international
Who Is Nayib Bukele? El Salvador’s ‘coolest dictator’
Key takeaways
- At 44, Bukele has built the world’s highest imprisonment rate and scrapped presidential term limits.
- The heavily tattooed gangsters of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) had their order.
- One victim was deliberately dumped on the road leading to Surf City, a tourist development part of President Nayib Bukele’s efforts to position El Salvador as a tropical paradise for holidaymakers and tech entrepreneurs.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
At 44, Bukele has built the world’s highest imprisonment rate and scrapped presidential term limits. What comes next?
xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogle Add Al Jazeera on Googleinfo[Muhammet Okur/Al Jazeera]By Niko Vorobyov Published On 2 May 20262 May 2026On Friday, March 25, 2022, hundreds of cellphones in the small, Central American nation of El Salvador glowed with the same text message: “Adelante” (“go ahead”).
The heavily tattooed gangsters of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) had their order. They went on a rampage, gunning down 62 people across the nation on Saturday, the bloodiest day in El Salvador since the 1980s civil war. By Sunday, 87 lay dead.
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