Nayib Bukele weakened El Salvador's gangs — and democratic norms

Imagine where U.S. democracy would be if President Donald Trump had an 80% approval rating, control of more than three-quarters of Congress, and the ability to blow past term limits with the Supreme Court’s blessing. Imagine if the 78-year-old Trump were 35 years younger; that is, not headed toward retirement, but poised to stick around for decades.

It’s little wonder that politicians across Latin America promise voters they’ll copy “El Modelo Bukele.”

That’s El Salvador today. A country the size of New Jersey, with Indiana’s population and an economy smaller than that of any U.S. state, is now under the total political control of President Nayib Bukele.

Bukele, now six years into his rule, is one of the world’s most popular leaders. He oversaw the dramatic weakening of El Salvador’s gangs, mainly MS-13 and Barrio 18, which formed in the United States decades ago. Bukele’s government claims El Salvador’s homicide rate has dropped from a staggering 103 per 100,000 people in 2015 to just 1.9 per 100,000 people in 2024. That would mean the country’s homicide rate is better than the United States’ rate of 5.7 deaths per 100,000 people and comparable to that of Canada.

But that model is brutally simple: Arrest everyone who seems to be affiliated with gangs, no matter how thin the evidence. Since Bukele launched his crackdown in March 2022, El Salvador has the world’s highest incarceration rate. About 3% of adult men are behind bars.

Anyone who looks suspicious, especially people with tattoos, can be jailed as a “terrorist.” In the first two years, 97% of those arrested were charged with “illicit association,” defined loosely as three or more people gathering with presumed criminal intent. At least at the outset of the crackdown, police had quotas to meet, regardless of probable cause.

Most of the people who’ve been imprisoned have never seen a judge, or have been convicted in mass trials of dozens or hundreds of people at a time. At least 350 have died in custody amid strict, austere prison conditions. Allegations and testimonies of torture are common. Bribes are often required for families to visit, unless their loved one is in the Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT). At that mega-prison built in 2023, where the Trump administration has been sending people since mid-March, no visits are allowed at all.

Since Bukele launched his crackdown in March 2022, El Salvador has the world’s highest incarceration rate.

Bukele once negotiated with the gangs’ leaders, who were already in the prison system. Whatever pact existed, though, fell apart violently in March 2022, and the crackdown that followed has been key to Bukele’s popularity.

That popularity is real and understandable. If you were a shopkeeper extorted by gangs, you got a big raise when the people running the protection racket disappeared. You can walk at night or visit friends in formerly off-limits neighborhoods. If your child was at risk of being recruited, bullied or sexually abused, then you’re likely thankful — for now — for the soldiers swarming your neighborhood. As long as they don’t start to suspect your child, too.

In 2023, the Bukele government inaugurated CECOT airing videos of prisoners with shaved heads, being crammed together and frog-marched half-naked throughout the facility. The footage horrified viewers abroad. In El Salvador, it drew cheers.

The cheers demonstrated how deeply the gangs were despised. And Bukele, a skilled political marketer with a background in advertising, has harnessed that rage. With charisma, youthful swagger and Instagram-optimized content, he enjoys swatting critics even as his claims confound fact-checkers.

Now, his model is being upheld abroad. While Biden administration officials kept a certain distance from El Salvador’s leader and his brutal prison videos, Trump and his allies have loudly praised Bukele, as we saw during his April 14 visit to the White House. With cameras rolling, Trump even suggested that Bukele build more CECOT prisons to hold U.S. citizens.

Bukele is one of the more successful examples of the global wave of elected authoritarians eroding democratic norms. Few other practitioners of this authoritarian playbook are as popular at home. Not Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, not Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not Argentina’s Javier Milei, not Trump.

With charisma, youthful swagger and Instagram-optimized content, Bukele enjoys swatting critics even as his claims confound fact-checkers.

But can this popularity last? Weakening El Salvador’s gangs was the easy part for Bukele. Though savagely brutal, by organized crime standards, El Salvador’s gangs are poor. Big cartels had kept them out of more lucrative criminal income streams, such as shipping cocaine and fentanyl internationally, or mining precious metals. Instead, MS-13 and Barrio 18 made money mostly by extorting and selling drugs to people in their own neighborhoods, which made them especially hated. But it also meant they didn’t have a lot of resources to take on the security forces or to corrupt the government from within. They were easy to knock down.

Long-term security requires deep reform of police, courts and prisons. Instead, Bukele keeps extending his “state of exception,” now in its 34th month. If violence has plummeted to Scandinavian levels, then why is the emergency still on?

El Salvador now has almost no checks on presidential power, and that is where we will be most likely to see cracks in the model. The judiciary, prosecutors, congress and the armed forces now have little or no independence from the executive. Independent nongovernmental organizations and the press are operating in the face of frequent harassment, legal machinations, cyberespionage and dwindling civic space. The overall climate is one of self-censorship, in which 61% of the population voices fear of speaking out against the government. This may be inflating Bukele’s approval ratings.

We know what happens when leaders break free of democratic controls. When the honeymoon ends and approval ratings drop, citizens are still stuck with that leader.

What happens in El Salvador when the unfettered leader starts declaring his own “liberation days,” making moves that seem to make no sense or run against most Salvadorans’ interests? He has already embarked on risky adventures with Bitcoin and his management of El Salvador’s economy is precarious. Mass incarceration and large-scale militarized policing are expensive and unsustainable. If corruption grows inside Bukele’s inner circle, then who will investigate?

The downsides to the Bukele model may emerge gradually. But the cracks are forming even as the hemisphere’s authoritarians, including the White House, celebrate it. Ask someone in Venezuela what happens when a once-popular authoritarian overstays his welcome. A quarter of the population has fled in the last 10 years.