But Juan Gonzalez, a former National Security Council senior director for the Western Hemisphere and a key architect of President Biden’s Latin America policy, told me that speaking more forcefully and having more influence are two different things. He insisted that the Biden Administration did condition parts of the relationship on democratic standards. “The problem was never that we weren’t critical enough,” he wrote to me. “It’s that Bukele had no reason to care. His standing at home rested on homicide numbers, not on Washington’s opinion.” Plus, Gonzalez pointed out, the White House viewed close ties with El Salvador as a key part of controlling migration flows through Central America before they reached the U.S. border, a key part of Biden-era immigration policy.
It’s unclear whether any strategy would have slowed Bukele’s reach, but, four years later, his online prowess, sharpened by his years running an advertising firm before he entered politics, has turned him into an icon of authoritarian, right-wing success and has endeared him to the Trump Administration, with El Salvador agreeing to imprison hundreds of U.S. deportees in CECOT without due process. The dramatic transformation of Central America’s smallest country—and Bukele’s implicit message that security and democracy are mutually exclusive—is now the subject of a growing number of academic studies, and has influenced recent successful Presidential campaigns in countries other than Colombia, including in Ecuador and in Costa Rica. According to a poll in early 2025, Bukele was the most admired foreign politician among Chileans, with forty-six per cent of participants expressing a desire for the country’s next President to govern like him. Later that year, Chile elected its own far-right President, José Antonio Kast. Bukele is “what most Latin Americans, whose lives are more and more determined by criminal organizations, wish they had: an efficient leader with enough courage to solve their main security problems,” Carlos Dada, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro, said in a recent speech to the Reuters Institute.
Like many Salvadoran journalists of late, Dada’s work has forced him into exile. He told me that whenever he describes Bukele’s human-rights abuses in public forums, he’s met with surprise. After the release of a documentary about these offenses that El Faro co-produced with the PBS series “Frontline,” Dada said that many of the messages he received expressed similar incredulity. “Smart people, informed people, telling me, ‘I didn’t know this about this guy,’ ” he said. “Because this guy is very effective with his propaganda.”
This is a testament to Bukele’s ability to control the narrative. Even Trump once asked Bukele who handles his publicity work, according to Damian Merlo, a U.S.-based lobbyist who works on behalf of right-wing Latin American political figures. Merlo has worked as a foreign-policy adviser to Bukele, and has been instrumental in forging his ties to MAGA and the White House. Merlo told me that he first met Bukele early in his political career, when Bukele was still the mayor of San Salvador and a member of the country’s left-wing F.M.L.N. party. Merlo has worked closely with Bukele since his first Presidential campaign, for the 2019 election, and organized interviews that Bukele did with Tucker Carlson, most recently in 2024. (The YouTube description of the 2024 interview, which has more than seven million views, reads, “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”) Merlo also described how he and Bukele had stayed up late together the night before Bukele’s appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in 2019, preparing for his speech, during which he famously took a selfie at the lectern. Merlo told me that Bukele had come up with the idea himself. When I asked about the content decision-making process, he said, “It’s ninety per cent him and maybe ten per cent his brother Karim,” explaining that Bukele personally directs scenes and suggests edits to videos.
These social-media instincts, aided by his troll army, have enabled Bukele to achieve global virality. Amparo Marroquín Parducci, a professor at El Salvador’s Central American University, observed that the country has become a kind of laboratory for political communication. Research by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas highlights how Bukele has sprinkled a friendlier, more hopeful tone into the far-right digital ethos. Interspersed among his attacks on journalists and human-rights defenders, many of whom have had to flee El Salvador, are posts about Bukele donating COVID vaccines to Honduras and a widely shared video of Bukele and Karim touring the country’s sleek new national library in San Salvador. The library is a modernist triumph, featuring a vast, sloping glass façade. But, when it was opened, Bukele was quick to stay on message, saying that its extended hours (it’s open twenty-four hours a day) were “possible because the country is safe.” This type of calculated spin is highly effective. Back in Medellín, after yet another conversation that veered toward El Salvador, I received a text from a Colombian woman with a picture of Bukele smiling and petting a dog being groomed. This photo promoted his plans to reduce the number of stray animals on El Salvador’s streets. (“Thousands of dogs and cats live on our streets,” he declared in a 2025 announcement of an initiative to rescue them. “We want to change that, but without cruelty.”)
