A Permanent State of Exception in El Salvador
A Permanent State of Exception in El Salvador
In cooperation with gangs and with massive popular support, Nayib Bukele is cracking down on dissidents and massively expanding the state’s carceral apparatus.
Two weeks had passed since Ruth Eleonora López’s detention. López, a prominent lawyer and head of the anti-corruption and justice unit of Cristosal, a human rights organization that has exposed numerous instances of corruption linked to Nayib Bukele’s administration, was arrested on May 18, 2025. She appeared before the Twelfth Peace Court in San Salvador on the morning of June 4, dressed in prison whites, her handcuffs not preventing her from holding a Bible. Among her first words were: “I want a public trial!”
“A public trial! The people deserve to know,” she shouted while police dragged her through a tangle of journalists. Hours later, the court ordered that she remain in prison. Facing a dozen media outlets waiting for her exit from the courthouse, López proclaimed with a ragged voice: “I am innocent and I will prove my innocence!” She was pushed by a human wall of security agents who placed her in a pickup truck that would eventually move her to a penitentiary center. “I have the right for people to know that they are prosecuting me for my opinions!”
The case against López is emblematic of Bukele’s El Salvador, where judicial independence has vanished and due process is not respected. She is being prosecuted in secret. Her case was not only placed under seal, but the Attorney General’s Office suddenly changed the charge against her: while initially accused of embezzlement, she is now being charged with illicit enrichment during her time as an advisor at the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The Attorney General’s Office gave no explanation of why she was charged with one crime at the time of detention but another in the formal accusation.
López’s case is one among hundreds that have been prosecuted by a regime that controls the entire state apparatus. El Salvador’s prison system has become known across the world for its intentionally shocking brutality. The country has the highest number of prisoners per capita in the world. Bukele has spawned “tough on crime” imitators and admirers including Donald Trump, who calls Bukele a “great friend” and has subcontracted El Salvador’s prison system for his indiscriminate campaign of deportation. Less well-known is that Bukele, under the cover of a state of exception, has dismantled the meager democratic processes and institutions negotiated at the end of the country’s civil war in 1992. Bukele claims he is defending Salvadorans against gang violence. In doing so, he covers up his own complicity with the gangs, as well as the fact that people now fear him too.
How did we get here? El Salvador’s twentieth century was a violent one, from the state’s mass killing of activists and Indigenous people in 1932, through years of military dictatorship, to a civil war from 1979 to 1992 in which more than 75,000 people were killed and thousands more were disappeared. At the end of the civil war, competing factions agreed to channel their disagreements into political struggle. But the ruling parties had little interest in solving the structural problems that had produced economic inequality and violence. Bukele took advantage of a country weary of traditional politics, promising he would defeat the “enemy” and build a “new El Salvador” where corrupt politicians and criminals could no longer harm citizens.
Bukele, known for his outsider politics and “dictator cool,” was elected in 2019 by wide margins. He has managed to convince many that El Salvador “went from being the most dangerous country in the world” to one of the “safest in the Western Hemisphere.” Some have called this “the Bukele miracle”: he has nominally achieved peace and become massively popular in the process, allowing him to be elected to a second term, even though that was, until recently, prohibited by the Constitution. Since then, the legislature, controlled by Bukele’s party, has voted to abolish presidential term limits, allowing Bukele to seek reelection indefinitely.
In the speech that marked Bukele’s seventh year in power—the second unconstitutional one—celebrated on June 1 of this year, he took the opportunity to emphasize his most important achievement: “We have defeated the nightmare that terrorized us,” he said in the National Theater, which sits in the historic center of the Salvadoran capital. He received a prolonged ovation from his officials, his deputies from the Legislative Assembly, his Supreme Court of Justice magistrates, his Attorney General of the Republic, and his faithful supporters. “You know what? I don’t care if they call me a dictator,” he assured, while sharply criticizing the national and foreign media that have described him as such. “I prefer to be called a dictator than to see how [gang members] kill Salvadorans in the streets.” Bukele has specialized in selling an illusory paradise through propaganda—one of his most effective strategies to erode democracy. He intensifies attacks against those who defend human rights and accuses them of supporting criminal groups.
It is irrefutable that the official homicide rate has decreased since Bukele entered office. The country is physically safer than it was before—though there is some doubt that the official statistics reflect reality. But Bukele omits that this achievement is based on a negotiation with the gangs in exchange for a specific benefit: that they make him president. Journalistic investigations have documented this negotiation process from its inception to the moment when it broke down in late March 2022, when eighty-seven people were massacred across El Salvador. This spree of violence prompted Bukele’s emergency declaration of a state of exception, which he has now extended forty times.
Under the state of exception, more than 85,000 Salvadorans have been imprisoned based on accusations of having links with gangs. Though some surely do, there is often no proof. Thousands of cases of abuse and arbitrary detentions have been documented by human rights organizations and independent media, exposing the regime’s systematic and deliberate violation of human rights.
The state of exception has become a punitive tool used to persecute dissidents. Police are sent to monitor critics of the regime, attempting to scare them into silence. In practice, neither evidence nor a warrant is required to make an arrest. State agents can invent excuses to detain someone without informing them of the charges against them or the fate that awaits them. The fear of retribution by the state has suppressed political resistance. Many citizens are increasingly afraid to speak in public. In June 2025, a poll from the University Institute for Public Opinion revealed that 60 percent of Salvadorans are more cautious when expressing political opinions than they were before Bukele came into office.
For many years, as gangs besieged communities, families understood that they had to “see, hear, and be silent” to survive. Now, this mantra may well refer to the state. “In El Salvador, we do not imprison our opposition, we do not censor opinions, we do not confiscate property of those who think differently, we do not arrest people for expressing their ideas,” Bukele said on September 24, 2024, before the seventy-ninth UN General Assembly. Yet Salvadorans are still afraid.
The evidence of Bukele’s negotiations with the gangs is now significant. For example, the Salvadoran government released Elmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook,” one of the leaders of MS-13 (El Salvador’s most powerful gang). The United States issued an extradition order for Crook in 2020, while he was supposedly serving a forty-year sentence in one of El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. In 2023, however, Crook was captured in Mexico. By that time, El Faro (El Salvador’s preeminent independent newspaper) reported that Crook had been released by the Bukele administration. This was confirmed by the U.S government, which stated that the gang leader “was escorted from a prison by high-level Salvadoran government officials.” In addition to Canales Rivera, Bukele’s government also released Carlos Alberto Cartagena López, or “Charli,” leader of El Salvador’s second-largest gang, Barrio 18. In April 2022, twenty-five days after the state of exception had begun, Charli was detained at a police checkpoint and minutes later released and escorted to his house.
In the beginning of May, just a month before Bukele’s speech at the National Theater, Charli gave an interview to El Faro in which he spoke in detail about the gangs’ negotiations with the government and the monetary benefits they received. The article unleashed a scandal that coincided with a small decline in Bukele’s approval ratings. Government officials responded by attacking El Faro. The newspaper received unofficial notifications of seven arrest warrants against its journalists. Ten members of its staff temporarily fled the country. It was not the first time that Bukele had unleashed his wrath against El Faro—which he has long accused of complicity with gangs because of its critical reporting—but it was the first time it has occurred since Trump’s reelection, which has emboldened Bukele since he no longer fears rebuke by the United States.
Challenges to Bukele’s dictatorial consolidation could come from outside forces, such as international institutions, or from inside the country, such as the business sector or civil society. With Trump in office, Bukele is largely protected from the former. As to the latter, El Salvador’s business community has not yet provided any countervailing force. On the contrary, Bukele has had no trouble cultivating their support for his authoritarian project. Francisco Robles-Rivera, an associate professor at the University of Costa Rica who studies economic elites in Central America, has explained that some see authoritarians as good allies for businesses, especially in the real estate and property sectors, because “they can start businesses without checks and balances . . . without public debate . . . and without transparency.” Bukele recently approved a metals mining law, even though the country had legislation prohibiting it. Poverty rates, meanwhile, are creeping upward while unemployment remains persistent, and the economy has replaced security as Salvadorans’ primary concern.
Bukele has enjoyed considerable popular support for his actions, and even now polls show him with an 85 percent approval rating. That creates dangerous conditions for those elements of civil society that make claims for justice, or present information that defies the government’s narrative. No opposition political figure has emerged to articulate popular concerns. Media outlets that are willing to challenge the government, like El Faro, have to rely on foreign funding that, in turn, provides Bukele with a ready line of attack against them.
For those who are willing to speak out, the costs are high. Alejandro Henríquez, an environmental lawyer, and José Ángel Pérez, a community leader and pastor of the Elim Church, have been sentenced to six months of pretrial detention after participating in a peaceful protest on May 12. The charges against them are public disorder and resistance. During the protest, Henríquez and Pérez had accompanied residents of the El Bosque Cooperative, a group of small farmers on the outskirts of San Salvador, who are fighting against eviction from lands that were granted to them as part of the agrarian reforms adopted in the 1980s. The families were victims of a fraudulent process that could leave them without their homes, and they sought to be heard by Bukele. Desperation led them to protest peacefully near his residence in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small wealthy town that he governed between 2012 and 2015 before being elected mayor of San Salvador.
The protest was documented by the media: mothers with small children implored him for help, asking the all-powerful president to intercede so they wouldn’t be evicted. But Bukele sent the military police to disperse them, even though those units have no legal authority over public order. That night, Pérez was arrested, followed by Henríquez the next day. Bukele later acknowledged that these families had been manipulated. But even so, their advocates remain imprisoned. Through detentions like these, the regime sends the message that no one can criticize, question, or make demands.
Another example: Amalia López is a well-known environmental activist and human rights defender. During the pandemic, her organization, Coalition for the Right to Defend Human Rights, registered numerous complaints of human rights violations ranging from the lack of public data on COVID-19 to the surge in femicides while the country was under lockdown. The organization sought a response from the state, but instead received an onslaught of attacks. Aggressive discourse resulted in physical violence against its members.
The Bukele administration has since implemented a law that will severely hinder the organization’s work. After the El Bosque Cooperative’s protest, Bukele implemented a “foreign agents” law, which imposes a 30 percent tax on organizations and persons who receive international funds. He justified this measure by claiming that it would limit foreign interference in internal politics. For López, this law is absurd: it imposes taxes on organizations that work for the benefit of the population, “when for companies that will build skyscrapers in El Salvador there are tax exemptions.” The European Union has stated that the law will restrict the work of civil society. There is little doubt that this is true.
López believes that the law is meant to underscore that dissent will not be tolerated. She knows that the risks of confronting a regime that has openly proclaimed itself dictatorial will make more civil society organizations self-censor. But even so, she believes that people must continue to demand their rights. For López, something feels inexorable: “People will always look for a way to express what they feel.”
As I wrote these last lines in early June, another prominent critic of Bukele, the renowned lawyer Enrique Anaya, was detained. On June 7, Anaya was taken from his house after being held at gunpoint by police. The accusation: money laundering and asset fraud. In the hours following his detention, his lawyer searched for him without success, eventually reporting a forced disappearance. Four days before being detained, during an interview on national television, Anaya had anticipated what would happen to him: “Whoever criticizes and does not kneel before the idol goes to prison.”
“You are speaking and criticizing, doctor,” the interviewer interrupted.
“Yes, yes, and of course I am afraid.”
“Are you?”
“Of course,” he insisted. “Any person who speaks here, we speak with fear. We speak with fear.”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has expressed concern that El Salvador’s criminal legal system is being used to repress opposition. Prisons will continue to fill with political prisoners whose cases will be shamelessly manipulated to deny them their freedom. In Bukele’s El Salvador, he is the only person who is above the law, and the only law that matters is his. The road ahead for El Salvador is long. Even the first step—telling the truth—is officially considered a crime.
Julia Gavarrete is a Salvadoran journalist specializing in political issues, migration, and human rights. She was a part of El Faro’s newsroom and won the 2023 Ortega y Gasset Award for Best Story for her piece “Una familia que no debe nada huye del Régimen de Excepcion” (“A Family with Nothing to Hide Flees the State of Emergency”).
