In violation of the Constitution, Nayib Bukele took office for his second presidential term promising that, just as he had dedicated his first term to security, this one will be dedicated to improving the national economy.
Bukele’s grand projects in his first term included the imposition of bitcoin, tax exemptions, and tourism. The latter one grew somewhat, but not enough to compensate for the failure of the other two. The lack of guarantees under rule of law dragged down even further the state’s balance sheet, as evidenced in the government’s inability to place bonds in the international market. El Salvador is the country with the lowest economic growth in Central America and the least foreign investment; the number of poor Salvadorans continues to grow, as does inequality.
As we close out this year, we have caught the first glimpse of his clear plans to legalize mining. His other big bet, which seems close to being secured, is a loan from the International Monetary Fund that will serve as a life raft.
But the economy that has improved notably in recent years is that of the Bukele family and their inner circle, under their control over the entire state apparatus.
Bukele and his family direct the flows of public funds with all public accountability mechanisms shuttered, and checks and balances eliminated. They have made the country their private enterprise. Riding on a wave of political popularity that they have deftly maintained, they are hashing out their true project: the substitution of traditional élites, placing themselves at the top of the food chain.
The Salvadoran dictatorship is a kleptocracy: a system of government in which self-enrichment through the abuse of the public purse comes first.
There are no longer any limits to their use of the state to grow their family estate. Not even the Attorney General’s Office —which with all of its flaws had managed to sustain technically sound corruption accusations against four former presidents— even tries to hide its total loyalty to the personal project of the family in power over the interests of the state. That is why the attorney general’s first action was to eliminate the special unit that investigates corruption and that had already built cases against several of Bukele’s ministers.
Without control mechanisms or access to public information, only Salvadoran journalism has managed to document and publish a few cases that prove the kleptocratic appetite of the Bukele family. This year it was revealed, for example, that the presidential family has become a large landowner, acquiring 361 hectares in 2023 alone. The Salvadoran press also exposed the purchase of three plots of land around Bukele’s private residence, to the tune of $1.4 million dollars in public funds, under the argument of expanding the “presidential residence”.
Perhaps most surprising, and serious, is that the majority of the population does not seem to be concerned about corruption or the lack of controls. Nor about the fact that, while the government has declared victory over the gangs, the country is still under the boot of a state of exception that limits our civil rights and deprives the public of information on the discretionary management of billions of dollars and the hand-picked allotment of state contracts.
Bukele has made clear in 2024 the relentless effectiveness of a communications strategy focused on the dismantling of gangs under the state of exception. He swept the elections with more than 80 percent of votes in February, running for reelection in violation of six articles of the constitution. His reelection is unprecedented in El Salvador since the dictatorial rule of the 1930s. The plethora of human rights violations in prisons, systematic torture inside these facilities —as denounced by national and international human rights organizations and the press— are not even close to eclipsing Bukele as he waves his main banner.
In its latest survey, the University Institute of Public Opinion of Central American University (IUDOP) asked Salvadorans about Bukele's main failure in his fifth year in office: only 0.9 percent identified the state of exception. The same amount of respondents identified repression, even if 65.2 percent said they believed it was “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that whoever criticized the government or the president would suffer negative consequences. 85.1 percent said they believed that the state of exception had “helped a lot” in controlling crime and almost half said they “agree” or “very much agree” that an authoritarian government can be better than a democratic one.
The gangs are no more, and the credit is his. As for the hundreds of innocent people dead and tortured in regime prisons, he skirts all blame.
The state of exception, in force for almost 33 months, has long since shed its exceptionalism: it is one more effective weapon for Bukele to evict street vendors from the main blocks of the Historic Center, now bustling with exclusive bars and restaurants; remove stalls along the roads to beaches promising investments in in hotels for foreign tourists; or arrest those who protest against the outrages of the regime.
The cost of being captured under the state of exception could be lethal: In July 2024, Cristosal, the human rights organization that has measured the effects of this repressive policy to the inch, reported four minors who died in prisons, 244 men, and 17 women. Of these cases, the organizations identified signs of torture on 112 of their bodies.
Reelection cemented his regime, and make no mistake: Bukele intends to perpetuate himself in power. In 2024, the Legislative Assembly that he controls took the first step toward indefinite reelection. On Monday, April 29, in its last plenary session, the outgoing legislature approved and sent for consideration of the legislators who took office two days later, on May 1, the possibility of modifying the Constitution at will, without the need of another legislature ratifying those changes. Bukele’s outgoing deputies granted him power to reform the Magna Carta in a matter of hours, and as many times as they see fit. The ruling party alone controls 54 of 60 seats. Bukele may now give the order to remove any article of the Constitution that prevents him from indefinite reelection.
None of this took a toll on his image. In the IUDOP survey about his fifth year in his past administration, only 0.6 percent identified the concentration of power as a problem for Bukele.
Bukele came out on top in surveys despite the string of corruption cases that his administration accumulated before 2024. Not the evidence of corruption during the pandemic, not the use of the presidential secret budget, not the embezzlement from prisons, not the pacts with the gangs, not the amnesty law for corruption cases during the Covid emergency managed to leave blemishes on public opinion. Only 1.8 percent of those surveyed recognized corruption and the lack of transparency as a failure of the administration. 42.8 percent said they identified not a single government failure.
2024 ends with an all-powerful and solitary Bukele atop the state, with four more years —at least— in that position, beloved by his public.
At least five publications left evidence that the concentration of power, the maintenance of the state of exception as a weapon of intimidation, and the shuttering of public information are all aimed at wealth accumulation and doling out money to the loyal who obey without grumbling and the business allies of a dictatorship that has yet to reveal its full full oppressive capacity.
This year, the powerful élite surrounding Bukele, and sharing his last name, has been the center of some of these revelations. Journalism has exposed the most secret inner workings of a system of national pillaging.
In September 2024, Redacción Regional demonstrated that, in 2023 alone, companies controlled by Bukele, his three brothers, his wife, and his mother acquired 361 hectares of land —92 percent of the land that the family clan currently owns— for more than nine million dollars. By the end of his first presidential term, the Bukele posse became owners of significant quantities of Salvadoran land. Their companies’ enrichment has been meteoric, as one paragraph from the report is enough to illustrate: “Corporación Logística de Servicios (whose administrator is President Bukele) spent eight years reporting assets worth $14,488.32 until the end of 2021. While El Salvador began a slow and costly recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, this firm leapt to $944,413.28 in assets by the end of 2022. By 2023, this figure shot up to $6,220,399.99.”
In a chart they published, lines illustrating the corporation’s growth, and that of the Bukele Group, are the slopes of a volcano from skirt to peak. This occurred between 2021 and 2023, years of the Bukele administration in which the wounds of the pandemic were still fresh. “Before Nayib Bukele took the reins of the country in 2019, he and his nuclear family’s properties spanned approximately 298,243 square meters, according to official figures obtained for this report,” Redacción Regional wrote. “During his five-year term, they acquired 3,633,456 more square meters.”
The family in power’s scandalous increase in patrimony is inscrutable, too, thanks to the protection of the state: The Unit of Access to Public Information of the Judicial Branch sealed off all access to Nayib Bukele’s probity reports from 2019 to 2024. The Supreme Court of Justice, imposed by Bukele loyalists in the legislature, joined the ranks of secretism by declaring the sealing of the president’s financial disclosures. This information, which used to allow the press to dig into political corruption, has been placed under lock and key. His brothers enjoy even greater secretism and freedom from accountability; while they hold no official public positions, they wield more de facto power than any sitting official.
Thanks to one of these properties, Bukele created his coffee brand, Bean of Fire, promoted on government social media accounts and with a shop inside Monseñor Romero International Airport. The storefront contract for the presidential coffee, too, was declared secret by the Autonomous Executive Port Commission (CEPA), whose director is Federico Anliker, a childhood friend of Bukele. A traffic light has even been installed to facilitate access to another of his properties, where soldiers stand watch. The state, employed in the service of El Salvador’s newest landowners, who are amassing a fortune by opaquely administering what should be public, is the protector of the patrimonial secrets of the most powerful Salvadoran politician of the twenty-first century.
Kleptocracy is the use of public resources for personal gain.
Bukele cannot be bothered to offer answers to civil society. He said as much in his speech in the central plaza of San Salvador on June 1 of this year, upon his unconstitutional swearing-in. He called on the people to raise their hands and pledge: “We swear to unconditionally defend our national project, following each step to the toe without complaining. And we swear to never listen to the enemies of the people.”
Karim and Yusef Bukele, the president’s brothers and primary advisors despite holding no formal positions, purchased an art-deco building in the Historic Center District of San Salvador for $1.3 million, just two and a half months after their brother signed a law exempting new investors in the district from paying taxes, as Focos revealed in October. Thanks to those advantages, the building is now home to La Doña Steakhouse, billed as the first luxury restaurant in the heart of San Salvador. The Bukele brothers have participated in the downtown gentrification, which has meant the expulsion of hundreds of informal vendors pulling and pushing their wares to market in carts; they now flee from city police as they scrounge to sell a thing or two to feed their families.
The state secretism is a heavy slab of concrete covering the knowledge of where they got the money to so precipitously become major-league landowners. But the occasional crack in the façade offers a glimpse of what is happening on the public dime: In November, El Faro uncovered that the Office of the President spent $1.4 million to buy three plots of land around Bukele’s private residence in Los Sueños, which was purchased by a company created by Bukele and his wife. The only official explanation was that the purchase was made to “develop a project for the Presidential Residence.” This attempt at an answer was as meager as it was absurd: El Salvador already has a presidential residence, in the upscale Escalón neighborhood of San Salvador. Bukele decided not to live there, as other presidents had done before him.
That hefty purchase was made right around the time that the public learned that the 2025 national budget would usher in almost $122 million in cuts to public education and health.
The voracious pillaging has extracted enough to go around, and there are many unanswered questions.
In January, Redacción Regional demonstrated that the state Mortgage Bank had dealt, between 2019 and 2023, up to $4.9 million in loans to 27 public officials and three of Bukele’s cousins. Half of these loans were issued during the pandemic. The benefactors included Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro; the president of the ruling Nuevas Ideas party, Xavier Zablah, who is Bukele’s cousin; nine of his legislators; Defense Minister René Merino Monroy; and Carlos Marroquín, the official tasked with leading the gang pact that Bukele sustained until March 2022. Some sums were larger than the value of the properties acquired, with benefits unheard of and few guarantees of repayment. Some beneficiaries used the money to invest in beach houses or golf course villas.
This year, too, El Faro discovered that the Court of Accounts questioned former Agriculture Minister Pablo Anliker —another of Bukele’s childhood friends— in 2021 for irregularities in $133 million dollars of spending during the pandemic on the Public Health Emergency Program (PES). The Court’s objections were forceful: Loads of tuna, chicken, and noodles were never delivered to El Salvador. Private companies were paid to package food for government distribution, despite the fact that soldiers had undertaken the task. Foreign companies labeled as money launderers or shell companies registered in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands were awarded contracts. This was food that should have reached the doorsteps of the most needy in El Salvador in the most desperate hour of the pandemic but, according to the Court of Accounts, it never arrived — even though it was paid for with the public purse.
The Court of Accounts, too, has since been co-opted by Bukele. His loyalists reduced without any explanation the total of suspected corruption to $60 million, absolved Anliker —despite the fact that he chose the contractors— and drafted a sentence blaming six of his subordinates. Now, the Court is doing everything in its power to prevent information on the resolution from being made public. There is evidence of one of the largest cases of embezzlement in recent national history, executed in record time during the pandemic, and the state is complicit in trying to bury it all.
Perhaps no grand declaration has aged more poorly than that of Bukele himself in 2020, in front of his cabinet of ministers, with the pandemic in full swing: “If anyone touches a cent, I myself will put you in prison.”
In this new Salvadoran dystopia, the population is both loyal to the president and increasingly poor. According to a 2023 government survey of households —the most recent study conducted— that year 1.9 million Salvadorans were living in poverty, which means that 55,097 more people tumbled into scarcity relative to the year prior. 30.3 percent of the population lives in poverty, the highest figure registered in El Salvador since 2018, one year before Bukele took power.
Yet the same dystopia that provides Bukele the comforts of absolute power also allowed him to be celebrated on social media upon the announcement in August 2024 of a new helicopter to move him about. Such choppers, according to specialized websites, cost around $5 million dollars.