At 43, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, re-elected last February for a second five-year term, is the envy of hundreds of leaders around the world for his approval ratings, which exceed 90 percent, and the huge majorities he enjoys in the Legislative Assembly, which allow him to push through his bills almost without debate. But last week, Revelations about his family’s unusual and rapid rise to wealth have revealed a dark side that could mark the beginning of a deterioration in his carefully crafted image.
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Just 15 days after being consecrated on the cover of Time magazine –under the title ‘The Strong Man’– as “the most popular of the world’s authoritarian leaders”, a detailed journalistic investigation by the Redacción Regional (RR) platform –which brings together reporting from independent media in Mexico and Central America– revealed a plot of multimillion-dollar land acquisitions and coffee businesses, involving Bukele, his wife, his mother and three of the president’s brothers.
Added to this scandal are leaks made in August by a group of hackers, about the excessive resources and contracts in the hands of the government deputies in the Legislative Assembly, which have perfected and expanded the scope of shady handling of public funds that were already known in the Parliament of El Salvador in other mandates, and now they leave the Bukele supporters in a very bad position.
In May, on the eve of his second term, a Latin American survey by the Gallup firm ranked Bukele as the president with the highest approval rating. In that poll, the Salvadoran president scored 92 percent, 26 percentage points above the second-placed leader, Luis Abinader, of the Dominican Republic. In August, in the Mitofsky world ranking, he also ranked first, with 93 percent approval of his administration.
Apart from a modern and effective management of his image, especially on social media, such a result is due to the spectacular reduction in the homicide rate, which, in 2019, when Bukele began his first term, was 36 per 100,000 inhabitants, By the end of last year it had fallen to just 2.4, a figure similar to that of Canada, two and a half times lower than that of the United States and ten times lower than that of countries such as Mexico, Colombia or Venezuela.
“We have put 85 percent of the gang members behind bars, attacking the pyramid structure of their organization,” Bukele told Time. “From the peons to the gang bosses, everyone has been falling and the pyramid has collapsed,” he added proudly.
When the magazine asked about the treatment of prisoners in the gigantic prison he built to hold up to 40,000 inmates, the president said that “these are criminals who confess to having killed ten, fifteen, and even twenty people each (…), the prisons of Latin America are in total chaos, and that is not the case in El Salvador.”
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and several NGOs have denounced numerous abuses committed under the state of emergency under which Bukele governs, extended 23 times by the Legislative Assembly. There are more than 6,400 documented complaints of these violations, and some 300 Salvadorans have died in the mega-prison and other detention centers.
Millions of dollars
Jaime Quintanilla is a young Salvadoran investigative journalist who received the Excellence Award from the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) last year. In an environment of mixed support for Bukele and fear of reprisals, Quintanilla dared to investigate the fortune of the President and his family. Last Thursday, on the platform Redacción Regional and the online television station Focos TV, he revealed a package of acquisitions of valuable rural properties by the president’s family.
The investments were made in a personal capacity by his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele; his mother, Olga Marina Ortez, and his brothers Karim, Ibrahim and Yusef, but some of the transactions involved companies linked to the family, with capital much lower than the money invested in the purchases. In one case, the Bukeles capitalized a coffee company with almost 5 million dollars, through a variable capital corporation that had been practically inactive for a decade.
The company was able to access mortgage loans for several million dollars. Quoted by the Madrid newspaper El País, Quintanilla points out that “these companies did not have a profile that justified access to million-dollar loans.” He adds that “before their growth, they had a net worth of less than 20,000 dollars,” and wonders how to explain “that a bank gives millions of dollars to companies that apparently have no way to back up their debt.”
The series of purchases, which began in the middle of Bukele’s first term, includes 34 plots of land, including two sugar cane farms, seven coffee plantations and a plot of land with a privileged view of the tourist lake of Coatepeque, in an area famous for its elegant vacation villas. There are also luxury apartments in the capital.
The Country details one of the purchases, considered the most significant: “Hacienda Dorada, a 231-hectare coffee farm located on the slopes of the Ilamatepec volcano, in the department of Santa Ana, in western El Salvador.” With this acquisition, Quintanilla says based on data from the National Coffee Institute, “the Bukele family entered the select group of 2 percent of large coffee producers in El Salvador who own more than 100 cultivable acres.”
With the shady handling of various reserved funds of the Government, suspicions are multiplying, since in the high government no one is accountable.
The farm produces nine varieties of gourmet beans that are highly valued in international markets, which the Bukele family markets under the Bean of Fire brand, and which The president himself gives gifts to important figures in the country and illustrious foreign visitors, with a profusion of promotional messages on the accounts of the Presidency of the Republic on social networks.
Two months ago, Bukele himself used his X account to say that he had become a coffee grower and promote his brand as any private businessman without political responsibilities would have done.
Quintanilla’s investigation presents evidence of purchases for more than 9 million dollars by the president and his family. And, although this is a family that had some capital and businesses before Bukele came to power, “it is not clear,” one of the reporters told EL TIEMPO, “how such a large growth in capital occurs, since we are talking about businesses that can exceed 10 million dollars, and all of this in just three years.”
The source explains that the Bukele family now has 12 times more agricultural land than they had before becoming President. And as for properties in the city, in four years they have acquired assets worth more than 1.4 million dollars. “With the shady handling of different reserved funds of the Government, suspicions are multiplying, since in the high government no one is accountable,” he adds.
The expenses of the deputies
According to Quintanilla, these multimillion-dollar purchases have taken place “in a context in which the majority of Salvadorans are going through an economic crisis due to the increase in the prices of the basic basket of goods.” And he adds that instead of the “economic miracle” that Bukele claims to be generating, the reality is that he and his family are the beneficiaries because “his government and the Assembly, controlled by the ruling party, have modified 17 laws to encourage the cultivation, commercialization and promotion of coffee.”
Bukele’s control of the Assembly is almost absolute. Of the 60 deputies that make up the Assembly, 54 belong to his party, Nuevas Ideas, and three more to allied parties. Only three (5 percent of the deputies) are in the opposition: two from the right-wing Arena party and one from the centrist Vamos party.
Days before the investigation led by Quintanilla was released, the 54 assembly members of Nuevas Ideas, including the president of the Assembly, Ernesto Castro, were involved in a scandal because each of them was assigned more than 14,000 dollars a month for hiring expenses that include journalists, cameramen, makeup artists and public relations personnel. The total of this budget item is close to 10 million dollars a year.
A company linked to Castro and his wife, Michelle Sol, now Housing Minister, received half a million dollars from a reserved fund of the Presidency more than twelve years ago, during the government of President Mauricio Funes. Funes was prosecuted in 2019 by the Salvadoran Prosecutor’s Office for the disappearance of 351 million dollars.
Alejandro Muyschondt, who served as Bukele’s security advisor in his early years, disclosed last year various business deals of high-ranking officials of the Presidency, as well as the luxurious life they live, far above the possibilities that their salaries allow them.
Muyschondt was arrested in August 2023, accused of revealing secrets. Weeks later, while being held in a police cell, he mysteriously fell ill and was taken to a hospital, where he died in February.
The scandals of the Bukele government have already produced a corpse. But it is still too early to know if they will begin to affect the well-worked image of the Salvadoran president.
*Since the publication of the complaint against Bukele, neither he nor his family have commented on the matter.
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