Nayib Bukele’s Content Machine Is Reshaping Latin America

Earlier this summer, watching the sun set over the mountains surrounding Medellín from my balcony, I heard a sudden chorus of cars honking in the distance. Shouts, dogs barking, and police sirens soon followed, before a series of more jolting, solitary noises rose above it all: vuvuzelas. A few of my neighbors emerged, waving the yellow jerseys of the Colombian national soccer team. Had I missed a World Cup game? In the building across the street, an old woman came out onto her balcony in a nightgown, a toddler in tow, and began banging a pot. No, the election results were in.

In June, Abelardo de la Espriella, a social-media-savvy, right-wing former criminal-defense lawyer, won the Colombian Presidential election, defeating Iván Cepeda, a leftist former philosophy professor handpicked by the incumbent President, Gustavo Petro, a definitive conclusion to a contest that had sharply divided the country. De la Espriella ran as a MAGA-style populist and, at some point during the race, dubbed himself El Tigre, adopting A.I.-generated images of a tiger as his mascot, perhaps the first clue that he is not especially concerned with being subtle. His campaign’s slogan was “Firme por la Patria,” or “Firm for the Homeland.” He had bragged about the size of his manhood in an interview and promised to “disembowel the left,” and his wife had said that, if he lost, they could simply leave Colombia, possibly to return to Florida or Italy, where they’ve lived previously. Part of de la Espriella’s success is branding: he had co-opted the national soccer team’s yellow jerseys to such a degree that some Cepeda supporters opted for the away kit, helping manufacture a nationalist ethos reminiscent of the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s campaigns.

Although de la Espriella won the election by only a slim margin, his victory was a rejection of Petro, who was term-limited and is considered the country’s first-ever leftist leader. Petro’s administration had raised the minimum wage, promoted a national energy transition away from fossil fuels, and taken steps to empower Colombia’s long-marginalized Black and Indigenous populations. But his agenda largely stalled in Congress, and, in contrast to recent conservative governments, his administration attempted to address domestic-security concerns by conducting simultaneous negotiations with an array of illegal armed groups, a strategy that mostly failed, with the groups becoming stronger and continuing to exercise control over vast swaths of the country.

This failure was a key issue in the election to replace Petro. Under him, homicides rose to their highest level in three administrations, and the number of people belonging to armed groups grew by ninety per cent. Petro called his strategy “Paz Total,” or “Total Peace,” and it attempted to address organized crime in a way that prompted comparisons with Mexico, where the former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “abrazos no balazos” (“hugs, not bullets”) model sought to tackle the root causes of violence and minimize confrontation with cartels. But these security initiatives were most sharply contrasted by El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, who has employed extreme measures, such as building a mega-prison and declaring a state of emergency, in service of his war on gangs. His approach, and the propaganda machine that has spun it as a law-and-order success story, has turned Bukele into an international figure, and cast leaders like Petro and Cepeda, who helped design Petro’s strategy, as soft on crime.

I lived in Medellín for much of the lead-up to the election. When Colombians I met learned that I was half Salvadoran, de la Espriella immediately faded into the background. Instead, they wanted to talk about Bukele. While getting a teeth cleaning, I listened to my dentist rave about how Bukele had vanquished El Salvador’s gangs. “The one where he goes, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the country is free,’ really resonated with me,” Jhonatan, a thirty-five-year-old barber in Medellín, told me, recalling a video of Bukele defending imprisoning one per cent of the country’s population. Jhonatan’s views on health care and education leaned left, but some of his most formative childhood memories involved witnessing violence. He once spent three days locked inside his grandparents’ house during a guerrilla attack on their town, emerging to find the streets littered with bodies. He told me that his admiration for Bukele was a major factor in his support of de la Espriella. It wasn’t just Colombians. I have had versions of the same conversation with Mexicans, Dominicans, and Venezuelans. “Ojalá tuviéramos un presidente así,” many said: “I wish we had a President like that.”

Bukele influenced both de la Espriella’s security policies and style of politics, María Jimena Duzán, a Colombian journalist, told me. But, she said, de la Espriella also had “invented a new self” during the course of the campaign, drawing inspiration from other right-wing leaders in the region, including the Argentinean President Javier Milei (nicknamed El León) and Bolsonaro. These leaders ascended to the international stage with a mixture of macho populism and a Trumpian right-wing, authoritarian aesthetic.

Still, before the election, no one I met was watching videos of Milei or of Bolsonaro. It was all Bukele. In a produce stall near Medellín’s city center, I saw a poster of Bukele’s Presidential portrait, his Salvadoran sash replaced by the colors of the Colombian flag. At one point, Cepeda gave a speech criticizing Bukele for turning El Salvador into “an immense prison” and violating human rights; de la Espriella’s online proxies posted videos attacking Cepeda and gleefully shared images of prisoners at CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, crowded into cells. Colombian friends shared the videos as stories on WhatsApp. De la Espriella met with WestCOL, one of Colombia’s biggest streamers, and declared his full support for the Bukele model. The Latin American author and political strategist Julián Kanarek told me that right-wing populism is part of Colombia’s history. “What isn’t part of history,” he said, “is for a smaller country north of Colombia to impose the dominant narrative onto electoral campaigns.”

In 2src22, Reuters revealed that an internal U.S. State Department report had mapped out Bukele’s domination of El Salvador’s media landscape through the use of paid influencers and troll farms spreading his propaganda. Though disinformation is not unique to El Salvador, one senior U.S. official viewed Bukele’s content machine as especially dangerous, providing a playbook for like-minded autocrats. Initially, diplomats assigned to the region sought to counter Bukele’s growing influence by sharply denouncing his anti-democratic impulses. But Enrique Roig, a State Department official during the Biden Administration who personally dealt with the Bukele government, told me that the U.S.’s approach to El Salvador shifted to more muted condemnation at the White House’s request, a decision meant to avoid antagonizing an important partner on migration. As Bukele gained popularity, there were internal discussions on how best to signal the Administration’s concerns about his increasingly authoritarian actions. On a diplomatic trip to El Salvador, Roig and his colleagues did raise these concerns with Salvadoran officials, but he told me that he now believes the Administration should have offered more public opposition to Bukele’s policies. “The fact we weren’t more strongly saying things in public was . . . to our own detriment,” Roig said. “It was a bad move on our part, and now we see how it’s playing out across the region, where you see other governments that are adopting the same approach.”

But Juan Gonzalez, a former National Security Council senior director for the Western Hemisphere and a key architect of President Biden’s Latin America policy, told me that speaking more forcefully and having more influence are two different things. He insisted that the Biden Administration did condition parts of the relationship on democratic standards. “The problem was never that we weren’t critical enough,” he wrote to me. “It’s that Bukele had no reason to care. His standing at home rested on homicide numbers, not on Washington’s opinion.” Plus, Gonzalez pointed out, the White House viewed close ties with El Salvador as a key part of controlling migration flows through Central America before they reached the U.S. border, a key part of Biden-era immigration policy.

It’s unclear whether any strategy would have slowed Bukele’s reach, but, four years later, his online prowess, sharpened by his years running an advertising firm before he entered politics, has turned him into an icon of authoritarian, right-wing success and has endeared him to the Trump Administration, with El Salvador agreeing to imprison hundreds of U.S. deportees in CECOT without due process. The dramatic transformation of Central America’s smallest country—and Bukele’s implicit message that security and democracy are mutually exclusive—is now the subject of a growing number of academic studies, and has influenced recent successful Presidential campaigns in countries other than Colombia, including in Ecuador and in Costa Rica. According to a poll in early 2src25, Bukele was the most admired foreign politician among Chileans, with forty-six per cent of participants expressing a desire for the country’s next President to govern like him. Later that year, Chile elected its own far-right President, José Antonio Kast. Bukele is “what most Latin Americans, whose lives are more and more determined by criminal organizations, wish they had: an efficient leader with enough courage to solve their main security problems,” Carlos Dada, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro, said in a recent speech to the Reuters Institute.

Like many Salvadoran journalists of late, Dada’s work has forced him into exile. He told me that whenever he describes Bukele’s human-rights abuses in public forums, he’s met with surprise. After the release of a documentary about these offenses that El Faro co-produced with the PBS series “Frontline,” Dada said that many of the messages he received expressed similar incredulity. “Smart people, informed people, telling me, ‘I didn’t know this about this guy,’ ” he said. “Because this guy is very effective with his propaganda.”

This is a testament to Bukele’s ability to control the narrative. Even Trump once asked Bukele who handles his publicity work, according to Damian Merlo, a U.S.-based lobbyist who works on behalf of right-wing Latin American political figures. Merlo has worked as a foreign-policy adviser to Bukele, and has been instrumental in forging his ties to MAGA and the White House. Merlo told me that he first met Bukele early in his political career, when Bukele was still the mayor of San Salvador and a member of the country’s left-wing F.M.L.N. party. Merlo has worked closely with Bukele since his first Presidential campaign, for the 2src19 election, and organized interviews that Bukele did with Tucker Carlson, most recently in 2src24. (The YouTube description of the 2src24 interview, which has more than seven million views, reads, “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”) Merlo also described how he and Bukele had stayed up late together the night before Bukele’s appearance at the U.N. General Assembly in 2src19, preparing for his speech, during which he famously took a selfie at the lectern. Merlo told me that Bukele had come up with the idea himself. When I asked about the content decision-making process, he said, “It’s ninety per cent him and maybe ten per cent his brother Karim,” explaining that Bukele personally directs scenes and suggests edits to videos.

These social-media instincts, aided by his troll army, have enabled Bukele to achieve global virality. Amparo Marroquín Parducci, a professor at El Salvador’s Central American University, observed that the country has become a kind of laboratory for political communication. Research by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas highlights how Bukele has sprinkled a friendlier, more hopeful tone into the far-right digital ethos. Interspersed among his attacks on journalists and human-rights defenders, many of whom have had to flee El Salvador, are posts about Bukele donating COVID vaccines to Honduras and a widely shared video of Bukele and Karim touring the country’s sleek new national library in San Salvador. The library is a modernist triumph, featuring a vast, sloping glass façade. But, when it was opened, Bukele was quick to stay on message, saying that its extended hours (it’s open twenty-four hours a day) were “possible because the country is safe.” This type of calculated spin is highly effective. Back in Medellín, after yet another conversation that veered toward El Salvador, I received a text from a Colombian woman with a picture of Bukele smiling and petting a dog being groomed. This photo promoted his plans to reduce the number of stray animals on El Salvador’s streets. (“Thousands of dogs and cats live on our streets,” he declared in a 2src25 announcement of an initiative to rescue them. “We want to change that, but without cruelty.”)

This initiative, in particular, stood out. It reminded me of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “Conversation in the Cathedral,” which opens with its protagonist searching for his dog in Lima, amid a municipal effort to capture strays and kill those which are unclaimed, a scene that underscores Peru’s post-dictatorship brutality. Though Bukele may call to mind some aspects of the caudillo-strongman archetype—recently, he has taken to trading his typical backward caps and bluejeans for a Bolívar-esque, gold-embroidered military suit—he also represents a stark departure, keenly aware of optics and the way globalization has shaped Salvadorans’ desire for a modern country.

Ultimately, CECOT is the spiritual center of Bukele’s online kingdom. In an official video of his inaugural visit, sweeping drone footage of his arrival in a caravan of black S.U.V.s resembles a scene out of “Sicario.” “Good evening, Mr. President,” security officials who are waiting to greet Bukele say in turn before beginning the tour. Bukele’s manner is polite but imperious, slow to bestow approval. When an explanation isn’t quite the line he’s looking for, he provides it himself, playing to the camera. In 2src24, Luisito Comunica, a popular Mexican streamer, recorded a tour of CECOT that has received more than seventy million views on YouTube. (The first comment reads, “What all of Latin America needs.” It has ninety-two thousand likes.) The striking images of its tattooed prisoners and their shaved heads, boxed in by cement walls under bright, white lighting that is always on, even at night, convey an ethereal, temple-like solemnity.

For most of the Colombian Bukele fans I encountered while in Medellín, the prisoners’ culpability was an afterthought. In the rare cases I brought up reports that thousands of innocent people have been unjustly imprisoned, I encountered indifference. I began to feel shrill, even schoolmarmish, for mentioning them. For my interlocutors, the dark side of Bukelismo—the capture of the judiciary, the decimation of the country’s once robust civil society, his party’s rewriting of the constitution to abolish Presidential term limits, and the other ways he had weakened El Salvador’s post-civil-war democracy—was outweighed by the reality that even Salvadorans I know who oppose him readily admit: for the first time in decades, the fear of organized crime that, for many, had shaped their daily lives is finally gone.

CECOT, and Bukele’s militarization of domestic security, have functioned not only as a content gold mine but as a blueprint for electoral success. Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son and the main challenger to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s Presidential election this fall, made a pilgrimage to the prison last year. Keiko Fujimori, the recently elected president of Peru, campaigned on promises to build mega-prisons and militarize the country’s borders. And, earlier this month, de la Espriella broke from precedent by giving his first post-inauguration speech at a military base in Cali that had recently been attacked, allegedly by guerrillas, instead of in Bogotá. “The Tiger has arrived, and they’ll find out how hard he bites when it comes to defending the Colombian people,” he said.