Nayib Bukele

Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez (Spanish pronunciation: [naˈʝiβ buˈkele]; born 24 July 1981) is a Salvadoran politician and businessman who is the 43rd president of El Salvador, serving since 1 June 2019. He is the first president since José Napoleón Duarte (1984–1989) not to have been elected as the candidate of one of the country's two major political parties: the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

Bukele served as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán for three years from 2012 to 2015 and then served three years as mayor of San Salvador, the nation's capital, from 2015 to 2018. After winning both mayoral elections as a member of the FMLN, Bukele was expelled from the party in 2017. In 2018, he established his own political party: Nuevas Ideas. He sought to win the 2019 Salvadoran presidential election with the center-left Democratic Change; as the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) dissolved Democratic Change, Bukele instead ran with the center-right Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA). He won the election with 53% of the vote.

Murders decreased by 50% during Bukele's first year in office, which he attributed to his deployment of thousands of police and soldiers to gang strongholds and an increase in prison security; his government was accused of secretly negotiating with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) to reduce the number of murders. After over 80 people were killed by criminals during a single weekend in March 2022, Bukele's government arrested over 75,000 people with alleged gang affiliations in a nationwide crackdown. Bukele's war on gangs was credited as effectively crippling them, resulting in a nearly 60% decrease in homicides in 2022. The campaign led the country to have the highest incarceration rate in the world as of 2023, and garnered accusations of human rights violations being committed by El Salvador's security forces. The homicide rate decreased by 70% in 2023 to 2.4 per 100,000, a record low below almost any other country in Latin America.

Bukele has maintained record high approval ratings of around 90% among Salvadorans throughout his tenure. He has been accused of sometimes governing in an authoritarian manner. In February 2020, Bukele sent soldiers into the Legislative Assembly in an effort to coerce the passage of a bill that would fund additional purchases of equipment for the police and armed forces. In May 2021, he led a move to fire the attorney general and five supreme court judges of El Salvador, which the United States Department of State and Organization of American States (OAS) denounced as democratic backsliding. Following the approval of Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021, protests against Bukele's government took place. His announcement that he would run in the 2024 Salvadoran general election led to criticism by constitutional law experts and organizations that immediate presidential re-election violates the country's constitution. The last president to seek re-election was Antonio Saca in 2014, while the last incumbent president to be successfully re-elected was Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1944. Bukele and his vice president Ulloa had their powers and duties suspended on 1 December 2023 in order to focus on their re-election campaign, and Claudia Rodríguez de Guevara assumed Bukele's powers and duties as acting president.