How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador

You can read the transcript of the interview here and the Spanish version here.

Before he became arguably the most popular head of state in the world, Nayib Bukele was an adman. The President of El Salvador has branded himself the “world’s coolest dictator” and a “philosopher king,” but he is, perhaps above all, a former publicist attuned to the power of image—his own and his country’s. On the day we met in late June, at the presidential offices in San Salvador, Bukele was dressed all in black. Nine brilliant peacocks roamed the lawn outside. “A leader should be a philosopher before he is a king,” Bukele told me, reclining in a chair as the sun set over the lush jungle grounds, “rather than the typical politician who is hated by their people.”

It was Bukele’s first interview with a foreign reporter in three years. The occasion was something of a victory lap. At 43, he has remade a nation that was once the world’s murder capital, turning it into a country safer than Canada, according to Salvadoran government data. Bukele’s policy of mano dura—iron fist—drove an aggressive crackdown on vicious gangs that has jailed 81,000 people and led to a precipitous drop in homicides. After decades of violence, fear, and extortion, citizens can move freely in former gang-controlled “red zones,” lounge in parks, and go out at night. El Salvador now markets itself as the “land of surf, volcanoes, and coffee,” hosts international events like the Miss Universe pageant, and draws tourists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to coastal enclaves like “Bitcoin Beach.” The transformation helped Bukele cruise to re-election earlier this year; his approval rating these days tops 90% according to the latest CID Gallup poll. His picture adorns key chains, mugs, and T-shirts at souvenir stands; prominent portraits of him and his wife greet visitors at the airport. As we spoke, blue-and-gold banners festooned the streets of the capital, remnants of his second inauguration three weeks earlier.

Bukele’s popularity has come in spite—or perhaps because—of his defiance of constitutional, political, and legal constraints. Since 2022, he has ruled under emergency powers that suspend key civil liberties, including due process. His security regime can make arrests without warrants, including of minors as young as 12, and hauls hundreds of suspects into mass trials. One in every 57 Salvadorans is now incarcerated—triple the rate of the U.S. and the highest in the world. Bukele’s allies have fired top judges and packed the courts with loyalists, allowing him to dodge a constitutional prohibition to run successfully for a second term—all with broad public support.

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Organized political opposition has, in the President’s words, been “pulverized.” Defense attorneys, journalists, and NGOs say the government has intimidated, surveilled, or attacked them, spurring many to flee. “El Salvador’s institutions have been totally co-opted, subdued, and made obedient to the presidency,” says Celia Medrano, a Salvadoran human-rights activist.

Human-rights groups have accused Bukele’s government of abuses including arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and torture. Salvadoran lawyers tell TIME they have documented thousands of cases of innocent people who were caught in the dragnet with no legal recourse. Bukele appears to consider them collateral damage in a larger war, the cost of guaranteeing the safety of the nation’s 6 million people. “Go anywhere,” he dares me. “Ask the people. It will be incredibly rare to find a negative opinion in the population.” He resents foreign critics’ focus on preserving El Salvador’s fragile democratic institutions—a corrupt system that, as many see it, only allowed the gangs to flourish. “Everything in life has a cost,” Bukele says, “and the cost of being called authoritarian is too small to bother me much.”

For Bukele’s admirers, El Salvador has become a showcase for how populist authoritarianism can succeed. His second term will be a test of what happens to a state when its charismatic young leader has an overwhelming mandate to dismantle its democratic institutions in pursuit of security. The results will have sweeping implications not just for El Salvador but also the region, where political leaders are eager to replicate what many call el milagro Bukele—the Bukele miracle.

Whether it can be sustained is a different question. While most Salvadorans say they are satisfied with the state of the country’s democracy, 61% say they fear negative consequences if they publicly express their opinions about its problems, according to a survey by Chilean firm Latinobarometro. Supporters hail Bukele as a visionary, but critics call him a millennial caudillo: a social-media-savvy strongman repackaged for the TikTok age. Some close to him say he worries about losing support as Salvadorans’ concerns shift from security to the economy. El Salvador remains one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, and Bukele has made a series of gambles that have not been well received by many foreign investors and creditors, including adopting Bitcoin as legal tender and investing some of the country’s reserves in the cryptocurrency.

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Even so, others are following the Salvadoran leader’s blueprint. His name is invoked on the campaign trail from Peru to Argentina. Some of his harshest critics, including in the Biden Administration, are now courting his favor. Ecuador and Honduras are building mass prisons inspired by Bukele’s. His popularity in El Salvador may export a brand of “punitive populism” that leads other heads of state to restrict constitutional rights, especially in a region where voters are increasingly gravitating toward authoritarianism. “The international community has been paralyzed by Bukele’s popularity and his success crushing the country’s bloodthirsty gangs,” says Benjamin Gedan, director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program. “But we know how this story ends. And when Salvadorans tire of Bukele, they might have no options to express their political preferences.”

The seeds of El Salvador’s transformation were first planted in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a sleepy town of 8,000 people on the outskirts of the capital. It was there, in 2012, that the sharply dressed scion of a wealthy local family arrived to run for mayor. “He would come with bodyguards to give speeches,” recalls Rosa Mélida, a 62-year-old resident, standing in the shade of a corner store. “He handed out food baskets to older people and paid to fix our houses.” As Mélida and her neighbors talk about the young mayor who became their President, they wave their hands toward the sky, gesturing at the green hills above. Bukele still lives up there, in a gated community called Los Sueños: The Dreams.

Bukele grew up in San Salvador, the fifth of 10 children of Armando Bukele Kattán, an affluent businessman and imam of Palestinian descent. He attended an elite, bilingual private school, where he was shielded from the brutal civil war that devastated El Salvador during the 1980s. As the son of an outspoken Muslim cleric, he learned how to define himself as an outsider and wield snark as a weapon. In an early sign of his tendency to troll his critics, Bukele captioned himself the “class terrorist” in the high school yearbook in 1999.

Although he enrolled in college to become a lawyer, Bukele soon dropped out. He ran a nightclub, a Yamaha dealership, and a political-advertising firm before deciding it was time to jump into politics himself. He decided to run for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small town that was looking for a candidate. Bukele’s first campaign video shows a smiling 30-year-old with a starched white shirt and neatly gelled hair, promising to use his business background to transform the town into a modern “model of development.”

It was soon clear that Bukele had larger ambitions. As mayor, he donated his salary to fund high school scholarships, poured funds into construction projects, and tripled the number of security officers patrolling the streets, documenting all his exploits on YouTube. When people questioned where the money came from, he debuted what would become a trademark slogan: “There’s enough money to go around if no one steals.” (In fact, the town would go into heavy debt during his term, according to Salvadoran investigative outlet El Faro.) At that point, Bukele belonged to the left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) party, like his father. Yet he conspicuously shunned its traditional red colors and outdated revolutionary slogans. More than a decade later, the town’s clinic, library, and park are still emblazoned with the peeling cyan N he adopted as a logo—branding that entwined Bukele’s first initial with the town’s. “He is allergic to anything that looks old or smells like your grandmother’s closet,” says a foreign diplomat who worked with him.

In 2015, Bukele ran for mayor of San Salvador and won in a close race. He continued to promote attention-grabbing public projects, including the construction of a flashy upscale market and an effort to put lights on every corner of the capital to combat crime. Bukele posted about these moves on social media, where he amassed a following that soon eclipsed that of the country’s then President. “He’s like a cinematographer,” says a former associate. “Before he even makes a decision, he’s thinking about what the end result will look like as a movie reel.” He cultivated an image of modern irreverence, often wearing a backward baseball cap, jeans, and a leather jacket. One popular image, visible on posters and magnets across El Salvador, shows him with his feet on his desk in the mayor’s office, sporting aviator sunglasses.

FMLN officials soon became wary of the young politician’s presidential ambitions. Bukele openly criticized the party’s leaders, crafting a parallel political brand with his trademark cyan symbols. His inner circle consisted of his brothers and several friends from his private-school days, all of whom have followed him into the presidency. After a series of clashes, Bukele seemed to decide he was popular enough to have outgrown the party. After one incident in 2017, in which he reportedly threw an apple at a fellow FMLN official, the group expelled him.

Within a month, Bukele had launched his own party, Nuevas Ideas, and ran in the 2019 presidential election as an antiestablishment populist. He wielded his social media machine effectively, bragging that while his opponents traveled the country he could campaign from his phone, as his media team created viral Twitter challenges and emotive ads. “It was a way to reach the population directly without going through the press filter,” he tells me. Campaigning with his pregnant wife Gabriela, a prenatal psychologist and former ballet dancer, Bukele offered the chance of a fresh start after decades of corrupt, unpopular governments. At age 37, he won the presidency with 53% of the vote.

Soon the musty red drapes and dark-paneled wood of the presidential palace were gone, replaced by gleaming cream walls with gold molding. Government social media accounts were given a facelift and began to pump out coordinated messaging. Bukele announced ambitious plans to renovate the capital’s historic center and attract foreign businesses and tech investors. In his first speech before the U.N., he created a viral moment by turning around and snapping a photo: “Believe me, many more people will see that selfie than will hear this speech.” The adman wanted to project a new, modern nation that was breaking with its past.

Yet El Salvador was paralyzed by entrenched violence. Its two largest gangs, Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, were American imports—both formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by civil-war refugees who were eventually deported back to El Salvador. In a country tentatively emerging from that brutal conflict, the gangs grew their ranks by forcibly conscripting young people. They controlled vast territories and forced everyone—from working-class street vendors to large companies—to pay “rent,” or extortion fees. They killed with impunity. Salvadorans were gunned down for not crossing the street, for looking a split second too long at someone’s sister, for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Previous governments had used emergency powers to briefly instate mano dura in a limited way, including in the early 2000s to stem gang violence. Though popular, the crackdowns eventually backfired, driving gangs to regroup and change tactics. Like his predecessors, Bukele allegedly sought to broker a truce with the gangs. Early in his presidency, according to U.S. officials and audio recordings published by Salvadoran media, he cut deals that provided financial incentives to MS-13 and Barrio 18 “to ensure that incidents of gang violence and the number of confirmed homicides remained low,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department, which sanctioned two Bukele associates for their involvement in 2021. (Bukele denies this.)

At the same time, he moved to consolidate power. In February 2020, Bukele entered the national parliament, flanked by armed soldiers and police in a brazen show of force, to demand lawmakers vote on new security funding. Political opponents called it an unprecedented act of intimidation. Yet Bukele succeeded in tightening his grip on the legislature, ushering in electoral reforms that cut the number of seats from 84 to 60. In May 2021, lawmakers aligned with Bukele voted to remove El Salvador’s Attorney General, who had reportedly been investigating Bukele’s deals with the gangs, as well as the top judges on the country’s Supreme Court.

The move drew international condemnation, including from the Biden Administration. “We have deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy,” Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted. Though privately infuriated by the rebuke, according to advisers, Bukele publicly embraced the outrage. He changed his social media bio to “world’s coolest dictator” and posted photos of soldiers helping civilians with the hashtag #quebonitadictadura—nice dictatorship. When international bodies raised alarms, he trolled their concerns. “Where is the dictatorship?” he tweeted when protesters demonstrating against what they saw as Bukele’s unconstitutional power grab blocked the city in 2021 without government interference. “Few countries can say this: We have never repressed a demonstration,” Bukele tells me, clearly angry at what he sees as foreign double standards. “We have never used a tear-gas can or a baton.”

Bukele turned the controversy to his advantage. He began to tweet mostly in English, noticing “an interesting audience for our country’s agenda,” he says. “It was an opportunity. We found that my social media presence served as a window for investors, investment funds, banks, important figures, and politicians.”

To market his vision of a new El Salvador, Bukele still needed a modern pitch. In September 2021, he made the nation the first to use Bitcoin as legal tender, earning global headlines and the attention of the growing crypto-currency community. Bukele installed Bitcoin ATMs, announced plans to build a geothermal-powered “Bitcoin city,” and boasted the move would draw foreign investment and benefit Salvadorans, many of whom lacked bank accounts or internet access, let alone digital wallets. Advisers admit it was a PR stunt. “We call it the Great Rebranding. It was genius,” says Damian Merlo, a Miami-based lobbyist. “We could have paid millions to a PR firm to rebrand El Salvador. Instead, we just adopted Bitcoin.”

As policy, the gimmick has flopped. Investing some of El Salvador’s national reserves into crypto was not well received by many foreign investors or the International Monetary Fund. Today Bukele concedes that Bitcoin “has not had the widespread adoption we hoped” among ordinary Salvadorans. Fewer than 12% have made a single transaction. But the move had the desired effect, putting El Salvador on the map for something other than its violence. “It gave us branding, it brought us investments, it brought us tourism,” says Bukele.

Amid the bitcoin hype, however, the alleged secret truce with the gangs fell apart. In March 2022, more than 87 people were murdered in a single weekend, the deadliest killing spree since the end of the civil war. One of the victims, later identified as a local surf instructor with no known gang ties, was left on the highway to Bitcoin Beach, hands and feet bound, a bullet wound in his head. It was a clear message to Bukele from the gangs, and an inflection point for the young President.

Bukele’s response was to implement a new, aggressive mano dura. He declared a 30-day “state of exception,” restricting free assembly and permitting arrests without warrants and detention without trial. The military surged into gang-controlled areas. Police barged into homes and strip-searched residents. Suspected gang members or collaborators were arrested at school, at work, on the street. “We were arresting more than 1,000 people per day,” says René Merino, the Defense Minister, who downplays the military’s role in the effort. “We had to do it in a way where the medicine would not be worse than the sickness.”

The police advertised a hotline to “bring more terrorists to justice.” By dialing 123, Salvadorans could anonymously report anyone they suspected of having links to gangs. In the swirling atmosphere of fear, however, it was often hard to separate violent criminals from innocent teenagers with rock-band tattoos, or clothing or colors associated with gangs, according to local defense attorneys. Some people denounced business rivals or called in neighbors to settle petty scores. Salvadoran security forces, under pressure from superiors to meet hefty arrest quotas, were happy to carry out the often indiscriminate sweeps. “If they didn’t find the person they were looking for, they would just arrest whoever was at home,” says Alejandro Díaz Gómez, a lawyer with local human-rights group Tutela, citing videos filmed by family members. (Bukele officials say that 7,000 people have been freed owing to lack of evidence.)

The approach succeeded at curbing the rampant violence. Homicides in El Salvador dropped by half in 2022 and more than 70% in 2023, according to government data. “It was an overwhelming victory,” says Bukele. “We were fighting an irregular army of 70,000 men and suffered no civilian casualties.” Jails filled with gang members and suspected associates; the population of the country’s largest prison, designed to hold 10,000, swelled to more than three times that number.

Next Bukele built the Centro de Contenimiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a sprawling detention facility that could house 40,000 more inmates. In slick videos set to upbeat music, Bukele’s government advertised the prison’s spartan conditions. Meals were reduced to two a day, prisoners slept on bare metal slats, and inmates were stripped to their underwear and frog-marched through corridors. Under previous governments, “there used to be YouTube videos posted by gangs showing them in prison with prostitutes, strippers, parties, drugs,” Bukele says. The images of the brutal crackdown became an unlikely sensation, making El Salvador’s President the most-followed world leader on TikTok. He issued a public warning that if the gangs moved to retaliate, “I swear to God they won’t eat a grain of rice, and we’ll see how long they last.”

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Salvadoran and international human-rights groups have accused the government of a range of abuses, including forced disappearances, torture, deaths in custody, and targeting poor and marginalized communities. Bukele scoffs at the allegations. The roughly 140 prisoners who have died in Salvadoran prisons per year during the state of exception amount to “an incredibly low mortality rate by Latin American standards,” he says, “indeed lower than the U.S.” He questions the focus on conditions in El Salvador’s prisons compared with those in notorious jails in neighboring countries. “How can I ask the Salvadoran people, who often have modest meals like beans and tortillas for dinner, to pay taxes to provide meat and chicken to prisoners who have killed their family members?” he asks.

Salvadoran officials say the punitive approach is part of the Bukele government’s appeal. “There are 660 million Latin Americans who are seeing what is possible with clear common-sense criminal procedures,” says Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro, whose office features a large screen depicting the location of every police car in the country, with different dashboards to keep track of reported crime. Villatoro says that the government “studied the enemy, like in any war.” He shows me a 90-page handbook cataloging gang tattoos, graffiti, and slang to identify suspects’ affiliations. If Bukele “hadn’t had the courage to send the hypocritical international groups to hell, we would have fallen into the same mistake that the six former Presidents made,” he says. Those predecessors had faltered in seeing through the draconian measures required to root out the gangs, Villatoro argues, whereas Bukele had persevered. “There are many priests,” Villatoro adds, “but few are exorcists.” 

After his allies removed Supreme Court judges and replaced them with supporters who reinterpreted the Constitution in his favor, Bukele decided to run for a second term in spite of a pre-existing ban. In February, he won a landslide victory, with 84% of the vote. Nuevas Ideas, a party that did not exist six years ago, won 54 of the nation’s 60 congressional seats. El Salvador had effectively become a one-party state, controlled by a single man.

Bukele insists his consolidation of power has been “100% democratic.” If other world leaders aren’t able to get such results, he argues, that’s on them: “We’re not going to artificially grant half of the Congress to the opposition just to say that we are a democracy.” Other heads of state, he suggests, would use any means necessary to achieve the transformation El Salvador has. “Their failure,” says Bukele, “can’t be our road map.” 

Bukele’s second inauguration in early June was a far cry from his first. A parade of high-level political figures made the trek to San Salvador, including King Felipe VI of Spain, regional leaders, more than a dozen U.S. officials and lawmakers, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson. “It was the hottest ticket in the Americas,” says Merlo, Bukele’s U.S. lobbyist. Bukele arranged a dramatic spectacle, designing new capes for the military guard and sporting a striking suit with a stiff, gold-embroidered collar and cuffs that evoked a cross between Latin American revolutionary war heroes and Star Wars. Visitors were ushered into the best restaurants, shown the gleaming new Google regional offices, and taken to the renovated historic center at night to showcase the country’s safety.

Bukele casts himself as an independent operator, but he has conspicuously cultivated ties to the American right. Though he came up in a left-wing party, “the left has lost its way across the world,” says Bukele. “It has a serious identity crisis, and the right is at least setting a course.” Bukele, who speaks English fluently, has given two rare interviews to Carlson and spoken at the Heritage Foundation and Conservative Political Action Conference. His tweets use tropes common in right-wing online circles. Bukele has baselessly accused the billionaire philanthropist George Soros of funding journalists who write critically about him, one of the reasons he says he has stopped speaking to the press. “At least state propaganda openly acknowledges it’s propaganda,” he says. “When we put out a video spot, no one’s hiding that it’s propaganda.” 

In recent months, he has invited Carlson and Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to spend the weekend at his lakeside retreat, staying up into the early morning discussing everything from politics to AI, according to advisers. Gaetz, a Trump acolyte who has recently visited El Salvador several times and posed for photos at the CECOT prison, says he considers Bukele a “kindred spirit” and an inspiration to the Western world. “He sees himself as a liberator, not an authoritarian,” Gaetz tells TIME. “Sometimes, to solve third-world problems, you need some third-world solutions.”

In July, Gaetz led the launch of a bipartisan El Salvador caucus in Congress which includes several Democrats, including Representative Lou Correa of California. “Whether you agree with his methods or not, he has brought peace to his people,” Correa tells me. “His popularity among the Salvadoreños in my district is unbelievable,” he says. “They love the guy. My job is to work with him.” 

Even the Biden Administration has softened its previous criticism. In 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department had sanctioned some of Bukele’s top officials for covert negotiations with the gangs and “multiple-ministry, multi-million dollar corruption,” and U.S. officials criticized his moves as antidemocratic. For his second inauguration, the Administration dispatched Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to attend, a marker of his growing clout. It’s clear that Bukele feels vindicated. When it comes to his controversial policies, “suddenly it’s better to embrace them [...] and try not to fight against something that is too popular, not just in El Salvador but throughout all of Latin America,” he tells me. 

Privately, U.S. diplomats agree. There is little to be gained by feuding with a leader with overwhelming popular support, they say. It’s more valuable to keep an open line, especially since they need El Salvador’s help to stem migration to America’s southern border and are seeking ways to counter Chinese influence in the region. Under Xi Jinping, China has invested $500 million in infrastructure projects in El Salvador, including a huge futuristic library that now flies the Chinese flag in front of the country’s National Palace and main cathedral.

At the same time, U.S. officials and international pro-democracy groups worry Bukelismo is catching on in the region. Political parties in Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina have incorporated the Salvadoran President’s name into their platforms and echoed his tough-on-crime language. Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich recently spent four days in the country learning about the “Bukele model” and signing a cooperation agreement. Citing Bukele’s example, Honduras has announced plans to build an emergency megaprison for 20,000, and Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa has declared an unprecedented state of “internal armed conflict” to crack down on criminal gangs.

But the long-term success of the “Bukele model” is far from certain. The security gains won’t guarantee long-term stability without a plan to keep the next generation from relapsing into a cycle of violence, Salvadoran officials and analysts say. Mass arrests have left more than 40,000 children without one or both parents. While military and police budgets have ballooned, funding for victim-care programs amounts to less than 1% of the security budget, says David Morales, the chief legal officer of Cristosal, a Salvadoran human-rights group. The state of exception, which has been renewed 29 times, “has now become permanent, and victims have been totally abandoned,” he says. “An autocracy has now been installed in El Salvador with a great human cost.” Bukele officials say they are seeking to make the current policies “irreversible” through a series of legal reforms. Then, Bukele tells TIME, he hopes to lift the state of exception and “return to normal constitutional processes and maintain the peace we’ve achieved.”

Security has also come at a steep financial cost for El Salvador. Under Bukele, its public debt has skyrocketed to more than $30 billion, or 84% of the country’s gross domestic product. The economy remains anemic. “Bukele has built a house of cards, because it’s an incredibly expensive security policy,” says Christine Wade, an El Salvador expert at Washington College in Maryland. “It’s not financially sustainable, and his future will depend on his ability to address that.” More than a quarter of the country still lives in poverty, and remittances from Salvadorans abroad amount to the equivalent of 20% of its GDP. Bukele needs a deal with the IMF to regain access to international markets and finance its debt, says Will Freeman, a fellow of Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. One stumbling block has been the Bitcoin gamble; another is the lack of budgetary transparency by his government, which has hidden its spending and contracting from public view. “Bukele has been very resistant to it,” Freeman suggests, because it could reveal corruption. But if El Salvador is left to face a brutal fiscal adjustment on its own, he adds, “that will be the big moment when we test how deep his popularity runs.”

For now, Bukele’s support remains unshakable among ordinary Salvadorans, including many who have family members in prison. Anyone who did not live through the terror of life under the gangs will never understand how much things have changed, says Alvaro Rodriguez, a 39-year-old taxi driver. “Thanks to Bukele, the most dangerous thing here are these pigeons,” he says, gesturing at a plaza in downtown San Salvador that citizens used to have to pay gang members to enter. 

Which is why Merino, the Defense Minister, believes the government has a mandate to continue mano dura. “No matter how much these human-rights groups cry and complain about the state of emergency, people here are much freer than in countries where there isn’t a state of exception,” he says. “Once you have the support of the population, there is nothing to stop us.”

No one, including Bukele, knows how El Salvador’s experiment will end. While he rules out running for a third term, he knows what happens to Latin American strongmen when they leave office. Three of his predecessors have been arrested or indicted. But for the former adman, it’s all part of a narrative: Bukele the Messiah. “I used to be the safest person in the country, I had bodyguards and armored cars,” he says, gesturing with his arms in our interview in his office. “Now the country has safety but I do not. I traded my security for that of the Salvadoran public.” He pauses. “As I said,” he adds, “everything in life has a cost.” —With reporting by Simmone Shah