Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nayib Bukele is a Salvadoran politician born on the 24th of July 1981 who became the 43rd president of El Salvador in 2019. He first served as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán from 2012 and then as mayor of San Salvador from 2015, before running for president with the GANA party after being expelled from the FMLN and winning with 53.1 percent of the vote on the 3rd of February 2019.
Bukele launched a seven-phase Territorial Control Plan starting on the 19th of June 2019 and declared a state of emergency in March 2022 following a weekend in which gangs killed 87 people. More than 85,000 people were arrested under the crackdown by March 2025. According to government statistics, El Salvador's homicide rate fell from 38 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 1.9 per 100,000 in 2024, though human rights organizations have documented widespread arbitrary arrests and at least 367 deaths in custody.
CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, is a 40,000-inmate prison built in Tecoluca and announced by Bukele in July 2022. It covers 410 acres and is staffed by 250 police officers and 600 soldiers. By June 2024 it held at least 14,532 inmates, and Bukele has also announced plans for a separate prison for white-collar criminals modeled after it.
Bukele announced the bitcoin law at the Bitcoin 2021 conference on the 5th of June 2021, saying it would generate jobs and promote financial inclusion. Bitcoin became legal tender on the 7th of September 2021, making El Salvador the first country to do so. On the 29th of January 2025, the law was amended to remove bitcoin's legal tender status after the IMF agreed to a $1.4 billion loan on that condition; as of the 19th of January 2025, the government held 6,043 bitcoins worth $611.2 million.
After Bukele's allies replaced the Supreme Court's Constitutional Chamber justices in May 2021, the new court ruled in September 2021 that a president could serve two consecutive terms, overturning a 2014 precedent. Constitutional lawyers said the ruling violated at least four articles of El Salvador's constitution, and the United States condemned it. Bukele ran for and won re-election on the 4th of February 2024 with 84.65 percent of the vote, becoming the first Salvadoran president re-elected since Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1944.
Bukele's paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians who emigrated from Jerusalem and Bethlehem to El Salvador in 1921. His father, Armando Bukele Kattán, converted from Christianity to Islam in the 1980s, became an imam, and founded four mosques in El Salvador. His mother, Olga Marina Ortez, is Catholic. Bukele himself has stated he believes in God and Jesus Christ but does not identify with any specific religion.