The Salvadoran president wanted the U.S. off his back. He got his wish.

OCTOBER 22, 2024

On May 4, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris stood on a podium at the Washington Conference on the Americas and took aim at the government of El Salvador, headed by President Nayib Bukele. Just three days before the conference, he — along with the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, controlled by his Nuevas Ideas party — had illegally fired the attorney general and all five magistrates in the constitutional chamber of the Salvadoran Supreme Court. Harris decried the move. “An independent judiciary is critical to a healthy democracy,” she said, narrowing her eyes and staring straight at the camera. “On this front … we must respond.” Her words were part of an official chorus. Before the speech, she tweeted her “deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy,” the same message that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had communicated directly to Bukele two days earlier.

The magistrates were fired for doing what courts are supposed to do: act as a check on executive power. In Bukele’s early days in office, in 2019 and 2020, the court consistently blocked his attempts to bypass the constitution. Meanwhile, the attorney general was leading a slate of investigations into corruption by high-level Bukele officials. The president replaced them all with sympathizers.

Among the new court’s first acts was to enshrine Bukele’s reign. El Salvador’s constitution states that a president cannot serve consecutive terms. In September 2021, Bukele’s judges approved changes to the constitution allowing him to run again if he surrendered the reins to an interim president, appointed by him, at least six months before the next term would begin. White House spokesperson Ned Price condemned the ruling, calling it a “direct consequence” of the illegal court firings. He prevailed upon Bukele to “demonstrate his commitment to democratic governance.” The top Biden official in San Salvador, Jean Manes, appeared on a prominent Salvadoran morning show to lay out for millions of viewers, in no uncertain terms, the path that Bukele was cutting. Destination: dictatorship.

About two years later, in February 2024, Bukele easily won reelection. Although there were indications of fraud, his victory was undisputed and was a product of his popularity and a lack of viable opposition candidates. He and Nuevas Ideas had successfully consolidated a de facto single-party state. But Bukele’s real crowning achievement was manipulating the Biden administration — and, following its lead, much of the West — into disregarding his dictatorial behavior and accepting him as a legitimate leader. There were no more speeches from U.S. officials decrying the threat to democracy. The Biden administration had become — and would remain — silent as he cemented his rule.

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Before Bukele assumed office in 2019, many considered El Salvador a democracy under construction. The country was the most stable it had been since the end of its civil war in 1992, but it faced severe social problems, like widespread violence and poverty, and had insufficient guardrails against state corruption. Bukele’s three most recent predecessors had each stolen thousands, if not millions, of dollars of public money, and the two largest establishment parties, Nationalist Republican Alliance on the right and Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front on the left, dominated political life. Bukele swore that he, the enterprising young mayor of the capital, would belong to neither ideological pole and would eradicate graft.

That promise quickly unraveled. Bukele and members of his inner circle became mired in allegations of unethical, corrupt and illegal behavior. Most recently, in September, a consortium of news agencies in San Salvador published a report that the Bukele family has used the presidency to enrich itself, amassing huge swaths of territory to, among other things, found a coffee company, whose product is sold on Amazon and promoted by the president himself. (Bukele responded to the report by calling the journalists “imbeciles,” while his brother and closest political strategist, Karim Bukele, said the family was diversifying its portfolio using existing wealth, but refused to provide proof. The journalists behind the investigation have suffered massive digital attacks since publishing the report.) Days earlier, leaked recordings had proved that the presidency ordered spying on journalists and opposition politicians through mediums like phishing. It was a standard month of scoops. Amid constant scandal, Bukele has accused civil society of investigating him because it conspires to drag the country back to its violent past.

At home, he poured money into creating a digital “news” ecosystem that peddled propaganda.

That past includes a longstanding relationship with the U.S., in which for generations Washington supported vicious governmental and corporate abuses — a course it has sought to correct in recent decades. But it has been inconsistent with Bukele. In the first year of his presidency, he had an advocate in Donald Trump’s administration, which was entering its last year in the White House. Its ambassador to El Salvador, Ronald Johnson, became a friend to Bukele and used his perch to help the Salvadoran hedge his improprieties. When Joe Biden became president in 2021, his administration began denouncing Bukele’s authoritarianism and made the crucial decision to focus financial and moral support on the human rights organizations and pro-democracy groups that were increasingly in the Salvadoran’s line of fire.

In May 2021, the U.S. State Department sanctioned five of Bukele’s most senior functionaries and two of his patrons for illegal acts, including stealing public funds, laundering money and using state institutions to silence political opposition. Seven months later, the Treasury Department joined the ensemble, accusing two officials of paying the leaders of the main Salvadoran gangs in exchange for votes and fewer murders. The Justice Department is now investigating that pact as part of federal terrorism charges against MS-13, a gang that also commits crimes across the U.S. (Bukele denies the pact.)

This fact-finding effort made Bukele irate. On X, he remixed historical wrongs in his interest — accusing the U.S., for instance, of once again treating El Salvador as a banana republic in its “back yard.” He made cooing overtures to China, the U.S.’s great strategic rival, and spurred Salvadoran Americans against voting for a U.S. congresswoman who had criticized him.

Jean Manes, who was sent to San Salvador after the court firings as chargé d’affaires, was tasked with resuscitating the relationship, guided by the following nonnegotiables: Bukele must run constitutional processes for the election of both a new attorney general and new Supreme Court magistrates, and he must stop attacking nongovernmental organizations and the press. But Bukele wasn’t interested in any of that. Manes left the country and her temporary post in November 2021, warning of dire gridlock. Bukele, meanwhile, attacked the U.S. government and published private messages with Manes on X, after which she was hounded by legions of trolls.

Bukele began gathering a squad of foreign interest groups as his primary allies, including global crypto enthusiasts, the Venezuelan right wing and MAGA Republicans. At home, he poured money into creating a digital “news” ecosystem that peddled propaganda. He summoned the magic of spectacle, hosting international surf tournaments and the Miss Universe pageant and beckoning tourists to the country’s Pacific beaches. Meanwhile, he attacked independent voices, especially journalists and human rights organizations both foreign and domestic, attempting to stunt narratives that contradicted his own.

His tenure hit a critical juncture in March 2022, when MS-13 went on a horrific killing spree across the country: 87 homicides, many indiscriminate, in three days. The attack was due to a breakdown in Bukele’s deal with the gang, but he used it to further concentrate his power. His congressional supermajority decreed a state of exception, restricting constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, allowing warrantless arrests and lengthening the amount of time the government can detain people without charges. The administration branded the state of exception as a war on El Salvador’s gangs, complete with a flashy advertising campaign featuring uniformed agents towering over thin, shirtless men. In less than a month, 15,000 people had been arrested on allegations that they belonged to or were connected to the gangs, but families protested that their loved ones were innocent.

In the U.S., members of Congress from Trump’s MAGA movement rhapsodized about the arrests and attacked Democrats for criticizing Bukele. On the streets of Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and beyond, he won fans who sang a tune contrasting with Washington’s: We need our own Bukele.

As the Salvadoran president found new ways to dominate, the Biden administration found itself in a bind. It concluded that publicly acknowledging El Salvador’s governance crisis so wounded Bukele’s ego that it also damaged U.S. interests, because he aimed his blowback where it hurt.

Exhibit A: China. By November 2022, Bukele had begun negotiating a free trade agreement with Beijing. El Salvador was also receiving infrastructure investments from China, including a new library, an ocean-side theme park and a stadium. The Biden administration calculated that if it stopped openly criticizing Bukele, it could convince him to rethink El Salvador’s expanding alliance with China. Although this reportedly helped impede a contract for 5G between Beijing and San Salvador, by May 2024, the two countries had begun defense cooperation, with China appointing its first-ever military attache to El Salvador. Biden’s strategy was “a failure, and shortsighted,” Douglas Farah, the president of the global security consulting firm IBI Consultants, told me.

This new official chorus enabled Bukele to sell the idea — eight weeks before the election — that the U.S. wanted him to stay in power.

Another complicating factor was the migrant crisis on the U.S. southern border, a political vulnerability for Biden. Migrant encounters at the border had surged after the initial shock of the pandemic, rising from fewer than 50,000 per day in 2020 to more than 300,000 per day in 2023. In Washington, Republicans pilloried the president and their constituents did too. But while crossings overall were rising, among Salvadorans the numbers were falling. Nearly 99,000 Salvadorans were stopped by U.S. Border Patrol in 2021. The agency clocked 2,000 fewer in 2022 and only around 61,500 in total the following year.

Bukele claimed the decrease was thanks to the state of exception. In reality, emigration from the entire Central American region — not just El Salvador — contracted even as it increased from countries farther afield, according to Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America. Between 2021 and 2024, Isacson found, Border Patrol’s average encounters with migrants from Guatemala and Nicaragua fell by 24 percent and 25 percent, respectively, and from El Salvador and Honduras by 44 percent and 54 percent, respectively. An analysis by two academics from Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin found that the region-wide drop was more likely attributable to U.S. policies such as the “Remain in Mexico” program, not to anything Bukele had done. But the Biden administration was willing to entertain Bukele’s narrative — an indulgence that might subdue the volcanic leader but was tantamount to supporting “an anti-democratic illusion,” the researchers concluded.

The U.S. was also flustered by Bukele’s popularity. Across polls, his approval rating was consistently at least 80 percent. Of course, such polling is untrustworthy in repressive atmospheres because who wouldn’t profess love if they feared jail? But the number was even higher among his compatriots who live abroad: By the Salvadoran government’s count, 97 percent of ballots cast by Salvadoran expats in the U.S. in the February presidential election were for Bukele. Washington was wary of the optics of contradicting mass opinion. But Salvadoran democracy workers insist that this is cowardly. “There are many dictators who have been popular,” Leonor Arteaga, a lawyer at the Due Process of Law Foundation, told me. “That doesn’t make it OK.”

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By the morning of Oct. 27, 2023, the deadline to register to run for president of El Salvador, Bukele remained off the ballot. Brian Nichols, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, was dispatched to San Salvador and stated on public television that “the legality and legitimacy” of reelection were a matter of “debate for Salvadorans.” Bukele had apparently heard what he wanted to hear: That night, with only a few minutes remaining before the midnight deadline, he made his candidacy official. A month later, Phil Gordon, Kamala Harris’ national security adviser, was also sent to San Salvador. He met with Bukele and posted about their “constructive” chat on X.

This new official chorus enabled Bukele to sell the idea — eight weeks before the election — that the U.S. wanted him to stay in power. While a White House press release reported that Gordon had stressed the importance of human rights and due process, the Salvadoran government’s press release said the Biden administration sought “to support the Bukele administration.”

To Bukele’s inauguration in June, the Biden administration sent an unusually high-level delegation, including Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. U.S. media described the trip as an endeavor to “court” Bukele and speculated that the about-face was an act of self-interest in an election year. (Salvadoran Americans are the third-largest Hispanic population in the U.S.) Bukele, who openly supports Trump in the 2024 election, had also invited a delegation of MAGA Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., Representative Matt Gaetz and the commentator Tucker Carlson, who suggested that Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.” The authoritarian had the Americans just where he wanted them: divided and competing over who could be a better pal.

That night, in a ballroom filled with his closest advisers, prized guests and social media influencers, Bukele celebrated his victory. More heads of state attended this inauguration than his first one in 2019, and every country recognized his leadership as legitimate, he boasted. To get to this moment, Bukele had needed the U.S. off his back — and it gave him his wish. Now he had the world before him, applauding.

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The Biden administration has argued that wooing Bukele in public is only half the story — that tough talks behind the curtain continue. Their version goes like this: The current ambassador to San Salvador, William Duncan, was tasked with leading a shift in tactics and tone, not substance. The U.S. wasn’t here just to point fingers. It wanted to help, particularly on the economy, jobs and human rights. This new stance didn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations with Bukele, and in fact the shift had increased American influence with its Salvadoran counterparts. But the administration has wedged itself into an awkward contortion: While the Department of Justice investigates a nefarious pact between the Salvadoran government and MS-13, the U.S. Embassy gives boats and drones to that same government for fighting crime.

The Biden administration’s version also raises the question of what has been gained. The effects of Bukele’s unchecked power are stark and worsening. There is no state institution that the president hasn’t bent to his will. Increasingly, he speaks in the pompous dialect of dictators: Opposition political parties are criminal, the country began anew with him, his rule as “philosopher king” is inspired by ancient Rome. The state of exception remains in force, and since 2022, security forces have arrested more than 80,000 people, largely arbitrarily. In prisons, disease, torture and death are rampant and may constitute crimes against humanity, according to three investigations by international organizations. An estimated 62,000 Salvadoran children have lost their primary caregivers to arrest, and it’s unclear who is keeping those children safe, fed and in school.

More concerningly, the Biden administration is now going out of its way to praise Bukele. On a podcast in September, Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, applauded the state-of-exception arrests — whose victims are people like Juan Saúl Castillo Alberto, an employee of the Salvadoran public works agency who was arbitrarily detained and starved in prison. He died at age 32. “The level of violence in El Salvador has plummeted,” Mayorkas enthused on the podcast. “And the level of migration has plummeted correspondingly.”

Bukele uses the cheerleading to lie. At the United Nations General Assembly in September, he took the podium to repeat a familiar claim: that El Salvador does not censor ideas or imprison opponents. Were this true, there would not be a growing group of Salvadoran journalists, judges, prosecutors, opposition politicians and activists living in exile. Polling institutes and journalism consortiums report that self-censorship by Salvadorans is also growing.

Bukele promises he won’t stay in office for a third term, but he hasn’t stopped others from sending a different message. Ten days after he won reelection, he was photographed smiling next to the bitcoin evangelist Max Keiser, who wore a baseball cap that read: “BUKELE 2029.” Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, told The New York Times that the administration is “eliminating” democracy and that the population wants Bukele to be president “for life.” Speaking to local press, Ulloa said “indefinite reelection” is on the table.

In Washington, even former members of the Biden administration are mystified by its reversal. “A decision with a short-term advantage while turning a blind eye to democracy is a bad bet that we’ve made so many times in Central America,” Ricardo Zúniga, one of Biden’s envoys to the region until July 2023, told me. “There is no record of a positive outcome.”

As the U.S.’s own election approaches, it is clear where Trump stands on Bukele — he’s a fan of autocrats. Harris’ position is less clear. She has pledged that a vote for her is a vote for democracy. “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators,” she said at the Democratic National Convention in August. “And as president, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals, because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.” Should she win in November, Harris will have to prove that commitment, given the record of the administration in which she has served.

PHOTOS: Nayib Bukele y Gabriela de Bukele durante el acto de traspaso de mando presidencial en 2019 (via Wikimedia) & President Joe Biden waves to the crowd as he prepares to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, March 7, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz, via Wikimedia)