President Donald Trump on Monday hosted El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at the White House. The meeting took place against the backdrop of several legal battles over Trump’s immigration policies, some of which involve El Salvador, where the administration recently sent almost 300 Venezuelan illegal immigrants suspected of being gang members.
But who is this individual who is also known as the “world’s coolest dictator?”
Nayib Bukele was born on July 24, 1981 in San Salvador to a wealthy Palestinian-Lebanese father and Salvadoran mother. He attended elite schools, but later dropped out of university to assist with his family’s advertising and PR firm. He learned his marketing and branding skills during this period of his life, abilities he would later use to great effect.
In his early life, he was intimately involved in business and media, maintaining a distance from the country’s political class.
He married his wife, Gabriela Rodriguez, in 2014. The couple has two children. Despite his Muslim heritage and Christian upbringing, he has maintained a secular persona. He was initially a member of the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) party.
Later, he split with the FMLN and formed the Nuevas Ideas movement in 2017. As the leader of the movement, he established a reputation as a polarizing figure with keen business savvy.
He began his political career as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012. In this role, he garnered praise for his handling of community projects.
He later launched Nuevas Ideas to subvert the influence of the establishment elites in El Salvador. His 2019 presidential campaign was decidedly populist. Buoyed by a strong social media presence, Bukele vowed to crack down on violent gang activity. At age 37, he became the nation’s youngest president after winning 53 percent of the vote.
Once he took office, Bukele tightened his grip on power. His social media savvy enabled him to maintain a 90 percent approval rating even amid controversies.
Bukele came under fire when he deployed soldiers to the Legislative Assembly, marching into the building with troops wearing riot gear and carrying firearms. “Now I think it’s clear who’s in control,” he declared after sitting in the speaker’s chair. Bukele faced criticism from human rights organizations who characterized the move as a “self-coup attempt.”
Bukele declared a state of emergency, with the legislature’s approval, in 2022 after gang violence claimed the lives of 87 victims. This empowered him to suspend constitutional rights such as due process, the right to assemble, and others. Under this authority, he carried out a series of mass arrests.
The emergency declaration was only supposed to last for 30 days. But the Legislative Assembly has extended it at least 37 times and it still remains in effect. Since the declaration, authorities have imprisoned without trials, raided indiscriminately, incarcerated children younger than 12. Bukele’s motto appears to be, “no trials, no warrants, no mercy.”
El Salvado’s prison system is known as one of the most corrupt. The government has incarcerated 85,000 people, often without evidence or court hearings. Judgments about who to imprison tend to rely on flimsy proof such as tattoos or neighborhood ties.
NEW: El Salvador’s President Just Issued a Challenge to Trump—“You Have 350 Million People to Liberate.”
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) April 14, 2025
This wasn’t a photo op. It was a mission briefing.
At the White House, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele looked President Trump dead in the eye and said:
“You have 350… pic.twitter.com/9QQDxkJhQ2
The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) is one of El Salvador’s most notorious “mega prisons.” With a 40,000 capacity, inmates are crammed like sardines in a can, with over 100 men to a cell. No mattresses. Only two toilets. 23.5-hour lockdowns. This is what awaits those unlucky enough to find themselves imprisoned here.
The CECOT prison is where the Trump administration has sent many Venezuelan illegal immigrants, igniting court battles that are still be litigated today. Many of these individuals are legitimate gang members who have committed violent crimes in the United States.
Yet, some have questioned whether all of these people deserve to be kept at CECOT given that, in several cases, US immigration authorities have used the same questionable evidence that Bukele’s administration uses to justify imprisonment.
There have been several reports of torture, including electric shocks, waterboarding, and beatings in the facility. About 153 inmates died in custody between 2022 and 2023 alone. Many of the victims showed signs of strangulation.
It is not only the mass incarceration that has been a problem in El Salvador. Bukele’s administration has used surveillance to monitor journalists and those who speak out against him. The president denies this, claiming, “In El Salvador, we do not arrest people for expressing their ideas.”
Yet, Bukele’s administration appears to have cultivated an atmosphere in which El Salvadorans are afraid to speak their minds publicly.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) called attention to the government’s new State Cybersecurity Agency, which has sweeping powers over cyber threats and personal data. Officials can demand the deletion of online content they decide is “inadequate, inaccurate, irrelevant, outdated or excessive.”
Many have raised concerns that this authority can empower the state to erase online publications critical of the government. “These new laws could be used to delete online publications that are critical of the government under the guise of data protection,” said Juanita Goebertus of Human Rights Watch.
To provide another perspective, others laud Bukele’s success in decreasing gang violence. His policies have slashed violent crime down to historic lows. The homicide rate fell from 38 per 100,000 people in 2019 to just under eight per 100,000 people in 2024, CNN reported.
The decline in crime resulted in increased tourism revenue and new coastal projects to attract more tourists. He has also received praise for taking measures to improve education, distributing laptops to students and expanding rural internet access. He also adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021.
Still, concerns about human rights remain. While violent gang activity has taken a serious hit, it is worth questioning whether the assaults on liberty were necessary or justifiable. There will likely be even more debate over whether the US government should partner with Bukele’s regime, given its stance on human rights and civil liberties.
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