2025: The Despot Takes His Gloves Off
El Faro
Gloves off. Emboldened by its renewed relationship with the United States, in 2025 the Salvadoran dictatorship openly launched a hunt for anyone critical or inconvenient, no longer even pretending that its actions were legitimate.
The Trump administration came as a gift at just the right moment: when the economy was sinking; when the relatives of detainees were beginning to despair; and when the government’s corruption scandals could no longer be hidden with more promises of hospitals, schools, airports, and Bitcoin cities.
Freshly appointed to the post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador in February and sealed a deal with President Nayib Bukele that was beneficial to both parties: El Salvador would take in all the “undesirables” that the United States wanted to send; in exchange, Bukele would obtain a license to extend his family’s dictatorial project (and a commitment that the nine gang members detained in New York, witnesses to his criminal alliance, would be returned). Democracy and human rights, pillars of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, were eliminated in one fell swoop on a pier on Lake Coatepeque.
Then the dictatorship struck. At the end of that same month, it arrested Fidel Zavala for the second time, a man who, after spending 13 months in prison, came out to testify about the torture and abuse that prison guards commit against the more than 80,000 people captured during the state of exception.
In May, it arrested the president of the El Bosque community, José Angel Pérez, and his legal representative, Alejandro Henríquez, for arriving at the gates of the residential complex where Bukele lives to ask him to prevent the eviction of the residents. Bukele said the protest was organized by foreign NGOs, which served as a pretext for his Assembly to pass, without debate and with expedited procedure, a Foreign Agents Law that essentially makes it impossible for civil society organizations that receive foreign funding to do their work.
That same month, police officers arrested lawyer Ruth Eleonora López, director of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption Unit and one of the most effective voices in civil society in denouncing human rights violations and corruption.
May began with the publication of the first issue of our magazine, which featured an interview with two leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang, in which they detailed their pact with Bukele. The publication, which rattled the official narrative, also accelerated the persecution of journalists. Police visits to the homes of reporters and editors multiplied. Two months later, fifty Salvadoran journalists had left the country. The police state was closing in.
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On the other hand, this has not been surprising. The dictator’s playbook includes the persecution of any voice that is critical or capable of questioning his narrative. In authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, criticism must be criminalized in order to neutralize it. And criticism, in a country that no longer has a real political opposition —with a few honorable individual exceptions— now resides among journalists, lawyers, and activists.
In recent years, Salvadoran journalism has shown that the corruption of Bukelismo is not only much greater than that of previous governments, but that it is tolerated, protected, and exercised from the top down. The Bukele family has considerably increased its fortune while closing off all mechanisms of accountability. Its officials also have license to enrich themselves with money that is not reaching the population. To boot, investigations have documented the dictatorship’s associations with criminal organizations, including its partnership with gangs; police abuses; and the lies of official propaganda. Journalism has done its job.
Human rights defenders have also kept track of abuses, documenting the return of systematic torture in prisons, and the impossibility for detainees under the state of exception to defend themselves legitimately. Their credibility has opened a crack in Bukele’s image abroad, which the dictatorship no longer seems willing to tolerate.
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In early June, Enrique Anaya, a constitutional lawyer and outspoken critic of the dictatorship, was arrested without a warrant.
At the end of that month, an IUDOP-UCA poll revealed that six out of ten Salvadorans are afraid to criticize the government. In this new phase, the adulation that Bukele demanded from the population is turning into fear.
Nayib Armando Bukele has now been de-facto president of El Salvador for eighteen months, in violation of the limits established in the Constitution. And it has been seventy-eight months since he began building a corrupt authoritarian regime, as delineated by the dictator’s manual, in which everyone around him also participates in corruption — because that, too, is a means of control.
As this year comes to a close, the kleptocratic dictatorship in El Salvador has consolidated its power, but much of this is due to the change of government in the United States. As long as Trump occupies the White House, and as long as Bukele gives him what he wants, the dictatorship feels secure. But herein lies one of its main vulnerabilities: Its impunity is now dependent. It depends on Trump, a fickle man, not withdrawing his protection.
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As time passes, internal discontent grows as more people are affected by the repression unleashed; more citizens refuse to participate in the regime’s lies, and more are outraged by immoral power. There are already small groups of people organized around this discontent. Discontent is, necessarily, a political act.
If 2025 is the year in which the dictatorship took off its mask and tightened its grip, it is also the year in which the pendulum began its return. Discontent has begun to take root. This is the paradox that history gives us: the more heads tyrants cut off, the more roots grow.