One Week Watching Bukele on Prime Time TV

The following is a transcript of episode 39 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

GRESSIER, HOST: In El Salvador, Canal 10, or “Channel 10”, doesn’t just broadcast news. It broadcasts one vision of the country. And in that vision, there is only one voice. Paved streets, painted schools, grateful citizens, and Bitcoin presented as a revolution. It is a carefully constructed narrative in which the president is always at the center.

This is our weekly podcast, Central America in Minutes. You’re listening to a special extended episode, produced with our Spanish-language sister podcast, El resumen. Today, we ask: How did Bukele remake a public TV channel focused on culture into his mouthpiece, a space without dissent, without opposition, without debate?

Between Monday, July 7, and Friday, July 11, El Faro monitored 15 broadcasts of the public channel’s news program: the early morning broadcast, between 4 and 6 a.m.; the 30-minute noon edition; and the prime-time slot, which runs from 7 to 9 p.m. More than 22 hours of television.

We found an omnipresent president.

The audio clips used in this episode are excerpts taken directly from those broadcasts. To analyze them, we ran transcripts of each broadcast —more than 400 pages— through large language models. We organized the coverage by headlines, main topics, mentions of the president, tone of coverage, and the presence —or, more to the point, absence— of critical voices.

“This is our voice”

In five days, there were 782 references to Nayib Bukele. Security, his flagship talking point, was not just a news item, but the main plot line. But Canal 10 wasn’t always this way.

NEWSCAST: Canal 10. Educational cultural television. Television with culture.

GRESSIER: “Television with culture.” That phrase was part of an institutional advertisement for Canal 10 in 1993. The slogan summed up the channel’s original purpose.

Canal 10 was founded on November 4, 1964, when the government of El Salvador launched a public television project with an educational mission, alongside Canal 8, or “Channel Eight”. It was called Televisión Cultural Educativa, Televisión de El Salvador, and its administration passed from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Culture.

In 1989, Canal 8 separated from the state-run system, and since then, Canal 10 has remained the only public channel in operation.

NEWSCAST: Now television in El Salvador is once again at the forefront, and we are going to be pioneers. We are going to be the pilot channel for digitalization.

GRESSIER: Governments of the right-wing Arena party, which ruled for 20 years until 2009, maintained the channel’s educational function. Former President Mauricio Funes, who served from 2009 to 2014, launched a program on Radio Nacional, public radio, but it was not until the following president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, that the left-wing FMLN administration leveraged Canal 10 to give spokespersons and officials plenty of airtime on TV.

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Then, in 2020, came the rebranding.

NEWSCAST: Dilapidated and abandoned, like everything left behind by previous governments. That was the state of Canal 10. But President Nayib Bukele’s strategic vision...

GRESSIER: This is how the relaunch was presented on TikTok, with images of remodeling underway and new recording equipment.

The change was editorial, not just cosmetic. On September 30, 2020, Communications Secretary Sofía Medina announced: “With the relaunch, we will have our own news program.” That same day on his Twitter account, Bukele added: “The previous government also had one... but no one watched it.”

Five days later, on October 5, 2020, Noticiero El Salvador was born.

NEWSCAST: A public, non-state media outlet is the new option for Salvadorans to stay informed. Today more than ever, we are changing and undergoing major transformations. Reality does not stop, which is why we need to find our voice to tell the truth, to inform you so you can make decisions, to denounce the abuses we are experiencing and have experienced, to shout when they want to silence us, to tell our story, our reality. To talk, dialogue, and discuss with all voices, to build a homeland, to be a country. This is our voice. Stay with us. We are going to surprise you. Let’s get started.

GRESSIER: That was the introduction to the first program of Noticiero El Salvador. Although Bukele has become famous on social media, he is fully committed to traditional media, running his own channel and even his own newspaper.

Noticiero El Salvador is currently administered by the Communications Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic.

Between 2020 and 2025, almost $16 million has been allocated to Radio Nacional and Canal 10, according to budget proposals available on the Fiscal Transparency website.

Political tensions over the relaunch were almost immediate. Months later, in February 2021, the Legislative Assembly asked the Attorney General’s Office to investigate how Noticiero El Salvador and the state-owned newspaper Diario El Salvador were being financed “as organs of disinformation, propaganda, and to instill hatred from the highest echelons of this government.”

NEWSCAST: Rising again after overcoming war and gangs... our country has undergone a complete transformation... 950 days without homicides, thanks to strategies such as the state of exception and the Territorial Control Plan.

GRESSIER: During the Canal 10 broadcasts that we analyzed from one week in July, the topic of security appeared 134 times in a single day: that is to say, 75 mentions of the state of exception, 36 of gangs, and 23 of the Territorial Control Plan.

The fight against gangs is the main topic. Since the state of exception was declared in 2022, gangs have been dismantled in El Salvador. The reported homicide rate reached its lowest point in El Salvador’s recent history. In 2024, according to official figures, there were 114 homicides recorded throughout the year.

This represents a rate of 1.9 for every 100,000 inhabitants.

But that’s only half the story. Between 2019 and 2022, Bukele’s government negotiated with the gangs, as previous governments had done. Secret agreements with gang leaders: fewer murders and electoral support in exchange for prison benefits.

For more on this topic, watch our video interview series “Charli’s Confessions: Interview with a Gang Leader on His Secret Pacts with Nayib Bukele”.

Although Bukele did not appear live or give an interview to the channel, he was present in every broadcast. Day after day, the anchors placed him at the center of their coverage, announcing each government advance as a direct action by the president. They used archival footage, compiled his social media posts, read them out, and projected images of Bukele’s posts on X.

In a single evening edition, on Thursday the 10th, Bukele was mentioned 168 times during a two-hour broadcast. That is, one mention of Bukele every 43 seconds. He is omnipresent, even when the topic is not political; the word “president” was repeated 558 times in stories not directly related to politics.

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His second term began with a different narrative: it is no longer just Bukele against the gangs and his opponents; now it is El Salvador against the world. Against local and international media, human rights organizations, international bodies, even the United Nations.

It is in Noticiero El Salvador where the government rolls out official responses to controversy.

Weaving the narrative

GRESSIER: On Tuesday, July 8, Mexico’s Secretary of Public Safety, Ómar García Harfuch, spoke at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference: 

GARCÍA: Personnel from the National Center for Monitoring and Protection of Airspace detected an aircraft originating from El Salvador that was transporting 428 kilos of cocaine, and three individuals were detained. The cost of the drugs totals 96 million pesos.

GRESSIER: That same night in El Salvador, the state TV station responded:

NEWSCAST: The results in terms of security are also reflected in the fight against drug trafficking since the navy maintains operations in the Pacific Ocean to stop the transfer of drugs that are harmful to public health.

GRESSIER: The next day, the narrative was featured in all three news broadcasts. In the Wednesday midday edition, they presented a report that reinforced the idea of a victory against drug trafficking: the capture of five vessels on the high seas, the seizure of more than 6,200 kilos of cocaine, and the arrest of 17 foreign nationals.

And they reinforced the message with even bigger figures:

NEWSCAST: And by the way, President Nayib Bukele’s government has dealt heavy blows to international drug trafficking. Since he took office, a total of 67.5 tons of drugs have been seized, equivalent to $1.584 billion dollars.

GRESSIER: On Friday, July 11, the narrative closed on a victorious note:

NEWSCAST: Let’s highlight what the Salvadoran president did recently. He refuted the statements made by Mexico’s Secretary of National Security, who claimed in a morning press conference that a small plane from El Salvador had been seized in Mexican territory. But the president, with compelling evidence, established that this was a lie.

GRESSIER: Another example of this narrative-weaving is Bitcoin.

NEWSCAST: President Nayib Bukele highlighted the performance of the overall Bitcoin portfolio, which shows further gains as a result of the growth in the value of the crypto asset. The strategic reserve is rapidly approaching $700 million, and the price of Bitcoin has risen to $11,900.

GRESSIER: Bitcoin, personally promoted by Bukele since 2021, is presented to the world as a symbol of Salvadoran modernization, although most Salvadorans never used it and the government reformed the Bitcoin Law in early 2025 to make taking it as payment optional, not legally mandatory — meaning it is no longer legal tender.

Here is the trick with Bitcoin: When its value dips, the government glosses over the losses and says that they have not materialized because their purported holdings have not been sold. The same would also go for profits: They are only made if sold, but this is not mentioned in state news outlets.

NEWSCAST: This digital currency is changing the economic landscape in El Salvador and around the world.

GRESSIER: The news program picked up on that story from Diario El Salvador, a newspaper founded by the Bukele government.

NEWSCAST: No one can deny that this is the government that has invested the most in the country's history.

GRESSIER: That’s Bukele at a press conference to launch the “Two Schools per Day” program, which he described as the country’s largest educational plan to fix up schools in disrepair.

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On Monday, they reported that schools 93 and 94 were being tended to. By Wednesday, that number had reached 100, highlighted as a milestone within the project. On Thursday, they repeated the figure, reinforcing it as a symbol of state efficiency. And on Friday, they announced that they were already working on schools 101 and 102. 

The figure remained on display for several days as a constant sign of progress, although it was not always accompanied by new evidence or specific stories from the field.

This all runs up against the fact that, according to a verification by La Prensa Gráfica, as of July, only four schools have been completed out of a total of 114 centers that were targeted for renovation. Among the first 28 projects announced publicly, only six show progress of more than 50 percent. Some construction projects were even temporarily abandoned, such as the school in the Los Apoyos district of Santa Ana, where work resumed more than a year after the first day.

The plan to fix two schools per day is a response to a broken promise. In 2022, Bukele announced that he would renovate more than 5,000 schools in five years. But El Faro found that, in four years, the government only began work at 424 schools.

Voices of gratitude

GRESSIER: In each broadcast on Noticiero El Salvador, the voice of Salvadorans serves to express one thing: gratitude.

VOICE ONE: I am grateful to the president for the actions he is taking to make the community feel safe.

VOICE TWO: First of all, I feel joy with God and gratitude to President Nayib Bukele, who has finally listened to our pleas. It’s a reality. I feel happy for myself, right?

VOICE THREE: Thank you, Mr. President, because your great effort has been seen.

GRESSIER: This is a list of news stories in El Salvador from July 7 to 11 that did not make it onto Noticiero El Salvador.

A court allowed Atilio Montalvo, former leader of the FMLN and political prisoner, to leave the hospital to serve house arrest due to his delicate health.

June ended with 22 flights carrying deportees from the United States, a record monthly number not seen in almost three years.

In Honduras, Juan Alberto Ortiz, an official and party leader of Nuevas Ideas, was arrested with $60,000 in cash; the money was seized, but he was released on bail.

What state TV does not mention also speaks volumes.

In over 22 hours of programming, human rights organizations were never mentioned; the term “human rights” did not appear even once. NGOs were mentioned only three times — and in a single segment. The institutional political opposition was mentioned only 13 times, and more than half of those mentions were concentrated in a single edition. For the rest of the week, it was simply erased from the discourse.

That week, the voice of power was not only prioritized; those who might call it to account were rendered invisible.

This is how a country is built. In prime time. Without dissent. Without contrast. Or, as Bukele had Salvadorans swear in a pledge of loyalty in June 2024, on the day of his unconstitutional inauguration, “without complaint.”

This extended August episode of Central America in Minutes was produced by Nelson Rauda and Daniel Reyes, and adapted in English by Yuliana Ramazzini. Editing by Roman Gressier and sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.