Lauren Blake is a freshman planning to major in Political Science, with a concentration in International Relations. She is the co-Politics Editor of The Lemur.
Five years ago, San Salvador was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Its streets were plagued by gang violence and gunfire echoed through residential neighborhoods. Thousands of young men were coerced into joining gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 (both had originated in Los Angeles but exploded in El Salvador), which had a stranglehold on daily life, controlling small businesses and overpowering the government in many parts of the country. With a homicide rate of 38 per 100,000, El Salvador was known as “the murder capital of the world.”
Nayib Bukele promised to change that. Elected president in 2019 on an anti-gang platform, the young, charismatic Bukele appealed to Salvadoran voters who shared his disgust for previous administrations’ inaction and corruption. His appeal might be compared to that of another young presidential aspirant running on an anti-corruption platform that same year in Ukraine: Volodymyr Zelensky). Bukele promised Salvadorans that he would soon make the country a place where they could walk down the streets without fear. Bukele has upheld that promise. Today, El Salvador’s homicide rate is down to a jaw-dropping 1.9 per 100,000 residents, one of the lowest in the hemisphere. The transformation is palpable in daily life: people are out more, enjoying the city life, smiling and thanking police when they see them.
But Bukele’s promise of safety—his social contract with the people of El Salvador—has come at a steep cost. Bukele’s law-and-order crackdown, known as the Territorial Control Plan, has relied on the suspension of the rule of law and the elimination of due-process protections for suspected gang members. Bukele’s policies have led to mass indiscriminate incarceration (El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world). Police have been armed and empowered to round up suspected gang members with little to no evidentiary standards for arrest; courts process and sentence many alleged gang members in mass show trials of up to 900 defendants. And criminals and innocent alike have been herded into high-security prisons like the now-infamous CECOT, the largest prison in the world,, where inmates endure inhumane conditions and brutality from the police. Bukele’s elimination of many constitutional protections for prisoners has yielded the transformative and sweeping results he promised: in just three years, 85,000 Salvadorans have been imprisoned. That’s around 2% of the entire adult population.
Much of this transpired without the watchful attention of the American public or the active interest of the U.S. government. The Biden administration did not want to be seen as cozy with Bukele, who was denied a meeting with Biden in 2021, but largely chose to stay quiet on El Salvador’s backsliding into authoritarianism as a result of the gang war (migration from El Salvador to the U.S. had dropped by 60% during Bukele’s tenure as fear of gang violence subsided, which probably had something to do with that silence). But that is no longer the case—in the past few months, as the Trump administration has launched its own policy of indiscriminate deportation of migrants to El Salvador, also largely without due process. Now it’s not just politics junkies and those with personal connections who know what is going on in El Salvador: Americans have seen the images of CECOT on CNN and they have watched Bukele chuckle and smirk with Trump in the Oval Office.
As many Americans fear about sleepwalking into authoritarianism at home, it is useful to walk through precisely how Bukele used the crisis of gang violence to justify his abandonment of the rule-of-law. Bukele began by declaring a state of emergency because of the gang violence. A wholly legitimate and probably appropriate step when first imposed, Bukele has now extended that state of emergency 37 times. This is right out of the dictator’s playbook—with emergencies come emergency powers. Bukele has granted himself the power to bypass fundamental constitutional protections, pack the courts, and create a Maoist environment in which free speech is stifled and opponents of his policies are labeled gang sympathizers. Bukele doesn’t shy away from his war on democracy, either. In 2021, he changed his Twitter bio to read “world’s coolest dictator.” Today, it reads “Philosopher King.”
President Trump sees Bukele as a kindred spirit and has embarked on a partnership with the president in collaborative defiance of the law in both their countries (the two men share other interests. Both are crypto enthusiasts and Bukele even tried to make Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador with predictably unsuccessful results). Trump has embraced Bukele’s platform, praising his war on gangs and working to expand the diplomatic relationship between the US and El Salvador. On March 15, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 Act to order the deportation of almost 250 migrants from El Salvador and Venezuela to El Salvador, where they are now kept in CECOT. In exchange, the US paid El Salvador the (strangely small) sum of $6 million, intended to be put towards Bukele’s mass incarceration efforts. Reading off of Bukele’s script, arrests, there was no due process for many of these migrants, who were simply apprehended and shoved onto planes bound for El Salvador.
The result has been perhaps the first major constitutional crisis of the second Trump administration. District Court judge James Boasberg rejected Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, demanding the return of the migrants. The timeline remains a little fuzzy (as well as the government’s interpretation of Judge Boasberg’s verbal order), but it appears that the Trump administration shuttled the migrants onto a plane after the order, in direct contravention of the judicial ruling. Bukele chimed in, taunting on X, “Oopsie … too late.” In response to lawsuits from the ACLU the Supreme Court has now ruled that the federal government must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant and Maryland resident (Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally) who was sent to CECOT on flimsy evidence of gang affiliation. So far the administration has used spurious interpretation of the word “facilitate” to avoid compliance (meanwhile, Judge Boasberg is currently evaluating whether to hold the government in contempt for ignoring his initial ruling).
Trump has invoked his electoral mandate and questioned the legitimacy of judges to check his power, much as Bukele has invoked his landslide electoral victories as justification for amassing extra-constitutional authorities. On Monday, April 14th, Trump met with Bukele in the White House, calling him a “friend” and a “hell of a president.” In that press conference, the two presidents passed responsibility for the Abrego Garcia debacle back and forth as if he were a hot potato and not a man who had been illegally ripped from his life and family. Trump insisted that, since Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador’s custody, the matter is out of his hands. When pointedly asked if he planned to return Abrego Garcia to the US, Bukele responded with incredulousness, scoffing “you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” As Bukele delivered his remarks, Trump sat next to him and nodded, a smirk on his face.
Of course, as I mentioned above, Trump’s friendliness to Bukele is in some ways a continuation of former President Joe Biden’s election-year pivot warming up to the Salvadoran president (he even sent a delegation to Bukele’s second inauguration, in a feeble attempt to curry favor with Bukele as immigration became a political albatross for Biden’s own re-election hopes). Biden’s failure to sufficiently condemn Bukele’s actions, precipitated by his own political weakness on immigration, set the precedent for Trump’s embrace of Bukele’s dictatorship. Certainly the key difference with Trump lies in his active engagement and collaboration with Bukele, and in his willingness to not only overlook authoritarian abuses, but to adopt and co-sign them.
This curious partnership may be the first signal of what illiberalism in the U.S. could look like if the rule of law is consistently ignored and openly violated. Bukele has provided the playbook for Trump—violate the constitution under the auspice of security, curtail judicial review, and silence opposition, all while invoking an electoral “mandate.” The ongoing clash between Trump and the judiciary will reveal a great deal about the future of this administration and beyond. We should pay close attention to how Trump and the Department of Justice respond if Boasberg finds them in contempt or if Chief Justice Roberts issues a sterner warning on the Abrego Garcia case. The strength and independence of the judiciary will be put to the ultimate test as it attempts to hold Trump accountable for an unprecedented display of executive overreach.
During a TalkAbroad conversation with a woman from El Salvador earlier this week, I couldn’t help but ask my partner’s opinions on Bukele. She explained that she thinks he has his “positives and negatives”: that he’s made the country safer, but at the cost of human rights. As she spoke, a question popped into my mind. “Cuándo termina su término?” When does his term end? She looked confused for a moment before explaining that his term had already expired, that he’d ignored the constitution to run for re-election and had won. I asked if the constitution had been formally amended, googling the word for amendment (enmienda) as I spoke. She smiled and replied, “Realmente, no hay un cambio muy directo, pero la interpretación de la constitución fue diferente.” (actually, there hasn’t been a direct change, but the interpretation of the constitution was different). Though she said it nonchalantly, it struck me that the erosion of constitutional democracy happens gradually—that it comes from passivity, from accepting the overwriting of foundational principles. If we continue to look away, to watch the headlines with a blind trust in the power of our institutions, we may soon find ourselves living in a system we no longer recognize. It happened to El Salvador. As the clock ticks on the court’s order to return Abrego Garcia, the question looms: will it happen to us, too?
By Lauren Blake
