Nayib Bukele
Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador since June 2019. He is the advertising executive and former mayor of San Salvador who broke the thirty-year hold of ARENA and the FMLN on the country's politics by winning the election of February 2019 in the first round, at thirty-seven, with a party borrowed for the purpose. He has since made the country the safest in the hemisphere and the least free in Central America. The method is the state of exception declared in March 2022 after the gangs killed eighty-seven people in a weekend. It is renewed monthly by a legislature his party controls. Under it eighty-five thousand people have been arrested without warrant, one in fifty adults. The country's prison population is the world's largest per head, the Terrorism Confinement Centre at Tecoluca holds forty thousand of them. The murder rate has fallen from fifty-one a hundred thousand in 2018 to under two. That is the number his voters see. The rest is the soldiers he marched into the legislature in February 2020 to make it vote a loan. There were the five constitutional court judges and the attorney general removed in one night in May 2021 by the new assembly. The court then found that the constitution's ban on immediate re-election did not mean what it said. There were the bitcoin made legal tender in September 2021 and quietly un-made in 2025 for the IMF's loan, and the journalists of El Faro whose telephones carried Pegasus and who moved to Costa Rica. There was the negotiation with the gangs that the American Treasury said his government had conducted before it turned on them. There was the re-election of February 2024 with eighty-five per cent, which the constitution forbade and nobody stopped. He was born in San Salvador, the son of a Palestinian Salvadoran businessman and imam. He ran the family advertising agency, was mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán and then of the capital for the FMLN, which expelled him in 2017. He calls himself the world's coolest dictator, which is a joke and a description. The prison at Tecoluca took the Venezuelans the Trump administration deported in 2025, for a fee. That is the export the country now has.
- Lived: 1981 CE – ?
- Nationality: Salvadoran
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
