El Faro English translates Central America. Subscribe to our newsletter.
“Raise your hands,” Nayib Bukele told a crowd of hundreds of people during his inaugural address on Saturday from a balcony at the National Palace, launching into call-and-repeat: “We swear to unconditionally defend our national project, following each step to a tee without complaining, asking God for wisdom, so that our country will be blessed with another miracle. And we swear to never listen to the enemies of the people.”
Bukele was dressed in a flat-collared black suit with ornate gold embroidering around the neck and cuffs, reminiscent of post-independence strongman attire. After he was sworn-in by Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro, in front of the National Palace balcony marched a military procession, the first time the march happened at an inauguration since the 1992 Peace Accords.
The speech began with Bukele boasting that “100 percent of the countries of the world” had recognized his government — an obvious rebuttal to all those who in recent months highlighted the fact that he was reelected despite an explicit constitutional ban and in an electoral process plagued with irregularities.
In an extended analogy, he compared himself to a doctor who had cured El Salvador of cancer —the gangs— despite the criticism of the clinicians of old, and promised that he would now turn his attention to citizens’ most pressing ailment: “To heal the economy, we will perhaps again have to take some bitter medicine.”
Closing the ceremony, San Salvador Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas and Dante Gebel, an international Evangelical icon, gave their explicit blessing to his continuity in power.
The atmosphere in San Salvador was tense. Snipers looked down from high points, including the Palace and the tower of the Metropolitan Cathedral, as soldiers guided the crowds. Bukele tinkered with the aesthetic of the Armed Forces; the Honor Guard donned new black capes and swapped its protocolary bayonets for assault rifles.
Days earlier, the president —not even pretending to be on official leave, as he had claimed in November in order to justify his reelection campaign— announced a military encirclement of the San Salvador neighborhood Apopa, purportedly to arrest gang members. Claudia Juana Rodríguez, his purported presidential designee, had not once appeared in public and was not visible at his second inauguration.
Meanwhile, web monitors reported a shutdown of the messaging app Telegram across multiple internet providers. Last week, a hacktivist group posted in Telegram chats claiming responsibility for a trove of documents extracted from the Bukele-controlled Supreme Court.
Hours before inauguration, in a particularly scandalous apparent act of hacktivism, Bukele’s face was transposed onto pornographic content displayed on digital ad billboards in different sites across San Salvador.
Parallel US delegation
In the strongest showcasing of support from Casa Presidencial for Donald Trump’s reelection campaign to date, Bukele’s office made a special announcement on Friday of the arrival of Donald Trump Jr., the only non-state guest that they highlighted prior to inauguration on official social media. That same day, the former president Trump was convicted on 34 counts relating to his cover-up of hush payments to the pornstar Stormy Daniels.
“Honored to be at @nayibbukele’s inauguration to support a leader willing to fight the globalist for the benefit of his people. We need more like him,” wrote Trump Jr. on X, where he also posted on Saturday “Fuck Joe Biden” and claimed that “these radical leftists [in the U.S.] don't just want my father in a prison cell. They want him dead.”
“We don’t jail the opposition here,” Bukele jabbed on Sunday in a video with Trump’s son. It was not true: In the two days prior to the election, nine historic leaders of the left-wing party FMLN had been arrested under dubious government accusations of planning a bombing on inauguration day, in what FMLN leader Nidia Díaz denounced as “another political capture.”
At CPAC in February, Bukele boasted of having “pulverized” the opposition. It was the result of a muddled election: Bukele not only managed to avoid any resistance from the electoral magistrates against his illegal candidacy; the government withheld public financing to opposition parties, arbitrarily cut the number of legislative seats just months before the vote, and changed the way the votes would be counted.
With Trump Jr. on the red carpets Saturday were Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and María Elvira Salazar, Utah Senator Mike Lee, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Mexican ex-presidential hopeful Eduardo Verástegui, producer of Sound of Freedom, a film on child trafficking popular in QAnon circles, boosted last year by the administrations of Bukele and, in Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei. Salvadoran Ambassador to the U.S. Milena Mayorga posed with them.
Also in attendance was former Ambassador Ronald Johnson (2019-2021), a retired Army colonel and former CIA liaison at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, considered an active promoter of Bukele among Republicans, from Miami, since he left the Embassy when Biden took office.
Other international visitors like libertarian president of Argentina Javier Milei met with Bukele for photo-ops. Matt Gaetz took the flattery a step further, calling him “an inspiration to the Western world.” In a video they posted together, Bukele responded that “we have a lot of common friends.”
Salazar, a former Miami news anchor of Cuban descent and correspondent who once interviewed Fidel Castro, wrote that “we need a Bukele in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.”
“We’ve seen this movie before,” exiled Nicaraguan journalist Wilfredo Miranda wrote in a column in El Faro. “Dear Salvadorans, I must reiterate: reelection corrupts everything… I acknowledge your exhaustion with the traditional political class that governed El Salvador, your disgust toward the gangs, your disappointment with democracy. But please do not put your trust in false prophets born in dark times.”
Return of the “socio confiable”
In their own overtures toward San Salvador, multiple top officials in Biden’s cabinet saluted the head of state’s second term and doubled down on muting criticism of constitutional and human rights violations. The Bukele administration seemed content accepting the courtship from Trump and Biden camps alike.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who was in El Salvador, underscored, “As President Bukele embarks on his second term, I want to express the United States' dedication to supporting the growth and prosperity of El Salvador.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken added, in step with the Salvadoran president’s emphasis on the economy: “We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to work alongside you and your administration to advance good governance and inclusive economic prosperity.”
Just two and a half years ago, when interim ambassador Jean Manes left El Salvador complaining of the “lack of a partner” there, she had compared Bukele’s ambitions to seek reelection —expressed in the obedient Constitutional Chamber’s reversal to allow him to run— to Hugo Chávez.
The public reaction from San Salvador to the U-turn was the warmest since Biden took office. Ambassador Mayorga posed with Bukele and her U.S. counterpart William Duncan, writing: “Thank you Ambassador Duncan… We recognize your impressive work.”
Nuevas Ideas legislator Alexia Rivas —a prominent member of a legislative bloc that millimetrically toes the communications line set by the ruling party— responded in the comments: “Socios confiables” — trustworthy partners. This is the same catchphrase used by the U.S. Embassy from 2019 to 2021, during the tenure of Trump appointee Johnson.
The praise did not cut cleanly along left-right faultlines. Honduran President Xiomara Castro’s private secretary, her son Héctor Manuel Zelaya Castro, celebrated the “historic inauguration.”
The Tegucigalpa delegation seized the opportunity of the visit to meet with King Felipe VI to discuss Spanish cooperation, alongside that of the U.S., for its proposed Inter-Oceanic Railway, an alternative project to the Panama Canal that Central American countries have dreamed of —and failed to implement— multiple times in recent decades.
The Salvadoran government announced a press conference set for the afternoon, to name Bukele’s second-term cabinet. But they did not hold it, have announced no cabinet, and have offered no explanation for the vacancies.
“The now de facto president and his family clan have risen above our laws to assume the throne, without any institution capable of imposing limits to their constitutional trampling. The authoritarian regime has become a dictatorship,” wrote El Faro’s editorial board on Saturday night.
“It is not the less privileged,” the board concluded, “but the middle and upper classes, whom we implore to stand up to the dictatorship.”
This article first appeared in the June 3 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
