In March 2025, the Trump administration announced it had deported hundreds of men, who it falsely claimed were all members of a gang called Tren de Aragua, to El Salvador. To accomplish this, President Donald Trump relied on El Salvador's young president, Nayib Bukele, to house the prisoners in the country's immense Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Bukele, now serving his second term as president, has since become both a darling of the U.S. far-right and a target of Democrats and other critics of the Trump administration's divisive deportation practices.
Campaigning on a 'tough-on-crime approach'
Bukele, 43, was raised in the country's capital of San Salvador as a "privileged outsider" whose father, a "Muslim businessman of Palestinian descent" operated a public relations company, said The New Yorker. Bukele dropped out of college to work for that company, "whose key client was" the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, one of the country's largest political parties. Bukele was elected Mayor of San Salvador in 2015 under the banner of the FMLN. But his "true ascent to the pinnacle would take a leap after being expelled by his party in 2017 and becoming an outsider," said CNN.
Bukele was first elected president of El Salvador in 2019 as a candidate of the center-right Grand Alliance for National Unity. At the time of his election, El Salvador was "one of the most violent countries in the world," whose endemic gang-driven bloodshed was a "key factor driving migration to the United States," said The Washington Post. Bukele campaigned on a "tough-on-crime approach and an anti-corruption drive" that he promised would deliver results after past governments failed to get the problems under control, said Foreign Policy.
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It seemed to work. "Homicides in El Salvador fell over 50%" during Bukele's first year in office, said Reuters. A 2020 report in the Salvadoran publication El Faro claimed that there had been "secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and leaders of the MS-13 gang" that helped lower street violence "in exchange for prison privileges" for members of the gang, said Mother Jones. In 2021, Bukele's new Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) Party swept legislative elections and gave him "near-total power to elect the next Attorney General and a new group of Supreme Court magistrates," said the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador.
Becoming the 'world's coolest dictator'
If Bukele had indeed made a deal with the country's gangs, it fell apart. In March 2022, he declared a state of emergency, which resulted in the "arbitrary arrest of more than 83,000 Salvadorans, harassment and violence against government critics and journalists, and mass firings of public servants," said political advocacy nonprofit Freedom House. Since Bukele was first elected in 2019, the country has shed 23 points in the organization's 100-point democracy scale, sliding into the "partly free" category.
In 2023, Bukele's government opened the Terrorism Confinement Center, a "mega-prison" that "can hold up to 40,000 inmates," said NPR, and where the Trump administration is now controversially deporting undocumented immigrants from the U.S. By 2024, El Salvador had the "highest incarceration rate on the planet, with more than 1,000 people in prison per 100,000 residents," said the Brennan Center for Justice.
The paradox of Bukele's increasingly undemocratic rule is that he enjoys widespread popularity in El Salvador, which "has come in spite — or perhaps because — of his defiance of constitutional, political and legal constraints," said Time. He is a "millennial of the we-have-to-break-things mentality, and he shuns ideology," said The Associated Press. In 2021, he updated "his ever-changing Twitter bio" to claim that he is the "world's coolest dictator," said The Guardian. He won re-election in 2024 with nearly 85% of the vote, and despite that seemingly implausible outcome, the Organization of American States observers "deemed the election free and generally fair," said Freedom House.
