Nayib Bukele Is No Conservative Hero

N ayib Bukele, El Salvador’s Millennial president, is quickly becoming the darling of some American conservatives. First, it was for his embrace of Bitcoin as currency in his country. Now, it’s for his tough stance on gang crime. American conservatives began showering praise on Bukele after he posted a series of videos showing imprisoned gang members being transferred to a maximum-security prison. But Bukele isn’t a conservative. He’s a tyrant in the making. Those praising him now will soon wish they hadn’t supported him (or hope the rest of us forget they did).

In 2019, Nayib Bukele made history as the first third-party candidate to win a presidential election in El Salvador since the 1992 end of the civil war between communist and right-wing militias. Some free-market enthusiasts became his first cheerleaders as he jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon and exempted crypto gains from taxation. He not only made Bitcoin legal-tender currency in the country, but also forced businesses to take payments in Bitcoin. In addition, he invested a significant share of the country’s wealth in Bitcoin, a move that almost bankrupted the country as cryptocurrency prices tumbled.

Even as Bukele garnered libertarian fans around the world with his pro-cryptocurrency policies, he began centralizing power around himself. In 2021, without much international outcry, his party’s legislators removed and replaced one-third of the supreme court’s constitutional chamber, whose jurisdiction is interpreting constitutional matters. Shortly thereafter, Bukele said he would run for reelection, even though El Salvador’s constitution clearly states that presidential candidates cannot be “anyone who has occupied the office of President of the Republic for over six months, consecutive or not, during the immediately preceding period or the preceding six months before the new presidential term.” But Bukele’s handpicked supreme-court justices ignored the plain meaning of these words to allow their preferred candidate to stay in power, perhaps without any limit.

If Bukele’s Bitcoin enthusiasm won him support from libertarians, his efforts to bring down the high rates of crime and murder in El Salvador have endeared him to conservatives. In 2020, Bukele sought increased funding for his “Territorial Control Plan,” an aggressive campaign to decrease the country’s sky-high homicide rate by confronting violent gangs. When the assembly took longer than he expected to approve funding for his plan, the “cool” president deployed the military to the legislative chambers and demanded that legislators support his plan, threatening to call an insurrection to dissolve it if they did not. The assembly balked, however, and the supreme court (before Bukele packed it with his cronies) ordered him not to use the military in such a manner.

After the Bitcoin charade and the military takeover of Congress came the emergency powers. About a year ago, Bukele requested emergency powers to confront the crime problem. Among the requested powers were arresting individuals without probable cause, restricting free assembly, and tapping phones and communications. Faced with immense pressure, both from public outcry over violence and from Bukele himself, Congress granted him emergency powers in a “state of exception.” That state of emergency has since been renewed eleven times, and Bukele retains his powers. Using them, Bukele has put more than one of every 50 Salvadoran adults behind bars, according to one estimate — a rate equivalent to rounding up over 6 million Americans and putting them in jail without speedy trial, no reason for arrest, no Miranda rights, and no legal representation.

And now Bukele has attempted to convince the world that the drop in crime is due to his wave of arrests — of course refusing to give up any of his powers even as he takes credit for reducing crime. Evidence from a U.S. federal-court indictment, however, suggests that another Bukele action — one he’d want to keep secret — might be playing a larger role: a deal he has made with MS-13 and other gangs to win reelection.

In the unsealed evidence in the case of the U.S. government against two MS-13 gang members, prosecutors presented evidence that Bukele made a deal with the transnational gang to refuse to extradite MS-13 members to the United States in exchange for the criminal organization’s reducing the number of murders until the 2024 presidential election. In other words, the tough-on-crime stance of Bukele may be nothing but a power grab, with the reduced homicide rate a mirage produced by a backroom deal with criminals who operate in the U.S. It’s curious to see how the videos that won Bukele praise from many online influencers on the right went viral shortly after this evidence became public. But, if borne out, these allegations would prove that Bukele is no American ally and is instead actively working with the criminals who terrorize American communities to stay in power.

To make matters worse, Bukele and his allies have received millions of dollars from subsidiary companies of PDVSA, the oil company of Venezuela’s socialist regime. Moreover, Bukele relies on a so-called “shadow” cabinet of all-Venezuelan advisers.

Yet Americans who seldom follow what happens in Latin America are now commenting on it as experts, saying that America needs someone like Bukele. Like the leftists who wish America was like Cuba, they forget to mention that thousands of Salvadorans make their way to the U.S. every single month seeking a better life, not the other way around. Other countries in the region, such as Colombia, with the help of the United States, have been able to go from poor, dangerous countries to middle-income and relatively safe places to live, all without autocratic rule.

Bukele might be hailed as a “cool” Millennial, a tough-on-crime leader, or the “Bitcoin president,” but American conservatives shouldn’t fall for him or his tactics. He’s not really a conservative or an American ally. He’s just another power-hungry Latin American strongman.