweeping arrests while rewarding the powerful behind closed doors. It is not that Bukele found a new way to solve the gang crisis. It is that he found a more sophisticated way to exploit it. He is managing to turn fear into fuel, and silence into obedience.
Since taking office in 2019, Bukele has not governed El Salvador so much as he has branded it. He has treated foreign relations as little more than a backdrop against which to stage his own myth. Whether hosting U.S. diplomats or addressing the United Nations, he rarely speaks in terms of shared goals or regional solidarity. Instead, he delivers slogans about sovereignty, strength, and the right to do things “the Salvadoran way.” He mocks the international press, belittles critics from human rights organizations, and accuses foreign governments of hypocrisy, all while cultivating an image of principled defiance. In truth, there is little principle in Bukele’s foreign posture, only the reflexive defense of spectacle.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele meets U.S. President Donald Trump in the
White House in April.Win McNamee/Getty Images
When Joe Biden’s administration voiced concerns over El Salvador’s democratic backsliding, Bukele replied not with policy, but with memes. When the U.S. Treasury sanctioned close aides for corruption and gang negotiations, Bukele dismissed the evidence as politically motivated. His administration grew closer to China, not from any coherent ideological realignment, but from transactional convenience. He promised to “decouple” from Western dependence while refusing to disclose the terms of his dealings with Beijing. Meanwhile, foreign investment remains cautious, and international watchdogs continue to warn of creeping authoritarianism. But none of that matters for Bukele’s purposes. He isn’t interested in diplomacy, he is interested in one thing: Branding.
And through that, Bukele managed to find the admirer who matters more than any trade deal or human rights resolution: Donald Trump. Since 2020, the two have engaged in a kind of transnational feedback loop. Bukele borrowed Trump’s rhetoric of fake news, his disdain for institutions, and his self-portrait as an outsider savior. Trump, in turn, has praised Bukele’s prison policies, his crackdown on crime, and his “toughness.” In early 2024, Trump said he wanted to send gang members in the U.S. to Bukele’s megaprison, CECOT. That the comment was legally absurd didn’t matter. It was symbolic. It signaled something deeper: that Bukele’s El Salvador is no longer just a country,it is a blueprint, a testbed for autocratic techniques wrapped in populist charisma. A sandbox for strongmen-in-waiting.
What Bukele has constructed is a political model that requires constant escalation. Repression must intensify to maintain the illusion of order. Dissent must shrink to sustain the image of unity. The myth of incorruptibility must grow even as corruption deepens. Each crackdown requires another, each spectacle demands a bigger one. And as Trump eyes another presidential term, he is watching not only how Bukele governs, but how he gets away with it. If El Salvador is the lab, the United States may be next in line for the experiment.
Bukele has not brought peace to El Salvador. He has brought quiet and called it peace. The question is not whether the silence will last. The question is what it will cost to keep it.