The swelling heat in Condadillo feels just a tad lighter from a pond behind Will Claros’ house. Claros, 43, a gold-toothed fisherman with a timid smile, lives in the town of Conchagua, La Unión, in the southeast of El Salvador; his hamlet is situated near a coastal highway that terminates at the Pacific Ocean. There, he and his neighbors get up early to fish for red snapper, dig for oysters, and feed their pigs, chickens, and cattle. At his house, he sat under the shade of a mango tree next to his fishing nets. “I hope you take a good look at it and keep a record that this existed,” he said, “because there will be nothing left.”
If all goes according to the government’s plan, Condadillo will disappear. A new construction project, which the administration has baptized as “Bitcoin City”, will rise in its place. In November 2021, President Nayib Bukele announced his plans for a new, Bitcoin-based metropolis at a luxurious private beach party thrown mostly for U.S. and European crypto investors. Six months later, to international acclaim, he unveiled a theatrical golden model of a modern town with skyscrapers by the ocean.
Bukele has spun this dream city from a series of promises he may not be able to keep. The heart of the city will be a plaza engraved with the symbol of Bitcoin. The city will harvest geothermal energy from the nearby Conchagua volcano. There will be no income or property taxes. People will be able to buy a luxury apartment for a quarter-million dollars or stay in a fancy hotel room after landing at the city’s new airport.
All of this has yet to be built. Not even the ground has been broken. But that airport’s tarmac is supposed to be right about where the cool pond in Claros’ backyard currently lies.
Claros’ tranquil, working-class life changed three years ago. Since then, government employees have parked in his driveway to test the soil and the water. A backhoe furrowed large trenches around the hamlet during the soil tests. Orange paint marks numerous trees for removal around Claros’ pond. The deadline for companies interested in the contracts for dirt roads and bridges to send their offers was July 11. He, like his neighbors, was forced to sell his land.
“It’s like a war,” Claros said along the edge of the water. “We’re only waiting for the first bomb to drop.”
* * *
President Bukele promised Salvadorans a prosperous economy with Bitcoin as one of its pillars. In May 2021, he made Bitcoin legal tender in a matter of hours, vowing to attract foreign investment while distracting international attention away from his growing authoritarianism; five weeks earlier, at his decree, the Legislative Assembly had illegally removed and replaced the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the Attorney General, two major thorns in his side. But in the ensuing months, Bitcoin snagged most of the headlines. “Bitcoin City” —which is supposed to be funded primarily by the government trading on the dips and rises of the volatile price of the cryptocurrency— has been at the heart of Bukele’s bet on Bitcoin.
Even so, his gamble has yet to pay off in economic terms. The country adopted Bitcoin three years ago, yet hardly anybody who lives in El Salvador has used it in daily life. Bitcoin was advertised as capable of saving users $400 million dollars just in fees for remittances sent from the United States, but only 302.2 million have been sent altogether through crypto wallets since the law came into effect, according to Central Reserve Bank figures. That’s 1.3 percent of all remittances in the same period; the saved fees figure is not disclosed. 50 crypto companies were set up in the first year after the approval, according to a technological advisor of the government; they created at least 113 jobs, according to a release signed by 14 companies.
The legacy of the Bitcoin project now rests on Bukele’s ability to build an airport, because the airport promise is all he has left. The government’s narrative appears to be: Build the airport and the Bitcoiners will come back. In June 2022, the Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly approved $12 million to kick-start the airport’s construction. Federico Anliker, a chubby-cheeked, slick-haired high school classmate of President Bukele, is the President of the Executive Commission of the Port Authority (CEPA), the institution that runs El Salvador’s airports and seaports. He has claimed, without providing any more details as to how, that the airport in Condadillo will attract more technologically advanced industries and land tens of thousands of jobs in its first year of operation.
But it’s hard to see how the government’s plans for the airport —and the Bitcoin city that is supposed to emerge because of it— will come to fruition.
The project’s promised energy source and funding are both up in the air. No publicly known studies or investment projects guarantee that energy can be extracted from the Conchagua volcano. Two Salvadoran energy experts denied the creation of any new power plants: one told me that Conchagua had never been considered as a possibility; another wrote that Bukele’s announcement of the discovery of a single well that would provide “95 megawatts” is “clearly false,” since those do not exist anywhere in the world.
Bitcoin City’s construction was to be partially funded by traditional government notes marketed to Bitcoin enthusiasts as “Volcano bonds” because a portion of the earnings would eventually be invested in facilities for geothermal energy. Although the bonds were supposed to go on the market in February 2022, the government has missed several deadlines it set for the launch, the last one for the first quarter of 2024.
Though the Minister of Finance has offered several excuses for the delay, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and “waiting for better market conditions”, the reason could be as simple as insufficient demand. A recent example: in April 2024, crypto giant Bitfinex Securities launched an offer to raise 6.2 million dollars for the construction of a new Hilton hotel at El Salvador’s existing international airport. It reportedly only raised $342,000, and investors are waiting for a refund because it didn’t meet the minimum requirements.
The government has yet to announce alternate funding for Bitcoin City.
The project did not fade away on the grounds of its economic infeasibility because this was never about Bitcoin alone. Rather, it is a project of appearances. On the day of the announcement, Bukele compared Bitcoin City to Alexandria, Alexander The Great’s iconic city. He himself has tied his status as “CEO of El Salvador”, as he has described himself in his X bio, to the success of this big gamble.
It is the tale of a forgotten fishing village that seems poised to be transformed into a tourist paradise for fat wallets. It is being built by investors appealing to both crypto believers and Salvadoran expats who have long dreamed of coming back home.
It is happening in Central America, but it has already happened in Southeast Asia or in the Caribbean. The houses and farming parcels are being turned into apartment towers and resorts, to be serviced by local hands. In that sense, it is hardly a new idea.
Whatever the risks, Anliker made clear early on that the government plans to move forward. In October 2022, he said on television that people would be relocated to “a worthy place to live, much better than where they live right now, very rough conditions for a lot of people.”
The people who already work and live in Conchagua know it’s more likely to bring them displacement than prosperity. “There are millionaires who are thanking God this is happening,” Will Claros said, “but they don’t see us being affected!”
* * *
The airport announcement caused the market value of land in Condadillo to quintuple. Rumors swirled among the locals, who talked about strange U.S. Americans, Italians, and Japanese who wandered the town asking if properties were for sale. A sign posted on a lamp post in the roadway listed a phone number with a message: “I need properties and estates.” Even a man in a pickup truck controlling a drone raises eyebrows: Is he with the government? Is he an investor? Is he just a tourist?
But longtime residents of Condadillo couldn’t share in the land speculation, even if they wanted to sell. Their only choice was to sell to the government, at a set price.
On Oct. 4 and 5, 2022, CEPA employees called the residents of Condadillo one by one to a meeting in La Unión, the eponymous department capital that’s 13 miles away. There, they were asked to sign promises to sell their lands to the government of El Salvador; the government offered $8,000 for 75,000 square feet of land. Claros and many of his neighbors resigned themselves to selling their homes at that price.
But when they spoke to neighboring landowners about relocating, they discovered that similar-sized parcels, with land to grow their crops and easy access to the ocean, would cost upward of $40,000.
Will Claros explains that many residents signed sales promises for a below-market price out of self-preservation. “We signed it because they told us we could either do it or deal with the Attorney General’s Office,” he said. “I don’t want any trouble. A lot of people rushed to sign, although maybe they could have waited for a better offer.”
He had good reason to be concerned. By the time the residents were summoned to the government offices, El Salvador had been under a state of emergency for seven months, five months longer than the Constitution allows. By then, over 55,000 people had been arrested (now, the number is around 80,000, according to official figures). Anyone arrested under the state of emergency does not have the right to an attorney and can end up in pretrial detention for months between court appearances, with no guarantee of habeas corpus. A Human Rights Watch investigation found “mass due process violations, severe prison overcrowding, and deaths in custody.” The state of emergency is still in effect, and roughly two percent of the adult population of El Salvador is incarcerated.
These are no times to challenge the government. Bukele was reelected as president for another five years in February. He did so despite a constitutional ban on reelection, cleared by the Constitutional Court that Nuevas Ideas, his party, illegally installed in May 2021. The legislation also changed the electoral vote-counting and districting rules just months before the contest, eliminating 70 percent of the publicly elected positions. Nuevas Ideas now holds 54 of the 60 seats of the Assembly. The Judiciary offered scant avenues for objection; the Bukele-controlled Assembly passed a bill in 2021 that forced a third of the country’s judges into retirement. Since then, Bukele’s party has selected 10 of the 15 justices of the Supreme Court, and is currently electing the remaining five. The President controls every institution, from the Attorney General and Police to minor courthouses and the Public Information Institute. “The level of disruption and interference in the Salvadoran justice system risks limiting access to justice for everyone in the country,” said a UN panel of experts in May 2023.
Oftentimes, Claros does not feel up for the fight. He says the mere mention of the Attorney General’s Office feels like a threat. “Do you think we would be selling if it weren’t because of Bukele’s law?” he jabs. “With the government’s law right now, we’re underwater, so to speak. There’s nothing you can do.”
* * *
Bitcoin City is not the first time Nayib Bukele has imagined an urban utopia. Large-scale real estate projects were a constant fixture throughout his rise to power.
Bukele began his political career over a decade ago in Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small city in Salvadoran terms (population: 11,000). There he incentivized the construction of high-rise condos, rezoned protected areas, and put a community in danger of eviction, according to research by Julio Gutiérrez, an anthropologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Gutiérrez argues that what’s most important about mega projects like the airport is that they “generate enough enthusiasm to create a speculative dynamic that increases the land price to create profits.”
The way Bukele has applied this strategy on a national scale is visible in Playas Blancas, a beach eight miles away from Condadillo. Houses sit abandoned with broken windows. Wire mesh from torn-down fences remains on the sand. But a boutique hotel, Casa del Golfo, opened in October 2021 to extensive state media fanfare, its website featuring white women in bikinis and their male companions holding up meaty marlin and tuna. The hotel —like others on the Salvadoran coast— caters to deep pockets: rooms go for up to $375 a night (the minimum wage in El Salvador is $365 a month). In July 2023, construction crews wearing cyan shirts —the color of Bukele’s party— paved the road to Casa del Golfo.
Luis Carballo, a 39-year-old fisherman who lives in Playas Blancas, told me he’s tried to secure his property deed because of what is afoot nearby. His wife, María Antonia, works across the street cleaning a rental house.
“Just the other day, an engineer told me that people are showing up in places like Condadillo saying they own property that they don’t,” Carballo told me. A soccer field sitting next to his house has been used as a communal property for decades. Now it is territory in dispute. For a few weeks, it was cordoned off by yellow tape reading “Forbidden”, with gravel dumped in the middle to prevent its use as a playing field. Some neighbors reclaimed it after a while. According to a source in the town municipality, two parties now claim ownership of the oceanside field.
The Carballo family is even hosting a U.S. citizen, Corbin Keegan, who refers to himself as “the first resident of Bitcoin City.” Keegan was an itinerant backpacker when he met Carballo. They first gave him a place to stay and next allowed him to build a 30-square-foot cinder block hut with a sheet-metal roof and a plastic curtain as a door. Keegan lives there for months each year, though he returns to his native Illinois each summer for seasonal jobs.
When in Playas Blancas, Keegan does not pay rent, but he sometimes chips in $20 to cover the rise in electricity since he moved in. Keegan sees himself as a pioneer. “Bitcoiners around the world will start flooding into El Salvador,” he told me. “There will be a huge pilgrimage, the floodgates will open and many of them will start coming down here. Tourism will be through the roof because of Bitcoin immigrants.”
The floodgate is not quite open, but tourism did increase by 32 percent in the first half of 2023 relative to 2019, per the World Tourism Organization, a U.N. agency. The government factors in Bitcoin as part of the allure, but the increased security also plays a major part. Morena Valdez, the Tourism Minister of Bukele’s first administration, said in a television interview in October 2022 that Airbnb income and use had increased by 300 percent compared to 2019 and that the country sought to increase its 5,500 hotel rooms to 13,000.
An October 2023 analysis published by Global Financial Integrity and the Vance Center for International Justice found Salvadoran properties for sale in crypto for a total of over 25 million dollars. Most of them were in beach locations, and some of them were only for sale through Bitcoin or NFT. Foreign influencers now frequently tout properties for sale in crypto, like a 150-year-old house in San Lorenzo, Ahuachapán, or a 9-bedroom beach house for $360,000 in San Diego, La Libertad.
The other major players are Salvadoran expats. Of an estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the United States, a 2022 survey showed that 60 percent intend to move back to El Salvador eventually, and almost half said they have invested in real estate in El Salvador. In a U.N. speech in September 2023, President Bukele said the country is on its way to having “reverse migration”, referring to the return of people who left decades ago (though immigration figures to the U.S. remained high during Bukele’s first term). The Legislative Assembly has passed a bill to give tax breaks to those who return.
Gladys Jeannette, a Guatemalan-American real estate agent offering 140 properties in the region, told me in April 2023 that she had already sold 40 percent of them since the Bitcoin Law was approved. Her buyer pool is a mix between U.S. and European Bitcoiners and Salvadoran expats. “Nobody who wants a family residence buys in La Unión right now. Builders are buying for future appreciation and future equity,” she said.
“If they break ground” at Bitcoin City, Jeannette said, “you could flip it a year later for double the price.”
In El Tamarindo, a nearby beach, Óscar Molina, a Salvadoran expat, opened the Boutique Hotel Mar Azul, which charges $250 per night per guest. Milena Mayorga, the Salvadoran Ambassador in Washington, attended the opening as part of a public-relations campaign to drum up investment.
Enrique Morales Choto, president of the Salvadoran Real Estate Chamber, told me there was increased demand in 2023 for properties near the coastal area, bumping up prices. “There are more people coming, some with retirement plans, who come and pay more than the locals,” Morales said. He attributed the change to improved security and advertising of the country.
The narrative of the tourists and expats coming in and buying the land omits one key actor: the people who already live here. To make room for the newly arrived, others will have to leave. People with no say in what will become of their lands or jobs. People who are being forced out.
* * *
In October 2022, a week after Condadillo residents were summoned to a government office to give up their lands for a purported fraction of their potential worth, three local farmers appeared at a news conference at the Central American University, a private Jesuit university near San Salvador.
The farmers dressed formally for the cameras, their collars buttoned, sleeves unrolled. Santos Eduviges Cruz, 59 years old, was the first to speak.
“I felt like laughing when they appraised our lands. At the same time, I felt resentment,” he said. Eduviges argued with the government lawyers: “After you take away my 5 acres of land for $24,000, you’re still going to have your jobs. But, what am I going to do?” He calls this “treason against the campesinos, the [rural agricultural] working people.”
Five days after the news conference, Anliker —Bukele’s high school friend-turned-official— made his rebuttal on state television: He said that the majority of the population was “very happy” with the project and the few malcontents were either from the “meaningless political opposition” or “being sponsored” by these groups.
“Campesinos sometimes regrettably lend themselves to being manipulated,” he said. “They are trying to paint a bad picture of such an important project. They want to keep those barren lands abandoned.”
But one man’s “abandoned” land is another’s home. In January 2023, I attended a local meeting of residents against the project hosted by Blanca Cruz, a 66-year-old resident of Condadillo. She’s the sister of Eduviges Cruz, who spoke at the news conference in San Salvador. When I asked about the price of her land, she insisted it was not for sale; she said officials told her to expect a settlement hearing with the Attorney General’s Office.
It was a small affair: six people sat on plastic chairs while Blanca’s 75-year-old husband lay in a hammock.
Ángel Flores is a union leader at the National Micro and Small Business Federation, a government agency. Flores lives in Intipucá, 10 miles away from the site of the future airport, and he was the first to speak. “People see mega projects as the norm,” Flores said, “and they don’t conceive opposing them, even if it’s going to bring more poverty and scarcity. That’s the mentality we’re fighting.”
Attendees listened thoughtfully, silently nodding their heads. Then he mentioned the government had outlined plans for promoting tourism in other beach communities in the area: with “Surf City”, 25 miles away in Punta Mango. Flores sees it all as part of a national strategy. A non-exhaustive list of mega projects in rural areas includes the Sapo River dam in Morazán, the construction of the Gerardo Barrios beltway in San Miguel (which includes evictions), the CECOT mega-prison for 40,000 inmates in Tecoluca, an Eco-terra residential complex in Santa Ana, a hotel complex in the El Bálsamo mountain chain, and the “El Salvador’s Cancun” resort complex at Isla Tasajera, where the Police tried to evict a community of 50 people on Dec 22, 2022. That litigation is still pending.
Flores then handed the floor over to Amado Ramos, an Indigenous Nahuat leader who could barely afford to get there, after traveling on a series of public buses that cost $3 — a sum that many in El Salvador make for an entire day’s work. Ramos said the last public meeting, on Dec. 28, 2022, was a success because 40 people attended.
The meeting ended with three agreements. First, they were going to try to get people who catch crawfish and shellfish to join their effort, since they would be affected as well. Second, organizers planned to print 100 fliers to invite people to their next neighborhood meeting. Third, they wanted to post videos online about their situation to raise awareness in nearby communities. But these residents are up against greater challenges than a change of mindset.
The group has failed to establish a negotiation with the government and has not reached any officials. They did, however, manage to meet with three of the four parties in the political opposition. Congresswoman Claudia Ortiz, one of the most prominent active politicians in El Salvador outside of Bukele’s coalition, met with Ramos and suggested that they enlist international support, such as from the British Embassy, to get the government’s attention. She pointed out that she could not help much herself. Combined, the opposition parties hold three of the 60 seats in the Legislative Assembly, insufficient to pass any initiative or block any bill.
It is nonetheless hard to imagine that any action the Condadillo residents could take would sway the government. Their unfunded efforts to shape public opinion face machinery that, on average, has spent $7.3 million a year since 2019 in promoting the government’s plans, including the airport. They have no mediator to voice their concerns. Although Bukele’s party lost in the district of Conchagua, where Bitcoin City will be built, their mayor is from Nuevas Ideas thanks to a gerrymandering move across the country that in one fell swoop eliminated 16 of the 18 municipalities in La Unión.
And yet, even their slim organizational efforts appear to have come at a price. Three members of Milpa, the Indigenous movement organizing against mega projects led by Ángel Flores, have been arrested under the state of exception.
In August 2023, a neighbor of Condadillo received a phone call from someone who identified as a member of the Attorney General’s Office. He was informed that a file had been opened on him and he was asked why he opposed the government’s projects.
A month after the news conference, two police officers, one wearing a ski mask, knocked on Flores’ door. A woman who was doing housekeeping opened, and they showed her a notebook with Flores’ name written on it. Flores had filed a complaint for the illegal clearing of a tree and they wanted to talk to him about it.
“I was alarmed,” he said. “I don’t know if they wanted to arrest me or persuade me of something.”
* * *
At the October 2022 press conference were two other farmers concerned about losing their homes. One of them, José Erme Martínez, said before the cameras that he would even take a job as a janitor at the airport because all he wanted was to support his wife. His terracotta-roofed small house sits by the side of the highway, guarded by a metal gate and three skinny dogs. On the morning I arrived, the dogs were sniffing out the corn tortillas that Martínez’s wife was cooking on a clay griddle over a wooden fire. Medlar, citrus, banana, and coconut trees flank an outhouse right in the middle of the property. “Don’t you think I’m going to miss all of this?” he asked rhetorically.
The other farmer was Hugo Guevara. I met him in August 2022. He lives in La Criba, a black-sand beach four miles away from the future airport, where a long-dormant plan for a resort complex —named “Secret Beach” by its developers— has re-emerged. Guevara and the other 50 families in La Criba have been fighting eviction since 2005. La Criba is a settlement of farmers who banded together in a cooperative in 1980. They paid for their lands and, according to Guevara, were scammed by a president of the cooperative who sold all of the plots in La Criba to a private party without their knowledge.
Now, they regularly attend neighborhood assemblies in Condadillo. They fear the hamlet they once saved is waiting to be displaced.
“In the 50s, our forebears told us the rich displaced them from the mountains because they used the land to grow coffee. That’s how people populated the shore. Now that their coffee business has decayed, they want to drive us away from the beach. But we have nowhere else to go,” he told me.
The government’s plans for Bitcoin City might be stalled, but the movements for the airport are underway. They are still trying to draw investors to El Salvador, announce to the world that they found El Dorado, and create booming businesses with trickle-down economic benefits. As Guevara told me his story, he pulled out supporting paperwork from a worn leather briefcase. Besides the case documents, he keeps close to another important paper: a social studies course curriculum he received in a supplementary education course offered by the Foundation for the Study of Applied Law (FESPAD), which has offered support to the Condadillo cause.
“The indigenous villages” —a pamphlet reads— “were established in 1543 and institutionalized dispossession, racism, and social and economic inequality. It became the core of the productive system by demanding tributes and forceful labor of locals in the Spaniards’ villages.” Owners of plantations paid low wages to workers and sometimes even paid them in “fichas,” coins that could only be traded for goods at the plantation stores.
Guevara, who had taken a break from his work under the sun to talk to me, seems to echo what he learned in that class. “How is it possible,” he asked, “that people with vast amounts of land are trying to dispossess poor people from all they have?”
Their stories are the hidden blemishes under El Salvador’s big makeover. The Bitcoin Country is a place of great inequality, with almost a million people on the verge of starvation. This offer of progress excludes the people who need progress most.
* * *
Will Claros received payment for his house in January 2024. He removed the tile roofs of one of the buildings on his land for repurposing on the one he is finishing, just across the street. When he started doing the same with the other house, government employees told him to stop. He needed to leave everything as it was since he no longer owned the land. When I visited him in early April, I noticed some of the roof tiles had gone missing.
Claros is not waiting for the government to tell him to leave. The money he received did not cover half of what he has spent on his new construction; he supplemented it with the help of his brothers who live in the United States. The new place is almost done, missing a roof, doors, and no less than a dozen moving trips on a pickup truck. Claros has already planted fruit trees on the outer limits of the property. He, too, imagines a future where he cannot earn a living as a fisherman. Instead, he said he will become a boat tour guide and open up a diner, right there at his home — even it is difficult to imagine him footing the costs for this latter project.
The government has reached agreements with almost every homeowner in Condadillo whose land is needed for the airport construction, according to Ángel Flores, the community leader involved in the resistance efforts.
In May 18, 2024, Milpa called another press conference to denounce how a company, “Desarrollos Turísticos del Pacífico”, had taken over private land at El Icacal Beach, eight miles away from the airport construction site. “The problem is worsening all over the coastal strip of El Salvador,” Flores said to local news. “Hotel groups are taking over the beaches, which implies displacing communities mainly made of fishers.”
In November 2023, Hugo Guevara called me. Alarmedly, he said that people in a National Registry Center vehicle had arrived at La Criba and started doing remeasurements. They told neighbors that the whole land had been registered to five owners. Guevara was concerned, he said, because their water source would now be in a private zone. “We don’t oppose development,” he told me. “There’s an area where they can do their project, but the community also has a right. We make a living from farming and fishing, and we won’t have land to grow or set out to sea. And that’s the only job we know how to do.”
