Nayib Bukele

Nayib Bukele (born July 24, 1981, San Salvador, El Salvador) is the iron-fisted president of El Salvador (2019– ), who has unabashedly styled himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” and the country’s “philosopher king.” He first gained attention as the young mayor of the capital city of San Salvador (2015–18) before ascending to the presidency. He succeeded outside the two-party system that had governed El Salvador since the end of its civil war, and he gained international recognition for his efforts to curb corruption and gang-related crime. His policies have proven successful in bringing down crime rates, as reported by the government, but they remain controversial for their erosion of human rights.

Early life

Bukele is the first child of Olga Ortez de Bukele, a Roman Catholic woman from a small town on El Salvador’s eastern border, and Armando Bukele Kattán, a businessman of Palestinian descent and a prominent leader in the country’s Muslim community as the president of the Arab Islamic Association of El Salvador (Asociación Islámica Árabe de El Salvador). Bukele has three younger brothers as well as six elder half-siblings. In contrast to the country’s prevalent poverty, The Guardian in 2016 compared his upbringing to that of a “boy prince.” At age 18 he dropped out of Central American University, where he studied law, to devote his attention to the family’s businesses. In that capacity he worked closely with the most important client of the business empire’s public relations firm—the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional; FMLN), one of the two political parties that had dominated Salvadoran government since the end of the civil war in 1992.

Political career

In 2012, at the age of 31, Bukele was elected mayor of the small town of Nuevo Cuscatlán, just outside San Salvador, as a member of the FMLN. From the start he carried himself publicly as “someone born into privilege,” according to the newspaper El País, and in private “his arrogance [was] only matched by his ambition.” The young mayor connected with the public by using social media and in-person events rather than more traditional avenues such as news releases and press conferences. In 2015 he ran for and won election to the office of mayor of San Salvador. He implemented popular projects for urban infrastructure, revitalization of the city center, and an extensive employment scheme, while avoiding initiatives that might prove controversial. He took on his own party, alleging corruption in the FMLN-led government. His confrontations with the party led to his expulsion in 2017 after he was accused of throwing an apple at a party member during a closed city council meeting and calling her a “witch.” After one term as San Salvador’s mayor, he announced that he would run for president in the 2019 election.

No longer a member of the FMLN, Bukele formed his own party, called New Ideas (Nuevas Ideas), in October 2017. However, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled the following year that the party was formed too late to participate in the coming election. Bukele later threw his hat in with GANA (Grand Alliance for National Unity), and, after leveraging his social media presence and campaigning on a populist, anti-corruption platform, on February 3, 2019, he won the presidency with nearly 53 percent of the vote. The victory broke the three-decade-long stranglehold that the FMLN and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista; Arena) had had on presidential politics, and Bukele became the youngest elected president in Latin American history.

Shortly after taking office, Bukele implemented his Territorial Control Plan, a multiphase anti-gang program that has boosted law enforcement and taken a hard-line against detainees. Although crime appeared to drop nearly immediately, critics attributed this early success in part to benefits some gangs allegedly received for reducing violence. Such reports, although backed by documentation, were nonetheless denied by Bukele. In February 2020 Bukele raised concerns when he sent the military into the National Assembly to pressure lawmakers into approving a loan for the third phase of his program and threatened a popular insurrection if the measure did not pass.

In February 2021 Bukele’s New Ideas party ran for election for the first time, and, along with the party’s allies in GANA, Bukele’s coalition captured a two-thirds majority in the legislature. The supermajority allowed Bukele to replace the attorney general and five of the Supreme Court’s justices. With power concentrated in his hands, Bukele began to take an increasingly unconventional approach to addressing some of the country’s biggest problems, including making El Salvador the first country to declare Bitcoin legal tender.

After a spike in homicides in March 2022, Bukele asked the National Assembly to approve emergency measures that suspended the right of association, the right to be informed of the reason for an arrest, and the right to legal counsel. Moreover, the measures gave authorities the power to monitor the communications of anyone suspected of gang membership. In July El Salvador claimed its first day in more than two years with zero homicides. Gang activity and the homicide rate fell dramatically, and the shadow of violence and extortion was lifted from daily life in much of the country.

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On the other hand, by February 2024 an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans (roughly 1 percent of the country’s population) had been arrested and incarcerated. Human rights organizations raised concerns over the resulting violations of the civil rights of Salvadorans, claiming that innocent people were being caught up in the sweep and that officials were abusing prisoners. Although Bukele’s approval rating remained extraordinarily high throughout the crackdown, critics noted that allies of Bukele’s government were engaging in disinformation campaigns to manipulate media coverage on crime, the economy, and other matters, while the withdrawal of previously public data allowed the government to fabricate statistics. In December 2023, for example, Bukele’s vice president proclaimed that El Salvador had passed 500 days without a single homicide, despite about 150 murders having been recorded in 2023 alone. Bukele often used his personal account on X (formerly Twitter) to announce government policy.

Although El Salvador’s constitution prohibits the president from serving consecutive terms, the Supreme Court—which had come to be dominated by justices loyal to Bukele—ruled in September 2021 that he could stand for reelection. The results of the February 2024 presidential election were a landslide victory for Bukele, who captured nearly 85 percent of the vote, compared with only about 6 percent for the FMLN candidate, Manuel Flores.

Personal life

In 2014 Bukele married Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, a psychologist and ballet dancer who founded PrePare, the first prenatal education center in El Salvador, and supported the creation of the San Salvador Ballet (later the National Ballet of El Salvador). They have two daughters, Layla and Aminah.