El Salvador, long known for its history of political and gang violence, has in recent years made headlines for its authoritarian turn under President Nayib Bukele. The country’s leader is a carefully crafted media product whose much-vaunted achievements are little more than publicity stunts, argues Óscar Martínez, Editor-in-Chief of the investigative news site El Faro and author of previous works on violence, gangs, migration, and journalism in Central America. With its rigorous reporting on government corruption and secret gang pacts, El Faro has drawn the president’s ire. That coverage—particularly interviews with gang leaders involved in the negotiations that were published in May 2025—is also the reason the newsroom has since been forced into exile. Bukele, el rey desnudo (Bukele, the Naked Emperor) thus stands as both a symbol of defiant journalism and a sharp examination of El Salvador’s resurgent authoritarianism.
This volume offers a concise profile of a self-interested autocrat who maintains a façade of democracy and national progress to conceal his abuse of power and pursuit of ill-gotten wealth. In six chapters, each built around an illustrative anecdote, Martínez explains how Bukele built his dictatorship, sustains his popular appeal, and deals with his critics. Written in a frank, sarcastic tone, the book sketches a politician who is idolized by his supporters yet opportunistic, ruthless, and ultimately diminished by his own lies.
This volume offers a concise profile of a self-interested autocrat who maintains a façade of democracy and national progress to conceal his abuse of power and pursuit of ill-gotten wealth.
Bukele began his political career as a two-term mayor for the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), first in the town of Nuevo Cuscatlán and later in the capital San Salvador. When he ran for the presidency, however, he skillfully repositioned himself as an outsider ready and able to take on a corrupt and criminal establishment. This clever self-presentation has continued during his time as president; Bukele frames himself as a visionary leader who is transforming the country into a modern, technologically savvy, and investor-friendly nation.
This hero’s story has proved as influential as it is false. Why then, despite evidence to the contrary, do many Salvadorans both at home and abroad believe it? In what is perhaps the most telling passage of the book, Martínez observes:
“The vast majority of my compatriots were desperate and humiliated. They knew nothing about democracy or history – they were too busy simply trying to survive. They were ready to be deceived, and eager to believe.”
Driven more by pragmatism than ideology, Bukele has made many statements over the years that chart his political journey. In social media posts he later tried to delete, he rejected dictatorship and corruption, celebrated independent journalism, and championed abortion rights. Today, his public stance on any of these issues is a complete reversal from his earlier professed commitments.
Bukele is not a leader who surrounds himself with “the people” to draw the legitimacy he craves, but an influencer who has cultivated a cult of personality. As he morphed from progressive mayor into the self-styled “coolest dictator in the world,” his aesthetics changed with him. The man who once wore a red FMLN outfit became a baseball-hat-wearing millennial president and subsequently a black-coated caudillo figure.
The day he began his second—and unconstitutional—term in office, Bukele addressed his supporters from the balcony of the National Palace. Martínez describes in vivid detail the spectacle that unfolded in the square. The president asked the obliging crowd to swear unconditional allegiance to his national project of renewal and to never listen to the “enemies of the people.” This symbolic oath of loyalty conveyed Bukele’s vision of El Salvador: a country ruled by one man who seeks an audience, not engaged citizens. For people to realize that the image of both the democratic leader and the modernizing nation is pure fiction, they will need to look beyond the publicity and understand how he governs.
Bukele is not a leader who surrounds himself with ‘the people’ to draw the legitimacy he craves, but an influencer who has cultivated a cult of personality.
In the president’s definition, democracy is simply what “the people” want. It took him five years to dismantle El Salvador’s democratic institutions and remove all obstacles to his arbitrary exercise of power. Martínez chronicles how a legislative supermajority in 2021 allowed Bukele to capture the Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court. The regime loyalists who were appointed to these institutions shelved major criminal investigations and paved the way for Bukele’s unconstitutional re-election in 2024. The slide into authoritarianism was swift and broad, even more extensive than the book might suggest. Martínez acknowledges that the state of emergency and the Foreign Agents Law have contributed to the closure of the civic space, particularly in independent media and civil society groups. To appreciate just how systematically checks and balances were removed, we will also need to consider how this administration muzzles universities and disciplines its bureaucracy.
With his background in advertising, Bukele perfectly understands the power of publicity and social media. He has built an extensive communications apparatus that combines traditional and social media with influencers and an army of trolls. This machine churns out sleek propaganda that relentlessly promotes Bukele’s personal brand. The government systematically manipulates information to fit its narrative, targets audiences’ emotions through a polarizing discourse, and creates conflicts to distract from inconvenient truths. This playbook was on display during Bukele’s initial powergrab, when he and a group of armed soldiers forced their way into the Legislative Assembly in February 2020. Ostensibly done to pressure lawmakers to approve a loan request for his security plan, Martínez lays out in detail how the president had orchestrated this spectacle primarily to deflect attention from a water supply crisis and the image problem it had created for the government.
As the author points out, not without a touch of despondency, Bukele continues to enjoy high approval ratings both domestically and internationally. In El Salvador, widespread discontent with the traditional parties enabled his ascent to power. Since then, Bukele has made a name for himself as a leader who gets things done and is bold enough to take on his country’s brutal gangs. Alas, much of this acclaim stems from the power of his propaganda. Images of the president’s war on gangs, particularly the widely publicized Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), have captured global attention. More generally, his narrative of a brighter El Salvador has proved so seductive that people are prepared to overlook his flaws or to see past the hype. The project that perhaps best illustrates Bukele’s mythical tales of change is his 2021 announcement that the country would be the first in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender and create Bitcoin City, a tax-free smart city to be fully powered by geothermal energy. Beyond the hype, its use as a currency was undermined by international lender conditionality while the city itself exists only in the government’s AI-powered media content.
Since Bukele came into office, El Salvador has experienced marked security improvements—chiefly the dismantling of the gangs and a sustained drop in registered homicides. Far from constituting a “security miracle,” as the administration claims, as Martínez shows, these developments stem from earlier gang pacts and the ongoing state of emergency. The deals, whose collapse in March 2022 triggered the start of emergency rule, date back to Bukele’s time as mayor of San Salvador. Under the agreements, the gangs traded homicide reductions and electoral support for prison privileges and protection from extradition. The state of emergency, Martínez explains, has outgrown the war on gangs. Instead, it sweeps up thousandsof people with no gang ties—Salvadorans get arrested on flimsy evidence or because they are regime critics. After four years, mistreatment in detention has resulted in over 500 documented deaths.
With his background in advertising, Bukele perfectly understands the power of publicity and social media.
The case of Alejandro Muyshondt illustrates both the regime’s cruelty and its ruthless handling of perceived traitors. A close friend and national security adviser to the president, Muyshondt was arrested in August 2023 after publicly accusing pro-Bukele officials of corruption and drug trafficking. Six months later he was dead, with photos showing his badly bruised and crudely stitched body. His death, never conclusively investigated, appears to have been a warning to disgruntled regime insiders.
The state of emergency’s origins, and the abuses it entails, raise important questions that go beyond Martínez’s book. Some of these concern U.S. federal prosecutions of top MS-13 leaders, the bureaucracy complicity in prison brutality and wrongful convictions, and the measure’s deep entrenchment in the legal system.
Bukele, el rey desnudo delves into the making of an autocrat. As a piece of narrative journalism, it is an unflinching examination of how Bukele consolidated his power. It is also a highly readable attempt to pierce the complacency of bystanders to El Salvador’s democratic breakdown. As the regime comes under greater external scrutiny, will repression grow, even transnationally? Will journalism survive in exile? And as the country prepares for general elections in 2027, will pro-democracy actors be able to mobilize resistance and build compelling political alternatives?
Sonja Wolf is a Research Professor with the School of Government and Economics at the Panamerican University, Mexico City. Her research examines gangs, security, and authoritarianism in the Americas, with a particular focus on El Salvador. She is the author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (University of Texas Press, 2017).