Some days feel like years. In the last three weeks, Nayib Bukele’s unconstitutional government in El Salvador has made it clear that its greatest weakness is not the problems it causes, but the narrative that envelops them. Narratives are stories woven on social media and in the media, which become embedded in the collective consciousness and help audiences understand themselves.
These narratives often appear stable until a change in the conditions that sustain them shakes and transforms them. These days, the oxygen that gave life to the official narrative seems to be running out. This has triggered Bukele’s worst authoritarian instincts. On Sunday night, he arrested Ruth Lopez, an internationally renowned human rights defender at Cristosal, on charges of embezzlement. On Tuesday, the Legislative Assembly, which he personally controls, passed a Foreign Agents Law, similar to those in Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which seeks to silence critical voices.
Suddenly, Bukele’s government —which prided itself on being modern and efficient— has entered a crisis fueled by at least three intertwined stories: another confirmation that he came to power through deals with gangs, the collapse of an ambitious infrastructure project, and the violent repression of the El Bosque Cooperative in front of his home in an elite neighborhood.
Each of these events, taken separately, represents a serious blow to his image; taken together, they mark a transformation: from a machine driven by propaganda to one sustained by repression.
Holes in the Plot
The tip of the iceberg emerged two weeks ago, when El Faro published videos in which gang leaders reveal agreements reached with Bukele officials at the start of his presidency to reduce homicides in exchange for economic benefits. They also claim that government officials helped them escape from prison after the implementation of the state of emergency in March 2022. This publication adds to a series of recent articles in the U.S. media further airing the direct links between Bukele and the gangs to the public in the United States.
El Faro’s publication came as Democratic congressmen accused Bukele of collaborating with Donald Trump in wrongful deportations —as acknowledged by the U.S. government itself— including the case of the Salvadoran man Kilmar Ábrego and more than 200 Venezuelan migrants detained in El Salvador, whose lawyers accuse the Bukele regime of torture.
On May 15, 2025, Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Chris Van Hollen introduced a motion in the Senate demanding a report from the Trump administration on the human rights record of El Salvador, and in particular on “Trump's deportation of U.S. residents to Salvadoran mega-prisons.” The Supreme Court has already ordered the U.S. government to “facilitate” Abrego’s return — a decree that, to date, both the U.S. and Salvadoran governments have refused to obey.
Although the approval of Kaine and Van Hollen’s proposal was blocked by the Republican majority, the motion sends a clear message: A growing sector of the Democratic Party is willing to make Bukele Trump's number one accomplice, as part of its agenda to win a majority in the 2026 midterms. The ranking Democrats of the foreign relations committees in the House and Senate have condemned López’s arrest. Van Hollen and Secretary of State Marco Rubio locked horns on the Senate floor: Van Hollen criticized Rubio for showing weakness toward Bukele during his visit to El Salvador in February, instead of demanding respect for democracy.
In response to being labeled a dictator and having his prisons compared to concentration camps, Bukele invited a group of U.S. congressmen to visit his prisons and shared information with them about gang-related homicides — the very gangs with which he had secretly negotiated for nearly a decade.
A Fundamental Weakness
This international erosion coincides with a local disaster: the landslides that, in late April, buried a major infrastructure project, the expansion of the Los Chorros Highway, a main road into San Salvador. For a week, the closure brought traffic in the capital to its knees, prompting Bukele to order transportation companies to provide free service. At least 16 businessmen, whom he blamed for the paralysis, were arrested; one of them, Roberto Jaco, died in custody.
On May 12, 2025, when El Bosque, a group of campesinos, protested in front of his private residence, calling for relief from eviction for 300 families, the government's response was immediate: A community leader and the cooperative’s lawyer were arrested. Family members say they do not know the whereabouts of the detainees.
Why would a president who boasts of supposed approval ratings above 80 percent, and of his absolute control of the three branches of government, respond with repression against journalists, arrests former allies in public transportation, and hound human rights organizations that receive international cooperation? Why does a government that has loaned out its sovereignty to the United States, in exchange for impunity and $6 million dollars, tremble before the press and protests outside the president’s house?
The answer is simple: The narrative is running out, as is the money. The Bukele government’s focus has always been on propaganda and the idealization of a charismatic leader. With no ideological vision or institutional framework, and with control of the state concentrated in his family circle, Bukele has turned social media into his oracle, the barometer of his power.
Unlike Daniel Ortega, whose power is sustained by alliances with Russia and China and who seems to care little about Washington, Bukele is deeply dependent on the North: not only for investment, but first and foremost for the massive remittances that fuel the Salvadoran economy. The agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain a $1.4 billion bailout has brought with it school closures, teacher layoffs, and cuts in health care. This —combined with his unpopular reactivation of metallic mining— has ignited social unrest unprecedented in the Bukele era.
But beyond material conditions, Bukele reveals a fundamental weakness that Kaine and Van Hollen seek to exploit: his obsession with Washington’s recognition. A publicist by profession, he has already squeezed all the popularity he can out of El Salvador; now he seeks validation in the United States, where his power is minimal, despite his influence in the MAGA sphere. Every revelation about his deals with gangs and his role in illegal deportations puts him on the defensive against an anti-Trump machine that sees him as nothing short of a two-bit dictator.
Bukele seems to have understood that his army of propagandists —made up of mercenaries from previous governments, journalists close to the political Left, and former newspaper executives— can do little in a scenario where San Salvador and Washington are converging in tension against his administration. The failure of the Bitcoin experiment ended up erasing any trace of the “cool” dictator who aspired to mix Silicon Valley aesthetics with populist rhetoric. That image no longer fuels him.
In an impoverished country like El Salvador, in growing social turmoil, what remains is repression and intimidation. The “cool” dictator is dead; the cruel dictator is born.
Ricardo Valencia is an associate professor of communications at California State University, Fullerton. Find him on X: @ricardovalp