Salvadoran democracy’s uncertain past and future

President Nayib Bukele was elected in 2019 on a promise of change and has since branded himself as “the coolest dictator in the world” (Associated Press 2021). Elected at age thirty-seven as El Salvador’s youngest president and known for issuing executive orders via Twitter/X, Bukele’s youthful style, featuring backward baseball caps and leather jackets, has fueled a populist leadership model characterized by sustained high approval ratings (Rauda Zablah Reference Rauda Zablah2023). Even his swift advances toward authoritarianism have not significantly detracted from his popularity.

At the time of Bukele’s first election in 2019, El Salvador scored 67 of 100 points on Freedom House’s Freedom in the World classification—a score of “free” political status that the country had held since 1997, a trend that led Gellman to describe El Salvador in 2017 as “democratizing.” In 2020, Freedom House demoted El Salvador’s status to “partly free,” with its score descending a few points each year since then, to 53 of 100 in 2024 (Freedom House 2024) and down to 47 in 2025 (Freedom House 2025). Vice President Félix Ullóa revealed plainly to the New York Times, “To these people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes—we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new” (Kitroeff Reference Kitroeff2024). The replacement is what Meléndez-Sánchez (Reference Meléndez-Sánchez2021, 20) calls “millennial authoritarianism: an innovative political strategy combining traditional populist appeals and classic authoritarian behavior with a youthful and modern personal brand built on social media” (see also Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara Reference Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara2024). The question of how one person has reversed decades of postwar democratization has implications both for El Salvador’s future and for other countries struggling with similar paradigms of human insecurity and whose leaders are intently observing the relationship between Bukele’s approach and his formidable popularity. In and beyond Latin America, far-right populist movements playing out largely on social media offer evidence of the widespread corrosion of democracy (Zanotti and Roberts Reference Zanotti and Roberts2021, 25–26; Pereira Reference Pereira2023; Gamboa Reference Gamboa2024).

Although Bukele’s bombastic communication style and audacious claims of triumph make him seem like the single-handed orchestrator of El Salvador’s current backsliding, the stage was set for him long before. Profound inequality throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a civil war that played out US–Soviet Union rivalries through the proxied bodies of Salvadorans (Sanford Reference Sanford2003, 67–69), and a postwar period characterized by gang rule reveal the long-standing tenuousness of El Salvador’s democracy. The civil war laid bare the absence of real democratic infrastructure in the country, and its aftermath included adopting benchmarks of procedural democracy that are often more effective on paper than in practice. Following the 1992 peace accords that left the right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party in power, entrenched impunity, massive corruption, and the ongoing drivers of civil war conflict, including unequal access to insufficient resources, fueled new forms of violence. The first change of presidential power to the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in 2009 suggested that El Salvador could still build up its democratic infrastructure even as it was haunted by postwar obstacles.

Democracy—a regime type defined by the possibility of multiparty representation of citizen interests selected through free and fair elections—is neither static nor infallible, as Levitsky and Ziblatt (Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018) have pointed out in their acclaimed How Democracies Die. Procedures alone do not make democracy, meaning that open elections are an insufficient test of democratic robustness (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2002, 52–54). Although such erosion has been evident for some time in El Salvador (Córdova Reference Córdova2019), it has sharply accelerated since Bukele’s 2019 election.

A former FMLN mayor, Bukele once described himself as a socialist.Footnote ² But as the social scientist Jorge Cuéllar notes, he should more accurately be labeled “an opportunist” (in Peralta Reference Peralta2024). Seizing opportunities for personal power, Bukele has reinvented himself as a populist authoritarian leader capable of realizing people’s dreams, including bringing security to areas plagued by gang domination (Radio Ambulante 2024; Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2024). Bukele’s administration has exhibited a range of indicators of backsliding democracy that imperil even the most basic benchmarks of El Salvador’s previous democratic status (Human Rights Watch and Cristosal 2022).

Levitsky and Ziblatt (Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018, 78) describe how democratic rot from within involves “capturing the referees”—silencing and disempowering neutral and independent adjudicators in favor of loyalists, thereby corroding democracy from within. Bukele deployed this strategy before the start of the state of exception through a series of actions that included ordering military troops into the Legislative Assembly to pressure lawmakers into alignment with his interests, ousting the attorney general, replacing all five Supreme Court justices in the Constitutional Chamber, and forcing judges over sixty years old into retirement. He has also selectively prosecuted corruption charges as a means of persecuting political opponents, including sitting and former politicians from opposition parties, effectively using the law to silence critics (US Department of State 2023). These moves protected him from retribution as he consolidated control over all branches of government through executive orders and constitutional rewrites.

Bukele has retained his popularity amid such antidemocratic measures through a public relations approach that rhetorically justifies his extremism. He frames such measures as imperative for citizens’ security and lauds himself as the only one courageous enough to achieve them. As seen most clearly in his governance of the ongoing state of exception, this framing requires careful control over the kinds of information made available to the public and the power to keep other knowledge hidden from view.

The control of public information during democratic breakdown in El Salvador

The ongoing democratic corrosion under Bukele’s leadership is epitomized by the degradation of public access to accurate political information and the proliferation of misleading information on digital platforms, especially Twitter/X, amplifying Bukele’s success far beyond El Salvador’s borders. Bukele and his administration have cracked down on journalists’ access to political happenings and their ability to question his authority (US Department of State 2022, 14–16). On Twitter/X, Bukele regularly undercuts the credibility of journalists critical of his policies; his followers respond by harassing them with thousands of social media messages using profane language and threatening sexual violence (Nóchez Reference Nóchez2022). Such behavior models the normalization of harassment toward journalists to the public at large. Bukele’s public relations strategy has prioritized the silencing of opposition to gain more narrative dominance to direct and control public opinion.

This behavior fits within the broader context of authoritarian regimes’ expanding use of social media to wrest control of the political narrative away from independent voices and experts. It reveals a creative and evolving strategy for millennial authoritarian leaders to capture “referees” beyond those that exist in government office by neutralizing the power of a free and independent press (Levitsky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018, 78). As Kalathil (Reference Kalathil2020, 33) describes, “authoritarian regimes are increasingly using digital influence operations as a method of censorship and manipulation, flooding the information space with false or misleading narratives designed to crowd out independent voices and expertise.” This strategy was clear in January 2022, when twenty-two members of a leading team of Salvadoran investigative journalists at El Faro were found to have been targeted in a Pegasus spyware operation that infiltrated their communication systems (Scott et al. Reference Scott, Marczak, Herrero, Razzak, Noura Al-Jizawi and Deibert2022). Although Bukele denied government involvement, he later baselessly accused the organization of money laundering. El Faro has since moved its operations to Costa Rica, citing “the dismantling of democracy, the lack of checks and balances on the exercise of power of a small group of people, the attacks against press freedom, and the shuttering of all transparency and accountability mechanisms [that] gravely threaten Salvadorans’ right to be informed while considerable public resources are allotted to disseminating propaganda and disinformation” (El Faro Editorial Board 2023). By consolidating power and then using it to attack and discredit oppositional voices while investing unprecedented resources into producing and disseminating news that reflects favorably on himself, Bukele retains authoritarian rhetorical control over the country’s public narrative.

Bukele’s manipulation of public-facing information is central to sustaining support for his leadership, even amid clear blows to the country’s democracy.Footnote ³ His strategic employment of Twitter/X, in particular, illustrates how he accomplishes the twofold goal of undercutting his critics while endearing himself to his supporters. Despite more than half of Salvadorans lacking regular access to the internet, Twitter/X has become a key tool for Bukele’s messaging and day-to-day business (Esberg Reference Esberg2020, Mila-Maldonado et al. Reference Mila-Maldonado, Andrés Lara-Aguiar, David Carrasco-Muro and Esteban Narváez-Ruiz2022). Mila-Maldonado et al. (Reference Mila-Maldonado, Andrés Lara-Aguiar, David Carrasco-Muro and Esteban Narváez-Ruiz2022) analyzed hundreds of Bukele’s tweets, revealing how the president adapts his account to his audience to formally confront opposing political and social forces and interact directly with citizens. In the latter context, he employs his charisma and “close and positive language” to promote their integration with his beliefs (Mila-Maldonado et al. Reference Mila-Maldonado, Andrés Lara-Aguiar, David Carrasco-Muro and Esteban Narváez-Ruiz2022, 20). The authors found that Bukele “presents an anti-systemic and critical character” toward his adversaries. But in social media posts designed to make the president appear “charismatic, representative of the people and transparent,” he instead uses a “political image … built on the basis of empathy to connect with his followers” (Mila-Maldonado et al. Reference Mila-Maldonado, Andrés Lara-Aguiar, David Carrasco-Muro and Esteban Narváez-Ruiz2022, 25). The authors concluded that Bukele’s use of social media is constitutive of his populism.

A closer look at the mechanics of Twitter/X and the role played by fake accounts and bots takes these findings a step further, revealing the extent to which pro-Bukele support has been artificially inflated. Bukele’s team has worked with troll centers to amplify his messaging and attack his critics (Bradshaw et al. Reference Bradshaw, Bailey and Howard2021, 128). Paid influencers and “likely bot farms” have been tasked with tweeting tens of thousands of messages of support for Bukele to “create the appearance of authentic grassroots support” (Kinosian Reference Kinosian2022). A secret team of social media specialists contracted by Bukele’s government anonymously revealed in an investigation by Reuters that their job included tracking and reporting Twitter/X users who posted criticism of Bukele in an attempt to get their accounts suspended (Kinosian Reference Kinosian2022). By manipulating Twitter/X’s reporting feature to his benefit, Bukele’s team has managed to mitigate the visibility and impact of his critics.

What is more, a 2022 International Crisis Group analysis of Twitter traffic related to Bukele’s first inauguration revealed “an unmatched spike” in pro-Bukele users joining Twitter immediately following his inauguration in 2019. In a single day, nearly as many pro-Bukele Twitter accounts were created as in the entire month before.

While clearly supported by an army of bots and fake accounts, the messaging was originated by real people. For example, the pro-Bukele hashtag #QueBonitaDictadura that proliferated on these artificial accounts was first tweeted by Porfirio Chica, a public relations strategist and close adviser to Bukele, and then used by Bukele’s official account only an hour later. That evening, over the course of two hours, the International Crisis Group reports, “#QueBonitaDictadura was tweeted or retweeted 4,324 times, including eight retweets from the president in a five-minute window” (Esberg Reference Esberg2020). Many posts included photos of the military providing services to citizens, which have since been traced back to previous tweets from Bukele’s communications department. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) Propaganda Research Project’s most recent Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation has likewise confirmed prominent social media manipulation in El Salvador by bots and humans alike, originating from government agencies, political parties, private contractors, and individual citizens (Bradshaw et al. Reference Bradshaw, Bailey and Howard2021, i).

Although there is no question that the reach of Bukele’s messaging has been artificially inflated, some research suggests a public willingness to disregard the potential danger of online information manipulation. In 2022, the OII’s Programme on Democracy & Technology analyzed survey data from over 150,000 respondents across 142 countries to assess internet users’ perceptions of the risks associated with exposure to misinformation. OII’s analysis determined that 74 percent of respondents from Latin America and the Caribbean reported concern about misinformation. When the survey data was compared to datasets designed to evaluate countries’ regime types and the openness of their national media environments, respondents in closed and electoral autocracies were less likely to worry about misinformation than those in liberal democracies. The authors found that the actual prevalence of misinformation or press restriction did not increase the perception of misinformation risk (Knuutila et al. Reference Knuutila, Neudert and Howard2022). The same report also revealed that older respondents (aged sixty-five and older) were less likely to recognize misinformation as a threat—a telling dynamic in an aging country like El Salvador, where population projections estimate that nearly a quarter of citizens will be over the age of sixty by 2050 (Knuutila et al. Reference Knuutila, Neudert and Howard2022; Avalos Reference Avalos2019).

By manipulating publicly available data to inflate perceptions of his successes and silence his critics, Bukele maintains popularity despite ongoing democratic corrosion. Rather than considering the control of national and international public information merely a result of democratic decline, it makes better sense to track the ways this media control itself activates and catalyzes authoritarian rule. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the implementation and public international reporting of Bukele’s mass incarceration of suspected gang affiliates under the ongoing state of exception.

Bukele’s branding of the 2022–25 state of exception

The weekend of March 25, 2022 saw a record-setting string of eighty-seven gang-committed homicides across El Salvador that resulted from the unraveling of a secret pact between Bukele and the gangs in what MS-13 called a “betrayal” of Bukele’s loyalty (Martínez Reference Martínez2022). The Monday following the homicides, Bukele successfully called on the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to pass a state of exception, which suspends many constitutional protections, including due process, drastically increases police powers to arrest and imprison suspected gang members, and curtails the right to legal defense (Kahn Reference Kahn2022). As human rights organizations reacted with alarm, Bukele swung back, tweeting in English, “to the international community: We have 70,000 gang members still on the streets. Come get them, take them to your countries, get them out of this ‘dictatorial and authoritarian persecution.’”Footnote ⁴ Continually renewed each month, the state of exception remains in place as of this writing, over three years since it began.

Wide-ranging reports from Human Rights Watch (2022a, 2022b), Cristosal (2024a, 2024b, 2023; Human Rights Watch & Cristosal 2022), Amnesty International (2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2024), and El Faro (Pappier Reference Pappier2022; Gavarrete Reference Gavarrete2023; Barrera Reference Barrera2024) reveal that many of the arrest raids under the state of exception have primarily targeted poor and undereducated men with no current gang ties. Other targeted populations include deportees, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ Salvadorans. Hundreds of detainees have died from untreated medical conditions, blunt-force trauma, strangulation, and starvation, even as families send monthly packages of basic food, medicine, and hygiene to incarcerated loved ones (Barrera Reference Barrera2024). There have been reports of prison personnel forcing women to do sexual acts in exchange for food and medicine (Cristosal 2024b). And even after the tens of thousands of arrests, gang extortion and violence continue in and, more covertly, outside of prisons (Papadovassilakis Reference Papadovassilakis2023). Meanwhile, Bukele has used the state of exception as a cover to attack and incarcerate his critics, as has been the case for dozens of human rights defenders, former state officials, and journalists (Human Rights Watch 2024).

Bukele’s approval ratings in El Salvador are between 80 percent and 92 percent (Martínez Reference Martínez2023; TResearch International 2023), reflecting a theme also visible in the United States, India, Brazil, and Argentina, where citizens are willing to sacrifice some democratic safeguards to support leaders who promise some tangible benefits (Xuereb et al. Reference Xuereb, Wohl, Stefaniak and Elgar2021). The Salvadoran public generally resents gang governance, as citizens navigate the daily insecurity that comes with threats of extortion and violence within gang territory. Since the mass arrests, many Salvadorans report feeling safer and having increased mobility in their communities, and some are no longer paying gang extortion (Martínez et al. Reference Martínez, Lemus and Martínez2023). In more than a dozen interviews conducted in January 2024 with Salvadorans ranging from nongovernmental organization staff to service workers, Gellman (Reference Gellman2024a) found that the drive for safety had prepared citizens to be single-issue voters in the February 2024 election. At the same time, other interviewees—namely people with past criminal records, those with loved ones who have at some point been gang involved, and those whose family members have already been targeted under the state of exception—expressed deep concerns about the way Salvadoran security is being enacted (Gellman Reference Gellman2024c).

The policy governing the state of exception ensures that once an individual is suspected of being a gang member, it is almost impossible to prove otherwise. During fieldwork in El Salvador in January 2024, Bishop and Gellman heard multiple stories from people in working-class communities who had been marked as targets by police or military personnel despite no empirical evidence of gang involvement. Bukele’s administration unabashedly denies the right to be free from arbitrary detention for tens of thousands of Salvadorans and is using the state of exception to amass more punitive power.

Setting the stage for “The Largest Prison in the Americas”

Prisons usually open with little fanfare, with the most engaged portion of the population being those who will derive jobs from the industry, whether as corrections officers, administrative staff, or subcontractors. Bukele, however, launched an international public relations campaign to mark the opening of the building he branded the Terrorism Confinement Center, publicizing detailed visual and textual information about the prison’s design, protocols, and purpose. The prison was billed as integral to Bukele’s “war on gangs” (Hernández Liborio Reference Hernández Liborio2023).

In February 2023, Bukele announced the official opening of CECOT on Twitter: “This morning, in a single operation, we transferred the first 2,000 gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center. This will be their new home, where they will live for decades, mixed up, without the power to do more harm to the population.”Footnote ⁵ This announcement connotes that every one of the two thousand transferred detainees is a gang member, even though many arrest raids under the state of exception, driven by government-imposed daily quotas, have resulted in the arbitrary detention, refusal of constitutional rights, and abuse of many innocent people with no current gang ties (Amnesty International 2024; Cristosal 2024b).

Still, Bukele continues to refer to the prison population under the state of exception as exclusively gang members, pushing this title as evidence of his success. When Voice of America referred to the first detainees transferred to CECOT as “alleged” gang members in a tweet that read, “Some 2,000 alleged gang members were transferred this Friday to the mega-prison recently inaugurated by the government of #ElSalvador,” Bukele doubled down: “The official media of the U.S. Government says that these murderers, judicially convicted of murdering thousands of Salvadorans, are ‘alleged gang members.’ Why are they publicly defending gang members? What is their interest in protecting criminals?”Footnote ⁶ The suggestion that detainees have been “judicially convicted of murdering thousands” obfuscates the reality that CECOT also houses adults imprisoned after the start of the state of exception, none of whom have yet been convicted of any crime and all of whom currently remain in indefinite pretrial detention (Cristosal 2024b; Amnesty International 2024). Meanwhile, Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro confirmed to the BBC in May 2023 that the government was still in the process of “building” CECOT prisoners’ cases: “We have a commitment with the Salvadorans that [CECOT prisoners] will never return to the communities. And we are going to ensure we build the necessary cases [against them] to make sure they never return” (BBC Mundo 2023). Such a commitment is colored by the troubling pattern of falsification and misuse of evidence by state agents in El Salvador, which include multiple instances of police tampering with crime scenes to avoid their own culpability (Observatorio Universitario de Derechos Humanos 2020), planting drugs and weapons on suspects to justify arbitrary arrests (Gies 2018), and creating gang aliases on the spot for individuals with no real gang affiliation (Lemus and Cáceres Reference Lemus and Cáceres2022).

The sharp rise in the number of prisoners has overwhelmed the judicial system, effectively disallowing the possibility of fair individual hearings before impartial judges that are standard in more democratic contexts. Instead, in July 2023, the General Assembly passed a bill allowing nine hundred detainees accused of the same crime to be tried simultaneously (Taylor Reference Taylor2023). Moreover, although on paper Salvadoran prisoners maintained the right to a defense, a US State Department human rights report on El Salvador revealed that public defenders’ caseloads had risen from an average of fifty cases per month to ninety-five cases per day, making it impossible for detainees to enact this right (US Department of State 2022, 8, 9). Under these antidemocratic conditions, Bukele’s pernicious stance that every detainee in CECOT had been “judicially convicted” demonstrates his willful disregard for both the rule of law and accurate public communication.

Moreover, Bukele’s announcement that CECOT will be these purported gang members’ “new home, where they will live for decades, mixed up,” holds significant implications for human rights. Since 2004, a practice had been in place to hold members of the two most powerful gangs in El Salvador, MS-13 and Barrio 18, in separate cells or prisons to prevent rival intergang violence and violence between gang members and civilians. Bertrand Galindo, former Salvadoran security minister, explained, “The point was that if we left them in the same facilities, with the level of violence that was occurring and the weakness of the infrastructure, the state was not going to be able to prevent them from killing each other” (Valencia Reference Valencia2014).Footnote ⁷

A year into his term, and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bukele became the first president in two decades to begin willingly mixing gang members in the same prison cells, a move widely criticized by human rights organizations (Linares Reference Linares2020). José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch, stated that not separating gang-affiliated detainees from one another or from other detainees showed the government’s “wickedness and cruelty” (Valencia Reference Valencia2020). The Human Rights Commission of El Salvador stated that the practice “carries a total risk of mutinies or selective or collective murders” (González Díaz Reference González Díaz2020).

Still, much of the news reporting on Bukele’s change in procedure referenced the country’s general prison overcrowding, as if the move were an inevitable reality in a national context where the prison population was already at double its stated capacity. Data from World Prison Brief in May 2022 shows occupancy level based on official capacity at 236.7 percent. Bukele’s team has publicly described CECOT as a facility built to alleviate overcrowding (Government of El Salvador 2024, 86). Bukele’s reiteration of his intention to mix gang members in the context of the new megaprison’s ample new space reveals this practice as a deliberate strategy, knowingly acquiescing to the violence likely to result, rather than an unfortunate necessity.

As expert witnesses who testify about Salvadoran country conditions in US immigration court, we have been privy to numerous cases wherein adjudicators have considered whether there is evidence of the Salvadoran government’s acquiescence to violence, to determine whether the case would fit within the grounds of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture. To be eligible for protection under the Convention Against Torture, an individual must show that the state is knowingly consenting or acquiescing to actions that would constitute torture. That is, state actors are aware of a high probability of violent activity, including physical pain or suffering and/or the threat of death, but do not halt it and may actively facilitate it. Indeed, the high probability of violent activity in prisons during the state of exception in El Salvador has been confirmed by a range of instances, such as a January 2025 riot in Izalco prison during which active gang members housed in a cell with retired gang members reportedly attacked each other using iron bars they had removed from their beds, resulting in at least three deaths (La Prensa Gráfica 2025).

The Salvadoran government’s deliberate mixing of gang members with others in prison is evidence of exactly the kinds of state acquiescence to violence detailed in the Convention Against Torture. This is not a matter of negligence, lack of oversight, or mere recklessness. Rather, the Salvadoran government is signaling through the public pronouncement of this practice that it is intentionally placing suspected gang members in situations where they are highly likely to be tortured by rival members and/or to inflict violence against other Salvadorans.

Beyond the threat of gang-inflicted violence in prison, prisoners in throughout El Salvador under the state of exception are subjected to widespread abuse at the hands of corrections officers. Prison staff are responsible for beatings, waterboarding, and using implements of torture on detainees’ fingers to force confessions of gang affiliation (US Department of State 2023, 5). Some Salvadoran corrections officers have historically received training about human rights, including the Nelson Mandela Rules, conflict management, and a culture of peace. But as of 2021, information on prison staff training is no longer available because, like so much political data in the context of the state of exception, it has been declared confidential (Fundación para el Debido Proceso 2022, 13).

Although human rights organizations including Tutela Legal, Cristosal, and Amnesty International work diligently to expose widespread human rights abuses in prison, Bukele’s careful management of public information keeps the full scope of the violations out of view. The state of exception’s prohibition on contact between detainees and the outside world effectively prevents widespread public knowledge about the abuses happening inside.

Despite proactive attempts to limit nongovernment-produced viewing of prison conditions, we know that hundreds of incarcerated individuals have died since the start of the state of exception, some after being beaten, strangled, and/or denied medical treatment (Human Rights Watch and Cristosal 2022). The Salvadoran state maintains that all prison deaths have resulted from natural causes (Avelar Reference Avelar2023). But in a sample of one hundred cases of prison deaths that occurred during the first year of the state of exception, Cristosal (2023, 29) found through photographic, forensic, and testimonial evidence that 75 percent of the deaths were violent, probably violent, or with suspicions of criminality on account of a common pattern of hematomas caused by beatings, sharp object wounds, and signs of strangulation on the cadavers examined. Even the deaths described by legal medical obituaries as nonviolent have, in some cases, involved cadavers showing forensic evidence of torture, demonstrating further state-sponsored complicity in concealing evidence of violence. By preventing public viewing of the widespread human rights violations, including deaths taking place in the prisons, the Salvadoran government can maintain the position that the state of exception is making El Salvador safer.

Pageantry and subterfuge

In a triumphant thirty-one-minute video tour of the prison’s facilities posted on his Twitter feed, Bukele admires the solitary confinement cells, a fully stocked armory of riot gear and weapons, and a separate building with recreational facilities for prison staff.Footnote ⁸ Professionally lit and staged press photos abounded in the days following the prison’s official opening, appearing in international outlets from Al Jazeera to the Washington Post (Krauze Reference Krauze2023; Al Jazeera 2023). The testimony of Professor Alexander Eduvay Guzmán Molina, who was arrested on the first day of the state of exception and detained for several months, describes how prisoners with tattoos would be arranged to appear in front of group photos shot by the government to use in their public relations. “There were people with tattoos, covered in numbers and letters, and they had them stand in front to make people think they had a whole group of gang members. And everyone else, civilians like myself, they put behind the formation,” Guzmán reports (El Faro 2023). Indeed, in the absence of a fair and impartial judicial process that would produce evidence of innocence or criminality, the visibility of imprisoned tattooed bodies has become a rhetorical stand-in for proof of the state of exception’s effectiveness. The prominence of tattoos in Bukele’s public relations campaign about CECOT is reflected and reinforced by legal moves to normalize and justify imprisoning anyone who fits this stereotypical demographic of a gang affiliate. According to an investigation by El Faro, having tattoos, even ones that have been removed, is already one of the most common reasons for arrest on gang charges (Lemus and Cáceres Reference Lemus and Cáceres2022).

Once the prison’s official opening was announced, Bukele began to retweet messages of support: “The most successful reduction in murder rates in any nation in perhaps the history of the world”; “We need more presidents like @nayibbukele”; “President @nayibbukele has put an end to decades of gang violence and terrorism, effectively restoring SAFETY in El Salvador (what many said could not be done). Bukele is a Patriot who puts the interests of El Salvador’s people FIRST.”Footnote ⁹ These messages of support—including several in English—that appear beside images and videos from CECOT, advance the appearance of enthusiastic public support from audiences at home and abroad.

The government’s billing of CECOT as the “largest in the Americas” (Cristosal 2023, 44) is in line with Bukele’s other proclamations of grandeur. He promised that the hospital he would build in response to COVID-19 would be “the largest of Latin America” (it was ultimately left partly unfinished; Romero Reference Romero2021) and manipulated public perception of crime statistics to assert that El Salvador is the “safest country in Latin America” (El Salvador in English 2022). Likewise, the creation of CECOT was announced just ten days after Bukele widely publicized the announcement that El Salvador had gone “300 days without a homicide.”Footnote ¹⁰ This announcement willfully ignored dozens of confirmed prison deaths, fatalities during confrontations with the police or military (conveniently no longer counted among official statistics), and the growing number of individuals who had “disappeared.” Clandestine graves discovered in El Salvador are deemed by Bukele’s government as matters of national security and the identities of their contents withheld from public view.

The relationship between misleading information and Salvadorans’ sense of safety is key. As Chen and Xu (Reference Chen and Xu2017) discuss, the interaction between information manipulation and policy change under authoritarian regimes enables the appearance of the government’s apparent willingness to take action—which is seen as improving citizens’ everyday lives—to be used as a lever to make the public more disposed to believe that the information the government provides is trustworthy. Branding himself as invested in improving Salvadoran lives and amplifying evidence that Salvadorans believe this to be the case is central to Bukele’s ability to be seen as trustworthy. This strategy is one way Bukele manages to sustain his popularity at home and abroad even in the midst of widescale democratic corrosion.

The month CECOT opened, Bukele triumphantly announced, “The Salvadoran opposition, its unions, its media, its NGOs, its experts; all came out yesterday, in UNISON, accepting the total success of our war against gangs.”Footnote ¹¹ But in an article titled “El Salvador Police Reports Contradict Bukele’s Triumphalism,” InSight Crime proffers details of more than a dozen reports from the National Civil Police that reveal the Salvadoran government believes more than forty-three thousand individuals profiled as gang members still remain at large in El Salvador, complicating the “total success” Bukele had announced (Valencia Reference Valencia2023). The increasingly widespread practice of publicizing reports that purposefully obfuscate factual country conditions advances the perception of Bukele’s trustworthiness, as is clear through the lens of Chen and Xu (Reference Chen and Xu2017), and simultaneously leaves citizens without the information they need to gain an accurate picture of the state of exception.

Bukele’s public “tough on gangs” approach, exemplified in the public relations campaign surrounding the opening of CECOT, pulls a rhetorical veil over several actions that suggest the Bukele administration’s continued acquiescence to the gangs behind closed doors. Leaders in Bukele’s administration have been resolute in their public communication about the government’s determination to lock gang members up for life (Aleman Reference Aleman2023). But in fact, Bukele has a record of releasing gangs’ high-ranking shot callers who are known to have committed serious violent crimes. InSight Crime revealed that between July 2021 and February 2022, the Bukele administration released four of the highest-ranking members of MS-13 from prison (Garcia Reference Garcia2022).

Further undercutting the plausibility of the Salvadoran government’s ability to root out gang violence—and interest in doing so—are recordings of conversations between senior Bukele official Carlos Marroquín and MS-13 that were made public in May 2022 by El Faro. The recordings reveal that one of the gang shot callers was quietly released by Bukele’s administration to show the administration’s “loyalty and trustworthiness” to the gang (Martínez Reference Martínez2022). The data suggest that the Salvadoran government is more interested in creating an appearance of cracking down on violence in order to boost electoral popularity than it is in meaningfully protecting its citizenry.

A growing number of detainees are being rearrested immediately after being released on bail or after their cases are dropped, despite the fact that double jeopardy is illegal in El Salvador (Brigida Reference Brigida2023). These arrests give an appearance of the government’s continued response to gang violence while in fact depriving of their liberty individuals whose sentences have been served or who have been found to be innocent. This disregard for existing laws further demonstrates the government’s lack of interest in upholding in practice the democratic laws that exist on paper and greater interest in constructing the facade of their success.

In an analysis of the Terrorism Confinement Center’s design using satellite footage and published in the Financial Times, Christine Murray and Alan Smith calculate that if the prison were to reach its supposed full capacity of forty thousand, each prisoner would have just 0.6 meters (just under two feet) of space in shared cells—an amount the authors point out is less than half the space required for transporting midsized cattle under EU law (Murray and Smith Reference Murray and Smith2023). Both Cristosal (2023) and Marvin Reyes, director of the Police Workers Movement in El Salvador, expressed doubt in a 2024 interview with Bishop that the prison truly has as much capacity as Bukele has touted. But the government has determined the details of CECOT’s design, cost, and capacity as “under reserve,” so they are impossible to confirm (Cristosal 2023, 44). In lieu of releasing such empirical information, Bukele has instead invited more favorable attention, including offering carefully choreographed partial tours of CECOT to international influencers like the Mexican vlogger Luisito Comunica, who posted footage of his visit to his 42 million YouTube subscribers. In July 2024, Bukele invited the conservative former US congressman Matt Gaetz to CECOT; in the resulting video footage posted widely online, Gaetz stands in front of a cell of tattooed inmates and proclaims:

This highly coordinated public relations strategy is central to what Adam Isacson (Reference Isacson2024), director of the Washington Office on Latin America’s Defense Oversight program, calls Bukele’s “authoritarian playbook”; by “flooding the zone” with a glut of admiring media attention, questions about what may not be visible fade in importance.

As Marvin Reyes revealed to Bishop during a 2024 interview, “Bukele … has brought journalists from many parts of the world and allows them to go and film and to document ‘what the prisons of El Salvador are like,’ but [CECOT] is a prison unlike the rest that are in completely inhumane conditions.” Indeed, the public look inside the prison offered in Bukele’s international public relations campaign starkly contrasts with the near impossibility of seeing El Salvador’s carceral spaces from any perspective other than the one offered by the government. The revoking of visitation rights for family members, attorneys, and, at times, even Bukele’s own ombudsman’s office (the entity responsible for investigating accusations of human rights abuses in prison) occludes the transparency that would threaten Bukele’s ability to control the public narrative (US Department of State 2022, 4). The result is both prisoners’ total isolation from the outside world and the world’s inability to bear witness to the wide-scale human rights abuses taking place in these carceral spaces.

Conclusion: Implications of Bukele’s carceral regime in and beyond El Salvador

Bukele is using the state of exception as cover to make sweeping changes to the country’s constitution and penal codes, taking advantage of the supermajority he holds in the Legislative Assembly after having ousted many of the former legislators to secure his continued authoritarian control. The opening of CECOT marks a key moment in El Salvador’s alarming democratic decline. Its existence, the policies and practices used to govern it, and the multiplatform international public relations campaign Bukele developed to promote its success are representative of a national context in which the government is more concerned with consolidating power and maintaining popularity than protecting the human rights of its citizens. Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro describes CECOT as “the biggest monument to justice we have ever built,” but CECOT as the crowning achievement of the state of exception, when analyzed in the context of democracy and human rights, is more emblematic of the dismantling than the construction of the rule of law (BBC Mundo 2023).

Although some applaud Bukele’s self-proclaimed cleanup of gang activity in formerly dangerous neighborhoods in the country, one must consider both the cost of these measures and the likelihood that superficial tactics like mass arrests can root out the gangs’ decades-long rule. As we write this, hundreds of mothers and other family members are camped in makeshift dwellings outside the prisons, hoping to hear word of their loved ones inside. As they wait, they face harassment from prison officials, police, and gangs operating in the areas around the prisons, including threats from security officials that they may be arrested themselves if they do not “stop asking questions” (US Department of State, 2023, 5). In working-class communities, police and military personnel have taken over some predatory gang practices, including extortion and sexual exploitation of women and girls (Gellman Reference Gellman2024c). This carceral regime should not be confused with universal improvement in human security.

The state of exception clearly illustrates Levitsky and Ziblatt’s description of autocrats using security threats to justify antidemocratic actions. Although Levitsky and Ziblatt (Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2018, 3) show that this most commonly occurs in subtle ways, with democracies “erod[ing] slowly, in barely visible steps,” El Salvador’s democratic rot has instead largely played out in highly visible, social media–based international public relations. Bukele’s wielding of Twitter/X to invite global attention to highly coordinated spectacles like the opening of CECOT advances his hero narrative nationally and internationally. It also has implications for democracy around the globe precisely because of the accessibility of this public strategy to other national leaders in countries as disparate as France, Italy, Hungary, India, Argentina, and Brazil (Kaltwasser Reference Kaltwasser2024; Pereira Reference Pereira2023; Zanotti and Roberts Reference Zanotti and Roberts2021).

International leaders from both sides of the political spectrum have lauded and attempted to emulate Bukele’s brand of mano dura, as evidenced by Bukele-inspired efforts in Honduras and Ecuador. While politicians from Argentina, Chile, and Peru who have espoused bukelismo have had mixed success gaining support for and implementing copycat approaches, there is no question that the Bukele model has become “one of the most visible, popular, and influential brands in Latin America” (Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara Reference Meléndez-Sánchez and Vergara2024, 85). This international popularity has normalized right-wing populist millennial authoritarianism as a viable alternative to democracy by reinforcing it through countless accolades across multiple platforms and reported on a global scale.

The power of the Bukele model lies not just in its physical force—that is, the militarization of the police and consolidation of authority to the executive branch that allows for the rounding up and imprisoning of entire swaths of the population—but in its narrative force. The firm hold over the global microphone that Bukele grappled for and now maintains is made possible by the rhetorical construction of a Twitter/X-based facade of broad success and manufactured support from key influential figures amplified by bots and trolls—a facade that all are forbidden to peer behind.

Once normalized in the public sphere, the harms of authoritarianism become more difficult to condemn persuasively. When privileged citizens survive the undoing of democracy personally unscathed, they become less invested in democracy as a necessary regime type. As some citizens grow accustomed to trading transparency for comfortingly repetitive news of their leader’s successes, it becomes easier to comply than resist. Security is not only about reality; it is also a game of perception. If people feel safer in their immediate environments, they might be more likely to overlook brutal stories of human rights abuses happening to others elsewhere. Such logic is hardly unique to El Salvador. It is also weaponized by right-wing populists from Donald Trump in the United States to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Until a more holistic approach is prioritized to address the root causes of violence in El Salvador, Salvadorans will continue to suffer a series of expensive and generally ineffective security plans that may fulfill political objectives but will not bring sustainable levels of safety. Transforming the culture surrounding gang and state violence requires more than a megaprison. The reality is that gang violence and state violence are deeply intertwined with cycles of poverty, lack of education, underemployment, systemic corruption, and impunity, not only in El Salvador but also in other countries looking to it as a model of how to improve human security. In the meantime, both domestic and international consumers of Bukele’s rhetoric may be distracted by the noise of his public relations campaign to overlook the silences. We do so at our own peril.