Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador. File photo.
By Misión Verdad – March 21, 2025
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, became an icon for the Latin American extreme right after he entered the Legislative Assembly of his country in 2020 accompanied by heavily armed military. In addition, between 2023 and 2024 he used a legal trick to run for the second time in a row for the Presidency of the Republic.
The reasons he put forward for invading the parliament revolved around the approval and financing of $109 million for the Territorial Control Plan, with which he sought to increase punitive action as a method to eliminate the armed gangs that plague El Salvador.
From this plan comes the infamous Confinement Center for Terrorism (CECOT), to which 238 Venezuelans deported by the government of Donald Trump have been transferred. In the facility, with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners, there were 14,500 people until last August. Most of them have been detained “illegally, arbitrarily and through the use of violence,” according to human rights organizations.
Today El Salvador is the country with the highest prison population percentage in the world and a prison overcrowding of at least 130%. It is also no secret that torture is law in prisons where 1.6% of the Salvadoran population is imprisoned, the number of prisoners having tripled during the Bukele regime. Yet, according to President Bukele, it is due to this that El Salvador went from having one of the highest homicide rates in the world to being the safest.
However, the US government, led by Biden, softened its accusations against the Bukele government in 2023, despite a State Department human rights report detailing thousands of illegal detentions, surveillance of opponents and journalists, warrantless raids, political prisoners, mass online trials in which defendants cannot speak to their lawyers, prisoners beaten to death by guards, pregnant prisoners suffering miscarriages for lack of medical care, and babies dying in jail.
Bukele pampered by White House
Bukele’s political rise consisted of a reinforcing his image through social media and a supposedly innovative discourse that overrode the already existing allegations of corruption, nepotism, misogyny, and abuse of authority of his administration as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán and the capital San Salvador.
The decline of a political class full of vices and stuck in old tensions of the civil war was the breeding ground for Bukele to emerge as a young figure and his authoritarian biases seemed more of a promise than a threat.
Pampered by the transnational media as the first millennial president of the region, he has implemented strategies based on new technologies, not only in the media field but also in the economic-financial field. Hence, his most recent maneuver ended with the withdrawal of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador after four years of its supposed use as a legal tender.
A loan of $1.4 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) “to balance finances” was the reason why the Legislative Assembly, at Bukele’s request, approved a reform of the Bitcoin Law. This modification eliminated the obligation to accept the cryptocurrency as a means of payment and prohibited its use for the payment of taxes.
The IMF, a battering ram of the neoliberal ordering of global economies, set as a condition “the mitigatation of the risks” of the cryptocurrency, which, in addition, did not achieve widespread acceptance among the Salvadoran population. For the IMF, the possible illicit uses of Bitcoin threaten the financial stability of the country and consumer protection.
With the decision to withdraw Bitcoin, Bukele aligns himself with the global financial elites and sets aside one of his points of honor. An analysis from the United States called it “extremely unlikely” that the Biden administration—which was already unhappy with the Salvadoran government—would ignore the fact that a Latin American country, which has a lot of debt, would start using the US dollar less than before; and it did.
The IMF, which was quick to react to Bukele’s implementation of the cryptocurrency as a legal tender, has been cautious with Trump, who is giving it special prominence and is moving to incorporate it into his country’s strategic reserve.
It does not seem to be the appropriate moment for Bukele to expose himself before another sample of the global funnel law since his current agenda is based on being pampered by the White House.
The prison shock business
The securitization of migration is an attractive policy for Trump, who does not seem to have enough cognitive or doctrinal resources to analyze the structural causes that generate this phenomenon. Therefore, Bukele’s punitive policies fit him like a glove and their agreement becomes good business.
The Salvadoran president prefers to give a neoliberal turn of the screw to his country’s economy, via IMF adjustment, rather than affect the wealthy classes of his country with taxes. From the beginning of his first administration, he launched a wave of mass layoffs and criminalization of public sector workers under the pretext of “rooting out corruption.”
Driven by his dogmatic vision, Bukele dissolved many government agencies, including those responsible for social inclusion, citizen participation, governance, and transparency. However, he insists that for his compatriots’ migration should be “an option and not an obligation.”
The reception of the 238 deported Venezuelans was explained by Bukele in financial terms. He stated that it “will help our penitentiary system to be self-sustainable. At present, it costs $200 million a year.” Various analysts highlight that the permanence of an inmate in the CECOT is less expensive than in the United States.
However, in order to turn El Salvador into a “prison state,” Bukele has resorted to exceptionality and discretionality as a rule. This, combined with a constant increase in the security and defense budget, becomes the perfect breeding ground for corruption. In the best style of the “shock doctrine,” he takes advantage of the crisis to obtain political and financial advantages.
In the first year and a half of the emergency regime decreed by Bukele, more than 200 people died in prison, with no reparations to the innocent victims for the damages. By the end of 2024 the figure reached 349, with no sign of willingness on the part of state agencies to reform the structural causes of these deaths, much less sanctions or blockades on the part of the “rules-based order” that might want to teach the Salvadoran government a lesson.
Salvadoran Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado said in December 2024 that his office is still investigating the deaths in prisons, although in June 2023 he had said that he had shelved 142 cases of deaths because “there was no crime to prosecute.
Three officials of the Bukele government have been sanctioned by the United States on various charges, including negotiating with gang leaders. In fact, along with the deported Venezuelans, some of the Salvadoran gangsters were extradited to El Salvador, and it is possible that this was part of the negotiation between the two governments, given the Salvadoran government’s insistence that they not be extradited when Washington requested them.
In September 2020 it came to light, through a case dubbed “Cathedral,” that Salvadoran government officials had been negotiating with the gang Mara Salvatrucha-13 for a year. The commission in charge of the investigation was later dismantled by Delgado. Other gangs, such as Barrio 18 Revolucionarios and Barrio 18 Sureños, also appear in a scheme in which the aforementioned officials entered prisons to establish agreements with the gangs.
This is nothing new in El Salvador; a chronology published by El Faro describes that this method dates back to at least 2012 and that it was part of “the old regime” that was rejected by the president in his speeches.
Token of a dangerous game
Bukele’s method to be pampered in the White House consists of anti-politics as an instrument. In addition to applying neoliberal mechanisms to convert the Salvadoran State into a business agency in favor of the geo-economic interests of the financial elites, he has become a token in favor of US control and coercion of governments that are not aligned with the US supremacist vision.
The use of “terrorism” as an excuse for interference persists even though, as in the case of the terrorist organization Islamic State, armed gangs are instruments for the US empire to exercise power in regions targeted for plunder and geostrategic positioning.
The narrative about the Tren de Aragua is another such case: it is a device with which Venezuela is being threatened through half-truths and scandalous and illegal actions, such as the recent deportation of the migrants. Perhaps the routemap traced by Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio consists of incorporating Venezuela in a list of “State sponsors of terrorism” in order to “legalize” any kind of armed action and attack “the root” of the threat.
While this is only a hypothetical scenario, the fact remains that Bukele enters the ingratiating circle of Trump’s geopolitics, with the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, and placing El Salvador in the orbit of a prison colony of the United States and of countries indebted to international institutions that promote dollarcentrism as a financial dogma.
Misión Verdad
Misión Verdad is a Venezuelan investigative journalism website with a socialist perspective in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution
