El Salvador's Business Model Fills Jails

El Salvador’s New Business Model Fills Jails El Salvador Last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele made an unusual offer to the United States: He said he was willing to take violent prisoners in US jails – citizens, legal residents, and migrants of any nationality – and house them in a mega-prison that now holds tens of thousands of suspected gang members. The offer was warmly welcomed. Bukele “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after meeting with Bukele in early February. “We can send them, and he will put them in his jails.” “There are obviously legalities involved – we have a constitution,” he added. “But it’s a very generous offer. No one’s ever made an offer like that.” Bukele has made El Salvador’s harsh prisons a trademark of his aggressive fight against crime. Now he’s offering to “outsource” them for a fee, he said on X, explaining that the payments would make the enterprise sustainable, essentially a viable business model. The crown jewel of the prison system is the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), which was opened in 2023 just outside of the capital of San Salvador. It can house about 40,000 inmates. Bukele says the prison is a symbol of El Salvador’s successful transformation: “El Salvador has managed to go from being the world’s most dangerous country to the safest country in the Americas. How did we do it? By putting criminals in jail. Is there space? There is now.” For years, powerful street gangs had a stranglehold on the country, terrorizing residents, strangling business, and threatening governance. Then, in 2019, Bukele was elected on a promise to bring crime under control. Three years later, he declared a state of emergency, suspended civil liberties, and sent the army out into the streets after rival gangs went to war and killed 62 people in a few hours. Since then, about 84,000 people have been arrested, in three years tripling the prison population to about 110,000 in the country of about 6 million. Homicide rates have plummeted, life has changed. “The environment where we live is very different now,” one woman told the Associated Press. “It’s very quiet now for the family, for the kids.” El Salvador last year had a record low 114 homicides, a decrease of almost 50 percent over 2023. In 2015, there were 6,656 homicides. As a result, Bukele’s approval ratings among voters hover in the 90 percent range. He won the election last year with 83 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the number of Salvadorans trying to cross the border into the United States has fallen by a third. Now, he’s looking ahead, trying to revamp the country in other ways, too. Recently, he lured Tether, the world’s leading stablecoin firm, to El Salvador to create its first physical headquarters. That’s part of his attempt to turn El Salvador into crypto central: In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. Last week, however, the International Monetary Fund told the country to stop accumulating and mining the currency. He’s been reshaping the government, too. Recently, he’s changed the constitution to make it easier to change it. Now he’s trying to eliminate public financing of political campaigns. Both moves, critics say, are designed to eliminate political competition. As a result, the “World’s Coolest Dictator,” as he calls himself, has opposition groups, human rights organizations, and others worried. A year ago, he won his second term even though the constitution forbids consecutive terms for presidents by packing the judiciary and resigning just before the election. Now he’s already talking about an illegal third term. Meanwhile, he has cracked down on journalists, unions, and civil society groups, intimidated opposition lawmakers, and ousted judges who cross him, wrote World Politics Review. He has also jailed thousands without any access to lawyers or due process: Amnesty International said that El Salvador is essentially undertaking the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence.” El Salvador has become the most incarcerated country in the world, with 1.6 percent of the Salvadoran population now behind bars – more than four times that of the United States. Now, there is a different type of climate of fear in the country: Salvadorans say that it is common to end up in jail because someone has anonymously reported them to the police, who don’t investigate the claims. Meanwhile, the US State Department describes El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons as “harsh and dangerous,” lacking water and other basics. El Salvadoran officials say they want to keep these individuals in jail for life, regardless of what crime they have – or haven’t committed. Now, Bukele is turning his success at reducing crime into a nationwide business by importing criminals. As Foreign Policy noted, “Where El Salvador has become a true leader – not only in the Western Hemisphere but globally – is incarceration.” Share this story

El Salvador's Experience With Cryptocurrency Ends In Failure

Finance & economics | Bukele buckles El Salvador’s wild crypto experiment ends in failure Its curtailment is the price of an IMF bail-out. And one worth paying A Bitcoin statue in San Bartolo Plaza in Ilopango, El Salvador Relic of another agePhotograph: Getty Images Mar 2nd 2025 Save Share Give For much of the time since Nayib Bukele became president in 2019, El Salvador has teetered on the brink of default. The warning signs were familiar: high debt and interest payments, exacerbated by a wide fiscal deficit; low dollar reserves; anaemic investment and GDP growth. Negotiations with the IMF over a bail-out were deadlocked. Mr Bukele’s relentless attacks on the judiciary, his opponents and the media did not inspire confidence. Then there was his crypto fixation. In 2021 El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender, alongside the dollar. The president vowed to shun conventional capital markets, and raise billions via tokenised blockchain bonds. He would buy $500m-worth of bitcoin, build a “bitcoin city” in the jungle and develop geothermal energy to power bitcoin miners. The conventional markets shunned him. Several Salvadoran bonds traded below 30 cents on the dollar in the summer of 2022. When the government started deferring public-sector salaries to preserve cash, investors prepared for the worst. Yet El Salvador has defied expectations—and on February 26th the IMF’s board approved a $1.4bn loan to be disbursed over 40 months. In order to obtain the money, El Salvador has made the usual promises on fiscal discipline. It is also scaling back its crypto project. After a change to the law in January, taxes are no longer payable in bitcoin, and its acceptance in the private sector is voluntary. On its way to the IMF deal, El Salvador showed remarkable commitment to paying its debts; Mr Bukele was in part motivated by a desire to show up his Wall Street doubters. The country’s bond prices have climbed all the way back to par. Officials used scarce dollars to buy back bonds at a discount, saving a good share of future payments of principal. The fiscal deficit, which hit 10% of GDP in 2020, has returned to pre-pandemic levels of 2-3%. A crackdown on tax evasion, strong inflows of remittances and an economic uptick have boosted government revenue; the phasing-out of energy subsidies and pandemic-era programmes have slowed spending. The fund’s loan lowers the risk of a debt crisis, especially if it unlocks a further $2.1bn from other multilateral lenders as is hoped. Despite the deficit-cutting, the country might not have managed much longer. When debt is high and growth low, raising money at 12%, as El Salvador did in early 2024, is unsustainable. Sovereign default is all the more costly in a dollarised economy such as El Salvador’s, with no lender of last resort to avert a bank run or financial contagion. Local bank deposits are partly backed by government debt, so default might snowball into a banking crisis and even de-dollarisation. Pumped, now dumped As for bitcoin, its demotion may be more of a blessing than a concession. Mr Bukele promoted the cryptocurrency as a way to provide financial services to the two-thirds of adults without a bank account and to lower the cost of remittances, which come to almost a quarter of GDP. But the main barriers to financial inclusion are the size of the formal economy and low digital literacy. Remittances are expensive because Salvadorans like to send and receive banknotes, a pricey business made pricier by crime. The government also rushed the roll-out of Chivo, a digital wallet. Bugs and identity theft, to snaffle the $30-worth of bitcoin for signing up, were rife. The IMF was wary of lending to El Salvador while bitcoin was legal tender. Its volatile price posed a risk to financial and fiscal stability. The fund also pointed to bitcoin’s potential use in crime. El Salvador, according to the IMF, will limit “transactions in and purchases of” the currency. The country has in fact kept buying up to 1.6 bitcoin a day since the deal, according to blockchain data. It may yet have to reduce or reverse purchases to comply with the agreement. El Salvador owns 6,102 bitcoin, valued at around $550m, including unrealised gains of $250m or so, about which the president boasts regularly. Despite these profits, crypto has brought El Salvador more costs than benefits. The free publicity has been welcome, yet crypto-investment and crypto-tourism have been small beer. Gains in financial inclusion and from more efficient payments are meagre at best: the currency never really caught on. In 2022, when the hype was at its peak, a survey by CID-Gallup found that only a fifth of firms accepted bitcoin and just 5% of tax payments were in crypto. Recent numbers are likely to be even lower, as Salvadorans have retained their strong preference for cash and payment cards. Moreover, the policy cost $375m in all—from the Chivo rollout, subsidised transaction fees, bitcoin ATMs and more—according to Moody’s, a rating agency. That far exceeds the profits on bitcoin holdings, which could still evaporate. By delaying an IMF deal, the crypto experiment kept El Salvador’s risk premium high. Mr Bukele enjoys stratospheric approval ratings, often above 90%. It was not crypto that made him “the world’s most popular dictator”, as he calls himself, but his draconian crackdown on crime, in which due process and the rights of presumed criminals have been forgotten. His obsession with cryptocurrency has done little to ease El Salvador’s economic woes. Although bitcoin may remain a reserve asset on the national balance-sheet, its days as legal tender are over. Mr Bukele is just the latest crypto-utopian to see his wild ideas dissolve on contact with reality. ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, finance and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.