El Salvador has become the Cuba of the right

The government of a tiny Latin American nation is once again enthralling an outsized number of foreign fans, using them to scrub its international image, and encouraging them to take bits and pieces of its authoritarian model home to their own countries.

For decades, the fans were leftists and the destination was communist Cuba. They flocked from all over the globe to tour Cuba‘s schools and hospitals, explain away or simply ignore its hunger and political prisoners, and report back glowingly on the narrow sliver of life their government minders had allowed them to see.

Today, the revolutionary tourists skew hard right and the destination is the police state of El Salvador, run by all-powerful President Nayib Bukele. Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump Jr, and countless right-wing influencers have all made the pilgrimage. Elon Musk dialogues with Bukele on X and hosted him at Tesla‘s Austin headquarters. Bukele was the second head of state President Donald Trump called after inauguration day and the first and only from Latin America so far this term to visit him in the White House.

Not since Che Guevara has a Latin America leader boasted such an international cult of personality — or used it so effectively to sell the world on a glossy, half-true version of his revolution.

To its foreign admirers, Bukele’s El Salvador is a land of volcanoes, bitcoin, and surf cities; once ruled by vicious gangs, it is now free from fear, thanks to its wise leader’s decision to pack the courts, suspend basic legal guarantees, and build a vast mega-prison into which anyone can be disappeared at any time, effectively indefinitely, without facing a judge or even learning the reason for one’s arrest.

Bukele’s visitors learn that mass roundups, even if they scooped up thousands of innocents, were the only way to break the grip of the gangs — much as Cuba‘s visitors once learned that its brand of communist revolution, even if forced droves into exile, was the only fix for Latin America‘s inequalities.

Bukele’s visitors learn, exactly like Cuba‘s, that basic legal rights and liberal democracy are bourgeois luxuries that needed to be cleared away so justice could triumph. Just as ordinary Cubans once supposedly welcomed the revolutionary firing squads, so, too, do ordinary Salvadorans embrace life under the police state.

Do they? Although Bukele has recently lost some support, he remains very popular, and for a reason. Before, many Salvadorans lived formally under a democratic government, and in reality, under the tyranny of the gangs. And for crushing them, Bukele handily won (unconstitutional) re-election without entirely asphyxiating the opposition, something Cuba‘s leaders never bothered with.

Even if over 60 percent of Salvadorans report they now fear discussing politics, his rule is not (yet) as oppressive as Cuba‘s, Venezuela‘s, or Nicaragua‘s, and may never go that far. His government doesn’t murder its critics, that we know of; it just surveils them and makes examples out of jailing labor leaders and environmental activists. Only one prominent Bukele aide-turned-critic has so far left prison in a body bag.

But there is another El Salvador, just as there was always another Cuba — one Bukele and his foreign fans don’t want you to see.

This is the El Salvador of the jails that are never photographed. Not the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT), a showpiece built to house tattoo-covered gang members, most of whom were detained before Bukele’s time and who make up a minority of the prison population. Rather, the squalid gulags housing most of the other over 81,000 people detained in the last three years, where torture is common and one detainee dies every four days.

It’s the country of prisons director Osiris Luna, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for doing gang leaders favors in return for their political support before the crackdown — the very same ones Bukele claims he brought to heel through pure, uncorrupted force.

It’s a country in which hundreds have disappeared since Bukele’s crackdown, several later reappearing buried in secret graves; where roughly one in six is on the brink of starvation and schools are closing, even as government spending on opaque public contracts has soared.

There’s a reason Bukele puts such energy into cultivating his apologists. He needs them.

The real tragedy of Cuba wasn’t that its proselytizers merely proselytized; it was that several of them exported the worst of its model abroad — namely to Venezuela, whose socialist autocrats learned from Cuba how to coup-proof their military and thus remain in power indefinitely, even as they went about systematically destroying their country.

Bukele’s fans are also now beginning to make the leap from praise to emulation. The sending of 238 mostly Venezuelan migrants from the United States to Bukele’s mega-jails, including dozens with active asylum cases, 90 percent of whom had never faced any kind of criminal charges, is not just occurring with Bukele’s cooperation; it’s a page pulled straight from his playbook. In several cases, the migrants were detained on the basis of having tattoos of soccer team logos and relatives’ names, supposedly evidence of gang ties. At least some of the renditions overrode court orders. The resemblance in tactics isn’t accidental. Bukele’s model “needs to happen and will happen in America,” Musk says, unironically.

Bukele would probably prefer more visitors to surf city to yet more prisoners, but he has incentives to cooperate. There are Salvadoran gang leaders now in U.S. custody who the U.S. Justice Department accuses of having cut secret, illegal deals with his government (Salvadoran investigative journalists have made and substantiated similar allegations). If the gang leaders manage to testify, it could blow a hole in Bukele’s carefully cultivated image, making him look less like a valiant crime-fighter and more like a mafia state ringleader. That’s why he’s only asking the Trump administration for one thing: that it drop the charges and return the gang leaders to El Salvador. Trump is already complying.

Many attempts at exporting Cuba‘s model failed, though not before doing plenty of damage. The same will probably be true of the Bukele model. The roundups of men like Kilmar Abrego García are already proving unpopular and facing serious judicial obstacles. In comparison to El Salvador, the United States has a sturdier judiciary — which can and should take down gangs like Tren de Aragua lawfully, without resorting to Bukeleian tactics —, a sizable opposition, and a population unwilling to trade away its basic rights for the simple reason that the vast majority doesn’t live in daily mortal danger. Nor is the Bukele model likely to transplant fully even within Latin America (if the public were as sold on Bukele as we often hear, you might, by now, expect at least one serious attempt at a replica).

The most likely outcome is less dramatic, and if you consider Cuba‘s trajectory, more predictable. Eventually, plenty of Cuba‘s foreign fans either recanted or settled into embarrassed silence as the revolution let slip its many hypocrisies and failures. Some realized they had seen only what they had wanted to see, conveniently played by a cynical autocracy interested chiefly in extending its own grip on power. The foreign fan club shrank. The autocracy remained. Don’t be surprised if history repeats itself in El Salvador.

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