A Sojourn in Nayib Bukele's El Salvador
Richard: I’m currently writing a book, and therefore posting fewer essays than before. As I step away from publishing new pieces, I thought it would be a good opportunity to use this newsletter to showcase the work of lesser known writers who I think are worth reading.
Today, I’m posting an essay by Snowden Todd, a writer and teacher based in Seoul. Before moving to Seoul, Snowden taught English in Busan, South Korea, and Cofradía, Honduras, following his experience as a management consultant in Texas.
He writes regularly at the excellent Chasing Sheep Substack, which you can find and subscribe to here. I particularly recommend checking out his most popular essays, particularly those on Korea, and “Finding Populist Equilibrium.”
Here, Todd recounts his trip through Central America last fall, with a focus on his impressions of El Salvador. I’ve written two articles on Bukele’s crackdown on crime. Unfortunately, since that time, the Salvadoran president has become complicit in the Trump administration’s human rights abuses involving Venezuelan migrants and taken other concerning actions. This has complicated the picture quite a bit, once again demonstrating how the same traits that allow a leader to undertake difficult but necessary political reforms can also take them down some dark paths. Regardless, I found this essay to be an enjoyable history and travelogue of the region, as well as a nice character study of European tourists, and hope readers will also benefit from it.
See the man — trim, 42, bearded.
We start with a tasteful jab at a Jewish hedge fund billionaire:
“Who elected Soros to dictate public policy and laws? Let me tell you something, Soros and his cronies hit a brick wall in El Salvador…”
Now he is onto Austrian economics:
“Who buys the treasury bonds? It’s the Fed!”
We arrive back at Law and Order:
“…from the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in the Western hemisphere.”
The audience, 30-40, mostly white, increasingly minority — still better suited to the state fair than tropical climes — loves it. Never mind that he is the son of an Imam, a former member of his nation’s original communist party, and keen to threaten businesses for raising prices. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has mastered a certain art of politicking recently lost in the US: busting heads. In some American cities, low-level crimes go increasingly unprosecuted; high-level crimes earn sentences replete with second and third chances. For some, it is a worthy tradeoff in the name of equity. For Bukele, who keeps nearly two percent of El Salvador’s adult population in a crowded cage, it is unconscionable.
But is Bukele the student or the maestro? As he launches into a tirade about George Soros, I start to get the sense that he is just a bit too eager to please—the diligent student at office hours, reciting his notes. Whether the CPAC attendees know it, the median Salvadoran does not spend much time scratching the same conspiratorial itch as Dave from Omaha.
No, to question Bukele’s script is to miss the essence of Bukelismo. Bukelismo is results — it is not ideology. Results are pictures of gang members in a cage — ideology is walls of text about it. Bukele has thus flipped the script of the typical Latin American dictator. Unlike with Daniel Ortega next door, results have preceded the consolidation of power. The upside is that Bukele can affiliate with whichever ideas the audience wishes — a paean to organic farming one day, a broadside against George Soros the next. Bukelismo just works. Who cares how?
Now, see here Tucker Carlson, wheeling out Bukele for a YouTube video (the Soros-backed media didn’t want your grandfather to see it via a cathode ray tube) with WORLD’S MOST EFFECTIVE LEADER stamped over a vaguely looking Jurassic Park thumbnail. See here Tucker Carlson — a man who already figured it all out long ago — lending a deferential ear to the world’s only Philosopher King.
For those short on time, I present you a summary of the interview:
“And, Mr. President, what did you do about the problem?”
“We put the criminals in prison.”
“And, what about the Soros-backed media/NGO industrial complex’s objections?”
“I didn’t listen.”
There you have it, folks, a Palestinian perched in a plantain republic can figure this stuff out, but your Yale-educated leaders can’t. But despair not, says Bukele:
“The people of El Salvador have woken up, and so can you.”
The view from afar is increasingly clear. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele suspended civil rights, arrested hordes of assumed gang members, and stuck them in fairly brutal maximum-security prisons. A small percentage were innocent, but the vast majority were not. The result is that El Salvador, once gang-ravaged, is a reasonably safe place today, with a murder rate similar to that of Canada.
With this image of results so fixed, it is easy to overlook that the world’s coolest dictator, now on his second term, has quietly made a Soros-approved pivot, scrapping mandatory Bitcoin acceptance and implementing some unpopular budget cuts at the behest of the IMF. The result is that Salvadoran bonds are having a breakout year, not long after the nation was pegged as a likely default following that of Sri Lanka in 2022. To top it off, in December, Bukele signed a law reversing the nation’s ban on metal mining. If there is one message emanating from El Salvador, besides the busting heads stuff, it is that the nation is open for business. Perhaps it is an encouraging sign in a region where several strongman autarkies endure.
But what is the view from El Salvador? This becomes one of the problems in understanding Bukelismo — there is Bukele, the phenomenon—a Palestinian Lee Kuan Yew preaching common sense, retweeting your jokes about Chilean helicopters — and then there is El Salvador, the nation — GDP per capita of $6,000, still growing at around 2 percent a year. It is easy to conflate the man with his territory.
Having once taught in neighboring Honduras, I wanted to see the territory. While home from South Korea this past fall, I found the time to do so. I started in Belize City and made it to San Salvador.
If America runs on Dunkin, it might be said that Belize runs on Belikin.
Alighting at the Belize City Airport, one is immediately greeted with a string of posters for the national lager, alongside various tropical rums. Unlike in the US, there are no puritanical warnings about overindulgence to be found, but instead a Belikin-backed mandate of NO WORKING DURING DRINKING HOURS. As one approaches customs, David Kafka, one of Belize’s finest Jewish real estate agents (the rest are Han Chinese), appears, also via poster, to share that far from just settling for the odd vacation, you can live in a drunken stupor at this little cut-rate Margaritaville. There is really nothing Kafkaesque about it.
It’s not just that Belize is boozy. If there is one fun fact I can share about the nation of 410,000, besides the leader of the Belizean opposition being a rapper who went to prison over a shooting involving P Diddy before converting to Orthodox Judaism, it is that Belikin actually has a monopoly on the domestic beer market. As one woman from a town called “Indian Church” explains to me, “If you get caught with a Corona, you get in trouble.” To my knowledge, no brave muckrakers have pointed out the questionable optics of a white family with an alcohol monopoly selling their brews to a largely black Caribbean population, but I will leave that to the professionals.
Brewing dynasties aside, the good news is that the nation Guatemala claims as its territory can be crossed for cheap in a school bus, allowing you to stop in San Ignacio, which is within reach of several notable Mayan sites, including a cave where you can see oblong Mayan skulls that overambitious iPhone photographers have further distorted. There is also a Mormon Church that offers services in both Spanish and English, often within the same testimony.
From San Ignacio it is a short taxi ride to the Guatemalan border, where you can cross on foot. Occasionally, a Belizean border guard will ask the nubile Guatemalan woman in front of you her age, just before he asks you what the age of consent in your country is. If an American wishes to exit on good terms, they should admit that it can go as low as 16, depending on the state.
After paying the exit fee, the trick is to ignore all the predatory taxi drivers and walk across the bridge and to the left, where a van to Flores can be secured for $3. From Flores, you can take a long-haul bus to Guatemala City, elope to Antigua (my Uber driver insisted I shouldn’t stay too long), and then descend into Santa Ana, El Salvador’s second-largest city, in a $30 shuttle.
But getting to El Salvador is not just a tangent. One of the more striking facts about Bukele is that he has become a pan-American phenomenon, with a favorability rating exceeding that of the Pope in much of Central America. And en route to El Salvador, I do not have to probe hard to find admirers.
In Caye Caulker, Belize, it is Jordi who represents the nation’s growing mestizo population. Jordi is of Salvadoran heritage, and like many mestizos in Belize, his family immigrated north to escape civil war. Though he wasn’t born there, and though he is optimistic about Belize’s own parliamentary politics, he wants to see how El Salvador has changed.
“I’ve heard great things.”
In Guatemala, it is Jose. He speaks very good English and used to work as a roofer in Boston until his marriage fell through.
“When you have to live in one corner of the condo, it’s very difficult.”
Now he uses his English to hang out with Europeans and coatimundis at Tikal National Park. Though he does not doubt the transformation, he is more skeptical of Bukele’s relevance to Guatemala.
“Guatemala is big—here in Petén, things are safe, but the city is dangerous. And these days, the gang members, they dress well. You wouldn’t even know they were in a gang.”
Back in Honduras, it was my co-worker Girsan, who split his time between running the town gym and teaching kindergarten. Besides not knowing anything about the Pope, Girsan betrayed no hesitation about Bukelismo:
“Oh, we’d love that here.”
But if Bukele is a pan-American phenomenon, it becomes clear on my shuttle from Antigua to Santa Ana that he is not a global one. For most backpackers I meet, El Salvador is just another Central American nation—no different than Guatemala or Honduras.
One such backpacker is Gia. I assume she is Spanish because when I hop in the van she says “hola” with a certain grace that betrays a romantic tongue, but in fact, she is Italian—blonde and northern, with teeth that have been spared the excesses of American orthodontics. True to her ancestry, she is reclining across the seat of the van like a Roman at a triclinium.
“Donde vas?” I ask.
“El Tunco.”
“De donde vienes?”
“Italia.”
“Hablas español?”
“No.”
Gia is probably a communist. I say this because, besides being Italian, she is a social worker and planning to visit Cuba for a full month.
“Why Cuba?” I ask.
“Hmm.. Good music,” she claims.
“Buena Vista Social Club?” I chime, fearing I’ve exposed myself as a dilettante.
But the name does not even seem to register, and this leaves me rubbing all of the hairs on my chin, which after three weeks on the road is positively pubescent.
“I saw that Meloni is trying to send refugees to Albania,” I add, seeking to elicit some sort of reaction.
“Oh, it’s very sad,” she laments.
“It is very sad,” I say, truthfully.
There is a pause.
“So Americans know Meloni?” she asks.
Even if Gia’s taste for Latin American strongmen is a bit retrograde, communist Italian social workers are very nice and worthy of your respect. Actually, the umpteen solo-traveling European women strike me as much more impressive specimens than men in the US, seeing as I never meet the latter stomping through the jungle of their own hemisphere.
Our first taste of Bukelismo comes in La Hachadura, the Salvadoran side of a border crossing with Guatemala. It is the kind of town that, being an entrepot of several thousand, has no apparent history. But it is from this direction, even if not this exact location, that the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado embarked on the conquest of the Nahua state of Cuzcatlan, now western El Salvador, in 1524. By 1539, he had conquered the Lenca of eastern El Salvador. Two years later, he was crushed to death by a horse.
While the Salvadoran border agent checks our passports and collects the $12 entry fee (a more formal extortion racket than is typical in the region), I have time to poke around a bit. Semitrucks wait hopelessly to clear customs. Behind us, an older woman meets a soldier while passing through. She smiles up at him before shaking his hand. Down the street, there is a Chinese restaurant. There are thousands of little towns like this, with a little pollo-themed fast food restaurant, and then, inexplicably, a Chinese one.
After 20 minutes or so, I make my way back to the van, where Gia is asleep, dreaming of the Cuban tourism ministry’s flashlight queue. We push on until a gas station stop in Sonsonate, where I first meet the other passengers.
Andrew is from Australia and is traveling with his friend, who is milling around the drink section. He is lanky and has far too many inside jokes with his buddy, but I empathize with him because, like me, he sounds a bit restless.
“I wish you could just, like, work a different job every day, that way I’d drive a bus one day, work outside the next day, work in an office the next…”
Jake is from Manchester, has migrated to London, and analyzes data for a living. He’s doing a year-long sabbatical in Latin America, which is apparently a thing you can do in the UK. He seems to be the only person familiar with Bukele’s state of exception and asks me what I think. I give a qualified but positive assessment, taking into account that Jake looks a bit enlightened.
“It doesn’t seem sustainable,” he replies.
While it does give me a bit of pause (and perhaps even anguish) when Brits use the word “sustainable,” Jake has a point. El Salvador’s state of exception has now been renewed over 30 times in Congress. One starts to wonder after three years if the measure is the one thing stopping El Salvador from reverting to a gang fiefdom, or if it’s just the kind of thing a Central American president gets used to.
While Jake formulates various opinions, an Israeli girl comes over to confer with me on the border fee business. She seems like a free spirit with a budget, and some intimate knowledge of Central American border fees.
“You paid here?” she interrogates.
“Yes, $12”
“It’s because you’re American — I don’t have to pay.”
She moves down the list.
“Did you have to pay to leave Belize?”
“Oh yeah, $20”
“I don’t think you actually needed to pay.”
I find this inconceivable, given that the border agent called me his man after I answered his legal inquiry about the age of consent.
I turn to Andrew, taking note of his pencil mustache.
“What do you do for a living?” I ask.
“I drive a bus,” he says, a bit despondently.
Andrew’s friend ambles toward the table. He has the air of a skateboarder, and after months on the road does not seem to know quite where he is.
“Have things gotten safer?” he asks.
We are dispensed at a string of hostels in the middle of Santa Ana. The first thing that becomes clear, is that, for all the mystique surrounding Bukele, Santa Ana looks a lot like any other Central American city, but even more dilapidated. And while Santa Ana is not quite Antigua, it does have some ruins.
The sense of decline is not an illusion: Santa Ana was the nation’s wealthiest city when it thrived as the heart of El Salvador’s coffee economy. Then the nation’s Civil War (1979–1992), fueled largely by demands for the redistribution of coffee fincas, disrupted the industry and sent many residents fleeing.
Suffice it to say that the coffee economy never fully recovered after the conflict, leading to a decline in Santa Ana’s role in the national economy. The upside to this, perhaps, is that Santa Ana retains a layout more faithful to its original grid of one-way streets than San Salvador, which has swollen into a spaghetti-like mess of highways and roundabouts.
At Hostal Casa Verde I check in and am given a full tour of the property in Spanish. (It is always the little mundanities—“don’t flush the toilet paper”—that need brushing up on in one’s target language.) Before my hostess leaves, she grants me a physical map of the surrounding area. Some streets two blocks over are marked in red and stamped with RED LIGHT DISTRICT. But before I can get any ideas, a sign in my room reads ABSOLUTELY NO VISITORS ALLOWED.
After settling in, I make my way into the hostel’s bar, where I meet the bartender, the first Salvadoran I can consult about Bukele. He looks quite professional in his polo shirt.
“Your Spanish is very good,” he indulges me.
At this moment, I am happy to forget the many times I have complimented someone’s broken English. I probe a bit about Bukele.
“Yes, yes, things are much safer,” he confirms. “And where are you coming from?”
“I was just in Antigua, Guatemala. Have you been?”
“I’ve never been outside El Salvador—what’s it like?”
I need a moment to gather my thoughts.
“Well, it’s a lot like El Salvador, but with more crime.”
“I see.”
But he has little else to say, and seems a people pleaser. Perhaps annoyed at my babble, the bartender leaves and is replaced by the hostel’s resident grandmother and a younger relative, perhaps in his 30s. They open a bottle of red and talk amongst themselves. Both are quite castizo, and given their drink of choice, seem to be faring well.
On the TV overhead, the Lakers are playing the Knicks in an early-season matchup. I suspect the choice of programming is aimed at the hostel-goers, though, it does not appear that any of my fellow European travelers are giving much thought to how Karl Anthony Towns will fit with the Knicks.
Watching the TV, the grandmother is suddenly reminded of who I assume to be a grand or great-grandson.
“You know, he always tells me, ‘Grandma! I’m going to make it to the NBA one day, and then I’m going to buy you a big house!’” she says, laughing to herself.
As an ad for the US presidential election plays, the grandmother points it out to her younger relative. I seize the chance.
“What do you think about Trump and Kamala?” I ask.
“Oh, they’re both terrible. All politicians are corrupt!”
“Even Bukele?”
“Oh, they’re all corrupt. He’s no different.”
It is not clear if she has any particular scandals in mind, such as the recent report that Bukele and five other family members acquired 34 new properties worth $9 million during his first five years in office.
“How do you feel about what he’s done?”
Her younger relative pitches in with a more measured tone.
“It’s complicated,” he says, waving his hand to signal “meh.” “He’s done some good things, but there are still lots of problems.”
“Inflation?”
“Yes, you know things have gotten very expensive.”
Now the grandmother lets loose.
“Santa Ana is disgusting—I mean, I walk around here, I can’t even use the sidewalk it’s so covered in trash!”
She goes on like this for a good while. As she vents, my Spanish falters, but the overall sentiment is clear.
As owners of a chic hostel, it is safe to say my hosts do not represent Salvadorans at large. But it is a worthy reminder that while El Salvador may have a murder rate on par with Canada’s, it also has a GDP per capita lower than Guatemala’s.
As I pick at my pita plate (such a dish exists at Casa Verde), they talk amongst themselves. Suddenly, a caste system emerges. Someone’s grandfather was a full European, seemingly a point of some pride. (Were they Spanish or Italian, though?) Finally, I overhear the grandmother engaging in a bit of taxonomy:
"You know, Salvadorans are part African.”
It is easy to lump all of the Northern Triangle into one big pot of botched development, but the demographic variations between the region’s nations can be quite substantial, assuming one takes the published data seriously. Over 10 percent of El Salvador identifies as European, with almost the entire remaining population registering as mestizo. By contrast, Guatemala is nearly half Indigenous, with the remaining population identified as “ladino,” i.e., mestizo — the government does not seem very interested in the gradients therein.
Where are the indigenous people in El Salvador? One answer may be that the government is not interested in finding out. In the 90s, it submitted this statement to the UN:
El Salvador does not have any significant population groups possessing characteristics that clearly distinguish them from the population as a whole…[the] Salvadoran society does not have any problem of ethnic populations
But the next day, I do not have to look hard for evidence of indigenous culture near Santa Ana, which is just 30 minutes from the Tuzumal archeological site.
Though it is the nation’s largest archeological site, and though it even has a ball court, Tuzumal is a minor Mayan ruin, which my sustainability-minded friend who analyzes data for a living can’t be bothered to visit. But my private belief is that once I have visited all the Mayan ruins, I will be bestowed with some secret knowledge about the Mayan world, which can then be deployed at various cocktail parties to great effect. With this in mind, I slink away from the Europeans the next day to fetch an Uber.
Like many such sites, Tuzumal was inhabited by the Maya until a not-totally-understood disaster displaced them around 900 CE. Afterward, the site was occupied by the Pipil, who had migrated from Mexico in the 11th century BC. Relatives of the Aztecs, the Pipil spoke (and apparently, in small numbers, speak) Nawat, the southernmost variant of Nahuatl, the same language you can find in central Mexico today, and a relative of languages extending to Idaho. (A fun fact about the Pipil: their name means “child” in Nahuatl, supposedly because other Nahuatl speakers thought Nawat sounded juvenile.)
My ride to Tuzumal gives me 20 minutes or so to discuss Bukele with Edwin, who, as his name may suggest, looks a bit European, perhaps even Italian, with long hair reaching down the back of his neck. After calming my nerves, I blurt out, “I’m curious, how do you feel about Bukele?”
He flashes a grin that suggests he has something to say.
“To be honest, I don’t like him much.”
“Why?”
He reflects for a moment.
“You know, they show you the good things happening in this country, but they don’t show you 100 percent of what’s happening.”
Then he uses the same word as the younger relative at the hostel.
“It’s complicated.”
“There are problems with the economy?”
“Every country has problems with the economy, but the problem here, besides the debt, is that they’re taking the pension money to put in projects that aren’t useful to the public.
How do I explain this? For a country to progress from the third world, you have to invest in the fundamental things—education, healthcare. Right now, they’re only spending on other things.”
There is something disappointing about visiting the third world (Edwin’s term, not mine) only to have all your first-world shibboleths spit back at you, but Bukele did recently cut funding for education and healthcare. (It appears that he did this, at least in part, to secure a loan from the IMF.)
“What’s happening, the government already has the country secured, they’ve put everyone in prison. Why are we still spending on national security if all these people are in prison?” he continues.
He asks me where I’m from. I share while noting that many in the US are fans of Bukele.
“The country has a state of exception. People outside think it’s just a law against gangs, but it’s not. What this is is just a way to have a monopoly on power, and there are no rights for anybody.”
It crosses my mind that Edwin might be listening to the same Spanish podcasts as me.
“The police, the soldiers — when they stop you to check your vehicle, verify your documents, that’s an everyday thing. The problem is that now they check your shirt, your hair, your shoes. Remember, your hairstyle, your shoes, or your clothes, it’s part of your fashion — it doesn’t mean you’re part of a group.”
“Do you know anyone who has been affected?” I probe.
“In this country, lots of people have been affected.”
(I take that as a “no.”)
“We’re in a situation where if you express yourself, there are consequences. Lots of people are afraid to speak up. Talk to the young people — they are suffering the most.”
By now, we are on the interstate. It is remarkably smooth.
“What do you think?” he asks, offering to share his soapbox.
“Oh, I don’t know enough.” I decline.
We both laugh. He continues.
“The truth is, there’s crime everywhere, and there—”
He points rather ominously in the direction we are heading.
“A few months ago, there was a sign about 100 days without homicides. And since that time, there was an incident there in Chalchuapa, three people were killed, and not necessarily gang members.
The problem is that they generalize everything to gangs, but psychopaths, rapists, that’s everywhere.”
It would be easy to flaunt the stats in Edwin’s face, but as he returns to the issue of over-policing, I get the impression that he has been subjected to some fairly unpleasant stops.
“The police can say, ‘I’m going to verify your documents.’ As a citizen, yes, I have to show my documents, but they have to respect my rights. They don’t do that.
And if I put in a complaint, then they will just make a report that I did something different, I lose my rights, and they put me in prison. Abusan!
They can say this is one of the safest countries in the world, but I don’t feel safe. Before you were threatened by the gangs in some places, but now you feel insecure everywhere.”
“But the majority of people support Bukele? Or is that false?”
“There are lots of people who believed at first, but I’ll tell you, when I talk with lots of people these days, they agree with me.
Have you heard of Mauricio Funes, the ex-president? He did the same thing as Bukele, changed things. People thought it was good at the time, but now people realize he was a fraud. I feel like we’re repeating the same situation.”
One of the virtues of backpacking in Central America as an American is that you will receive an education in both Central Americans and Europeans. Nowhere is this principle more apparent than at the pupusa-making class Jake invites me to later that evening.
For five-dollar admission, you get to hang out at a family’s hostel while the daughter teaches you to make pupusas from scratch in a courtyard. Such an event is like catnip for the European backpacker, and as I push through to the courtyard, I find myself the lone American in a throng of Germans and Brits.
Among them is Christina, a 20-something from Germany. She is what I call a “meta-German” because every time she does something that could be construed as German, she is keen to note its “German-ness.”
“We like things to work,” she explains.
Christina is also very keen to announce to the Anglo-Saxons in the courtyard (New and Old World) that she chose to study English in Punjab because it actually has a culture. I think about joking that she probably could have studied in London and had a similar experience (and maybe even giving Jake a good slap on the shoulder after doing so), but think better of it.
Christina comes with a 30-something German counterpart, Angela. Despite Christina’s pretenses of Germanness, it is in fact Angela, with her thin lips, machinelike dough kneading, and later insistence that we walk all the way back to our hostel at midnight instead of getting an Uber, who more fits the bill.
Taking stock of the many Germans I have met over the past two weeks, I ask Angela why I only meet Germans, and never Spaniards, in Central America. She has absolutely no theories.
“The Spanish are certainly traveled people,” she insists.
“But you would think, with the language, there would be lots of Spanish people, right?” I prod.
“It is just a mystery.”
The hostel’s resident daughter stands before a table that looks like a Subway ingredient station, but way fresher, and featuring lots of chinchurron, ayote, and loroco, a native flower. The daughter, who is veritably in college, is mestiza and appears to have been chosen for this job due to her palatability to a foreign audience. That is to say, she is very cute. Angela would seem to agree, based on the number of pics she takes of her.
As the daughter begins directing us to prepare the various ingredients, it becomes clear that, from the host family’s perspective, the genius of the pupusa-making class is that the customer is essentially paying to do all the tedious labor that goes into making pupusas. This may explain the high proportion of Germans in the class and total absence of Romance peoples.
As she directs our efforts, the daughter, who speaks no English, keeps using the word “chiquitita” to describe how finely the various ingredients are to be chopped. Inevitably, Angela is reminded of the ABBA song of the same name, at which point it is a foregone conclusion that it works its way into the daughter’s playlist.
“This is just like Erasmus,” Christina reflects.
An ingredient-filled cornmeal griddle cake, the pupusa is essentially an arepa and not so different from a baleada, which, Honduras’ Mayan heritage notwithstanding, breaks most glaringly with the former two in its use of wheat flour. Unlike the Spanish-derived word baleada, though, pupusa is a Nawat word meaning “fluffy.” The pupusa is often eaten with tomato sauce and a fast-pickled cabbage, the latter of which invites some reflection from the Germans.
“You let it sit for just 30 minutes?” Angela wonders aloud.
In between chopping and kneading, which I haplessly try to model after Angela, I find time to ask the daughter about Bukele. She seems to have been asked the question many times and takes care to disassociate herself from any strong opinions.
“Yes, there have been many positive changes with respect to security, but some people are upset about the budget cuts.”
I remember Edwin’s own budget gripe.
“I go to a private school,” she continues, “but there’s only one public university in El Salvador, and they cut its funding.”
“What are you studying?” I ask.
“Sociology.”
Christina’s ears perk up.
“She said she studied sociology?” she asks from across the courtyard.
After paying to cook our food, we sit at the table. Christina discusses her experience as a woman traveling through developing nations alone, which in all seriousness, sounds much more unpleasant than my own.
“Honduras actually wasn’t bad, but Caye Caulker—that place was creepy.”
Eventually, the US election comes up, and like the resident daughter discussing Bukele, I take great care to disassociate myself from any strong opinions as I sit between Christina and a British vegetarian. Thankfully, I have none.
“I won’t be there to vote,” I confess.
“Can’t you mail in a vote?” Christina asks, a bit worried.
Another German, more versed in American federalism, vouches that the electoral college renders my vote useless.
“I would have voted for Olaf Schulz if I could have,” I quip.
“Even he’s to the left of Kamala,” Christina ripostes.
An hour or so from Santa Ana, Juayúa sits on the route of flowers, a scenic tourist path through mountainous coffee fincas. As I alight in the middle of town the next day, a market is underway. Soldiers stand about with guns slung over their chests. Another man has an entire large python slung over his shoulders. There are no Europeans in sight. Near the town square, I spot a little mural showing indigenous plantation workers picking coffee beans in tranquility.
The mural obscures the less-than-tranquil history of the region. Though small, Juayúa was home to the peasant rebellion of coffee workers that would shape El Salvador’s politics over the ensuing decades, before culminating in the nation’s civil war.
In 1932, the communist peasant leader Farabundo Martí launched an uprising against the nation’s coffee tycoons, the Fourteen Families. Juayúa was among the first towns overwhelmed by the machete-wielding rebels, many of them Pipil people. The town’s coffee baron was murdered in his home. Stores were looted. Other towns throughout the nation fell to the more than 50,000 peasants. (Most of these figures have a certain Xenophontean quality.)
El Salvador’s then-military dictator/witch doctor Maximiliano Hernández Martínez showed little patience. In a letter penned at the start of the uprising, he uses a familiar term—la mano fuerte [a strong hand]—to describe his desired response. Three days later, Juayúa, along with many neighboring towns, was recaptured by the government. The suppression of the rebellion, which claimed over 10,000 peasant lives, became known as La Matanza (the massacre). But while the peasant leader Farabundo Martí was executed shortly thereafter, his memory did not fade.
In 1980, a new communist alliance assumed the name Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) before waging guerrilla warfare. Just like its namesake, the FMLN stood for the redistribution of coffee fincas from the nation’s landed elites. But despite committing more than a few atrocities (to be clear, so did the rival ARENA), the FMLN became one of the nation’s major political parties after the 1992 peace accord ended the war. Besides producing multiple presidents, the party claimed Bukele as a member until 2018.
It is easy to overlook this history because Bukelismo is strikingly ahistorical. While it does not register to those outside the nation, one of Bukele’s biggest pivots has been to bury the nation’s Cold War past. The annulment of history is born out most clearly by the name of Bukele’s ruling party, Nuevas Ideas.
In Chalchuapa, where I visited Tuzumal, a statue of Che Guevara commemorating the 1992 peace accord was toppled. A similar statue was destroyed in San Salvador. (Perhaps the choice of the Cuban revolutionary suggests the civil war was not as much of a draw as claimed.) Elsewhere, a judge presiding over an investigation into the massacre of El Mozote by the military in 1981 was fired. Recently completed projects, such as the 3 February Dam, bear reference to a new history—in this case, the date Bukele was elected.
Bukele himself is now something of a coffee tycoon after buying up over 30 properties. He has even indulged his celebrity in the most banal way—by starting a coffee brand. One possible reason for suppressing the past is that the past in El Salvador is so hostile to business, and Bukele is, if anything, an entrepreneur.
The reason does not matter. Bukele is the first Latin American strongman in decades who frames his rule not in terms of Cold War ideology, but post-political pragmatism. Such a program was supposed to be the purview of technocratic bureaucrats gazing into the end of history, but Bukele is perhaps the first leader in the Americas to show the potential of a post-political dictatorship. In Juayúa, as in the rest of El Salvador, there is no alternative.
Down the street from the mendacious mural, I check in at my Airbnb, where a rather indigenous-looking woman collects my lodging fee. Not only does she not accept Bitcoin, but she only takes cash. After settling in, I return to the courtyard, where I have my first encounter with an American tourist—a full family of them, in fact. As I slink by, the dad takes stock of me like a feral child between a round of Uno with his own much better-kempt kids.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Memphis, you?”
“We’re from Los Angeles.”
I suspect some interregional hauteur, but am beyond such aspersions.
“Where are you coming from?” I ask.
“We just flew in today and took a cab here.”
After hanging about Europeans so long, it is a notable contrast. You see, the American tourist has a single destination in mind. He has already planned his one-stop itinerary, booked a hotel, and put in several months’ worth of notice. Certainly, he has brought the kids, perhaps even a special laptop to keep an eye on things. He will see the cascades on Saturday, the town market on Sunday, and be back to work by Monday. A photo album for the event will be saved to iCloud. Individuals will be tagged.
But the European tourist has no plans or dependents. Perhaps after seeing Colombia, they will start a second master’s — maybe get back into event planning. In this fit of extended adolescence, which can extend to one’s 40s, the European tourist will sleep in a dorm room without air conditioning (but with insects and a smell), while their American counterpart lounges in the closest thing to a Hilton. Meticulously or not, pictures must be taken—it will be hard to remember it all through the ethanol-induced haze. And while I find myself increasingly partial to the European tourist, it is surely the American tourist who makes it all possible, and for that, we are ever grateful.
Like much of the region’s transportation, Salvadoran buses come with economies. As one sits waiting for departure in the bus lot, a carousel of merchants commences, with most vendors making at least three revolutions (and many more matter-of-fact assertions of the ware in hand) before petering out. Given the diversity of the goods on offer, and their low price point, the experience is akin to having the shelves next to the checkout aisle presented to you on a rotary. Occasionally, there is remarkable coordination—first a bag of Doritos, then bottled water, only to be completed by a roll of paper towels. (From my seat, I cannot glean if the succeeding merchant is sporting Pepto-Bismal.)
The economy does not disband when the bus leaves, but evolves. At a red light, teenagers might rush to offer drinks, a bag of lychees, or fresh food. Supply is never wanting. At the occasional stop, an apothecary climbs on. The driver always welcomes him. Though he may look disheveled, when he speaks, you get the sense he should be doing color commentary for a minor-league baseball team.
The man who climbs on my bus to San Salvador the next day is no different. He starts with a promotion for a mysterious box of pills.
Opening the box, he takes out a blister pack.
“Feel each one,” he instructs.
He rubs his finger over the aluminum-foil-coated plastic but does not give anyone else the chance to do so.
“When you take one out, it has that vitamin smell.”
I struggle to imagine it.
“Look at the quality,” he instructs, before lifting it overhead.
I comply. Few others do.
“This is for the brain.”
He extends it toward the left side of the bus.
“This is for the eyes.”
Now the right.
“This is for the nerves.”
He returns it to the center, where I can see the words VITAMIN B COMPLEX beside his tanned fingers. It is hard to find fault with his science.
“It works even when the person suffers from a complete deficiency,” he continues, “and it costs only one dollar.”
No one bites. He summons his next ware from a plastic bag.
“Now this is different—don’t confuse it. This works for all types of pain. It is the highest quality—it has the red capsules. In all the good pharmacies, it costs two dollars or two twenty-five, nothing less.”
He looks at me.
“Nothing less,” he reiterates.
“But here? Here it is only a dollar for your pain.”
He holds up a box reading Dolo Neurobion. It becomes clear that the potential source of confusion is that, as with the previous ware, this one contains B vitamins, but with the addition of acetaminophen.
No one bites. He proceeds with his final ware.
“Now, if you suffer from fungi, allergies, itching, discoloration—there is this sulfur soap.”
He brandishes a yellow bar.
“But what quality!” he exclaims, as if he just stumbled upon a brick of gold.
“This opens the pores, dries, releases…”
I lose track of the verbs.
“It expires in two thousand and twenty-nine, and it, too, costs only one dollar,” he concludes.
No one bites. Truthfully, I have never seen anyone bite. But the man is often there. And with as much grace as he advertises his wares, he leaves after their presentation.
Salvadoran buses are not quite as crowded as Belizean buses, though the latter has the advantage of playing reggaeton while you sit pretzeled. Not only does the Salvadoran bus I am on not play reggaeton, but it does not play music at all. El Salvador is a serious place these days.
The boy next to me, in khakis and a white button-down that hints Mormon, can do without the music — he has nodded off, sparing him from my inquiries about Bukele. He makes a point all the same. One of the commonalities I have found between public spaces in East Asia and Latin America is the presence of daytime sleepiness, likely due to the long hours workers in both regions clock. And it is hard not to see the resemblance between my Salvadoran companion and the Taiwanese boy who comes into Louisa every day and sleeps for three hours.
Latin America is more Asian than most realize. Sometimes you see a man, mostly indigenous, and in an aged state, he looks quite Asian. Back in Hondruas, my co-worker Girsan’s father’s doppelganger was, sure enough, Jackie Chan. (It was no joke, he really did look like Jackie Chan—more than I looked like Justin Bieber, anyway.) In Belize, I spent an entire trip trying to figure out if the elderly man next to me was indigenous or one of the nation’s Chinese. It is, of course, not only the transatlantic voyage that looms over Latin America, but Siberian ice bridge crossings, and if certain archaeologists are to be believed, even Austronesian sailing.
But as the bus windows shows, the earliest Salvadorans chose forbodingly — it is an Eden that occasionally erupts. Still, it was the Spanish who had the uniquely bad sense to plot San Salvador between the volcanoes Ilopango and El Boquerón, now looming. Ilopango’s eruption in 536 CE registered among the largest in recorded history, covering the globe in ash, and confounding the Byzantine historian Procopius. El Boquerón’s in 1917 was a more parochial affair, spitting volcanic bombs over the capital, but this time leaving Europe to destroy itself in peace. Taking stock of the metal beams hoisting various parking garages as we enter the city, I realize that San Salvador has been designed to accommodate this fact—that eventually it will be swallowed by a volcanic eruption, cemented as a motley of Palestinian suzerainty, Pipil revolts, and castizo hubris. There is plenty of graffiti for future archeologists to consider.
Around 3:00, we arrive at the San Salvador bus terminal. The lot, like much of San Salvador, is still crested in barbed wire. As I get up, a man taps me on the shoulder and points at my seat.
“You left your change.”
When I travel, I have the terrible habit of bringing my Protestant thrift with me. In fact, I am ashamed to admit that I haggled for the Cerveza Gallo hat donning my head in the picture above, though in my defense, the lady selling it insisted the special deal arranged was just for me.
My Protestant thrift rears its ugly head again as I alight from the San Salvador bus terminal and am met by a taxi driver ready to whisk me into his cab.
“How much?” I ask.
“Seven dollars.”
“Uber is much cheaper,” I blurt.
“Ah, well, Uber!” he says in exasperation. Unlike the Guatemalan taxi drivers, he has no yarn to spin.
In places where Uber is legal, it would seem that the contemporary taxi economy mostly revolves around positioning and pressure. Be the first one to the bus, and surely, a wearied tourist will eagerly cough up the indeterminate surcharge.
At the Guatemalan border, a similar scheme is at work, and it is easy to see why. Score one $70 ride to Flores a day, as I was offered, and you are netting $25,500 annually. (The trip is less than two hours.) Score just two a week, and you aren’t so far off of Guatemala’s per capita income. Perhaps milling around, waiting for a hapless, non-Protestant tourist, isn’t such a bad gig.
But given the low stakes at the San Salvador bus terminal, I start to feel a bit guilty about my Protestant instincts and cough up $5 for a trip around the corner. Thankfully, my driver set an egregiously high rate at the start and is still content enough to chat.
Unlike Edwin, he is not so much a sovereign citizen and reveals his fondness for Bukele. He centers his praise on the infrastructure improvements.
“It’s gotten much better,” he notes as we wind through a roundabout. “The roads here used to be beaten up.”
It may sound like a trivial observation, but if you have ever been to Honduras or Guatemala, you will know that functioning roads are no joke. In the western half of El Salvador, anyway, even the roads that lead to little towns where women press tortillas in front of their homes have a remarkable fresh-tar sheen. Elsewhere, Bukele recently inaugurated a $160 million bypass connected to the Pan-American highway with the help of the Japanese government.
For people like my driver, it is a crucial point. Bukelismo is not just jail cells, but dams, ports, roads, airports, and entire cities — planned ones, at least. That is one reason El Salvador teetered on default years ago, and as Edwin complained, has been cutting spending on education and healthcare to reign in its deficit.
To tally the score: a national stadium, a Pacific railway, a new international airport, a Bitcoin City (apparently unaffected by the undoing of Bitcoin as legal tender), 1,000 upgraded schools per year, and a technological institute. Much of this, and perhaps in particular the geothermal Bitcoin mining city in La Unión, is starting to look like vaporware. Still, it reflects an unusual level of ambition. To my knowledge, there are no world’s largest flagpole projects in the works.
“To me, Bukele is much more serious than the previous president,” he adds.
But why is Bukele so serious? Why did he do this instead of say, robbing the state treasury using trash bags, like Funes? Or, like Flores, embezzling money from earthquake victims for personal use? Bukele, to be sure, appears to have embezzled money to roll out the nation’s ghostly Bitcoin payment system, but this is progress by regional standards. Perhaps Bukele, being an entrepreneur, sees the longer game. Martinez was stabbed to death by his cab driver in Honduras. Funes croaked ailing as an exile in Nicaragua. Bukele will surely be embalmed in San Salvador’s historic center.
“Before Bukele, did you ever have problems with crime?” I ask.
“I’m lucky to have never been affected, but I know people who were — other drivers, friends. I have a family member who was killed.”
It is a potentially somber topic, but he does not dwell, and just before arriving at the hotel in Zona Rosa, he asks me about my favorite pupusas.
“You have to try the garlic,” he insists, bringing his hand to his mouth in a chef’s kiss.
The next day, I make my way to the Salvadoran Museum of Art, which doubles as a kind of history museum, replete with crucified plantation workers and yellowing union newspaper clippings. One of the most notable modern pieces on display is Danny Zavaleta’s 2006 map of San Salvador, and not just for its garish, Grand Theft Auto-like aesthetic.
In Zavaleta’s version of the capital, just a few years removed from the nation’s first attempt at Mano Dura (“iron fist”), and the same year as the implementation of Super Mano Dura (I shit you not), the historic center belongs to pirates. The city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, dubbed Disneyland, are defended by armed guards. To the far east are blood splatters. A man claims his territory with graffiti.
Busting heads did not work for El Salvador in the 2000s. The difference between the efficacy of Mano Dura then and now centers in part on the judicial system. Whereas in 2004, the nation’s anti-gang law was declared unconstitutional for enabling the arrest of citizens based on their appearance and associations, Bukele has had the good sense to replace any judges who might object to his own similar initiative.
Enrique, my driver to San Salvador’s historic center later that day, is not from any of the areas shown in Zavaleta’s map of San Salvador, but a small town just outside the city. He does not tell me which. He is mestizo, donning a cap and glasses, and listening to the indie band The Drums, the same band my roommate in college liked. He is only 20.
“How do you feel about Bukele?” I ask.
“He’s been very good for us,” he says. “I voted for him in the last election.”
He turns the question at me.
“You have an election in the US — are you going to vote?”
I admit not and try to explain the Electoral College to him, sounding a bit weaselly.
“It’s a red state for Trump,” I say of Tennessee.
“Un estado rojo para Trump,” he repeats, not seeming to find any logic in the words.
“Did you have problems before Bukele?” I ask.
He does not need much time to think.
“In my town, every day, someone would come by and make people pay five dollars,” he says. “They’d pretend they were selling tortillas. And if you didn’t pay, they would kill you.”
It is the first time I have thought about the details of a protection racket in a Salvadoran town, though extortion was the most common way Salvadorans faced gangs before Bukele. By some counts, 70 percent of El Salvador’s businesses were being extorted before the state of exception.
“People would get in my Uber, I wouldn’t know who they were,” he continues. “They’d tell me to be quiet until we got to the place, and then they wouldn’t pay me. It was difficult [era bien yuca] to say no because you knew they could just kill you.”
The verb matar seems to stay at the top of his mind.
“You know, I work with the police now — if I did that back then, they would have killed me.”
“Some people say he’s ignoring human rights,” I mention, pitching a softball.
“Look, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” he says with some frustration, “but we have a state of exception. We’ve put over 80,000 people in prison.”
The fact seems to justify itself.
“People act like they were innocent people,” he continues, “but with what they did, we were ruining the economy. If you want to improve the country, you have to do this.”
“I understand,” I emphasize, but I’m not sure how much I do.
He reflects with an analogy.
“It’s like a cancer, you have two options—do you want the solution or are you going to stay like this?”
There is a long pause as we wind onto the interstate. I think about the many stories of Salvadorans abroad returning home recently.
“Do you think people still want to immigrate to the US?” I ask.
“Lots of people still want to go — you can make in a month in the US what we make in a week.”
He is quite pragmatic.
“How much do you make here?” I probe shamelessly.
“Here the minimum salary is $387 a month. If you work in a call center, you can make $700-800.”
He asks me something, but my Spanish falters and I don’t understand. He assumes the blame.
“It’s probably because I’m from San Salvador. In the west, Santa Ana, they have a very different accent.”
To hammer home the point about the dialectical variation of Spanish, which is really no joke, he tries to show me a recording of a Dominican rider speaking Spanish but can’t find it.
“Diablo! Diablo! I can’t even understand them,” he insists.
Before I can plot out the next thing to say, he continues, “You know our original language?”
“Nahuatl?” I guess.
“We spoke Nawat. Then the Spanish came, robbed us, and made us speak their language.”
He says it with a certain matter-of-factness that betrays no real contempt — yes, we spoke this language, and then we were conquered, and now we speak this one. Maybe in 500 years, he will speak Chinese or Swahili.
It strikes me that I know nothing of Salvadoran Spanish or even really Central American Spanish. When I worked in Honduras, my co-worker Tom, who spoke no Spanish, liked to deride the region’s dialect as pidgin Spanish, but the language of Cervantes takes many forms.
“Can you teach me some Salvadoran Spanish? Stuff you use in the street?” I ask.
“If we’re with friends, screwing around, we say Mira, maje! [look idiot].”
There are no pirates in El Salvador’s historic center today, but hordes of families, local or otherwise. Dotted around the Barrios Plaza, men sell bottled water in a language that does not quite register to me as Spanish. In the middle, a bronzed Gerardo Barrios sits on horseback — the prototypical 19th-century Latin American president, a coup stager, and a coup victim. Fought a war with Guatemala — God knows why. Executed by a firing squad. Not quite a Central American Cincinnatus, but then, what other ex-president would you give a statue? Historic plazas need dead presidents. As I walk toward the brutalist El Rosario Church, I spot a policewoman prodding several homeless-looking men to move it along.
If one wanted to know why Bukele runs half of his Twitter account in English and attends a conference devoted to owning libs, the bustling historic center is surely part of the answer. For a small tropical nation, tourism is a wellspring. Bukele, a marketer by trade, would like to sell El Salvador’s forgotten charms to the world. So far it is working. Tourism numbers have nearly doubled since his election, though there are few visible American tourists in San Salvador. One sign that there is a way to go is that a family casually asks me for directions to a restaurant in Spanish.
After seeing the brutalist church, I arrive back at the plaza. On the north side sits the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior. After being destroyed first by earthquake and then fire, it is now in its third iteration. During the late 1970s, El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero deferred completion of the newest version to fund projects for the poor. After Romero was assassinated for his left-wing sympathies in 1980, 250,000 mourners (again, a Xenophontean figure) attended his funeral at the cathedral. Forty-four died in the bomb-filled mayhem. The event was among the major catalysts for El Salvador’s ensuing civil war.
As I push in, I notice men and women kneeling before an altar in prayer. The cathedral is very much living, but one should not overinfer from the pious Salvadorans inside. If a recent survey is to be believed, El Salvador today has more Protestants than Catholics, following trends in other Latin American nations. But what is the distinction, anyway? It is easy enough to forget in the US, with all the talk of deaths of despair and hedge fund harems, there are still men who do manual labor and kneel before a cross. I make my way downstairs to Romero’s tomb. He was canonized in 2018, one year before Bukele’s election.
As I leave, I head to the opposite side of the plaza, where the new Chinese library Bukele unveiled this year sits — the product of suspending diplomatic recognition for Taiwan in 2018. It is silver, gleefully contemporary, and makes little sense. Despite residing in El Salvador’s historic center, one of the only apparent historical continuities with El Salvador’s past is the giant red communist flag that waves at its entrance. It is a Chinese flag. The library is, if nothing else, pristine—there are security guards at every turn to ensure so. I walk through a metal detector to go inside.
But how empty it is! Like a steel cavern with stray bookshelves off to the side. While there are plenty of people, unlike at the cathedral, it is not totally clear what they’ve come for. I climb several flights of stairs, eyeball the stray bookshelves, and exit onto the library’s terrace, which faces the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior. Barrios looms in the middle of the plaza. Around me, Salvadorans pose to take pictures with the gold and white facade across the plaza. Perhaps that is the library’s true function — as a vantage point from which to view the cathedral.
 | A guest post by
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I read this all the way through and want to thank the author for his hard work and insights. I learned a lot and am grateful for the lesson. And the photos! Great stuff.
Interesting that the CPAC types who bag on George Soros have no problem with a foreign billionaire stringpuller directly managing the government of the United States. Maybe because Elon Musk is an apartheid-legacy South African and not a Jewish globalist.