Nayib Bukele | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Official portrait, 2019 | |
| 81st President of El Salvador | |
| Assumed office 1 June 2019[a] | |
| Vice President | Félix Ulloa |
| Preceded by | Salvador Sánchez Cerén |
| Mayor of San Salvador | |
| In office 1 May 2015 – 30 April 2018 | |
| Preceded by | Norman Quijano |
| Succeeded by | Ernesto Muyshondt |
| Mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán | |
| In office 1 May 2012 – 30 April 2015 | |
| Preceded by | Álvaro Rodríguez |
| Succeeded by | Michelle Sol |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez 24 July 1981 San Salvador, El Salvador |
| Political party | Nuevas Ideas (since 2017) |
| Other political affiliations |
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| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Parent |
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| Education | Central American University (no degree) |
| Occupation | Politician, businessman |
| Cabinet | Cabinet of Nayib Bukele |
| Signature |  |
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Political offices
Elections
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Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez (Spanish: [naˈʝiβ buˈkele]; born 24 July 1981) is a Salvadoran politician and businessman who, since 1 June 2019, has been the 81st president of El Salvador. As a member of the Nuevas Ideas political party, Bukele is the first Salvadoran president since 1989 who was not elected as a candidate of one of the country's two major political parties: the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) or the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), of which Bukele had previously been a member.
Bukele established an advertising company in 1999 and worked at an advertising company owned by his father, Armando Bukele Kattán; both companies advertised election campaigns for the FMLN. In 2011, Bukele announced that he would enter politics. The following year, he joined the FMLN and was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Bukele served until his 2015 election as mayor of San Salvador, where he served until 2018. In 2017, Bukele was ousted from the FMLN; he founded Nuevas Ideas shortly afterward and pursued a presidential campaign in 2019. After the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) refused to register his party, Bukele ran for president with the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) and won with 53 percent of the vote.
Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan in July 2019, an anti-gang program that sought to reduce the country's 2019 homicide rate of 38 per 100,000 people. Homicides decreased by 50 percent during Bukele's first year in office and he attributed it to the plan. Digital news outlet El Faro and the United States Department of State accused Bukele's government of secretly negotiating with gangs to reduce the homicide rate. After 87 people were killed by gangs over one weekend in March 2022, Bukele initiated a nationwide crackdown on gangs. This resulted in the arrests of over 83,100 people with alleged gang affiliations by October 2024, with over 12,000 incarcerated at the new Terrorism Confinement Center. The country's homicide rate decreased to 2.4 homicides per 100,000 in 2023, the second-lowest in the Americas (after Canada). Bukele passed a law in 2021 that made bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador, and has promoted plans to build Bitcoin City, focused on using geothermal energy to mine bitcoin. In June 2023, the Legislative Assembly approved Bukele's proposals to reduce the number of municipalities from 262 to 44 and the number of seats in the Legislative Assembly from 84 to 60. He ran for re-election in the 2024 presidential election and won with 85 percent of the vote, after the Supreme Court reinterpreted the constitution's ban on consecutive re-election. He became the first Salvadoran president to be re-elected since 1944.
Politicians, activists, and journalists have accused Bukele of authoritarian and autocratic governance. He ordered 40 soldiers into the Legislative Assembly building in February 2020 to intimidate lawmakers into approving a US$109 million loan for the Territorial Control Plan. In May 2021, after Nuevas Ideas won a Legislative Assembly supermajority in that year's legislative election, Bukele's allies in the legislature voted to replace the attorney general and all five justices of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice. Bukele has attacked journalists and news outlets on social media and has implemented laws that, critics claim, censor the press. Before Bukele's presidency, he considered himself a member of the radical left; since becoming president, he has not identified with any political ideology, but political analysts have described him as a populist and a conservative. Bukele has high job-approval ratings, and is popular in El Salvador and across Latin America.
- ^ "Member State: El Salvador – Government Officials". Organization of American States. Archived from the original on 4 April 2024. Retrieved 6 April 2024.
- ^ "Designada del Presidente ya Sanciona Decretos como Encargada del Despacho" [Presidential Designate Now Sanctions Decrees as In Charge with the Office]. El Mundo (in Spanish). 14 December 2023. Archived from the original on 14 December 2023. Retrieved 14 December 2023.
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