“Bukelismo,” A Deceptive, Illiberal Model of Peace

Spreading from El Salvador to the United States

On January 1, 2025, a viral post on the social media platform X touted the alleged reduction in homicides in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele from 6,656 in 2015 (which equated to a world-leading homicide rate per person) to 114 in 2024 (the lowest rate in the Western Hemisphere). Despite the fact that Bukele actually did not take office until 2019 rather than 2015, and setting aside that his more recent homicide statistics are partially manipulated, the post caught the eye of Elon Musk, who commented, “Needs to happen and will happen in America.” Bukele himself responded to Musk’s comment, “We could help…”

In recent months, Musk has joined the ranks of President Bukele’s many international admirers, who champion his hard-on-crime policies—in addition to his charismatic, my-way-or-the-highway, nationalistic ethos—as the illiberal model of peace and prosperity for other countries to follow. Musk himself gave President Bukele a tour of Tesla headquarters in Texas in September this past year. Both shared videos on X of their conversations about “the future of humanity.”

What draws Musk to Bukele’s style of governance? Among other things, Bukele is most (in)famous for enacting a State of Emergency in late March 2022, known as La Régimen de Excepción, and continually keeping it in place. The policy allows him to justify conducting mass arrests and raids of citizens allegedly involving in violent gangs. Thus, crime and homicides have plummeted, but El Salvador now has the highest mass incarceration rate in the world—more than three times higher than the United States. This includes a lot of innocent people and hundreds of inmates have died. Even Bukele quietly admitted recently that his government has released about 10 percent of those arrested during the State of Emergency because they were innocent.

Could Musk and Bukele really team up to administer this form of illiberal governance—known colloquially as “the Bukele Model” or “Bukelismo”—in the United States itself?

There are obvious differences between El Salvador and the United States that make this seem like little more than another one of Musk’s pipe dreams. For starters, the United States has more than fifty times more people. El Salvador also has been plagued with civil war, drug violence and economic stagnation for the past several decades. These conditions have paved the way for Bukele’s remarkable public support in taking extreme, anti-democratic actions to reduce crime. These societal differences notwithstanding, Musk’s desire to replicate Bukele’s policies and approach in the United States is noteworthy for three reasons.

First, Musk has emerged as a key policy leader in Washington D.C. since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November 2024. As Trump’s informal mouthpiece, he has had an immediate impact on policy, most notably torpedoing the initial national budget proposal of the Speaker of the House, fellow Republican Mike Johnson. Musk has the requisite political and financial influence to make mimicking Bukele’s strategies to combat homicides and crime a reality.

Second, Musk’s connection to Bukele is part of a broader trend of U.S. Republican elites cozying up to Bukele over the past several years, as listed in Table 1. Beginning in 2021, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Bukele about how he lowered the homicide rate and fought the gangs’ control of the country. A few years later in March 2023, U.S. Senator (Florida) Marco Rubio (now Trump’s pick for Secretary of State) traveled to El Salvador and wrote a subsequent article about the country’s crackdown on gangs and crime and its importance as a strategic partner for the United States in the region as a model of how to address the root causes of migration. U.S. Representative (Florida) Matt Gaetz then mentioned Bukele in his Turning Point Action speech in December 2023 when discussing the rise of populist movements across the world. Shortly thereafter, U.S. Representative (Arkansas) Tom Cotton toured El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT, and then spoke in Congress about his experience and his hope for the United States to take a similar approach to crime.

Tucker Carlson interviews President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador following his second inaugural in June 2024. Photo source: Tucker Carlson Network.

These initial interactions paved the way for the watershed moment, which was Bukele’s second presidential inauguration in June 2024. An informal group of major Trump supporters attended who were enamored with Bukele’s authoritarian politics, including Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guifoyle, the Chairman of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), Matt Schlapp, and Utah Senator Mike Lee. Other lesser known but important Trump political strategists like Alex Bruesewitz and Sara Carter were also there. All these attendees posted on social media about their admiration of Bukele and their personal interactions with him that weekend, and Carlson published a long, in-depth video interview with Bukele a few days later. Shortly thereafter, Gaetz created the El Salvador Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, which now has sixteen members.

An entrance to El Salvador’s new mega-prison, CECOT (el Centro de Confinamento de Terrorismo), which opened in February 2023. Photo source: El País.

Table 1. United States Congress members, Trump campaign advisors, and media personalities that have traveled to El Salvador to support Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele or who are a part of the U.S. Congressional El Salvador Caucus. 

Exactly how U.S. Republican relationships with Bukele came about is unclear, but Carlson’s longtime coverage of the gang MS-13 took him to El Salvador as early as 2017. Moreover, Bukele has done a lot of reaching out himself, as well as globally marketing his personal “brand.” He immediately tried to make connections to U.S. Republicans upon taking office at President of El Salvador in June 2019, orchestrating meetings with the Heritage Foundation and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, as well as hiring longtime political operative Damien Merlo to broker connections for him with American politicians, who received substantial payments shortly after Rubio published his supportive article on Bukele in spring 2023. In addition, Bukele employs social media-savvy young people to vigorously promote and defend him online.

Third, Bukele’s State of Emergency regime has immediate application for Trump and his supporters’ aspirations to deport millions of immigrants, whom they routinely paint as criminals. During Gaetz’ personal tour of Bukele’s mega-prison, he expressed his desire for other countries to follow Bukele’s example, broadly speaking. He stated,

The people of the United States of America are very grateful for the State of Exception and we are grateful that CECOT exists. … We think the good ideas in El Salvador actually have legs and can go to other places and help other people be safe and secure and hopeful and prosperous. … This is the solution. The solution is to separate the killers from the people who want to grow in their life.

U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz tours the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador on July 21, 2024. Photo source: The Government of El Salvador.

Importantly, Gaetz did not specifically name the United States as one of the “other places” that could benefit from implementing Bukele’s policies. In fact, he seems to be referring to other Latin American countries from where many people migrate to the United States. Nevertheless, the accolades he heaps upon El Salvador are the opposite of how he consistently characterizes the United States, which he depicts as a country of open borders, high crime and corrupt politics. A few months later, Gaetz expounded his views on X in a more obvious U.S. parallel: 

I’ll never forget where I was when the conviction of President Trump happened. There I was in El Salvador, watching my country arrest a political rival and descend into third-world chaos. And then I looked at El Salvador under Nayib Bukele – and its return to strong borders, an orderly society, a celebration of nation, and a focus on rooting out real corruption. We need that level of focus on honest, fair government here in the United States. If it can happen in El Salvador, it certainly can happen in the greatest country that has ever existed in all of humankind.

Once again, Gaetz does not say “President Trump should implement the State of Emergency in the United States.” The implication, however, lurks unstated. Carlson, however, was more explicit in a revealing, off-the-cuff remark during a video interview on January 13, 2025 with Michael Shellenberger on California’s politics. “I have thought for twenty years that California will only be saved by, like, some, Nayib Bukele-like figure. Some authoritarian Latino in a cape is going to show up and just impose order on the state. … ‘We are not going to do any of this bullshit at all. No, you can’t camp in LA. No, you can’t do meth in LA.’ … We could have a Bukele! It’s gonna happen.”

Sara Carter, a regular Fox News contributor who was in El Salvador for Bukele’s inauguration alongside other U.S Republican leaders and strategists, posted a long video describing the meeting with Bukele and the various Trump allies the night after the inauguration. When summarizing Bukele’s explanation of how they attacked gang members with such speed and force during the abrupt implementation of the State of Emergency, Carter hints at the use of laws about terrorism as a means of suspending due process rights not only in El Salvador, but generally. This sounds consistent with recent proposals by Trump and his allies, such as declaring Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations (and thus justify the use of military force), bringing back the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process that can be labeled as suspected criminals, or passing the Laken Riley Act to empower state attorney general to do the same. Carter explains the legal strategy and its alleged upsides in El Salvador:

They have the authority to hold these people under terrorism laws. So under the laws of terror in El Salvador that Bukele has put in place, that is what they have done. And they have ensured that to me that they will not be releasing them, [except] people who have committed lesser crimes. … Which is why now you actually see children in the streets, playing, riding their bicycles, walking with their moms. You see young girls feeling ok walking from their house to church or to the grocery store, to a coffee shop, without the fear that they will be raped. … That is what we [Bukele and us] were talking about. We were talking about changing this nation for the better. So what about our country, [America]? 

Knowing that the eyes of many Republican leaders and media personalities like Carter have already been focused on Bukele’s legal justifications makes Musk’s recent comment on X that a Bukele-inspired approach to crime reduction “needs to happen and will happen in America” all the more predictable. It also means that Musk’s comment should be taken seriously.

There is one surefire piece of evidence that Trump himself is paying attention to Bukele and his ideas. During his nationally televised nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump took time to express his admiration for the “wonderful shepherd” of El Salvador—“And I’ve been reading about this for the past two years.” He then took his supporters by surprise in his explanation for why El Salvador’s homicide rate has declined:

He’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. … In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. Why are they down? Now, he would have you convinced that because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people, no. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America.

Trump then repeated this criticism in his next campaign event. It would be inaccurate to jump to the conclusion that Trump does not endorse Bukele’s human rights-abusing policies, rather his criticism of Bukele is consistent with his general views of Latin American governments and migrants. Moreover, Trump could be jealous of his own supporters’ clear admiration for Bukele. Regardless, Bukele and Trump appear to have had a positive conversation early in November 2024, and Trump invited him to his upcoming inauguration. So long as the political strategists around Trump can reframe Bukele’s policies as Trump’s ideas, and ensure that Trump gets the glory for them, then Trump is likely to go along with their implementation because they fit his intentions.

No one knows exactly how that process will look, but there is evidence that key leaders within Trump’s inner circle—like Musk, Gaetz, Carlson, and Miller—are well-versed in the Bukele model. They appear willing and eager to enact similar, undemocratic actions in the United States, especially with respect to Trump’s mass deportation program. In theory, they will need Congress and potentially the Supreme Court to be on board with extreme policies like a State of Emergency. However, the most recent news reports indicate that Trump plans to simply issue an array of executive orders to begin mass deportation on day one of his upcoming presidency and then deal with the fallout later.

Finally, the application of Bukele-style policies within the United States would lend additional international credibility to this style of governance. As has been well documented, Bukele’s fame has spread throughout Latin America long before U.S. politicians took notice; U.S. adherence to his policies could provide the match for other countries to go beyond mere talking about such policies to implementing them with full force.

As different variations and combinations of the future of global illiberal politics circulate that mimic the styles of authoritarians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Vladamir Putin, Xi Jinping and Victor Orbán, we should not overlook the potential of “Bukelismo” to spread like wildfire.

Jeffrey Swindle is a Lecturer in Sociology at Harvard University, and he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine beginning in summer 2025. He researches the global diffusion of cultural ideas and their social consequences, with a current focus on illiberal ideas about violence.