Sizing up Bukele and his El Salvador experiment

By Sarah Birke

A story is a story until it isn’t. That is the case with El Salvador. After President Nayib Bukele was first elected in 2019, there was a flurry of interest that lasted several years, focused on his crackdown on crime and his consolidation of power, culminating last year in his abolition of presidential term limits and his bid for a third term in February 2027. More recently there has been less coverage: it is now taken as a fait accompli that Mr Bukele is here to stay.

But the country remains, in my eyes, as interesting as ever. I returned last week to get the lie of the land. In interviews, one theme kept surfacing, beyond the obvious ones of how he is amassing power and how to resist it. It is that under Mr Bukele the country is becoming a laboratory.

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele

That is, people reckon, a deliberate move on his part. For one, he wants to be seen as someone who transforms societies, and as a model to copy. For another, it is a good way to get cash and backing from the likes of the World Bank and IMF. Third, the cynics say, his experiments help collect data about the population, giving him yet more control over it.

Two of his signature policies illustrate the lab theory. In 2021 he made El Salvador the first country to make bitcoin legal tender (it was a flop). Slashing the murder rate to an unprecedented degree is a policy leaders in the region aspire to copy. But the methods have had a high cost: a state of exception has been in place since March 2022, more than 91,000 people were arrested, many without a warrant or access to a lawyer. He has used the laws to lock up critics, such as Ruth López, a prominent lawyer who was arrested in May 2025.

Now the next experiments are under way. Mr Bukele, long a tech-savvy leader, is trying to use technology, including artificial intelligence, in public services (he has already digitalised many bureaucratic procedures, which even critics praise). Last year he launched two more. In health, users can now reach a doctor through an app, DoctorSV. For free, the doctor—aided by AI—will carry out diagnoses, order tests or write prescriptions. For people with chronic illnesses, it sends reminders to help them manage their conditions. In schools, Mr Bukele has launched a project to have Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, help lead children through three subjects. (He had already handed out tablets or laptops to all those in education.)

To hear the president tell the tale, everything is going swimmingly. Some funders, including the World Bank and the Development Bank of Latin America, are also fans—but they may want these projects to succeed. Critics start from a well-earned distrust. A proper, independent evaluation is needed, as is more transparency. Not much is known about the costs or what is done with the data.

Mr Bukele should certainly not be taken as an example; he has destroyed the imperfect democracy that the country had built. Whether any of his policies can be separated from that record, and still teach the region something, is a question worth asking properly.
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Credit: The Economist