The Influencer President
How Nayib Bukele entertained his way to dictatorship.
APRIL 30, 2026
In early 2024, one story dominated the news agenda in Spain. Television, radio and newspapers all attempted to understand what had happened in Barbate Port, in the province of Cádiz on February 9. That day, six medium-sized speedboats, belonging to drug traffickers or smugglers, had sought refuge from a storm among the breakwaters and docks of the port. Six Civil Guard officers set out on a Zodiac — an inflatable boat with a motor — to intercept the vessels. One of them, a semi-rigid inflatable boat that was 14 meters long, weighed 5,000 kilos and powered by four 300-horsepower engines, pulled away, accelerated and rammed into the Zodiac, which was 6 meters long, weighed 500 kilos, and had only a single 150-horsepower engine. The larger boat accelerated toward the smaller one and ran over it like a pickup truck speeding over a dead dog. One of the sailors filming from another boat is heard saying with disgust upon seeing the Zodiac: “It’s the Civil Guard, with that shitty raft! That piece of shit is all they’ve got.”
Officers Miguel Ángel González, 39, and David Pérez, 43, died in the collision. Another officer was seriously injured. Over the following weeks, the four occupants of the larger boat, including the driver, all Moroccan nationals, were either arrested or turned themselves in.
Right-wing parties, especially Vox, the most radical, turned the event into a spectacle. They claimed that politicians who let undocumented immigrants into the country were responsible for the incident, that Spaniards were tired of being lenient with Africans, that Moroccans in general had been killing Spaniards for years, that the situation was out of control and nobody was doing anything about it. Of course they would do something, if they came to power. And it was about time they came to power.
“They’re all such wimps, these politicians. You need a man with a firm hand to bring all that scum to heel. You know who? Hey, you! You know who?” Ángel jolted the toothless man awake, who had lost himself, as he sometimes did, in his attempt to roll a cigarette.
I happened to be passing through Madrid at that time, on an extended layover on my way to a literature festival in Norway. I’m a creature of habit, and whenever I’m in Madrid, I sit down to read a newspaper in a dive bar in Plaza de Tirso de Molina, where in the mornings toothless junkies down their first cold beers of the day and the waiters, two wrinkled men who look much older than they are, never shut up. It’s great. In that little dive bar, I get my news in three ways: I read the paper, I glance at the news broadcasts almost always being shown on the old TV mounted on the wall, and I listen to the analyses of the prematurely old men serving beers and cortados.
On the television screen of the bar that morning, the newscaster announced the death of the two civil guards in Barbate Port.
One of the two waiters, the one who didn’t make sandwiches and was always at the bar, was the one who ruled the roost. In the bar, besides those coming and going, there were also two people sitting at a table: a toothless man, who sipped a small beer while rolling a cigarette with the leisurely pace of someone who had nothing else to do that day, and a very fat woman with purple streaks in her hair. It was obvious they were both regulars. They called the waiter who made drinks by his name: Ángel.
Ángel was upset about what had happened: “They’re all brutes and bastards! The guards in those shitty boats and the fucking Arabs on their yachts!” Just outside, in the Tirso de Molina plaza, dozens of Africans were hanging around in small groups, many of them regulars at Ángel’s bar.
The toothless man and the fat woman just nodded. Ángel didn’t speak, he shouted. “They’re all such wimps, these politicians. You need a man with a firm hand to bring all that scum to heel. You know who? Hey, you! You know who?” Ángel jolted the toothless man awake, who had lost himself, as he sometimes did, in his attempt to roll a cigarette. He barely looked up, but Ángel was satisfied he was listening: “Like that Bukele guy. Now he’s got balls.” “Yes, he’s got balls!” the other waiter chimed in. And Ángel launched into a tirade about how Nayib Bukele has a prison where it’s legal to kill “gang members,” and where if someone is convicted of murder, they don’t get food unless their family brings it to them, and about how he had wiped out “those gangs” in just a month. The toothless man nodded, and the fat woman dozed.
I asked for the bill, and with that, I felt like I existed again in that bar. Ángel placed it in front of me on a small plate, and I took the opportunity to ask, “Where’s that Bukele guy from?” “From Ecuador or something like that,” Ángel replied. “And how did you find out about him?” I asked. “From TV. He’s everywhere, because nobody’s ever done what he has,” Ángel answered. As I left, Ángel continued explaining to the toothless man the virtues of Bukele, the one from Ecuador or something like that.
Traveling the world as a Salvadoran since Bukele became president is different. Before, the natural reaction was a question, or a misunderstanding: “And where is that?” “El Salvador, the one in Chile or Brazil?” Since Bukele has come to power, the reaction is usually: “Oh right, Bukele’s country.”
Weeks after hearing the waiter Ángel say that to solve the problem of the Spanish coast, a Bukele was needed, I toured some cities in Norway. In the port city of Fredrikstad, I met with a group of teenagers in their final year of high school, all Spanish students. At one point, out of curiosity, I asked who could locate El Salvador on a map. Nobody could. I asked if any of the 30 or so of them had heard of Bukele, and four raised their hands. It seems like a small number, but it isn’t: Four teenagers immersed in their first-world teenage lives, almost 10,000 kilometers from El Salvador, didn’t know where the country was but had heard of that man.
In Spain, a Civil Guard officer congratulated me at the airport after returning my passport: “Congratulations, what a tremendous president you have.” In Colombia, every taxi driver I spoke to had words of praise for Bukele. The same in Chile. In Panama and Costa Rica, if it were up to the taxi drivers, Bukele would govern them. In New Jersey, one afternoon I’d had enough and asked the Dominican barber, who had been delaying my haircut for half an hour to extol the virtues of Bukele’s mega-prison, if he knew what a state of emergency was, and he said no. I asked if he knew that Bukele had made a pact with the gangs, and he said it was impossible. At least I managed to finish my haircut in silence.
It’s overwhelming going around the world talking to people whose argument for praising Bukele is that they saw a television program that featured the mega-prison or that they are among the 16 million people who saw the mockery of an interview the Mexican YouTuber Luisito Comunica did with Bukele in 2021, which ends with Bukele saying, “I hardly ever give interviews, but I’m sure that this interview will be watched more than any news program or newspaper, so it was worth it.” Or else, they saw a snippet of the “interview” that the rapper Residente, who seems to think he’s an expert in everything, conducted with Bukele in the middle of the pandemic, on Instagram live, in which the singer made it clear that he knew almost as little about El Salvador as the bartender in Madrid. Perhaps they saw that empty speech by Bukele in 2019 before the United Nations plenary session, which resonated around the world because thousands of media outlets thought it was disruptive of Bukele to take a selfie from the podium, and predicted — accurately — that the gesture would be more viral than his words.
Bukele knows that the world will talk more about when he decided to change his status on X to “Philosopher King” than about the nearly 1 million Salvadorans on the brink of famine or the hundreds of corpses with signs of torture that have come out of his prisons and been buried with the same cause of death on their official autopsy.
The other side of the coin is not as well known. It didn’t go viral when Bukele used soldiers to prevent journalists he considered inconvenient from entering his press conference, or when he accused a newspaper of money laundering on national television without evidence, or when he accused journalists of being gang members, or when the Salvadoran Journalists Association announced in June 2025 that there were 47 Salvadoran journalists in exile. Nor do Bukele’s absences get any attention: the four years that he spent without holding a single press conference in the country; the six years — his entire time as president — without granting a single interview to a Salvadoran journalist (journalist, I said).
Bukele, who at 18 began working in his family’s advertising agencies, which for over a decade handled the political campaigns of the leftist party, knows how to sell himself and understands that what’s important doesn’t necessarily have to be interesting, and that the world pays more attention to a selfie and a cheerful YouTuber than to a famine or a mafia pact. He understands that a slogan matters more than an idea, and instead of presenting detailed public policy plans, he offers catchy slogans: “Money abounds when nobody steals”; “The same old faces” (as he calls all politicians who aren’t him or his cronies); “Return what you stole.”
Bukele knows that the world will talk more about when he decided to change his status on X to “Philosopher King” than about the nearly 1 million Salvadorans on the brink of famine or the hundreds of corpses with signs of torture that have come out of his prisons and been buried with the same cause of death on their official autopsy: death by pulmonary edema, which is as specific as saying that someone died because they stopped living.
He always understood how to get attention, ever since he was mayor of San Salvador, the capital, and signed up to go up against La Choly, a popular radio personality, in a fairground competition in August 2015. That week, nobody talked about anything but the lead-up to the big challenge in which Bukele and La Choly would see who could withstand the jolts of that bumpy musical fairground ride, which tries to shake off its passengers. Bukele emerged the victor.
Bukele knows how to market himself and that the packaging matters. That’s why we no longer see the man from his early years in politics: thin, with a receding hairline, an unkempt beard, and a red t-shirt, standing among a crowd of second-rate members of the leftist party, soaking up the sun at rallies. Instead, he has gradually transformed into the magnanimous Bukele, with a perfectly groomed beard, jet-black hair covering his entire head, and that black frock coat with the gold trim — as if tailored by the couturier of Simón Bolívar and Michael Jackson — which he wore at the National Palace in 2024 for the inauguration of his second, unconstitutional term as president. The Bukele you see is a product of Bukele the publicist.
His image is carefully crafted and polished, far removed from that of other politicians who hold babies and hug elderly women: Bukele presents himself as a demigod, or dressed as an emperor; on one occasion an animated video showed him descending from a spaceship amid fireworks before he appeared in person at an event. It’s all filmed, of course, so that afterward it will saturate social media. Bukele is an influencer, and what he’s selling is himself.
It must be said that the political opposition in El Salvador was close to non-existent, and Bukele had no trouble leaving it light years behind. One day, a journalist asked a simple question to Bukele’s predecessor, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a former commander of the Popular Liberation Forces: “What is your Twitter handle?” Cerén, smiling nervously like a child before an oral exam, answered that it was Twitter.com.
Bukele devoured an entire political class that didn’t understand social media, for whom TikTok or Instagram were just dances and photos their kids watched on their phones, and YouTube just showed irrelevant videos that would never replace national television.
Bukele understood that if you’re from a tiny country of 21,000 square kilometers, where few in the world can name two former presidents, it’s a good idea to appear on camera with a rapper like Residente and to talk for an hour with the unsuspecting Mexican actor Luisito Comunica, who understands the complexity of a country like El Salvador as much as he understands advanced chemistry. Bukele understood that the way to get attention is to take a selfie to make a point about how the U.N.’s communication is obsolete, as if anyone believed those plenary sessions were ever intended to go viral.
Bukele usually manages to show the world the corner of his country that he wants them to see, and knows how to make those who look feel privileged, as though they are getting an exclusive.
Bukele’s goal, as a savvy social media expert, was always to go viral and acquire a global reach. To do so, he needed to cultivate a following. And little by little, gesture by gesture, he managed to convince thousands of influencers worldwide that talking about the “coolest dictator” on the planet would bring views; it’s not uncommon for 100 videos containing the word “Bukele” to be uploaded to YouTube in a single day. To reach Spain, Bukele doesn’t need to leave El Salvador; that’s taken care of by dozens of young influencers, and dozens more self-proclaimed journalists, who spend their time “analyzing” his actions and fawning over “the savior of El Salvador,” as one of them dubbed him.
This is how, one by one, video by video, Bukele reached the eyes of Ángel, the bartender in Madrid. And how, for example, in 2024, 81 percent of Chileans said they had a positive image of Bukele.
Like every good publicist, Bukele doesn’t just want to be seen but wants people to see what he wants them to see. Just ask any Chilean citizen, Colombian taxi driver, Spanish Civil Guard officer, or Dominican hairdresser to answer a few questions: Have you seen pictures of Bukele’s mega-prison? Do you know why they’re all the same? Do you know that there are 22 prisons in El Salvador? Have you seen pictures of any other prison in El Salvador?
Bukele usually manages to show the world the corner of his country that he wants them to see, and knows how to make those who look feel privileged, as though they are getting an exclusive. That’s how dozens of journalists presented their safari in Bukele’s mega-prison. The journalists who entered it for a carbon copy tour usually believe it’s a scoop and not just another regular visit. And they keep doing it, and will continue to do so, because it gets likes and hearts and views.
Bukele knows that a good idea will never surpass a good controversy. He also knows that hatred generates more interest than ideas. That’s how he won the hearts of millions of Colombians. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro criticized the victory of the far right in Argentina in 2023, Bukele jumped into the fray, tweeting at him: “Now say it without crying.” And that’s how he won the hearts of millions of Chileans when, after President Gabriel Boric criticized El Salvador’s repressive measures in an interview, arguing that, without getting to the root of the violence, they tend to be “a short-term fix that leads to long-term problems,” Bukele came out guns blazing on X to say “how difficult it must be to lead a country with so little common sense” and “thank God the Chilean people are more than their president.”
When Human Rights Watch criticized the draconian measures in his prisons, his response was to post a simple nickname on social media: “Homeboys Rights Watch.” When the European Union’s criticized his Foreign Agents Law — a carbon copy of the one enacted by the Nicaraguan dictatorship, which essentially allows him to define who is a foreign agent, person or organization, and impose an extra 30 percent tax on all their income — he simply wrote on X that it was a shame that “an aging and overregulated bloc . . . led by unelected bureaucrats still insists on lecturing the rest of the world.”
He was even more brazen in 2025 when mocking the U.S. judge who ruled against the deportation of Venezuelans arrested in that country and sent to the Salvadoran’s mega-prison. When the judge issued the prohibition, the plane with more than 200 Venezuelans was already in the air. Bukele wrote: “Oopsie . . . too late” with a laughing emoji. I could go on describing the attacks and mockery of Nicolás Maduro, Kamala Harris and Claudia Sheinbaum. Bukele seems to emerge victorious from these scraps. Until you stop to think and realize that he’s won nothing, that this is only a squabble in tweets and posts written from many hundreds or thousands of kilometers away.
But Bukele knows how to play the long game. During the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, when Donald Trump was running for his second term, and after Bukele had showered him with praise on social media, Trump had one of his outbursts. At the close of the Republican National Convention, he said, referring to Bukele and the lowering crime rate in El Salvador: “I’d been reading about this for two years, we said, ‘Let’s see what it’s all about.’ And I realized he’s not training them but sending these criminal types, traffickers, inmates, to the United States. He doesn’t say so, he tries to convince everyone he’s doing a wonderful job.” Bukele shook off his delusions of being the emperor of social media and abandoned his bullying tactics in the face of the biggest bully. On his account, he wrote a discreet “Taking the high road.”
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My Cuban friends always told me it’s exhausting to travel the world listening to everyone explain what your country is like, even though they’ve never been there and certainly never have experienced its hardships. Historical differences aside, I understand them better now.
On May 21, 2025, several weeks before I considered myself an exile from Bukele, I finished a short tour of the offices of Democratic senators and congressmen in Washington who were interested in what was happening in El Salvador. These meetings are exhausting; you have 30 minutes in which to explain what you’ve seen. The politicians frown as their entourage of assistants frantically jot things in notebooks that seem like they’ll be filed away somewhere. After three days of meetings, going from office to office, with my creativity waning and my English vocabulary stretched to the limit, I took a walk to clear my head among the fir and cherry trees surrounding the Capitol, thinking of nothing and with absolutely no desire to utter the name Bukele again for a few days.
By then, I had been unable to return to my country for 21 days, after receiving threats of arrest for publishing an interview with two gang leaders who detailed the pacts they had made with Bukele over the course of eight years. I stopped at a liquor store on the corner of New Jersey Avenue and E Street to buy a painfully small pack of cigarettes for $17. Hearing my terrible accent, the Asian man behind the counter asked me, in an even worse accent than mine, where I was from. Anticipating what was coming, I answered, “El Salvador.” “Number One Country,” he replied, and in his broken English, continued: “Do you want to know why?”
I remained silent.
“Why?” I finally replied. It’s so humiliating not to have learned to keep quiet yet.
“Bukele, friend of my president Trump, no gangs, rich with bitcoins, Number One.”
“OK, OK,” I answered, and went back to my hotel room, with no energy to do anything else.
This piece is an edited excerpt, translated for The Dial, from the book “Bukele, el rey desnudo,” published by Anagrama in January.
✺ Published in The Dial
