El Salvador’s gang-busting President Nayib Bukele, who can now seek unlimited reelection following a constitutional change, embraces the moniker of “dictator” and breezily shrugs off concerns about human rights transgressions.
Critics fear Thursday’s parliamentary vote to abolish presidential term limits clears the path for the 44-year-old’s final embrace of authoritarianism.
But despite mounting concerns, he remains wildly popular at home and abroad for his war on gangs, with citizens of many crime and violence-plagued countries clamoring for a Bukele of their own.
His crackdown has seen nearly 90,000 presumed gangsters sent to a prison he had specially built under a state of emergency that has now been in place for over three years.
It is a move credited with plummeting homicide rates but also criticized for indiscriminate arrests — including of minors — inhumane prison conditions, torture and deaths in custody, according to rights groups.
For Bukele, a small price to pay.
“We… changed the murder capital of the world, the world’s most dangerous country, into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere,” he crowed as he was reelected with a crushing 85 percent majority in February 2024.
Trump’s administration paid Bukele $6 million to keep 252 Venezuelans, accused without evidence of gang ties, in his notorious CECOT “Terrorism Confinement Center.”
The men were repatriated to Venezuela recently after four months behind bars with horrific tales of torture, even sexual abuse.
– ‘Philosopher King ‘ –
Bukele is a social media whiz with a sharp beard who spurns convention and often ditches formal wear and the presidential sash in favor of jeans and a baseball cap.
He has 7.6 million followers on X, which he uses prodigiously to communicate directly — often in English — with his fans at home and further afield.
“He fosters a cult of personality; there’s devotion to him,” analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington told AFP last year.
“His charisma and his communication skills are without peer in Latin America.”
Bukele is also a cryptocurrency enthusiast, and in 2021 made El Salvador the first country to accept bitcoin as legal tender despite repeated warnings from the International Monetary Fund.
Bukele often turns to irony in the face of criticism, and has self-identified on X as “dictator of El Salvador” and “world’s coolest dictator” in an ironic nod to detractors.
Today he goes by “Philosopher King.”
– Average student –
Of Palestinian heritage, Bukele is a son of San Salvador, the capital, where he was born in 1981.
“An average student,” a former high school teacher told AFP, though already a joker, he signing off as “class terrorist” in a yearbook.
He studied law at the Central American University but did not graduate, and joined his father’s business empire of textiles, pharmaceuticals and publicity at the age of 18.
Bukele started his political career in his early 30s, serving as mayor of a San Salvador suburb, and then of the capital itself.
In 2019 he graduated to the presidency — upending an unpopular, corruption-riddled two-party system in power since El Salvador’s civil war ended nearly three decades earlier.
– Ruthless –
From the start, Bukele showed himself to be nothing if not ruthless.
Shortly after taking office, he ordered heavily armed police and soldiers to storm a then opposition-led parliament to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to finance an anti-crime plan.
Bukele’s allies subsequently won a majority in the Legislative Assembly which promptly replaced senior judges and the attorney general — two institutions with which the president had clashed.
The newly Bukele-aligned Supreme Court allowed him to seek reelection in 2024 despite a constitutional single-term limit which has now been definitively scrapped.
He launched his crackdown on crime in March 2022.
When gangs then in control of vast swaths of the country threatened to kill people at random in a response to his state of emergency, Bukele simply threatened to deprive jailed gangsters of food.
In recent months, dozens of activists and journalists have gone into exile as Bukele has stepped up arrests of critics.
“You know what? I couldn’t care less if they call me a dictator,” the president said in a speech in June.
Bukele is married to Gabriela Rodriguez, a psychologist and ballet dancer with whom he has two children.
He maintains a small trusted circle that includes his brothers Karim, Yusef and Ibrajim, and his government includes several former schoolmates.
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