Bukele, a 42-year-old president who often wears a backwards baseball cap, worked for years in political propaganda before social media became crucial to his rise to power five years ago. Since then, his approval ratings have skyrocketed to 90%, according to a CID Gallup poll conducted in June. Bukele’s modern political messages, his charisma and his brutal repression of gangs continue to win him fans inside and outside the country, even amid controversy.
With this, Bukele is using a manual increasingly used by 21st century autocrats, according to Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.
Social media was once hailed as the quintessential democratic tool for organizing protests, even revolutions, around the world. Now governments from Russia to Uganda are using them to control the narrative.
“They use this release technology tool to actually prolong and strengthen their dominance,” Gunitsky said. Those types of governments use influencers because their content “doesn’t look as much like propaganda and is more about shaping the narrative in more subtle ways.”
In the Bukele government, El Salvador built a sophisticated communication machinery. He blocked access to information that did not match official messages and hired teams of former journalists to produce high-quality videos showing security forces taking on the country’s gangs. The government has also mimicked Russia, forging an army of tech-savvy contractors — or “trolls” — to create fake social media accounts, spread falsehoods and harass critics.
At the same time, his message of a forceful response to gang violence spread throughout the region, gaining converts in other crime-fighting countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
With this, “an entire industry” has been born, as influencers adhere to the president’s image, said Oscar Picardo, director of research at El Salvador’s Francisco Gavidia University.
A study by Picardo University and local investigative outlet Factum examined 69 Bukele-friendly YouTube accounts, which together have more followers than the entire population of El Salvador. They discovered that many accounts—which earn money through the number of visits and subscribers—can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month, far more than the average salary in El Salvador. That content is eaten within the Central American country, and also by many of the 2.3 million Salvadorans living in the United States.
The group of accounts broadcast almost 32 hours of pro-Bukele content on a single day in May, according to the study. 90% of the videos analyzed contained false or misleading information, and almost all reflected government language.
One account, Noticias Cuscatlecas, could earn up to $400,000 a year by posting videos of violent attacks by suspected gang members against a chilling musical background, the UFG and Factum calculated.
The channel usually concludes the videos with the same message: “(Bukele) devised a plan to exterminate all this cancer from society and the most incredible thing is that he is succeeding. Now the people are no longer afraid.”
On TikTok, a video declares: “God chose Bukele for president-elect of El Salvador.” On YouTube, characters disguised as TV presenters attack human rights groups and journalists. They feature Bukele’s critics bursting into flames while claiming that his channel “brings you the latest news.” Others sit down for an exclusive interview with the president.
In April, the president of the Congress of El Salvador, Ernesto Castro, announced that he was opening the assembly to YouTubers and influencers from social networks to “report objectively.”
“The right to be informed and to inform is not the power of media companies,” Castro wrote in X, the social network formerly called Twitter.
AP requests to interview Bukele and his cabinet throughout his more than four-year tenure have been denied or ignored. Two people familiar with the inner workings of the president’s media machine refused to speak to the AP out of fear of the government.
For Guzmán and others, access to the assembly strengthened them, allowing them to increase their audience. Since then, Guzmán has been offered access to other big events, such as the opening of the Central American and Caribbean Games, something experts say Bukele used to show a kind face to the world.
Press credentials dangled from the TikToker’s neck and he beamed with pride in a government press box, standing among other influencers holding selfie sticks.
“Here we are accredited. I feel part of this, well,” said Guzmán, with a broad smile.
Around him, others were taking turns interviewing each other and bragging about how many people were connected to their channels. A man in a Hawaiian shirt jumped over the rows of bleachers to get a better signal. As Bukele took the stage to deliver a speech, Guzmán and others chanted “¡Reelección!”
El Salvador’s government is not the first to open its doors to social media personalities, but researchers and critics say the environment created in the country poses a special risk, as other leaders in the region try to imitate Bukele.
Picardo, the UFG researcher, said that these types of accounts publish a barrage of content when the government tries to publicize something, such as Bukele’s experiment with Bitcoin, his crackdown on gangs, or the Central American Games.
The researcher warned that his increasingly hostile tone is a harbinger of a further deterioration of press freedoms, echoing the alarms of the US State Department about a “villainization” of journalists by Bukele.
El Faro, Oscar Martínez’s award-winning news organization, is among those facing attacks and harassment for its intense investigation into Bukele, which includes audio recordings showing that the president’s government negotiated with gangs to reduce the violence.
The government has opened a case against El Faro for tax evasion, something the news site says is totally baseless. The phones of dozens of journalists were hacked with the Pegasus spyware, routinely used by governments to spy on their opponents.
In April, El Faro announced that it would move its operations center to Costa Rica due to increasing harassment.
Martínez worries that his investigations will be drowned out by the deluge of misinformation, saying that if Bukele remains in power in the upcoming elections, it will put reporters in El Salvador “much more at risk.”
“At that moment, Bukele is going to decide to remove all the obstacles that he has within the country, and the main obstacle that Bukele now has within the country is independent journalism,” Martínez said.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
