Since 2019, El Salvador’s president, who was unconstitutionally re-elected in 2024, has offered a melting pot of promises to Salvadorans. Many of them are in their infancy or halfway through, such as an accident-prone stretch of Los Chorros Highway, La Unión Airport, and the renovation of Rosales Hospital.
But in other cases, Bukele made promises he simply did not keep: To build a place called Bitcoin City, which, according to videos and models shared by his propaganda machine, looked like a science fiction movie set and would be powered by geothermal energy extracted from the Conchagua volcano. The model of the promised city was golden. But there, what exists is what was already there: the slopes of a volcano. He promised to build cultural and educational centers in former prisons in El Salvador; a children’s hospital with a heliport; to increase the minimum pension; and even a train that, in its first section, would run from San Salvador to Acajutla, on the western coast.
El Faro visited some of the places where Bukele promised facilities would be built, but which, almost a year into his unconstitutional term, have not even been started. The logic is simple but compelling: If a lie can be photographed, it is a big lie.
“Today we will fulfill a promise we made to Chalatenango. Today we have begun with the total and definitive closure of Chalatenango Prison,” Bukele wrote on Twitter on Dec. 26, 2019, when some 600 inmates were transferred to other prisons in the country. That same day, he promised to remove the entire prison population and demolish the facility to build a university campus for northern El Salvador. A year later, on Dec. 27, 2020, he also said that one of the benefits of the 2021 budget was tens of millions of dollars earmarked for the University of El Salvador (UES), including two new campuses: Chalatenango and Morazán. Since then, the UES has suffered continuous cuts. This photograph was taken on Tuesday, Apr. 22, 2025. Only rubble remains of the former prison in the La Sierpe neighborhood of the city of Chalatenango.(Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro
The Pacific Train is a campaign promise that Nayib Bukele put in writing in the Cuscatlán Plan, which he presented to the country in January 2019, when he was a presidential candidate for the GANA party. On multiple occasions, Bukele spoke again about the train as something that would begin construction shortly. In October 2019, already president, he mocked the old, disused train tracks. In 2020, during his speech on the 199th anniversary of independence, he referred again to the Pacific Train: “The ferry, our new airport in the east, the Pacific Train, the new hospitals, the new university campuses. Some of these things are already under construction.” To date, there has been no progress on the sections that would run from San Salvador to Acajutla. In this photo, taken on April 25, a train is missing — and so are the tracks.(Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro
(Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro
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Where Metapán Prison once stood, members of the Municipal Police Force (CAM) patrol a parking lot and an agromarket that, according to residents, has been operating since 2024. In Sonsonate, the façade of the old prison still stands. Inside, there are several amusement rides, food stands, and beer sales that fill the place. Neighbors complain. When there are no amusement rides, people use the property to get drunk, urinate, defecate, and smoke marijuana. In both spaces, President Nayib Bukele promised in April 2021 to build cultural and educational infrastructure.(Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro
On Sep. 7, 2022, Bukele visited the Dr. José Ciro Brito Educational Complex in the municipality of Nahuizalco, Sonsonate, to supervise construction work. Among many promises, Bukele mentioned the remodeling of 5,150 schools — 1,000 per year, equivalent to two per day. He also said that the project would be possible thanks to funds from the government, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). To raucous applause from his audience, the president also assured that, between September 2022 and September 2023, the first 1,000 fully funded educational centers would be ready. The photograph, taken in February 2025, shows the ruins of the North Tapalshucut School in the municipality of Izalco, department of Sonsonate, abandoned for a year since its remodeling began. The students do not study in any new school, but under a UNICEF tent, a hundred meters away. A government report indicates that only 424 schools were renovated in four years, but provides no details on what it means by “renovated.”(Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro
On Feb. 22, 2019, President-elect Bukele posted on his Twitter account that, once he obtained a legislative majority, he would convert legislators’ new building into a children’s hospital with a heliport. In the 2021 legislative elections, the Nuevas Ideas party won a two-thirds supermajority, enabling them to make any decision unilaterally. On June 13, 2023, Bukele loyalists reformed the Assembly ahead of the upcoming elections, reducing the number of legislative seats to 60, of which they won 54, achieving an absolute majority, even capable of modifying the Constitution with the stroke of a pen. But as of April 2025, the pediatric hospital-cum-heliport does not exist, and the building that once belonged to the legislators still belongs to the legislators, but now to Bukele’s legislators.(Photo: Carlos Barrera)El Faro
On May 9, 2022, on his X account, Bukele posted a golden model city, accompanied by splendid phrases: “#Bitcoin City is coming along beautifully. Landmarks and all… And the airport. And no, the city won’t be made up of golden metal; that is just the architect’s choice of color for the scale model. The actual city will be mostly green (trees) and blue (sea),” he wrote. He threaded a number of images to the same post: a gravity-defying lookout spot from the volcano and a city shining at night on the slopes of a volcano. Alongside Bukele was Mexican architect Fernando Romero. This was supposed to be Bitcoin City, facing the Gulf of Fonseca, in La Unión. A city that would be powered by the Conchagua volcano, where bitcoin would be mined and hundreds of happy bitcoiners would live. Three years later, in January 2025, when this photo was taken, only the volcano’s slopes remain below. Not a single bitcoin miner. Not a city, not green, not blue, not gold. And bitcoin is no longer legal tender in El Salvador.(Photo: Víctor Peña)El Faro
