The first time El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele tried to pass a sweeping “foreign agents” law, which taxes nongovernmental organizations receiving international funding, the global community came down so swiftly in 2021 that the bill was killed before it could even rise to a legislative vote.
Four years later, when he introduced the bill again, it became law without a single public comment by a foreign government.
In fact, in the span of three weeks in May, Mr. Bukele clamped down on critical voices through a series of arrests and threats, the deployment of military police, and the passage of this long-planned law that will slap a 30% tax on all NGOs that receive funding from abroad. And he did it all with seeming impunity.
Why We Wrote This
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele escalated crackdowns on protests and civil society in the leadup to his seventh year in office. Why now?
The timing might owe something to his dipping performance on areas like the economy and education inside the Central American nation, but most point to external factors that have reduced the power of checks and balances in the region. The United States, which under the last administration imposed sanctions on Mr. Bukele’s officials and likened the president to former, autocratic Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, is now a strong ally of the Salvadoran president. President Donald Trump’s administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelan deportees to languish in Salvadoran prisons this year, joking with Mr. Bukele in the oval office in April about imprisoning U.S. citizens in El Salvador as well.
“This is the era of true noninterventionism in the region,” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. The Trump administration “really cares about two things in Latin America: migration to the U.S., and China. As long as you don’t go against their wishes on those things,” Dr. Freeman says, “the internal political conditions will just be each leader’s to decide.”
“Chaotic” reality?
Mr. Bukele won reelection in 2024, despite a constitutional bar on running for consecutive terms. His party has controlled both the legislative and judicial branches of government since 2021. Controlling all the levers of power has emboldened him to enact controversial policies, like the “state of exception,” which has imprisoned more than 87,000 Salvadorans while curtailing civil liberties since 2022.
The escalation in El Salvador comes as Mr. Bukele, a former ad man who has positioned himself as the region’s foremost security expert, has lost his tight grip on El Salvador’s narrative, analysts say. Even his enormous popularity is showing signs of receding, albeit relatively. A recent poll by CID Gallup shows 84% approval, a decline of 7 points since November 2024.
An “effective government narrative is hard to manage when reality is chaotic,” says Ricardo Valencia, an assistant professor of public relations at California State University, Fullerton.
A May report by the University of Central America in San Salvador found that since March, the Bukele administration has generated 22 international news events, 15 of which put the country in a negative light. Events including the arrival of Venezuelans sent from the U.S. to a Salvadoran megaprison, and the publication of a series of interviews with gang leaders who described negotiating with the Bukele administration, which directly contradicts the president’s tough-on-crime image, were not good for Mr. Bukele’s reputation, according to UCA researchers.
But there’s also a sense that Mr. Bukele has been emboldened by his relationship with the United States and Mr. Trump in recent months. And few foreign governments have called out Mr. Bukele on his clampdown in May.
On May 12, a group of rural campesinos staged a peaceful protest to draw attention to threats of land eviction. In a bid for the president’s attention, the farmers marched near his private residence. That night, military police dispersed the protesters and arrested a community leader and the group’s lawyer.
The next day, Mr. Bukele accused organizations “whose only real objective is to attack the government” of being behind the farmers protest, and of trying to destabilize El Salvador. That’s when he announced the foreign agents law.
The situation escalated further with the arrest of Ruth López, a prominent anti-corruption activist, on May 18. In 2024, the BBC singled her out as one of the 100 most influential women in the world. Police arrived at Ms. López’s home at 11 p.m. after the attorney general, a Bukele appointee, accused her of embezzlement on social media. Two weeks later, the government had yet to provide any evidence to back up the allegations and declared the case secret when presenting formal charges.
Cristosal, the NGO where Ms. López is the chief legal officer, calls it an arbitrary arrest.
Two days after her arrest, the foreign agents bill was passed. Beyond the tax, the law forces anyone who receives funding from abroad to register under a new institution, which decides which organizations and individuals can carry out their work inside El Salvador.
“This is an attempt to punish the advocacy, accountability, and human rights work” of civil society, said Verónica Reyna, human rights director at the NGO Servicio Social Pasionista, at a press conference May 21. She said Mr. Bukele has been “emboldened” by foreign governments, including the U.S., made worse by the fact that he pushed the foreign agents law through the legislative assembly “without questioning from world powers.”
Reforms vs. repression?
The timing of Mr. Bukele’s escalation is surprising, says Dr. Freeman, given that he’s not facing imminent elections, nor a particularly organized opposition. But still “There’s a pretty good opportunity structure right now, where he knows he’s not going to face any consequences from Washington or really other significant international repercussions. It’s just something he’s wanted to do, and now he can do it,” Dr. Freeman says, referring to the various aspects of the May crackdown.
“The increase of [government] punitive actions generates a lot of concern in Salvadoran society,” the University of El Salvador, the country’s only publicly funded university, said in a rare public statement. The government’s moves “negatively impact the exercise of citizens’ legitimate right to protest against government actions or decisions they consider harmful to their rights and interests.”
Rodolfo Cardenal, a Jesuit priest, wrote in a column about the protest near Mr. Bukele’s home that “The root of popular discontent is … characterized by a deepening inequality.”
His warnings echo common refrains during El Salvador’s bloody civil war in the 1980s. The war ended through peace accords that included a fundamental component: that all police should be civil, not military like the ones that were sent to repress peaceful protests on May 12. “Without radical reforms, repression is the alternative to maintain power,” Mr. Cardenal said.
