This is the first of three pieces on what actually happened in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Not the caricature, not the press-release version. A walkthrough of the decisions, the blood, the political capital, and the bets that followed. Part 1 covers how a security emergency delivered near-total political control. Part 2 will examine the economic wager that came next. Part 3 will look at healthcare, education, and the country’s new place in the hemisphere.

You might ask why I don’t call it the Salvadoran Miracle. Because the miracle has a full name: Nayib Bukele. The man who publicly entrusted his nation to Jesus Christ on the day he took office. This is not a religious piece. It is a record of the key moments that pulled a country out of open gang rule and rewrote its political map.

Where was El Salvador before 2019? The headlines were predictable: gang violence and extortion, internal displacement, thousands of Salvadorans risking the journey north. Most outsiders would not consider visiting. Step into the wrong neighborhood and the consequences were final. Paying “rent” to the gangs was the price of another day. Decent work was scarce. The public hospital system was a national embarrassment. Walking after dark was unthinkable. Migration looked rational. Security, healthcare, education, and the economy were all in advanced decay.

THE GENESIS

Bukele officially took office on June 1, 2019, after winning the February 2019 presidential election. A five-year term that would change the country’s history. He replaced Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a 74-year-old former guerrilla commander closely aligned with the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes and a close friend of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. At his inauguration, Bukele publicly surrendered El Salvador to Jesus Christ.

He immediately sought a relationship with Washington. The Biden administration largely turned its back and later sanctioned officials in his government. Beijing saw the opening. After the previous administration had already switched recognition from Taiwan to China, President Xi received Bukele with full honors in early December 2019. The visit produced a package of non-refundable cooperation, a national stadium, a state-of-the-art multi-level library, water-treatment plants, and infrastructure for the Surf City coastal corridor, along with private investment interest. Beijing gave San Salvador the visible attention and respect that Washington, at that moment, refused to extend.

INTERNAL OPPOSITION

For the first two years, Bukele faced a hostile National Assembly (Congress) and courts that blocked or delayed almost every major initiative. Loans, projects, and partnerships were questioned as a matter of course. The opposition’s strategy was straightforward: limit his impact, wait him out, and reclaim power in five years. He faced 68 deputies out of 84 who were prepared to obstruct him.

Bukele responded by naming them publicly on Twitter, on national television, and across social media, exposing the conditions they demanded in exchange for allowing projects to move forward. He then built his own party, Nuevas Ideas, and asked Salvadorans to give him a governing majority capable of actually changing the country.

THE CHANGE

On February 28, 2021, Nuevas Ideas won a landslide. It took 56 of the 84 seats, a qualified majority. With allied parties, the governing bloc controlled roughly 64 seats; the opposition was reduced to about 20. On May 1, the new Assembly’s first order of business was to remove, by expedited vote of 64-20, the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the attorney general, then appoint replacements. The Constitutional Chamber ruled its own dismissal unconstitutional. The new legislative majority and the executive ignored the ruling.

The Assembly next amended the Judicial Career Law (Decree 144), mandating the immediate retirement of any judge or prosecutor aged 60 or older, or with 30 years of public service. The message was unambiguous: every institutional obstacle that had protected the old politics and the old impunity would be removed.

THE TRAGEDY THAT KILLED THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT

Even with formal control of the state, another power still ruled large parts of the country: the gangs. They controlled territory, collected taxes, administered their own justice, and in some neighborhoods prevented the police from entering. MS-13, in particular, was not prepared to accept the new government’s security pressure. It decided to force Bukele to the negotiating table the only way it knew.

Over one weekend in late March 2022, the gangs murdered 87 people, the deadliest stretch of Bukele’s presidency. The message was clear: we can still shut the country down. Bukele gathered his security cabinet and, in his own words, told them to pray. Then he ordered a frontal offensive, first against MS-13, later against Barrio 18 and the smaller maras.

On a Sunday night, the Assembly approved the state of exception, suspending certain constitutional protections in cases involving suspected gang members. Days later it rewrote the penal code: ordinary gang membership jumped from 3-5 years to 20-30 years; leadership from 6-9 years to 40-45 years. Negotiating with gangs itself became a crime punishable by up to 15 years.

The results were rapid and visible. Homicides collapsed. Extortion networks that had functioned as a parallel tax system were broken. Crime across the board fell because the cost of being a criminal rose sharply and the probability of remaining free fell even faster. It was no longer profitable or sexy to be a criminal in El Salvador.

HISTORIC RE-ELECTION

In February 2024, Bukele won re-election with 84.65 percent of the valid vote. International observers validated the process. On June 1st, he began a second consecutive term. His real opponents by then were not the residual local parties but the Biden administration, parts of Brussels, and a Western press that had already settled on calling him the “new dictator of Latin America.”

The re-election was not abstract popularity. It was the electoral consequence of results people could feel. For the first time in decades, ordinary Salvadorans experienced a country in which they could walk at night without calculating the risk. They responded by giving Bukele another term and by handing Nuevas Ideas and its allies roughly 95 percent of the new legislature. Historic parties such as the FMLN were reduced to near-irrelevance.

By mid-2024, the political map had been redrawn. The gangs that once operated as a shadow government had been stripped of territory and capacity. The institutions that had blocked change had been subordinated. The streets were quieter than they had been in living memory. That combination produced near-total political capital.

But conquering the gangs and the political system was only the first battle. The harder one remained: converting that security and that political capital into an economy capable of generating jobs, investment, and durable prosperity. That is the story of Part 2.