How El Salvador fell for its ‘Millennial Dictator’

For years, the Mara Salvatrucha, one of the most violent street gangs on earth, brutally controlled all aspects of life in Italia, a verdant, working-class suburb of one-storey houses just outside El Salvador’s capital San Salvador.

Mirroring scenes in communities across the impoverished Central American nation, Italia residents would cower at home as heavilytattooed gang members robbed, extorted, raped and murdered at will.

No more. The gang members are gone, most of them locked up, and the neighbourhood has come back to life, with locals lingering in the streets and plazas, chatting with old friends as they seek respite from the tropical heat.

For Maura, a 34-year-old housewife, that has meant doing something that was previously unthinkable – letting her two adolescent daughters play in the street and even cycle, out of sight, around the block.

“I used to be scared that some gang member would force one of them to go out with him, and if she refused, they would kill her,” says Maura, who declined to use her real name out of fear of reprisals if the gang returns.

“Even the police wouldn’t come by here. The president, he has given us security. He needs to win again. If he doesn’t, I’d have to emigrate.”

The president she is talking about is Nayib Bukele. El Salvador’s controversial, millennial leader, who once styled himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” is expected to win re-election by a crushing margin in tomorrow’s presidential vote.

El Salvador’s constitution only allows a single term for each president. But Bukele packed the constitutional court which then came up with an improbable reinterpretation to allow him to run for re-election. Polls show him and the New Ideas political party that he founded with around 80 per cent support. His nearest challenger, Manuel Flores, of the Lftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which ruled El Salvador for a decade prior to Bukele’s election in 2019, has just 4 per cent.

That is largely thanks to Bukele’s crackdown on the mara gangs, with about 77,000 suspected members – roughly 2 per cent of the adult population – locked up.

It has transformed El

Salvador, a tiny country with an outsized homicide problem. In 2018, just before Bukele came to power, El Salvador’s annual murder rate was 52 homicides per 100,000 residents – one of the highest in the world and about 50 times greater than the UK.

Now, the rate is down to 2.4, his government says, making it one of the safest societies in Latin America.

In practice, that has meant ordinary Salvadorans, like Maura, resuming lives placed on hold by the rampant and random bloodshed that could be visited on them at any time. No longer concerned about being extorted for every last penny, she is thinking of setting up a corner shop to bring in some extra income for her family.

Yet Bukele’s success at halting the gang warfare has come at a huge price. Human rights are flouted and there is a growing climate of fear as Bukele, 42, and cybermobs of online trolls attack journalists and others who dare to question his growing authoritarianism and alleged corruption.

The US has even blacklisted several of his closest allies for negotiating a secret, illegal truce with the maras. They are accused of offering jailed gang leaders everything from mobile phones to prostitutes, casting into doubt Bukele’s hardline law-and-order credentials.

Meanwhile, the president’s grandiose economic plans, including his adoption of Bitcoin as the national currency seem to have stalled. Public debt is at a three-decade high of about £20 billion and extreme poverty has doubled since Bukele took office. Many fear that the former advertising executive and heavy user of TikTok and X, formerly Twitter, really is on the verge of becoming the latest in a longline of Latin American despots.

Under the state of emergency declared by Bukele, constitutional rights were suspended, allowing arrests based on tipoffs, detention without charge, and unrestricted government access to citizens’ emails, text messages and phone calls.

Human rights groups say wrongful detention by police desperate to hit arrest quotas are rampant and have documented thousands of cases. Often suspects are seized for failing to pay officers money or because a vengeful neighbour anonymously accuses them of being a gang member, says Samuel Ramírez, an IT engineer from San Salvador, who founded the Movement for Victims of the Regime.

“We have no rights anymore.

There’s no due process. You don’t even get a trial,” Ramírez says. “This is about Bukele wanting more and more power and to instil fear in the population.”

Nearly half of the detainees are held in a new mega-prison, a half-hour drive outside San Salvador, reputed to be the largest in the world. Inmates only leave their severely overcrowded cells to be interrogated or stripsearched, with numerous allegations of torture and deaths in custody.

Yet democracy is the least of most people’s concerns back in Italia.

“Only God and the president know if they have detained innocent people,” says Maura. “Here they have arrested gang members. God put him [Bukele] here to do that.”

President Nayib Bukele