Lawfare Archive: Nayib Bukele's Crackdown on Dissent in El Salvador

The Lawfare Podcast

In this Lawfare archive episode, Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic interviews Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, about President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian consolidation of power in El Salvador and his

Key takeaways

• Cristosal executive director Noah Bullock outlines a recent wave of repression in El Salvador, highlighted by the arrest of anti-corruption advocate Ruth López on fabricated charges and the detention of bus company owners for defying presidential tweets.
• Bukele's approval ratings have dropped from approximately 80% to 50%, prompting increased use of state repression to control public narrative and silence dissent after years of unchecked institutional capture.

Main topics

• Bukele's authoritarian consolidation of power
• Human rights crackdowns and political arrests in El Salvador

Notable quotes

"They get legitimacy. They get a platform to have their prison system and therefore their security system lifted up as a way to do things, which is unfortunate that the United States is playing along with that."

Conclusion

The episode serves as a critical examination of how Bukele's authoritari

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hi, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at VoteFromAbroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to VoteFromAbroad.org now and click Request My Ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. VoteFromAbroad.org. Speaker 4 (0:38) I'm Athena Smith, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for October 4th, 2026. On September 25th and on September 29th, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments on the Trump administration's decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador's notorious SICOT prison and its alleged defiance of Chief District Judge James Boasberg's order to stop the flights. For today's archive, I chose an episode from May 20th, 2025. in which former Lawfare senior editor Quinta Drezic sat down with Noah Bullock, executive director of the Central American Human Rights Organization, Christosol. The two discussed SICOT in the context of efforts by El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, to consolidate his power and erode El Salvador's democracy. Speaker 5 (1:36) It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Quinta Jurassic with Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Christosal, an organization that focuses on human rights in Central America. Speaker 1 (1:50) In making a deal with President Trump, they get legitimacy. They get a platform to have their prison system and therefore their security system lifted up as a way to do things, which is unfortunate that the United States is playing along with that. Speaker 5 (2:07) We're talking about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Bukele's agreement with the Trump administration to house immigrants removed from the United States in a notorious Salvadoran prison. You're the executive director of Cristosal. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the organization and what you do? Speaker 1 (2:30) Yeah. Well, Cristosal, we were actually founded 25 years ago here in El Salvador. We're a human rights organization. Our mandate is to provide assistance to victims of violence and human rights violations. And our programming is built around that mandate. So we have programs to provide legal assistance, protection assistance. We have investigative teams that build evidentiary bases about patterns of human rights violations. That's useful for advocacy, but also for seeking justice. And, you know, we work with victims and victims organizations and their families also to amplify their voices, to advocate for rights and access to justice. Historically, you know, our organization really specialized in providing assistance to internally displaced people in Central America, people fleeing mostly gang violence in Guatemala and Honduras, narco-trafficking groups, and to a lesser degree, sort of security forces and abuses of power. In recent times, in El Salvador specifically, our work has focused a lot on sort of a process that we called here a process of dictatorship and the dismantling of the democratic. system that was put in place in 1992 here that ended over a decade of civil war and decades of dictatorship in El Salvador over the last six years under the Bukele administration. We've seen the president use his popularity and electoral victories to capture the institutions of the state and install a different political regime, one that is, I think we can say without too much doubt, autocratic. And so our work has begun to focus much more on supporting the victims of the autocracy that's emerged in El Salvador. Speaker 5 (4:23) I wanted to talk to you because I think... People in the U.S. have probably heard a lot about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele recently because of this partnership between Bukele and the Trump administration sending Venezuelan detainees whom the Trump administration has identified on the basis of very thin evidence as members of Trendo Iroquois to the Salvadoran prison known as Secot. Before we go farther into those details, though, I want to... focus on one specific instance of sort of sliding toward dictatorship, which actually happened just hours before we sat down to speak, which was your colleague at Cristosal, Ruth Lopez, was arrested late on May 18th by the Salvadoran National Civil Police. What do we know about what happened? Do you know where she is? Where do things stand? Speaker 1 (5:11) Well, that's right. Ruth was arrested at her house at about 11 o'clock at night last night. Actually, police officers with machine guns showed up at her house and tricked her husband in saying that they were responding to a report of an accident that involved her car. And she came out. And then when she was out there, they informed her that they had an arrest order from the attorney general's office. And they informed her partner that she was going to be taken to a specific holding facility. Speaker 1 (5:49) And basically throughout the entire night, we weren't able to confirm where she was. She wasn't able to have access to her legal representatives or her family. And that produced a concern for us because those are conditions analogous to forced disappearances, at least short duration forced disappearances, which put the person who has been detained by the state at risk of abuses. but also causes trauma and psychological damage in the family who doesn't know where they are or if they are well. We've been spending most of today trying to see her, trying to get her access to her legal representatives. It's been pretty irregular the way the procedures have been going. We've been told she's going to be in such and such place for medical checkups and we can come and bring... She has to wear prison uniform now, but we have to buy it. And medicine, she needs to take medicine daily, but she actually doesn't have access to that right now. And when we get to the places, then they move her to somewhere else. And so it's been a little bit of a whack-a-mole just to try and verify her whereabouts and her well-being and have her have access to legal representation, which is concerning. Speaker 5 (7:07) And so I know that she has been working on your leading your anti-corruption team. Have there been any firm allegations against her? To what extent does this just seem retaliatory? Speaker 1 (7:20) Well, last night, almost minutes after she was detained, the attorney general tweeted out with a photo of her with the police officers or the arresting police officers and alleged that she was involved. and some sort of a corruption scheme while she was working at the electoral tribunal here in El Salvador. Obviously, we don't have any evidence about that. It does seem like this action happens right now, kind of on the crest of a repressive wave that's been sweeping through the country over the last 10 days or so. Maybe a little bit more, starting with the journalist from an online media outlet called El Faro that published interviews with... With gang members who gave testimony about their partnership with the Bukele administration and how they provided political support for them, and those journalists had to leave the country. Then there was an incident where the president basically ordered on Twitter the detention of owners of a series of bus companies here because they didn't obey a tweet he sent out on a Sunday night. And then last week we had... a group of a cooperative of 350 people that were they did they were doing like a vigil outside of the president's neighborhood his private residency asking for his clemency so that they wouldn't be forcibly evicted from the land that they make a living off of and and they sent the military police to break up the vigil and detained five of the people one of them was a evangelical pastor that serves that community and other one was their legal representative And then sort of, sorry, it's getting long, but I mean, I told you it was a wave. It's a big wave. And sort of after that, the president tweeted out the reprisals for what he said was like NGOs manipulating these poor people who are asking not to be evicted. He is going to pass a foreign agents law similar to those ones that we've seen in Russia or Nicaragua and in the humanitarian context. Speaker 1 (9:30) That was the end of last week. And so Ruth's detention comes at the back of that sort of that wave of repression. And for people who don't know Ruth, she was named by the BBC as one of the most hundred influential women in the world last year. She's one of the most credible and outspoken voices about corruption and human rights violations in El Salvador. So when they decided to persecute her. It's clearly an attempt to send a message that dissent has a consequence. It's an attempt to intimidate and to quiet critical voices. And they chose probably one of the loudest and most credible critical voices in civil society to target first. Speaker 5 (10:18) So you described this as a kind of a wave of repression. It seems like what you're sketching out is kind of a moment of consolidation or attempted consolidation by Bukele of sort of authoritarian control. Do you have any sense of what sort of sparked this crackdown? Speaker 1 (10:40) Yeah, I think it might be worse than a consolidation. The power of the state has already been most Speaker 2 (10:47) entirely consolidated into the president's hand and his family. Speaker 1 (10:51) I don't think anybody in El Salvador doubts that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. And there's no institution in the country with sufficient independence to intervene and protect rights or check power. And that's just a fact of Salvadoran life that's been in existence for, I would say, at least two years. What I think has changed is that this has been probably his worst two months politically. He had a job approval rating of about 80 % in January. And polls came out. We saw three different polls last week that said that he's about at 50 % right now. So he's had a 30 % drop in approval rating. And it's important, too, to put nuance on public opinion here. In the year-end poll that was done last year, the president, people, 80 % said that they support his job. his job approval. But 83 % said that they would be afraid to express an opinion that doesn't align with him and his party. So you have a Salvadoran population that says that, sure, I support the president, but I'd be afraid to tell you if I didn't. And now we have a population that feels compelled now to say that maybe they're not in agreement. And so I think that when the dictatorship begins to lose control of the narrative, They go and use the repressive apparatus of the state, which they've been building, to send new messages about what will be tolerated and what won't be tolerated. Speaker 5 (12:25) So I want to rewind a little bit and just sketch out for listeners who are less familiar maybe how we got here. You said that in the last two to three years, the state has really consolidated control, and Bukele specifically has consolidated control. What does the process look like from Bukele coming into office in 2019 and kind of seizing that power? How did he go about it? How did he build that political legitimacy, those approval ratings that were maybe in the 80s, maybe not? And how do we end up where we are today? Speaker 1 (13:00) Yeah, Bukele is similar to other contemporary autocrats in that he came to power through electoral means. legitimate electoral means. It's worth noting that the electoral system that Bukele came to power in is the one that our colleague Ruth Lopez helped to build when she was there as a technical advisor. He had popular support. He came to power as part of a popular opinion