The High Price of Safety in El Salvador

Nöe del Cid watched his neighborhood come back to life from the seat of his wheelchair.

This tight row of cinderblock houses with barred windows and corrugated metal roofs formed, for much of Mr. del Cid’s life, a precarious border zone between enemy gangs. Bullet scars are still visible, chipped into the walls of houses and staining the flesh of residents like Mr. del Cid, who was partially paralyzed in 2003 by a gunshot to the neck.

In the two years since President Nayib Bukele unleashed his brutal crackdown on El Salvador’s gangs, most of the gangsters who once lorded over the neighborhood have been imprisoned, fled or gone into hiding, Mr. del Cid said.

“He took the action that we needed him to take. And not only that, he’s maintained it,” said Mr. del Cid, who at 38 is the president of the neighborhood’s community association. “It’s very admirable.”

When I visited the neighborhood recently, the street teemed with life — thickets of overgrown vines and hibiscus, neighbors gossiping on their stoops, Mr. del Cid’s wife deftly frying enchiladas on a gas cooktop propped on a table by the street. His mother, who lives across the way, keeps the TV running — when Mr. Bukele comes on, she uses a megaphone to broadcast the president’s words to the neighbors. You never know what he will say — or do! He’s part mafia boss, part Willy Wonka — a mercurial leader with a showman’s instincts, dropping dead-eyed threats between grand declarations of benevolence.

Earlier this summer, thanks to a free ride on a bus sent by the government, Mr. del Cid and his neighbors joined the adoring crowd outside the National Palace to witness Mr. Bukele’s inauguration. This second term is both legally indefensible (El Salvador’s Constitution bans consecutive re-election) and, like the president himself, wildly popular (he won by a landslide). Mr. Bukele took the occasion to warn people not to complain about the “bitter medicine” coming their way. This is one of his favorite catchphrases — and he means it.

Since 2022, he has kept the country locked into a draconian “state of exception” that grants dizzying power to the police and the military, while stripping ordinary Salvadorans of basic legal protections. This state of affairs — extraordinary by name and intent — should only last a month at the longest, but Mr. Bukele’s government resets the clock each time it’s due to expire. Under the steely cover of this open-ended emergency, his war on gangs has played out — a tangle of unproven denunciations, forced disappearances, torture and child imprisonment.

Insofar as Mr. Bukele wanted to stop street violence and spread public safety, his anti-gang crusade has worked. But at what cost? Crime and punishment — not to mention the mass migration of those fleeing violence — have gained an intense political resonance around the world, and so the president’s project has become a kind of rhetorical Rorschach test for politicians and professors. Sitting far from El Salvador, they lambast it as a chilling spectacle of totalitarian oppression, or extol it as the triumphant liberation of ordinary people from crime. I seldom heard such hyperbolic reactions, though, from the Salvadorans directly and radically affected.

I mentioned to Mr. del Cid that many innocent people appeared to have been imprisoned along with the gangsters, expecting him to argue and justify. He’d tell me I was naïve, I figured, or insist that those people weren’t really blameless.

But he didn’t. Like virtually all of the dozens of Salvadorans I interviewed, Mr. del Cid’s view of the crackdown was complicated. He readily agreed with my point. He himself, he said, knew completely innocent people — he was sure — who were taken away by the police, and never came back. Their families are having a terrible time, he added ruefully. The police and military seemed to have abused their power, he suggested, or perhaps the investigations just weren’t careful enough.

“The police took them because of some misunderstanding, or just because someone paid them to do it,” he said. “It’s very ugly.”

But then he looked back out at his quiet street. It had been so bad here, and for so long. Children were forced to trek through dense forest to school rather than risk the street. The elderly woman a few doors down barely survived getting hit in the lower back by a ricocheting bullet. Mr. del Cid’s mother (the one who now broadcasts Mr. Bukele’s speeches) had made the painful choice to send his pretty, then-14-year-old sister to the United States because the gangsters were starting to stare at her.

He pivoted again. “In reality —” he said plainly. “Look—” Imagine you lived here, he said. Imagine the gangs can just come into your house, and they want to know where you’ve been, and what you’re doing. And they can beat you, or even kill you.

“We’re starting to feel security,” he said. “And security is what people want.”

Anyone who doubts Mr. Bukele’s wizardry with publicity should consider this: El Salvador is a tiny country, roughly the size of New Jersey, in which nearly a third of the people live in poverty. Still, the president is one of the most watched, discussed and admired leaders on the planet.

Almost all of the hoopla around Mr. Bukele boils down to two sets of data: crime statistics and domestic popularity.

The number of murders in El Salvador, which by 2015 was considered the world’s homicide capital, plunged by 70 percent in 2023, per government figures, making this one of the safest spots in the hemisphere. When it comes to imprisonment — a central motif of the president’s governance — El Salvador now boasts the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate.

The philosophical conundrum presented by Mr. Bukele is that his supporters are, in a sense, eager sponsors of their own oppression, having essentially swapped their rights for quiet streets. Notwithstanding the outrage of scandalized lawyers who pointed out that his candidacy was unconstitutional, he captured 85 percent of the votes when he won re-election earlier this year. His approval rating hangs above 90 percent.

This particular combination makes his rivals covet Mr. Bukele’s special sauce. The idea that a leader can strip away people’s rights and they will love him all the more for it — this must be unbearably tantalizing to a certain brand of politician. And let’s face it, the idea that a leader could quickly deliver a radical, tangible change in the daily life of most people, even if the methods are plainly bad? I admit it: That first part, at least, is attractive. Mr. Bukele’s style may be capricious, cruel, or clumsy — but it is definite.

The “Bukele model” is now the talk of Latin America. Bureaucrats from across the region troop back and forth to San Salvador to study policing methods and visit President Bukele’s sprawling showcase prison, where they gaze upon defanged prisoners, skin scrawled with tattoos, but eyes drained of obvious emotion. One of the most lauded speeches at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in the United States came from Mr. Bukele, whose reception The Associated Press described as akin to that of a “rock star.” Polls suggest that, in some Latin American countries, people prefer Mr. Bukele to their own leaders.

And yet, arguably, Mr. Bukele is not new. Leaving aside the stirring rhetoric and madcap schemes that keep his news cycles churning, he looks very much like the latest version of an all-too-familiar Latin American figure: The populist-talking, military-adjacent autocrat who invokes dire security dilemmas while trampling human rights and discarding the rule of law.

Among the familiar tactics of would-be dictators:

Keep the army close. Mr. Bukele has pledged to double the size of the military and, controversially, sent troops to patrol streets, encircle residential areas and even stage a brief takeover of Parliament, stirring unpleasant memories of the civil war.

Marginalize intellectuals and dissidents. The University of El Salvador is being starved of badly needed funding owed by the government, and had to keep many classes virtual last year. The campus was used to host visiting delegations and sports competitions.

Suppress the opposition. ​​With Mr. Bukele and his allies controlling the Legislative Assembly, some political rivals have faced corruption charges criticized as politically motivated.

Weaken the judiciary. Mr. Bukele defies Supreme Court rulings and his supporters in the Assembly imposed age limits on justices. When his party won control of the legislative chambers, one of the first things they did was to fire and replace all the justices in the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber, along with the attorney general.

The gang crackdown, however, is new — not so much in content as in scale. President Bukele has borrowed from the “mano dura” (iron fist) anti-crime policies employed by Salvadoran governments since 2003. But there is one critical difference: Mr. Bukele’s campaign against crime is utterly unrestrained by even a pretense of due process. More cops, more soldiers, more prison space — more of everything, it seems, except judicial safeguards.

The mass imprisonments have clearly taken criminals off the streets, but many experts believe the sudden peace is also explained by covert negotiations between Mr. Bukele and the leaders of the gangs he’s sworn to destroy altogether. (He adamantly denies negotiating with gangs.)

José Miguel Cruz, research director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, has been studying El Salvador’s criminal underworld for decades. He classifies the Bukele model as, primarily, a feat of management and public relations.

Mr. Bukele has been negotiating with gang leaders ever since he was the mayor of San Salvador, Mr. Cruz said, and has now struck a deal with the same people he describes as “devils.” There is so much state secrecy overhanging the prisons that it’s almost impossible to be sure who is being held where, but when a top leader of the gang MS-13 who was supposed to be in prison in El Salvador turned up inexplicably in Mexico, it gave credence to a widespread theory that top criminal bosses have quietly been freed and moved out of the country, leaving their underlings to bear the brunt of the crackdown.

“He tried to keep the leadership of the gangs in good standing so he wouldn’t have any backlash,” Cruz said. “You hear these things and — no, he hasn’t defeated the gangs. They are still there.”

In San Salvador, I found the Rev. José María Tojeira in his office, preparing to say a weekday Mass. A longtime human rights advocate, Father Tojeira has worked in El Salvador since the days of death squads and murdered priests. He was the longtime rector at the Jesuit Central American University, where he became the director of the Human Rights Institute, and helped prosecute members of the military who killed six priests on the campus in 1989.

Father Tojeira has met Mr. Bukele a few times, he said, including at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend. “The truth is, I liked him,” he added sheepishly.

Thanks to generations of political violence and leadership upheaval, Father Tojeira said, most Salvadorans don’t expect much from their leaders. Nobody is particularly surprised, for example, when politicians use their jobs to get rich.

“Governments give out presents to keep people happy,” he said. “This president, since he came into power, has chosen the presents very well.”

The grand present, of course, the most elusive gift, is basic safety. But what makes Mr. Bukele a different kind of leader, Tojeira argued — and, perhaps, what makes him dangerous — is that he plays the game so well.

“He’s doing things that are very similar to what others have done but, from a cynical point of view, he does them better,” the priest said. “He presents himself as an outsider, with a very accessible language, criticizing politics, criticizing economic inequality, criticizing legal inequality.”

The perception that Mr. Bukele is a man of the people, that he cares about the poor — this image has been as politically potent as the safe streets, Tojeira argued. He has postured as an enemy of the corrupt political elite, the cruel gangsters, the lecturing foreigner.

Some of this dynamic — populist charisma mixed with ruthless policy — may sound familiar to Americans living in the age of Trump. And, indeed, some of the U.S. politicians most enamored of Trump are also fervent believers in Mr. Bukele’s methods. Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson both attended his most recent inauguration, and the latter sat down with President Bukele for a dialogue so fawning it’s hard to call it an interview.

Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Matt Gaetz also made pilgrimages to Mr. Bukele’s brand-new “mega-prison,” a hulking and sterile-looking detention center big enough to hold 40,000 inmates. Both lawmakers came home waxing philosophical about crime and punishment, and preaching the virtues of Mr. Bukele with a fervor that should ice the blood of U.S. citizens.

“I saw, up close, thousands of these savages, or devils,” Senator Cotton said from the floor of Congress upon his return. “Some so-called human rights groups whine about this prison … those same groups also complain about a supposed lack of due process.”

“Incarceration works,” Cotton told his colleagues. “Obviously.”

Mr. Gaetz, too, returned from El Salvador with fantasies of importing the Bukele model. In between complaining on Charlie Kirk’s show about “the third-world mess that the U.S. is descending into” and affirming approvingly that he hadn’t seen what Mr. Kirk called “gay flags” in El Salvador, Mr. Gaetz suggested that, by failing to imprison enough people, the United States was effectively imprisoning everyone.

“What people in New York and in L.A. and in Chicago are learning is that, if you don’t have security, there is no prosperity,” he said. “If you can’t let your loved ones walk down the street and engage in commerce and enjoy life, you already are a prisoner.”

Mr. Bukele has rounded up some 81,000 prisoners to be held incommunicado under murky circumstances. Thousands of children as young as 12 are among the detained, and some of them have been tortured.

Many of their families have no idea what they’ve been charged with, where they’re being held, when they might be freed — or even, in some cases, whether they are still alive. The stories are similar: The police came one day, and their family member never came back. The detentions are so lacking in transparency and due process that it seems more appropriate to call them abductions or forced disappearances. Ingrid Escobar, the director of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, said her legal aid organization’s research suggests that about one-third of those detained are innocent.

I met a crowd of anguished family members at a meeting of MOVIR, a group that advocates the rights of the prisoners. Mostly women, some children in tow, documents in their hands and trepidation on their faces.

The first to approach me was a 43-year-old mother named Sandra Velasco. She wanted me to look at a photograph of her 25-year-old son, who worked on a chicken farm before he disappeared into the prison system. He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t do anything, she insisted.

Ms. Velsasco, too, was arrested along with her son, and spent several months doing forced labor in a women’s prison before being released. Her hands shook as we spoke; she was visibly fighting down her fear.

“I came here scared that they’re going to put me in again,” she said, and burst into tears. “But I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Samuel Ramírez, the director of MOVIR, lectured the crowd. Mr. Ramírez, an engineer who operated radios with the guerrillas during the civil war, exhorted the group to understand their personal pain as part of a broader political reality. What had happened to them, he stressed, was also happening to countless families across the country. This was Mr. Bukele, and it wasn’t going to get any better. Everyone should understand that.

A huge Archbishop Oscar Romero, the sainted San Salvador prelate gunned down in 1980, stared down from a wall mural. Windows were flung open to the street, letting in blasts of hot, smoggy air and the groan of engines.

Everyone should make an on-camera denunciation, Mr. Ramírez went on. That was the best hope. Tell the story, say the name, show the photograph. The denunciations would go on file with the government and, just as important, would be transmitted on social media. Someone might recognize a face, share a detail or offer a crumb of information. Some people have been released, he reminded the families, and photos could jar their memories.

As I spoke with Ms. Velasco, a crowd of mothers gathered at a polite distance, waiting their turn to talk. One of them was Jesus del Carmen Lara, a 54-year-old mother whose daughter was taken away.

“They told her to find someone to watch her kids,” she said, mopping at her tear-sodden face with a dish towel she wore slung over one shoulder. “They said they just wanted to ask her a few questions. But she never came back.”

Her daughter, Carina del Carmen Lara, has been held incommunicado for more than two years. Her family believes she is being held in the women’s prison in San Salvador, but they’re not sure.

“I feel that somebody pointed the finger at her,” the mother said. “Because she didn’t do anything.”

Ms. Lara is tortured by the question of whether her daughter is alive or dead. The younger woman is susceptible to pneumonia, she said, and was fighting a virus when the police took her away.

Lara has gone to the prison gates, and to the police, and to the public defender assigned to her daughter’s case. She always asks the same question, the one burning perpetually in her brain: Is my daughter alive? Each time, she said, she was shooed away.

At that point another mother, who gave her name as Fatima Gomez, leaned into the conversation and locked eyes with me.

“The only place I haven’t gone is to hell,” she said in a heavy voice. “And that’s only because I don’t know where it is.”

I landed in San Salvador just as Mr. Bukele was kicking off a new crusade. This time, he was turning his ire to food costs. Price gouging was out of control, he complained in a nationally televised dressing-down of his cabinet. Prices had to come down — not generally, not vaguely, not next week, but the following day. He mentioned his brutal approach to gangs, intimating that he was prepared to send price gougers, too, off to prison.

“To the importers, distributors and food wholesalers: Stop abusing the people of El Salvador, or don’t complain about what happens afterward,” he said.

“We are not playing around,” he said coldly. “I expect the prices to come down by tomorrow, or there are going to be problems.”

This was textbook Bukele: An ominous and sweeping demand for a result — safer streets, cheaper food — with magnificent indifference to the details of how such a thing could be accomplished, or who might be hurt in the process. These dictates have created a dark carnival atmosphere in the country, events swinging and shifting on the whims of Mr. Bukele, everyone scrambling to adjust to his decree.

At this writing, there seems to be no indication that anyone has yet been arrested for overcharging for food. But the threat still hangs there.

As a crowd-pleasing bit of publicity, of course, it sounded fantastic. What food shopper in our inflation-glutted global economy wouldn’t thrill to hear the president, instead of denying the problem exists at all or making small noises of concern, order the prices to get cheaper overnight?

But the implausibility of President Bukele’s demand was on display the next morning, when I visited the vegetable sellers in the pungent warrens of La Tiendona, San Salvador’s central wholesale market. Distribution hubs like this one are crucial to the supply chain — El Salvador’s farms, hobbled by migration, don’t produce nearly enough food. Produce must be imported, resold and moved quickly to small businesses and individual hawkers who run carts and stalls throughout the country. At La Tiendona, local vendors from around the region pick through piles of fruit and vegetables trucked in from Guatemala and Honduras then, having made their choices, fan back out to sell.

Mr. Bukele’s order, of course, had no effect on the farmers over the border, or on the trucking companies moving the produce to La Tiendona. Virtually everyone I spoke with, food market denizens who know the produce market inside out, reeled over the problem of selling their goods cheaply when they, themselves, had paid the usual price.

A 75-year-old woman named Julia Elia had come by bus from Agua Caliente, a riverside community in the city of Soyapango, east of the capital. A gold tooth glinted in her mouth and her arms were roped with lean muscle from years of hauling sacks of vegetables, but when I asked about the prices she burst into tears.

Like many street peddlers, Ms. Elia just barely balances on the edge of survival. She borrows from loan sharks at exorbitant rates in order to buy yuca, radishes and carrots in the capital, she explained, then hauls them back to her local market to sell. She pays back the loans and survives on whatever is left.

Now she found herself trapped between the unchanged prices she had to pay for her merchandise, on the one hand, and a crowd of customers empowered by the president to demand cheaper vegetables — all with the threat of prison hanging over her.

“God knows how we’ll go forward,” she said. “People will just have to accept that we can’t sell any cheaper.”

I wondered if this painful dilemma had soured her feelings toward the president.

The answer was no. Ms. Elia, too, had a complex view of Mr. Bukele.

A few years ago, when a wall of her house collapsed in a storm, she prayed for help, she said, knowing she’d never find the money to fix it. God didn’t arrive in the flooded community, but Mr. Bukele did, aides and reporters in tow. Ms. Elia still believes his visit was providential. She approached him and asked for help. And — sure enough — workers were sent to repair the house.

“He really impressed me,” she told me. “People say bad things about him but, for me, he’s a great person.”

And then she went on her way, lugging her sacks of overpriced vegetables, hoping she’d find somebody to buy.

They say the plazas of the historic center used to be empty and dangerous, but it’s hard to imagine that now. The walkways thrum with people who wander in wonderment — to be out, to be fearless, to breathe the air and notice that there are actual tourists in their midst.

Families eat cheap picnics from paper bags; men from an evangelical fellowship pray in a circle under the trees; couples with entwined fingers pose for selfies. Children shoot plastic rockets toward heaven with rubber bands to watch them fall again in thin streaks of light. The sky goes purple and clouds pile like bruised cotton over the rooftops of the National Theater and the National Palace. The National Library, which is open all day and night and was built with donations from the Chinese government, rises like a beached cruise ship against the gathering dark, all its windows glowing.

A man named Tony Ventura was running a play train back and forth in front of the government buildings. The front car had been painted to look like Lightning McQueen, and the train made a nice picture, gleaming against the dignified facades. Ventura sells rides to children, keeping a mental tally of the tourists who put their children on his train. “I just need an Australian,” he told me. “I’ve had British, Japanese ….”

We didn’t finish talking, because suddenly fat raindrops were landing all around us. The gelatinous heat of gathering storm had been there all day, and now at last the sky broke open, and the rain pelted down. Ventura rushed away to see about his trains. The light smeared, the revelers became dark blurs rushing past, and suddenly this rebuilt plaza with all its quiet optimism was empty again, everyone running for cover.

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