How Nayib Bukele Refounded a State
The young president of El Salvador skillfully rose to power then wielded it to install a new elite and crush violent gangs. He is now focused on delivering economic growth to a newly-peaceful country.
Nayib Bukele is the president of El Salvador, a post he has held since 2019. At just 43 years of age, Bukele has established himself as a de facto ruler with widespread popular legitimacy and support through his decisive defeat of the gangs that had made El Salvador one of the most violent countries in the world prior to his accession to the presidency. Bukele is a live player in politics and government in the Western Hemisphere, with other signature moves like making Bitcoin legal tender in the country in 2021. Located in Central America, El Salvador is one of the smallest and poorest countries in Latin America and was, until Bukele, also one of the most dangerous. In the Americas, widespread violent criminality and disorder in poor countries has been frequently treated as an effectively unsolvable problem, or perhaps a problem solvable only with an indeterminate amount of foreign financial support to help generate economic growth through investment and fund generous social programs. Instead, Bukele has solved this problem on his own, for the first time achieving a key step for much faster economic growth and development in the country. Like other unusually successful small states such as Estonia or the United Arab Emirates, El Salvador may become a model of governance for autocratic governments in small countries without significant natural resources.