In May 2020, during the height of Covid, El Salvador was under a military-enforced lockdown. At a news conference, I asked President Nayib Bukele a straightforward question about meeting with the business community about reopening the economy. Mr. Bukele bristled and criticized the founder of El Faro, the news outlet where I work.
Afterward, I received death threats from Mr. Bukele’s supporters. One that still stands out was written on Twitter by someone outside the country: “I want to go back to El Salvador so badly and shoot you 3 times in the head so you stop being a fool.”
The reaction was typical of a certain strain of Mr. Bukele’s followers, who treat criticism of the president as an unforgivable sin. After six years, he is still wildly popular, with a national approval rating of over 80 percent. Much of the diaspora is devoted to him as well. While the idealized version of him — an efficient, eloquent leader who has reduced crime in the country and is committed to fighting corruption — sounds great, the reality is that he is a mercurial and unrestrained politician who controls every institution at the expense of the country’s democracy.
Now he has become President Trump’s jailer, welcoming deportees from the United States to be imprisoned in El Salvador’s brutal prison system. Venezuelan and American families, whose loved ones have been sent to these prisons, are now going through what many families here have gone through since Mr. Bukele came to power — feeling the terrifying arbitrariness of his regime, his self-interested way of ruling, his cruelty. Many are now realizing what some of us have warned people about for years: that even if Mr. Bukele has ironically called himself the “coolest dictator in the world,” he’s a dictator nonetheless.
The so-called Bukele model of national security is built on thousands of cases like that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was improperly expelled to El Salvador in March. In 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a state of exception — still in effect — to weaken the country’s powerful gangs and lower the soaring crime and murder rate.
It has also eroded Salvadorans’ constitutional rights, and thousands of people with no criminal records have been arrested in a sweeping operation that eventually dismantled the gangs’ territorial control and drastically reduced homicides. Since the state of exception began, around 80,000 people have been arrested and imprisoned in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele admitted last year that 8,000 innocent people were arrested and released in the sweep, but civil society groups say the number is much higher.
