From Murder Capital to Vacation Destination: Exploring the New El Salvador

“Do you know who lives there?” “Charlie, the man who steers our boat, asks me as I jump into the deep blue waters of Lake Coatepeque in northwestern El Salvador.” He points to a minimalist-style villa the freshly mown slopes of an island in the middle of the lake. “This belongs to President Bukele. Ocho million dollars!”

In any other Latin American country, people would speak with contempt about their leader’s personal wealth. But Charlie’s tone is one of praise, excitement, and even pride. It’s a feeling I encounter again and again when traveling through El Salvador, and for good reason. Until recently, the country was known and feared as the “murder capital” of planet Earth, with one in 10,000 residents becoming the victim of murder. Today, four years after Nayib Bukele took office, the number of annual murders has fallen from 5,000 to just 495: a statistic that has earned him the lifelong gratitude of his voters. “I can finally go outside without worrying,” a student at the Universidad Don Bosco in Soyapango, once the most dangerous suburb of the capital San Salvador, told me. “It still doesn’t feel real.”

Born to a Muslim family who emigrated from Palestine, Bukele served as mayor of San Salvador before setting his sights on the presidency. As the undisputed candidate, he won a surprise victory against El Salvador’s entrenched elite with his anti-establishment and anti-corruption agenda. Many presidential candidates in Latin America promise to “drain the swamp” and end the corruption that impoverishes and oppresses their countries, only to become part of the establishment they vowed to dismantle. Bukele is the rare example of a politician who not only kept his word, but also managed to stay in power.

Bukele’s holiday home on Lake Coatepeque.

One of Bukele’s top priorities was to hunt down El Salvador’s largest gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and 18th Street, which make their money through prostitution, drug smuggling, human trafficking and the transport of aliens across the U.S.-Mexico border. The government’s prosecution of the gangs is less like a crackdown and more like an all-out war. To this day, tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers are regularly mobilized to besiege and infiltrate criminal strongholds.

Drastic problems require drastic measures, and Bukele’s goal was to arrest and imprison anyone who had even the slightest connection to the criminal underworld. By 2023, more than 72,000 Salvadorans have been taken off the streets and placed in the country’s already overcrowded prisons.

Bukele’s crime policy, while effective, comes at a price. While the state has managed to arrest many dangerous criminals, it has also arrested a significant number of people who, after thorough investigation, turned out to be completely innocent. Gabriela, a lifelong San Salvador resident and tech entrepreneur who I met at a Miami-style beach party in the surfing town of El Tunco, told me how her private driver stopped answering the phone one day. After contacting his sister, she learned that he had been arrested by police while standing on the street with former gang members and drinking Pils – El Salvador’s national beer.

Journalists and activists accuse Bukele of human rights abuses and argue that mass incarcerations will not solve El Salvador’s problems but will only worsen them. His supporters disagree: By cleaning up the streets, the president can develop public works that improve the country’s economy and infrastructure. While highways and libraries cannot justify the injustice suffered by Gabriela’s driver, as I travel through this new, improved and, most importantly, safer version of El Salvador, I agree with the average citizen that these are, in some ways, necessary sacrifices. “I don’t agree with everything Bukele is doing,” was the standard response I kept hearing, “but we are doing better than in the past – and that gives me hope for tomorrow.”

While so many corrupt Latin American countries live in an inescapable present, El Salvador can look to the future. In addition to his fight against crime, Bukele is best known for his involvement in cryptocurrencies. Shortly after settling into San Salvador’s Casa Blanca, the 42-year-old leader surprised the world by investing a significant portion of government funds in Bitcoin. In retrospect, the decision wasn’t all that surprising. The crypto craze was at an all-time high at the time, and as the value of Bitcoin rose, Bukele saw an opportunity and must have believed he would triple the treasury, even quadruple the amount of money he had invested. Unfortunately, his announcement came just before the crash of FTX and the federal investigation of its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried: events that are sending the crypto world into a downward spiral from which it has not yet escaped. Although exact figures are difficult to ascertain, El Salvador is rumored to have lost over $70 million.

One might think such a mistake would harm the country’s economy, not to mention Bukele’s credibility, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Unlike neighboring Guatemala, where a despotic attorney general is currently trying to reverse the rise of a democratically elected, left-leaning president with an agenda not dissimilar to that of his Salvadoran counterpart, El Salvador remains stable, peaceful and even prosperous. One of the biggest benefits of Bukele’s war on crime is that the resulting security opened the country to an industry that had previously been virtually non-existent there: tourism. In Coatepeque, construction workers are building a variety of hotels, hostels and clubs to accommodate the growing number of travelers. Other projects are in the works on Lake Llopango outside San Salvador.

“This place used to be extremely dangerous,” Gabriela told me as we walked to a stunning mirador, or viewpoint, looking out over a dense and seemingly endless canopy of leaves. “This is where all the gangs from Soyapango are hiding.”

More confused than worried, I look at two soldiers standing guard with their fingers on the triggers of their loaded shotguns. Laughing, Gabriela tells me that her presence is purely ceremonial: Bukele, needing to maintain the standing army he has assembled for his war, is sending troops around the country to act as glorified bodyguards. Not to protect visitors from kidnappers – the likelihood is slim, she says – but to give them something to do until they’re called upon to lay siege to the next criminal hideout.

Although El Salvador is not as large as Guatemala and Honduras to the north or as diverse as Nicaragua and Costa Rica to the south, it has much to offer the curious traveler. There is Santa Ana, a colonial town near the Guatemalan border, from which you can visit Coatepeque and climb the Santa Ana volcano, which is filled not with lava but with pools of boiling water. There’s El Tunco, the aforementioned surf town, where you can test your skills on some of the biggest, longest, roughest waves you’ve ever seen – or watch others surf from the beach.

Aside from the grueling traffic, San Salvador is a surprisingly organized capital, where neon-lit hipster cafes share parking spaces with tiny pupuserias – simple cafeterias serving El Salvador’s signature dish: thick corn or rice tortillas stuffed with cheese, pumpkin , spinach or chicharron, to name just a handful of ingredients.

This doll holds the Guinness World Record for the largest doll (4.5 meters).

Exploring El Salvador is no longer life-threatening, but still very adventurous. If you want to get from one place to another, you usually can’t book a private shuttle. Instead, you’ll have to board a public “chicken bus,” decommissioned American school buses that the U.S. government deemed too old and broken to transport children but that were given a second life in Central America. In many cities you also have the option of renting motorbikes. If you’ve never driven one before, don’t worry – you don’t need a license or experience, and El Salvador’s roads are so chaotic that you’ll be a pro by the time you reach your destination. That is, as long as you don’t get thrown into the air by a knee-deep pothole or a camouflaged speed bump.

The biggest adrenaline rush (or panic attack) I experienced in El Salvador was on a group tour to the Siete Cascadas, or Seven Waterfalls, near the city of Juayua, an hour-long motorcycle ride south of Santa Ana, where I expected to be calm and peaceful Walk quickly turned into something out of the survival novel Robinson Crusoe. As I walked barefoot through a jungle filled with spiders, snakes and crabs – yes, crabs – I was so stunned by the absurdity of my predicament that I didn’t even think to object when my tour guide (a 9-year-old, A boy named Cristian, a shrimper, told us to climb up the falls instead of going around them.”I don’t think this tour is approved by the Salvadoran Health and Safety Authority,” I half-joked, clinging to the slippery ones , moss-covered rocks and prayed that I would survive another day.

Brave the Siete Cascadas without shoes or rope.

As much as I ended up enjoying my stay, I didn’t originally plan to visit El Salvador. Even though I had heard what Bukele did, I still imagined the country as it was in the past, as it looked when I saw it on the news or in an episode of The World’s Toughest Prisons. Instead, I thought I would spend more time in Guatemala, which was portrayed in the media as safer and friendlier: Guatemala. Ironically, Guatemala proved more unpredictable, as just days after I entered El Salvador, rightly outraged Guatemalans clashed with law enforcement and barricaded the borders. Weeks later, they have still not managed to stop the old government’s persecution of their elected president. But this is another story.