Nayib Bukele could have had it all. In 2019, the millennial millionaire won El Salvador’s presidency with a decisive mandate before his fortieth birthday. Still popular in the polls, he controls all three branches of government in the tiny Central American nation at a moment of historically weak us hegemony and a fractured domestic opposition.

Bukele might have used this unprecedented power to salvage El Salvador from the wreckage of neoliberalism. Instead, he is driving the country to ruin.

In September 2021, El Salvador became the world’s first nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. By then, Bukele’s irreverent reformer shtick had worn thin, undermined by his increasingly brazen authoritarianism. After sending troops into the legislature in February 2020, he imposed a militarized “state of exception” during the COVID-19 pandemic, triggering a prolonged constitutional crisis. After winning a legislative supermajority in the 2021 midterms, his party enacted a sweeping judicial purge, firing hundreds of judges and illegally replacing the attorney general and the entire Constitutional Court. In March 2022, he imposed martial law again, this time in response to a surge in gang violence after the collapse of a secret government pact with the criminal gang ms-13. The ensuing mass arrests doubled the country’s already untenable prison population, making El Salvador’s incarceration rate the highest in the world.