Bukele Brothers Buy More Property in Tax-Exempt District They’re Reshaping

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Real estate in San Salvador’s Historic Center is in high demand, and the Bukele family continues to buy property in the area.

Over the past five months, Karim and Yusef Bukele —the Salvadoran president’s brothers and advisers— acquired three properties for a combined $1.25 million.

The properties, purchased through their company Lagencia, sit at the intersection of 8th Street East and 4th Avenue South, in a part of the Historic Center known for its cultural landmarks.

Between September 2025 and February 2026, the purchases were negotiated by Karim Bukele, Lagencia’s sole administrator and legal representative.

In just three years, the president’s brothers now own five properties totaling 3,037 square meters in the Historic Center, according to public information available at the National Registry Center (CNR) and analyzed by El Faro and Redacción Regional.

Along with those, Lagencia also recently purchased a 254-square-meter property in the upscale Escalón neighborhood of the capital for $350,000.

As for Lagencia’s purchases in the Historic Center, they amounted to $2.8 million and began in 2023, two and a half months after the Law Creating the Authority of the Historic Center of San Salvador (APLAN) came into force.

This law, signed by Nayib Bukele, grants income tax exemption for ten years for diverse real estate investments of $1,000 or more, in properties with a minimum of 25 square meters. Investors in the Historic Center are also exempt from municipal taxes.

Expenses incurred by investors in rebuilding or renovating sites for public use and purposes are also now deductible from income tax.

The new authority APLAN’s General Director Adriana Larín said during an interview on state television that the commitment to the Center has attracted $194 million in investment projects.

The new regulations have drawn denunciations for suffocating property owners who do not meet the government’s criteria, and for spurring the expulsion of small traders and informal vendors from the area.

In several cases, street vendors have been evicted under threat of arrest under the state of exception, which allows for summary imprisonment and denies the right to defense.

The “center of power”

Nayib Bukele’s brothers have never held any formal position in their brother Nayib’s governments; however, they are part of the inner circle of decision-makers.

Karim, the president’s chief political advisor, has been a member of official delegations since his brother became president in 2019.

Business leaders, public officials, and two representatives of private sector trade associations agree that Karim, who was also Nayib’s campaign manager, is the strategist and chief negotiator for the government.

According to two sources in the executive branch who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, and who participated in the creation of policy for the Historic Center, Karim is “the brains” behind the new measures.

“The Historic Center is his passion. He’s obsessed with it,” says one of the sources.

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One example of his influence came on May 4, 2020, when the Assembly permitted the executive branch to take on an additional $1 billion in debt. It was Karim’s first public appearance as a vote negotiator in the Legislative Assembly.

Yusef was key in negotiations for the so-called “bitcoin bonds” and the failed implementation of the crypto asset as national currency.

“They’ve divided themselves up by area,” a friend of all the brothers familiar with the administration told El Faro in 2020.

“Yusef is in charge of the economic cabinet; Karim is the political strategist, the speechwriter; Ibrajim is the emissary for negotiations or special missions for the president: for example, executing economic recovery projects.”

The Bukele brothers were also profiled by the now-defunct Special Anti-Mafia Group (GEA) of the Attorney General’s Office as the “center of power” in Operation Cathedral — a sweeping criminal probe that revealed the Bukele administration’s pact with gangs and corruption in Covid-19 emergency purchases.

A third brother, Ibrajim, admitted to their influence: He told El Faro on June 1, 2019 —inauguration day— that he had conducted around 270 interviews with potential government members and sent a shortlist of candidates for posts on economic and autonomous institutions to the president for selection.

Ibrajim also introduced himself as an “advisor to the president” to Turkish business executives during an official mission accompanying Nayib Bukele in August 2019.

El Faro also revealed that there had been high-level negotiations between foreign cryptocurrency investors and the Bukele brothers since at least May 2021, a month before the Bitcoin Law was formally presented to El Salvador and the world.

Growing land holdings

Karim and Yusef Bukele’s company Lagencia, founded in 2017 with assets of $2,000, only has balance sheets for 2017, 2021, and 2022 in the public records. Audit reports do not appear in those same records either. This is a violation of Salvadoran law.

Prior to the new purchases, the agency reported assets totaling $1,617,746, according to a renewal of the company’s registration filed in December 2024.

According to Article 441 of the Commercial Code of El Salvador, all companies must disclose their financial situation to the CNR in order to continue operating.

“The balance sheet, income statement, and statement of changes in equity of companies must be certified by a certified public accountant and filed with the commercial registry in order to be effective against third parties,” the regulation states. “Without such filing, they shall not be considered authentic.”

According to its articles of incorporation, the company run by the Bukele Ortez brothers is dedicated to “digital production, digital agency, conceptualization, and design of advertising campaigns,” as well as to real estate.

The agency, like other companies that the Bukeles have used to acquire land, spent its early years largely dormant.

Balance sheets and deeds of sale report that it had no fluctuations in assets until 2023, when they began accumulating land and properties.

Then came the surge. Between 2023 and 2026, a period straddling Bukele’s two administrations, the presidential family acquired 39 properties in the country, totaling 365 hectares and representing 92 percent of all the land they own.

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These include coffee farms, land on Lake Coatepeque, private beaches, sugar cane farms, luxury apartments, and houses in exclusive locations in San Salvador.

During that period of steep growth, Nayib Bukele had already been in power for years and had exerted control over the legislature, the courts, and the prosecutor’s office.

For the Bukele brothers, the Historic Center is a priority. Of the $12.2 million they invested in real estate since Nayib Bukele came to power, these investments stand out as the largest share, accounting for almost a quarter of their portfolio.

They have even exceeded the value of the largest tracts of land, on which a coffee farm operates, acquired by a company run by the president in the western part of the country.

In the case of Lagencia’s purchases throughout the country, investments in the Historic Center represent more than 86 percent.

A fire in downtown San Salvador

Revitalization of the area is a strategic commitment for the government. The law that created APLAN, an executive branch office, establishes that investments within the 80 key blocks of the project are exempt from taxes.

Three of the Bukeles’ five properties fall within this defined area, while the remaining two new properties are adjacent to 8th Street East between 4th and 6th Avenue South.

This is where, in the early hours of February 13, a fire consumed several historic buildings and killed five people, including a pregnant woman and a five-year-old girl.

A week later, authorities have not explained what caused the flames, while police and soldiers still guard the ruins.

On February 14, after firefighters extinguished the blaze, public attention turned to the century-old buildings that went up in flames.

Among the affected properties is the La Concordia Artisans’ Society building, one of the properties acquired by the Bukele family.

That same day, Karim Bukele acknowledged that the property was his. “Yes, Casa Samayoa is my property, as is La Concordia,” he wrote on social media on February 14.

The building is located at 8th Street East and 4th Avenue South, three blocks or a five-minute walk from Gerardo Barrios Plaza.

According to the deed of sale available at the CNR, the Bukele brothers’ company purchased the building from the artisans’ association on September 9 for $444,000.

Karim Bukele, as the legal representative of his company, personally made the payment through two cashier's checks from Banco Davivienda.

The first was on June 26, for $15,000 as a deposit or guarantee of the promise of sale. The second check for the remaining $429,000 was delivered on the day the deed was signed.

According to historian Salvador Guzmán, Salvadoran artisans founded the association in 1872 with the aim of “improving the moral and material conditions of its members and the working class in general.”

Prior to the sale, the building was still used as a meeting place for La Concordia members and housed several families and businesses.

On October 14, a month later, Lagencia purchased a neighboring property across the street from La Concordia.

The company paid $488,000 for the 525-square-meter building. The payment was similarly made by two cashier’s checks. In 2003, the property had cost its former owner $27,000.

An embargoed property

Casa Samayoa, also owned by the Bukele brothers, is next door to La Concordia and was not damaged by the fire.

According to the sale, a company owned by the parents of ruling party deputy William Soriano sold this property to Lagencia for $288,000 on August 29, 2024.

Karim Bukele, representing Lagencia, wrote two checks to the Soriano family for Casa Samayoa, in favor of the company Productos Mar y Sol.

According to El Diario de Hoy, the Soriano family’s company had been in litigation with the Treasury Ministry since 2017 for modifying tax returns with transaction amounts they had been unable to prove.

On August 18, 2017, the case reached the Attorney General’s Office, which stated that the company had provided false information to the Treasury.

Prosecutors ordered a seizure of $213,000 and placed a lien notation on Casa Samayoa, signaling the ongoing litigation.

It’s unclear how the Soriano family’s company managed to transfer the property to the Bukele family’s company in 2024, given the seizure procedure in progress.

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By that year, the Attorney General’s Office had been under Nayib Bukele’s full control for three years, since he used his legislative supermajority to illegally install Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado in May 2021.

Lagencia’s last purchase in the area was completed on February 9, four days before the fire, for $322,000.

The previous owner, a 75-year-old merchant, bought the 483-square-meter property in 2022 for $28,500. In four years, the property value increased elevenfold.

Almost a week after the fire, the cross street of the Historic Center where the Bukeles’ properties are located was cordoned off with yellow tape and guarded by dozens of soldiers and police officers.

Embers could still be seen in the rubble of La Concordia and the adjacent lots that served as a dining room and gym, where machines lie piled up like metal corpses. The partially collapsed building across the street is now owned by the president’s brothers’ company.

“An open-air architecture museum”

According to historian Carlos Cañas Dinarte, this part of the Historic Center became a construction laboratory for experimenting with different materials after the eruption and earthquake of 1917.

“The entire area was rebuilt with materials imported from California and Belgium, using stamped sheet metal. They imported rapid but efficient reconstruction technology,” he said.

“What we have in that area of San Salvador is an open-air architecture museum.”

The heritage value of the Historic Center of San Salvador has been recognized on paper by different governments. The area was declared a cultural heritage site of El Salvador in 2008.

In 2016, the Presidential Secretariat of Culture reinforced protections for properties such as these, which are now more than a century old.

Cañas Dinarte added that the current government “practically erased the Cultural Heritage Law, eliminated the assessments that should have been issued by the Ministry of Culture, and left all of that to a new structure: the Planning Authority of the Historic Center of San Salvador (APLAN).”

In the Historic Center, APLAN sets the rules. It was created on March 30, 2023, as a branch of the Ministry of Tourism.

According to the law that governs it, APLAN is responsible for “protecting, preserving, and regulating a defined area of the Historic Center of San Salvador, declaring it a cultural, tourist, and development zone for the promotion of activities and capital investment.”

But in practice, the agency has served as a tool for evicting businesses and informal vendors that do not fit with the aesthetic that the government seeks.

Of the five properties Karim Bukele has purchased in the Historic Center, three are under the umbrella of APLAN, while La Concordia and Casa Samayoa are outside the designated area.

Two and a half months after Nayib Bukele signed the law establishing this entity, the agency purchased an 80-year-old, 506-square-meter Art Deco building for $1.3 million, located on 2nd Street East, four blocks from Plaza Gerardo Barrios, as revealed by Redacción Regional in October 2024.

The sale records show that the seller received the $1.3 million “to his complete satisfaction.” In other words, the Bukele brothers made this million-dollar investment in a single payment.

A fortune from Jerusalem

Upon the October 2024 revelation, Karim Bukele told Spanish newspaper El País that his family was acquiring properties with capital they already possessed, and with mortgage loans to companies with little capital.

He said they used family companies worth millions of dollars as collateral.

As of February 20, Lagencia has not registered any mortgage loan or collateral with the CNR to support Karim Bukele’s claim, according to publicly available records.

The building is classified as “mixed-use category 2,” for restaurants, lodging, galleries, museums, bookstores, pharmacies, and shops.

Two other properties fall under mixed-use category 6, for parking lots and fast-food restaurants that are part of a shopping center, and restaurants with à la carte food and limited consumption of alcohol.

El Faro and Redacción Regional sought a response from Karim Bukele regarding the new property acquisitions, and as to whether they applied as beneficiaries of the tax exemptions promoted by his brother's government.

At the time of writing, there had been no response. Nor has there been since September 2024, when Redacción Regional published the first in a series of investigations into the wealth accumulation of the presidential family.

The outlets also attempted to obtain reactions from APLAN, the Bukele brothers, and the Ministry of Tourism, through the president’s Press Secretariat, but at the time of writing, there was no response.

Apart from the version that Karim Bukele offered to El País in 2024, the other explanations that the Bukeles have provided about their family's investments and increase in wealth have been published on their social media accounts.

On February 14, after Karim revealed that he had bought La Concordia, users of X questioned his purchasing power.

“We bought Yamaha, one of the largest drug distributors in the country, one of the largest advertising agencies, a clothing manufacturing factory, investments in banks and companies in the U.S., etc.,” he responded, “all before 2019.”

The next day, he added that the origin of his family’s fortune actually began when his Palestinian grandfather arrived from Jerusalem.

He went on to detail a series of other family investments in clothing, television, and banking. “All of this was before 2019, quite a while before,” he said, presenting no evidence.

No-one with the last name Bukele has publicly ventured an explanation for why they acquired beaches, coffee farms, lakes, and investments in strategic government areas, such as the Historic Center, after Nayib Bukele took office.

Investors, advisors, siblings

Nayib Bukele is the only sibling required by law, as a public official, to file a financial disclosure.

Transparency experts point out that his siblings' roles in the government should be of particular interest to state oversight bodies due to potential conflicts of interest.

On November 14, 2023, during his brother’s presidential campaign for unconstitutional reelection, Karim was a central figure at the inauguration of the National Library, donated by the Chinese government.

The new library is the crown jewel of the renovated Historic Center’s tourist appeal.

His founding partner in Lagencia, his brother Yusef Bukele, emerged as the liaison between the government and private enterprise.

In the case of the president, he has not released his asset report for the end of his 2019-2024 term or the one at the start of his second term.

Nayib Bukele made his only known declaration in 2019, when he claimed to have assets, together with his wife, of $2.5 million, of which about $171,000 were real estate.

The companies Prepare and Bu-Ro are founded and run solely by the presidential couple. In the last six years, they purchased three properties totaling $1.8 million, on La Mascota Street in San Salvador and on El Flor Beach, in the Los Cóbanos Protected Area.

Bukele has even violated the Anti-Corruption Law that he himself requested and approved on February 11, 2025.

New regulations establish that the Ministry of Finance should publish officials’ asset declarations on a special website “easily accessible to the public, no later than fifteen business days after it has been submitted.”

Eduardo Escobar, executive director of Acción Ciudadana, asserts that this law was merely a formality to comply with transparency obligations that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) requested of Bukele in order to deliver the first disbursement last year of the $1.4 billion they agreed upon.

“Ultimately, the government had no interest in complying,” says Escobar. “The law on illicit enrichment of public officials was already in force, and there was already sufficient case law requiring this information to be made public, but neither the government nor the Supreme Court of Justice complied.”

Jonathan Sisco, a constitutional lawyer with Cristosal, says that, “in a country where polls indicate that the economy and corruption are the main concerns, the problem is not only legal: it is ethical and political.”

“While millions of families fulfill their obligations and face difficulties, any privilege for an elite linked to power erodes public confidence,” Sisco adds.

Public information, he says, “allows us to verify that the public sector serves the interests of the majority and not a group close to power.”