On 1st June, Nayib Bukele was sworn in for a second term as president of El Salvador, the first to serve a consecutive term since the infamous general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, whose bloody tenure (1931-1944) was bookended by military coup d’états. Bukele defied no fewer than six articles of the constitution that expressly prohibit presidential reelection.
The militarised ceremony drew a coterie of far-right grotesques, from US MAGA enthusiasts Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr to Argentina’s libertarian president Javier Milei and Mexican soap actor-slash-conservative activist Eduardo Verástegui. They came to pay homage to the millennial millionaire publicist whose aggressive advertising and messianic flair have made him an avatar of the far-right reaction sweeping the globe.
Leveraging discontent
Bukele catapulted to power through his old party, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the former leftist insurgency that fought the US-backed military dictatorship to a draw in a 12-year civil war (1980-1992). When the FMLN won the presidency in 2009, it unseated the party of the oligarchic bourgeoisie that had governed uninterrupted since the negotiated transition to democracy.
The FMLN held office for ten years, enacting historic social investments and progressive institutional reforms within the formidable constraints of a crisis-ridden economy structurally subordinate to the United States. But the pace of change slowed during the party’s second term. The traditional right, emboldened by a regional resurgence, escalated its Washington-backed destabilisation campaign, which Bukele deftly leveraged against both left and right to style himself as a renegade reformer crusading against a corrupt political establishment.
Once elected, Bukele pivoted hard right. He dismantled FMLN social programmes and redirected funds into propaganda and the military, centralising power around the executive. Methodically, he disassembled the fragile liberal democracy established by the 1992 peace accords, using the pandemic as a pretext to remilitarise the country and suspend constitutionally guaranteed civil and human rights.
Bukele catapulted to power through his old party, the FMLN, the former leftist insurgency that fought the US-backed military dictatorship to a draw in a 12-year civil war. Once elected, he pivoted hard right
Nevertheless, Bukele maintained popularity, expertly channeling the discontents of a population whose elevated expectations had turned to frustration with the deceleration of FMLN reforms, perceptions of corruption and the persistent problem of organised street crime fuelled by a vast informal economy and masses of working-class youths excluded from postwar neoliberal development.
By late 2021, however, public opinion began to flag. Popular movements joined liberal groups in mass protests against Bukele’s deeply unpopular Bitcoin experiment and in defence of democracy. In spring 2022, the president ordered another constitutional hiatus in response to a surge in homicides following the collapse of a secret government pact with criminal gangs. Today, the country boasts the world’s highest incarceration rate; constitutional rights remain suspended, while political dissidents and social movements are criminalised and persecuted. Despite the mounting humanitarian toll – at least 26,000 of the 80,000 arrested, hundreds of whom died in custody, have no gang ties whatsoever – the crackdown produced relief from extortion and violence in many working-class communities. These results buoyed Bukele’s support domestically and abroad, turning him into a far-right global celebrity.
A widening dragnet
Approval ratings notwithstanding, Bukele was not eager to put his agenda to the democratic test. Instead, he rewrote El Salvador’s postwar electoral system ahead of the 2024 general elections, all but eliminating opportunities for minority party participation. His legislative majority slashed the number of municipalities and legislative seats, withheld mandated public campaign funds from the opposition and illegally replaced the entire constitutional court, which dutifully authorised his reelection bid. His second inauguration was, in reality, a coronation.
By then, the old right was diminished, many of its oligarchic backers defecting to Bukele’s bloc. The FMLN, discredited and demoralised, retreated into irrelevancy. Commandeered by a faction that insists on non-confrontation with Bukele, its former leadership has been forced into exile or languishes in deadly conditions behind bars. Meanwhile, the social movements that once drove the party’s agenda face repression unseen since the civil war, with former combatants and organised refugee communities disproportionately targeted. Those who dare to organise openly – environmental defenders, advocates for the unjustly incarcerated, relatives of political prisoners and more – do so at their peril.
The regime’s dragnet, however, is widening. Bukele’s state of exception is being deployed as cover for massive coastal land grabs and urban dispossession to make way for tourist megaprojects and speculationdriven real estate development by the ruling faction. These processes are repeated across Central America, where land and water defenders face predatory extractivism and foreign ventures driving dispossession and displacement. This emerging rentier accumulation pattern, consolidated in the wake of the recession, indicates the exhaustion of a neoliberal development model fuelled by maquiladora exports and migrant remittances.
Regional parallels
Bukele’s scrapped Bitcoin City project was inspired by the Prospera charter city in Honduras’s Caribbean. That anarcho-capitalist enclave was backed by investors adjacent to market fundamentalist Peter Thiel and faced fierce local opposition. Under President Xiomara Castro – whose 2021 election restored democracy to the original ‘banana republic’ after a 2009 military coup unseated her husband, former president Manuel Zelaya – the high court ruled such autonomous zones unconstitutional. Investors took the case to arbitration in a World Bank court, while Castro moved to withdraw Honduras from the jurisdiction of such investor-state dispute mechanisms.
Other land battles have had a deadly toll, with activists imprisoned or murdered for defending their territories from megaprojects and monocultures. The continuity of these conflicts from the narco-dictatorship of Juan Orlando Hernández to the Castro administration points to the contradictions and limits of progressive governance in the region, where economic dependency and imperialist pressures continue to condition the structures of accumulation and governance.
Castro came to power in Honduras thanks to the heroic organizing of popular movements that called not for a restoration, but for a refoundation of Honduran democracy. Similar demands have been raised by indigenous-led movements in Guatemala that elected Bernardo Arévalo president in 2023.
Liberal commentators appear mystified by the robust domestic support commanded by Bukele’s profoundly illiberal project. Yet the FMLN was elected, not long ago, at the onset of a global recession on a post-neoliberal, social democratic platform that promised a break with the discredited status quo. El Salvador’s pivot toward fascism under Bukele is a more poisonous response to the same metastasising crisis. For neighbouring Honduras, Guatemala and beyond, it is also a mirror, threatening a possible future should progressives fail to meet popular expectations.
