Nayib Bukele: from election as mayor to negotiations with gangs in El Salvador

In 2015, Nayib Bukele was elected mayor of the capital of El Salvador, San Salvador, by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the FMLN, a former guerrilla group transformed into a party after the civil war. Before that, in 2012, also for the left-wing party, he had been mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán.

A young advertising businessman, Bukele took seriously the 2018 survey indicating that more than 75% of the population of El Salvador agreed that neither Arena nor the FMLN should return to govern. Better than being left or right was being new.

Expelled from the FMLN in 2017, after successive conflicts with the party leadership, he created the Novas Ideias movement, later transformed into a party. As the party was registered too late to launch its presidential candidacy in 2019, Bukele first tried to run for Democratic Change, a center-left party, and, after this possibility was frustrated, he joined Ghana, a right-wing party.

At that moment, Bukele presented himself as the man who could break with bipartisanship. He campaigned against "the usual", attacked corruption on social media and presented the youth who follow him as a counterpoint to the traditional political elites. He won in the first round, with around 53% of the votes.

The identity of leader, of savior hero, added to the intentional reduction of party identification and placed at the center of its actions what 58.6% of respondents to an important survey identified as the country's most serious problem: insecurity.

If you didn't know all this and don't believe it, check. And also take the opportunity to seek information about the numerous evidence of clandestine negotiations between representatives of your government and the main factions.

Yes, the official story that associates Bukele's success against homicides with mass incarceration hides that the fall began before the exceptional regime and the massive arrests that began in 2022.

Penitentiary documents analyzed by the newspaper El Faro record meetings between government officials and MS-13 leaders since the first months of the administration. The conversations dealt with reducing homicides, prison benefits for factions and electoral collaboration with Novas Ideias.

In 2021, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on two Salvadoran officials and stated that government representatives had offered financial incentives and privileges to organized crime, specifically MS-13 and Barrio 18, in exchange for reduced violence and political support.

I bring another set of information for you to check. The gangs that Bukele says he defeated were not born on the streets of El Salvador. Barrio 18 emerged in Los Angeles in the 1960s, and MS-13 was formed in the 1980s among young Salvadorans who had arrived in the United States during the civil war. American deportation policies of the 1990s helped transport these structures to a society just emerging from war.

In El Salvador, successive incarceration policies filled prisons with young people identified as gang members and separated prisoners according to their affiliation. The jails have consolidated themselves as spaces for recruitment, organization and command of the gangs themselves. We know how it happens.