El Salvador’s Faustian Bargain

The people of El Salvador lived in fear of gangs for decades. Then President Nayib Bukele decided enough was enough. What happened next was a miracle, and all it took was la mano dura: an iron fist. The gangs disappeared—there one week and gone the next.

I heard this story again and again when I visited El Zonte, a surfing town on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, in March 2023. A particularly gruesome display of gang violence the previous year had led Bukele to declare a “state of exception,” empowering police to arrest anyone suspected of gang affiliation without telling them why, informing them of their rights, or allowing them access to a lawyer. El Salvador is now the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. It has also gone from being one of the world’s most dangerous places to having the same homicide rate as Canada.

Bukele has kept the state of exception in place for more than three years, even though the constitution caps it at 60 days—and even though the murder rate plummeted within those first two months but has flattened since. By Bukele’s own admission, some of the 100,000 Salvadorans who have ended up in prison are innocent; his government writes them off as “collateral damage” or a “margin of error.” Meanwhile, hundreds have died in custody, per Amnesty International, some as a result of “beatings, torture, and lack of proper medical care.”

Critics of the state of exception argue that security without justice is a Faustian bargain. Bukele is just fine with that, and he has reason to think that the rest of the country is, too. Every year since 2022, Central American University has polled Salvadorans, asking if they support the state of exception. More than 80 percent consistently say they do. But when the question spells out what a state of exception entails—that it allows the government to arrest people without judicial orders—only about 30 percent of respondents approve, suggesting that many of those who back the policy are not thinking about it too carefully.

Still, polls have ranked Bukele as Latin America’s most popular leader; politicians in Colombia and Honduras have promised to emulate his crackdown; and U.S. President Donald Trump was so impressed that he deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, using Bukele-like emergency powers under the Alien Enemies Act to do so. That innocent people are disappearing into El Salvador’s prisons is no secret—making the embrace of Bukele a disturbing signal of just how far a strongman can go without losing political ground.

From the beginning of his political career, Bukele sought to project a forcefulness that would stand in contrast to El Salvador’s seemingly innocuous, ineffective political class. Amparo Marroquín, a political-communications researcher at Central American University, told me that Bukele presented himself as a combination of influencer, telenovela leading man, and devout Catholic. “When he talks in public,” Marroquín said, “he’s not addressing citizens. He’s addressing fans.”

The son of a prosperous businessman, Bukele became mayor of San Salvador in 2015, on the improbable promise that tourists would soon flock to San Salvador’s desolate plazas. Not even Salvadorans dared visit these at night; most complied with a tacit curfew the gangs had imposed. As mayor, Bukele cleaned up the city’s historic center, making it more “modern, cosmopolitan, presentable to visitors,” the historian Héctor Lindo-Fuentes told me. He built a futuristic mall and repainted colonial buildings. And he went to war with street vendors, promising to “reclaim” the streets from the “occupation” of some 20,000 people who rose at dawn to sell trinkets, clothes, and food in San Salvador. Street vendors, Bukele soon discovered, were stubborn creatures: They returned after every eviction, sitting with their tamales and coconut towers next to the newly repainted national cathedral.

Like many, if not most, Salvadoran officials, Mayor Bukele negotiated with the two criminal gangs, MS-13 and Barrio-18, that had held much of the country in a balance of terror for decades. El Faro, an investigative news site, reported that the mayor struck deals with gang leaders not to disrupt a city holiday celebration, and to keep the violence away from his new mall. Gang leaders gave Bukele the code name “Batman.”

Bukele became president in 2019 and continued in the same vein: He offered the gangs leniency in return for a commitment to being more discreet—no longer robbing bus passengers and committing crimes in broad daylight, for example. But that arrangement fell apart in March 2022. Leaders of MS-13 were on their way to meet the president when the police intercepted and captured them. An apologetic official negotiating on Bukele’s behalf first blamed a “crazy minister,” according to audio retrieved by El Faro. But then Bukele refused demands to release the gang leaders within 72 hours, and so MS-13 went on a killing spree, murdering a total of 87 people, mostly at random, in what became known as the “dark weekend.”

That’s when Bukele declared the state of exception. Parliament gave the green light, and the military went into the streets. Thousands of gang members were thrown in jail. Salvadorans I talked with recalled feeling “liberated” by the roundups. They no longer had to show their IDs to gang members and pay fees when they went to visit relatives in another town. They discovered new freedoms—like barhopping at night in San Salvador.

Many gang members were swept into El Salvador’s now notorious prisons. But what happened to the top gang leaders remains murky. Reports suggest that some have relocated to Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. U.S. extradition requests for others have gone unanswered.

Marvin Reyes joined El Salvador’s national police corps in 1995. He remembers a police academy flush with idealism: After 12 years of civil war, El Salvador had become a democracy, and police officers from all over the world—Reyes recalls a guy named Joe from New York City and a “giant” Norwegian man—came to train the country’s newly reformed police force.

Yet the end of the war also marked the rise of the gangs. The United States started deporting Salvadorean nationals, deeming the country safe enough for them to return. Many had spent years in the gang-ridden underworld of Los Angeles. Some created MS-13; others joined the Mexican-led Barrio-18. El Salvador’s police weren’t ready. And the government’s response careened from force to negotiation and back again. Sometimes, Reyes told me, police were sent ill-equipped to the front lines; other times, they would go to lengths to capture gang members, whom judges would then almost immediately set free.

The state of exception allowed the police to feel that the government had their backs. Jorge Panameño, a forensic detective in the volcanic region of San Vicente, told me how satisfying this was. He had once gathered proof that an MS-13 member had killed more than 10 people. Just weeks after this man was arrested, Panameño saw him roaming in the mountains with high-caliber weapons. Under the state of exception, the police would catch this guy again, Panameño was confident, and this time he wouldn’t be released.

A state of exception sounds like the opposite of due process, and in many ways, it is. But El Salvador’s crackdown on gang violence succeeded in large part because the country’s police had spent years carefully amassing legal evidence. Law enforcement knew the whereabouts of gang members. “It took us one month to get most of them,” Panameño told me, in disbelief.

But Bukele, instead of declaring a public-safety victory, kept the state of exception in place. Less than two months after its declaration, Reuters reported that police were scrambling to meet the daily arrest quotas their higher-ups imposed. (Police authorities deny that any such quotas were established.) Soon, police came for the families of gang members, for people whose tattoos looked similar to those of gang members, for people with any tattoos. An officer in San Salvador told me he stood by as his colleague arrested the boyfriend of a woman the colleague was interested in.

Every country, Bukele has said, has “imperfect police.” A video that went viral on social media shows police burning vendors’ merchandise on a beach, seemingly at random. Yet some violence doesn’t seem random at all. Union leaders and journalists who criticized Bukele have also been imprisoned.

The constitution sets limits not just for the state of exception, but also for presidential terms. Bukele ignored those too. He ran for reelection last year in a country where consecutive presidential terms are not allowed. On election day, a writer named Carlos Bucio Borja protested at the polls, reading aloud the passages of the constitution that made Bukele’s candidacy illegal. Bucio Borja was arrested under the state of exception, and Bukele won with more than 80 percent of the vote.

On a Friday seven months into the state of exception, half a dozen police officers showed up at the home of a single mother in Santa Tecla, in the foothills of the San Salvador volcano. Dayana (not her real name—the family requested anonymity for reasons of safety) was in bed recovering from an appendectomy. The police hustled her into their car in her pajamas.

They didn’t tell her why she was being arrested, and under the state of exception, they didn’t have to. But in the car, they joked about Dayana’s 4-year-old son having a gang member as a father. The boy’s father doesn’t even live in El Salvador; he and Dayana had had a brief affair when she visited Guatemala. She wondered how they knew she had a child.

Just before her arrest, Dayana had won a temporary U.S. visa that would allow her to work on a fish farm in Alaska. Many of her neighbors envied her. Maybe, she thought, one of them told the police she was the mother of a gang member’s son. Anonymous tips by phone are common. According to Dayana, one of the arresting officers told her that he would get a cash bonus for meeting his quota, that she would rot in jail, and that she would never see her son again.

Dayana spent the next six months in a prison so overcrowded that she slept on the floor and avoided standing up, worried that she would lose her spot. The prison guards made the women take pregnancy tests, she told me; when one tested positive, she was taken away, then came back and told Dayana that the police had forced her to have an abortion.

Dayana’s father, a math teacher—I’ll call him Juan—lobbied for her release by publicizing her case. He gave an interview to a local television news program. This strategy had worked for other prisoners. Samuel Ramírez of a Salvadorean human-rights group called Movimiento de Víctimas del Régimen de Excepción told me that his organization has had better luck securing release of innocent people with social media than through the legal system. “We use emblematic cases,” Ramírez said: “pregnant women, elderly people in a wheelchair.” But Dayana told me that in her case, freedom was more a matter of luck. Her interrogator, apparently in a good mood one day, signed the papers to let her go. She came home to find that both her father and her brother had been arrested. Dayana’s young son witnessed the arrests and wasn’t able to defecate for weeks after. He still has stomach problems.

Juan’s case file was rife with errors, including that he was in his 20s. His interrogator conceded that the police must have gotten the wrong guy and released him within weeks. But Dayana’s brother is still in prison. No one in the family has been allowed to visit.

Juan told me about the family’s experience over a video call. In the background, I could see his wife rummaging through a box. When she found what she was looking for, she interrupted Juan to ask if she could show something to me. It was a picture of her son, a young man with dark hair and a beard, playing electric guitar with his church band. “This is him. He is a kind, decent person,” she said. “We are decent people.”

Daniel Monterrosa, a surfer I met on my trip to El Zonte in 2023, had been defensive when I brought up criticism of Bukele. He told me that my very presence in El Zonte attested to Bukele’s success, that tourists and gringos would never have gone there before. I called him this winter, curious whether the reports of innocent people under arrest had changed his mind. The past two years had opened opportunities he previously couldn’t have dreamed of, he said. He’d offered surfing lessons to foreigners and earned enough money to compete in international surfing championships. Sure, mistakes had been made, but “Bukele cannot be blamed for what the police did wrong,” Monterrosa told me. Overall, the changes were positive.

Reporters both within and outside El Salvador often refer to Bukele’s state of exception as a “cleanup” of violence. The term evokes his project in San Salvador as mayor, when “cleaning up” the city center meant moving poverty out of sight. Today, San Salvador’s historic center has come closer to what Bukele promised when he was mayor. The city recently erected a library that looks more like a casino and hosted the Miss Universe pageant. An outdoor ice-skating rink opened during the Christmas season, with an expensive cooling system to keep the ice from melting in the tropical heat. Plazas bustle with tourists.

Bukele’s international reputation for standing up to gangs has overshadowed the years he spent trying and failing to get rid of street vendors. But the president has at long last had his way with peddlers, too. Along avenues once lined with tents and plastic tables, only a few people dare to push coffee carts or drape themselves with merchandise.

That’s because police have used the state of exception to sweep up street vendors, who’ve been much more compliant with eviction notices ever since. But this “cleanup” demonstrates the bluntness of Bukele’s instrument of power: He managed to get rid of street vendors only by treating them like gang members, and sending them to the same prisons.