Panic World - The man behind Trump's Salvadoran gulags

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

This week we’re asking an important question: Who is really inspiring the “vibe” of Trump 2.0? No, it's not Elon Musk. We’re talking about President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Joining us is Ricardo Avelar, to explain how this club promoter, hustle bro, and LinkedIn influencer grew up to become a dictator whose playbook President Trump is now stealing from. Aside from being a massive blink-182 fan, our guest Ricardo Avelar is a journalist and political analyst. You can find him and his work on X/Twitter @docavelar. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: http://multitude.productions/ads. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, if you wanted to rate Naibu Koukule at a 10 in terms of how cool he is, do you think he's the coolest, which would be a 10, or do you think, like, he's not that cool? Do you remember when kids go out and play in the neighborhood and there's one kid who's rich and he owns the ball, but he's really bad at sports, but he's just like he throws tantrums and he's so uncool that he will take the ball whenever, like, you beat him or something? That's him. Today we're going to be asking a very important question. Who is really inspiring the vibe of Trump 2.0?

This is an episode all about Central America's coolest guy, Naib Bucale, the head of America's new network of gulags and extraditional prisons, and the president of El Salvador. This is Panic World. I'm Ryan Broderick. Sometimes you'll be hearing from our producer Grant Irving. Panic World is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality.

And this week we're going to be talking about the hustle bro, the LinkedIn influencer, the dictator, Bucale. He has used the internet to warp reality in El Salvador, and he has led to the rise of an extremely annoying millennial brand of fascism, one that might just be coming to a country near you sometime soon. And joining me today is journalist, massive Blinkwinae 2 fan. That I am. I am. Welcome. How are you? I'm good. All thanks considered. I'm good. I think we need to start adding that to the introductions for all of our guests is what is their favorite band. I think that's important.

So I want to run through Bucle's entire career because I think for many Americans, he just sort of appeared out of nowhere. But I think you could argue he's the most influential man in the world right now, or at least one of them. He caught my attention when I was covering cryptocurrency during the post-COVID boom. But what is your earliest impression of Mr. Bucle? Where did he come from for you? So my first impression of Naibukel is when I was like 15 or 16 and El Salvador has never been big on like IDing people to come into bars or clubs. And Naibukele ran a club, one of the most famous clubs in San Salvador. And if you were lucky enough to look old enough, which was never my case.

But I finally met him in 2014. I met him personally. I was in an event. And I approached him. I was running a little NGO at the time. And I wanted to have him over to have a little debate, you know, with like, college students. And the first thing I noticed I approach him is that he doesn't look in the eye.

And then when I, when I shook his hand, it was like dead fish. And that was, that was horrible. That was, that was, that was cringy. And it got me to think that it's so weird that you see this character and he looks so like, you know, bold everywhere he goes. But he's a really awkward guy. That is weird. It's weird until it's not, until you think about it and it makes total sense, you know?

Like, he's a typical, like, internet guy who behind a lot, like, a screen. He's like closer J.D. Vance than he has Trump in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I did not know that he started his life as like a club promoter. And I feel like that makes so much sense. Do you remember a night of the Roxbury? I do remember Night of the Rocksbury. Kind of like that, like trying to hard, like Abu Tavi brother. Exactly. To go back before the nightclub. So, you know, I do want to run through a bit of his childhood because it is important. important, I think, to understanding him. So dad is Muslim, uh, opened the first McDonald's franchise in El Salvador. He was a polygamist with six wives. And Naibuble is the fifth of 10 children.

You know, he's started as sort of the rich kid in the area. But in 2012, he's running an ad agency and an import business and he's elected to mayor. And that is the beginning of his political career. And he he kind of runs on like almost like a macronian. And I think he still does to a degree. Sort of paints himself as like a liberal with a capital L. Like I'm all for business kind of thing. And this is what Time Magazine writes about his early political days. He wielded his social media machine effectively bragging that while his opponents traveled the country, he could campaign from his phone and his media team created viral Twitter challenges and emotive ad. So do you have any kind of memory of like the early internet content that Bouglai was putting up online?

There was an article in 2012 before the mayors and Congress elections in 2012 of like which candidates were big on Twitter. And there was a chart of the, you know, like ranking all the candidates. So there was this guy. The mayor of San Salvador at the time had like a thousand followers. This is 2012. And Naibo Kele was like sixth place and he had 324 followers in 2012. That's crazy.

And he was promising to long. launch a satellite and promising to attract a billion dollars in investment for this little town, that was his brand. He started with 300 followers 13 years ago. He was trying to like salute Hugo Chavez and like he even saluted at some point Nicolas Maduro. So he's a kind of guy who's like showing people that he's, one, lefty, two, that he's modern looking like he's criticizing his party, which was at the time a leftist party for a

being too orthodox. That is so interesting. It is not exactly the same as sort of the American far right starting with Occupy, but it's not not. It's like there's clearly this moment in 2012 happening in politics around the world where millennials, I think, are becoming politically conscious and they're saying, the world is sort of atrophied and like we can shake things up and we can use the internet to do it.

do you have any sense of like when he went viral for the first time? Like when did he become, when did he stop being the guy with 300 followers who was lying and became like the guy who actually knows how to use the internet? If you think he even does not use the internet. There's a funny moment in the lead up to the 2015 election for like mayor of San Salvador when there's this old guy, old establishment politician, gray looking dude. And he said to Bukele in Spanish, you're too young.

But the word he used jovencito is like a little dismissive. Oh, it's like a diminutive of young, right? Yeah, exactly. So it was really dismissive. Really like. That's really bitchy. That's funny. Yeah.

So it's so Naivukely always see, always saw himself, I think, as like, millennials against boomers, you know? Sure. There's also a problem in El Salvador that we had a civil war, which meant that the elites in the 70s and 80s left the country. And they all grew up in Miami. Which means there's a big void, so there's nothing in between boomers and millennials. There's no Gen X, there's no, like, leadership there.

There was a big void. So there was a massive jump from, like, you know, these great-looking people to Bukele, who dares to show up without a tie. So Na'i Boukele is effectively the first politician in a long time who was allowed to criticize the leftist party from within without being expected. And that made him, that made him special, sort of. You know, he was, when he was still part of his party, he had a fight with the vice president at the time, the vice president of El Salvador. The vice president replied a tweet saying, like, I don't know, this is inappropriate.

We can find a better way to this causes. Right. And Naibo Kelle replied with an image of a snickers bar. He remember those ads, like, if you're hungry, grab a snickers because if you're hungry, you're a lunatic. Okay. So he just replied with his knickers. And that's it. And that, you know, it's a, like the brattiest way.

to end an argument. But that was him. That was like he was, he was playful. He was sort of not taking himself for politics too seriously. And that's why he became a sensation with young people. So that's why young people wanted him. You talked about like how cool quote unquote he is. And we have this great New Yorker description of a young Buckelai.

So this, so in 2015, he is elected the mayor of San Salvador, as you mentioned. He, of course, hires all his family members to positions of power. Yeah, and then this is how the New Yorker described him. Bucolay, who wears leather jackets and backward baseball caps and has a beard, has a beard, invokes Alexander the Great and Steve Jobs. And his brand is meant to be a bit of both. A potentate with an anti-establishment streak. How insale is that? I mean, there is this kind of guy, though, that he absolutely is.

And I do love that this kind of guy transcends borders and cultures, that there is just, like this absolute piece of shit asshole who like is obsessed with how great he is and he doesn't seem to understand the functional difference between Alexander the Great and Steve Jobs because they're all just inspirational quotes on his Instagram feed. But so this is this is how the New Yorker describes his governing. Social media, he once said, has shown us what people really are, which is not true. That is just absolutely not true. Before everybody was pretending.

The public heard from him constantly on Twitter and Facebook. Facebook. As the mayor of San Salvador, he cleaned up the parts of the city's ramshackled downtown, renovated a trio of historic plazas, opened a high-end market. In addition to a library equipped with computers and players for children, he unveiled a $24 million public works project called 100% Illuminado to install lamps on every street corner. And then the quote he has here, he said this to the Virginia Quarterly Review in 2016. You can call it PR if you want to be a little cynical, but I'm talking about inspiration. I'm talking about something sublime. And it's just like, no, it is, you're doing things that are like very visible. Like all of those things are just like,

they're very hard to ignore, which I think is his whole deal. There are a couple of important things with what the New Yorker said at the time. They say a trio of public squares. It literally is three public squares that are clean and then the rest around as a mess. They are now starting to clean these surrounding squares. But it was literally, three squares that were extremely gentrified with a Starbucks so people, like, more privileged middle class people could go and take selfies there. So it was that. And then also that high, the high end market they're mentioning, there was a report a couple of weeks ago. You know, there's an outlet in El Salvador called El Faro, and they interviewed a former gang member who was

part of the negotiations between the Buele government and gangs, something that Buele now denies. And he said that the whole idea behind this market is that, gang members were offered to operate some of the stalls in that market. Well, I think that kind of confirms a thought I had had about the thing you said about him having about 300 Twitter followers yet the beginning, which is you can have a million followers, but if you have 500 of the richest people following you, that is way more powerful. I've seen this in like, particularly in Latin American countries, like they will have like the influencer that everyone kind of follows, but nobody really cares about.

And then you have the guy with like half the following who can do like whatever he wants and everything he tweets matters. And it feels very much like that's what Bucle is leaning into in the beginning of his career, which is like doing things for the upper middle class so that they talk about it and just assuming that like the influence trickles down. And that was his thing. In the very beginning, Naibu Kelle had a great opportunity to be something different. You know, like it. And among millennials, some millennials, he was even seen as, you know, an interesting choice. Yes, a little questionable. Yes, that kind of guy who wears, I don't know, like leather jackets in a country that's 30 degrees Celsius.

But, yeah, a little questionable. But at the same time, like, there's an opportunity here. Right. Finally, someone who's not speaking in like Cold War terms. And he just, he just, you know, rebranded authoritarianism for us. So, yeah, he wasted that opportunity. Well, not. So we're going to start talking about his shift.

but our producer grant pointed out a couple interesting posts in 2017 that seemed to foreshadow the direction he's going in and I want to share them with you so first there's this one from 2017 can you talk can you describe to the audience what you're seeing here so it's it's like an AI generated picture of Buckele being really like kawai really blushy

with big anime eyes that is and what Okay, so this is, it's important. It's important. It says how members of Congress think they look like after being Photoshopped. So this is one year before the legislative elections. And something that was really funny is that El Salvador was like a, we had like, like, our Congress was like, you know, a collection of old politicians. They were all in their 60s, some in their 70s, people who went through the Cold War,

for people who would recite Bible verses and Congress and stuff like that. So they obviously looked really old, but during electoral season, they would all go through like several layers of Photoshop. So he was making part of like, this became viral in El Salvador, people taking photos of like candidates not looking anything like they were in real life. So that was him, that was him trolling them. Okay. And yeah, this is one other one, which I think is much.

much more indicative of where he's headed. All right. So it says, so it's a neighbor of San Salvador. And the caption says, mayor of San Salvador, leader of the six districts, renovator of the historical downtown.

The three plazas, yep. Yeah, three plazes, exactly, the maker of one hour per day, which was his flagship thing, that they were going to do

like one massive public work a day, which only lasted for like 20 days. Yeah, puppy rescuer. He bears colorful socks and he is the daddy of all Areneros. Areneros is Arena was a right-wing party. So he's a daddy of Arena and protector of people in the Capitol. So yeah. And he's sitting in like sort of a game of Thrones.

He's on the Iron Throne. Yeah. Wait. So in this caption, there's a reference of something that like I could not figure out in our research and we were trying to figure out this. in a lot of his posts he talks about like saving dogs what does that mean oh yeah that that means he understands the internet he understands what people want to see is he saving dogs he says he's been saving dogs wait is there no evidence that he saved any dogs because okay wait just for the listener for the for the listener for the listener for the listener so we we like went through all a lot of his

stuff right and like there's a drumbeat of like maybe like once a month once once every couple months, he will just be like, I've saved a lot of dogs. He's tried to launch a few, like, initiatives to have, like, like, a veterinary clinic or something. And then when he brought Bitcoin to El Salvador and his bro... Which we'll get to. We'll get there. He started, like, a pet hospital. Okay.

That is called Chivo Pet Chivas and the ATMs. Wait, it's like, like, it's an ATM brand that he's like Nate. Yeah, so Chivo. So Chivo, so Chivo Wall. it was the digital wall. And the Chivo ATMs were all over the country. Nobody used them. They were used to like dry clothes.

There are photos of people literally drying clothes in the ATM. And then he called the hospital Chivo Pitts. So yeah. And it was supposed to be funded by the earnings of Bitcoin. But obviously Bitcoin has set us back on like $450 million. So I see. I see that. So he's okay.

Okay. So he's just like constantly saying like all of. the money that I'm making by like being like, you know, an exploitative capitalist, I'm using to rescue dogs as like an internet thing that, like as a PR thing. Exactly. But but then you need to understand what like go into, go into the political psyche of Latin Americans. We want a good dictator who is bad to those were bad, but really charming to those

were nice. Yeah. So like it's just a you guys thing. That's not a us. thing for eat absolutely not an us think you guys are learning yeah we're teaching you that yeah um but you know i was i i i've been watching the latest season of you and it's the same thing you know like a really violent guy with a romantic side yep that is that is what bukele is trying to offer people like but i love dogs will be like oh my god he's he's so nice okay so we'll get there but

So these two posts I showed you happened right before he's kicked out of his political party. And I don't know if this appeared in your research. But so he was a mayor of San Salvador and he's running the council sessions. And there is one councilwoman who is defying him and he doesn't tolerate that. And apparently he threw an apple at her and called her a witch. And that was like the tipping point. That's when they kicked him out. Yeah.

constant inner party criticism and then actually throwing a fruit is the last straw for this party. But like any good dictator in waiting, he just decides to start a new party. That's surprise, surprise, completely centered around him, which is new vos ideas or new ideas. Yeah. And he becomes a lot more aggressive online. One of the issues was starting, the new ideas. the New Ideas Party is a law that prevents donations to candidates that aren't officially recognized parties.

So on Twitter, he jokes multiple times about taking donations in Bitcoin instead. And this is in 2017, which I think is really interesting that he's like, he's that early to it. So I'm going to show you a couple posts here so you can kind of explain to our audience what's going on here. So this one is from November 2017. I'm going to need therapy for doing this again. So this is November 2017 and he's saying when they don't know how to stop a movement and they use the entire state machinery to achieve it to stop it.

Like he's criticizing a government of his own party by saying like they're using the entire state to stop us from using Bitcoin. Right. Okay. So he's starting. And there's a reply there that's really important. there's a Sylvia Aquino he was part of his network of like pseudo intellectuals he was sent to

he was sent to Europe to be like a diplomat or something and he replies to Bokele saying it is important to know that we are that they are only they are only warming up their engines but they will throw everything they have against us we will win anyway wink and it's so funny that they're they're talking exactly like the freaks in America Like, they're just saying this.

It's the same pattern, too, of just like, there are these technologies that allow us to be anti-establishment. They exist. No one knows how to use them. We don't really know how to use them, but we know they exist. And, like, us being annoying and, like, throwing apples at people and wanting to take, like, illegal donations is actually an entire conspiracy theory. And it's a conspiracy against us. And Bitcoin can help it. When you establish a dictatorship, dictatorship, dictatorships almost by definition, they require.

some sort of bubble, you know? Like, no one, like, they, like, the world is what we tell you what the world is. They are, so if you read Buchela's newspaper now, he, they published a lot of articles about, like, great things that China is doing. Sure. And it's a very, like, fringy newspaper talking about, like, they never, even now that they're good friends with Trump, they want published many things about, like, flattering things about the U.S., but they will keep publishing about China. So it's really interesting this dichotomy of like one Buckele that's outward looking and he's like tapping into trends. He knows about Game of Thrones. He knows about like Bitcoin and stuff like that.

But at the same time for his own people, like this is his public persona. But when he governs, he governs it like trying to create a bubble. Right. This is not this is not the world that have been telling you that exists. So here in America, everyone can just log into their truth social account to get a sense of what kind of, you know, filter bubble. might be living in. But I assume that the further that bubble expands, the better things get for the citizens living inside of it, right?

Like, in fact, we're going to find out exactly what happens when you get subsumed by the president's filter bubble on a national level right after an ad break from our newest sponsor, Truth Social. Before we cover, like, how dark things have gotten under Bucolese regime. We have to sort of talk about how stupid they were when it started. And I feel like the moment Buccahousalekh. Galae gets known internationally is for the Bitcoin stuff, which, you know, happens around COVID. But before that, February 2019, he's elected president of El Salvador.

He takes office in June. He announces that he's the world's coolest president. And he immediately gets in a Twitter fight with Andreas Manuel Lopez Obador, the former president of Mexico, which honestly, I would do. Yeah. Like, I'd pick a fight with Omlo, for sure. Yeah. And that is when American media immediately zeroes in on his Trumpiness.

Foreign policy calls him El Salvador's Trump. He's tough on crime, as he says. But he also rules via Twitter. He fires hundreds of governing employees, not with an organization called Doge, but it might as well have been called El Doge. and he appoints family members to his cabinet again. Yep. Because.

But he says they're not, they're not, they don't have a salary. So that's it. I mean, as if that is the main problem. Obviously, that is one problem. But the other problem is you're giving your family members influence over a public decisions. Yes. And.

But yeah, he does that. He starts firing people. He starts announcing things late at night on Twitter. Classic. But it's, that's it, right? I mean, he immediately. kind of seizes on a project from a Christian missionary named Mike Peterson called Bitcoin Beach in El Zante, a small beach town in El Salvador. The idea is to revitalize a small town with Bitcoin.

And it sort of starts as like a UBI, universal basic income concept where everyone's going to get 50 American dollars a week. This money is coming from an anonymous donor, which is still anonymous. I have some suspicions of who it is, but the people that I think it might be are extremely litigious. So let's just say, I wouldn't be surprised if they were South African. I just wouldn't be surprised if they happen to be a South African apartheidist. Bukle eventually takes credit for being the anonymous donor. But once again, I'm pretty sure it's one of the handful of South African apartheists that now run Silicon Valley. That is my theory.

Does he wear many hats? No. I think he's maybe one of the boy blood purveyors, if I had to guess. So in 2021, Naibu Klee goes to Bitcoin, Miami, where I was also there with my dad. And he announces there that Bitcoin is going to become legal tender in El Salvador. And then he posts the famous Laszer Eyes picture to mark that decision. The law passes. The country puts $150 million into Bitcoin. And the law goes into effect in September.

And seems like great, right? Everything went fine. There was a massive protest that the law came into effect. I think every American listener is now primed to understand how a dictator, you know, screwing with the basis of an economy could, you know, wreck everything while also it still sort of runs. So now there's people turning against Spooka. but I'm guessing he handles this in a very chill way

and doesn't do anything, you know, wildly unhinged or illegal or anything, right? You know, sort of in like Scooby-Doo terms, who he really was. He pulled his mask out. Again, remember, I've said that there are two people within him. There's the sophisticate and worldly guy, and there's the authoritarian guy.

So 2019, you sort of see moments of this authoritarian guy, but he's still trying to show us that he's this, like, cool precedent. he's a millennial, that wherever he goes, whoever he meets, he's not going to wear a tie. He's Obama. He's, he's, he's, he's trying to show us that. But then there's this thing in 2020, early 2020, he's trying to get a loan approved for his security program. He desperately wanted a loan.

But he also wanted to portray, another thing to consider is El Salvador doesn't have synchronized elections. So we elect presidents every five years. but we elect Congress every three years, which means that a precedent will govern with different legislatures. And not just like midterms like you have in the States, but we have, like, depending on when you win, you may govern with two or three different legislatures. Oh, interesting. Okay.

So when Bukele got to the presidency, Congress was still in hands of the opposition. So the first two years of his presidency were a little difficult because he had to negotiate with people he hated, people he despised and people he was constantly attacking. So February 2020, he's trying to get a loan approved. And Congress is saying, well, we can approve it only if you come and explain where you're going to like take this money to, what you're going to do with this money. And Buckel is getting desperate.

He doesn't like that. He doesn't like those terms. So he brings the military into Congress. This is during what they call his auto coup. Yeah, exactly. So February 9th, 2020, Naibukele brings the military into Congress. only Nebuchel is doing something that many people must have dreamed of, but never did, which is use the police and the military as a political tool.

Right. And so he could- I can't even imagine what that would be like. I have no ability to imagine what that would be like. I think if that happened here, we would all, like, everything would shut down. Like, we would have reacted really appropriately if that happened. I think Americans would be super freaked out if, like, there was some sort of secret police roaming the streets. I think the Americans would be really upset about it.

Yeah. It's a bit like January 6th just led by the, wait, that's actually what happened, right? It was inspired by the president. He wasn't personally there. He'd try. Is your military made up of like chiropractors and landlords as well? Like, is that your thing? The guy with the horns and the ski instructors flew in.

They were a little more disciplined with their uniforms that day. Yeah. But so anyway, yeah, he did that. he started threatening Congress for a week and then he said if you don't meet on Sunday we are going to force you to meet and approve this loan so obviously people in Congress said we're not meeting we're not showing up to Congress to approve it but Buele brought the military anyway and so they stormed Congress they they force the doors open

Buele sits on the speaker of the house's chair so to say which is something symbolic but At the same time, it's a major transgression, you know, to our Constitution, to our separation of powers. He sits on that chair and then for some strange reason, he starts praying. Oh, this guy's such a psycho. And then he starts praying and then he just says, now it's obvious who's in control. If we wanted to push the button, we would have pushed a button. But God asked me for patience.

That's so. That's literally what he says. There's a stage right outside Congress. They brought people in buses from all over the country to support him and support his rally. This is his self-coo rally. And people were upset when he said God wanted me to have patience. People were like, no. Like throw them out now.

But people are demanding a self-coot. He doesn't do it. And then COVID comes. So, you know, there's like this whole cloud dissipates. Oh, so that it kind of like freezes the standoff a bit. Yeah. Right? It lets him experiment with putting people into camps and detention.

During the next congressional election cycle, his party wins big, and he becomes fully in control of the government. So what does he do with all that power? In 2021, there is a legislative election. Remember, there's not a synchronized calendar. You have another round of it. Yep. And Bukele wins a super majority.

So the auto coup doesn't even need to happen now. He's now in control. Okay. He's now in control. So in May 1st, it's the first day of the new people in Congress. and on the first day, they do a coup. They carry out a coup against the Supreme Court. So imagine like Trump and Republicans in Congress suddenly removing by force all four justices that are not with them.

Is it four or three? I don't know, the liberal justices. But imagine that it doesn't matter. But imagine them like taking out all of Supreme Court justices and putting their own people. there. I couldn't imagine that. I could never imagine that in a million years, but that sounds scary. Yeah. He brought the military into Congress. He gets rid of oppositional Supreme Court justices. He's doing all this for a lot of reasons, but the big one is his fantasy to have El Salvador run on crypto and have all the crypto bros around the world flock to the country and live up their techno-libertarian

dreams. Here's the punchline, though, to all of this. This is all happening across like 2021 into 2022. As he's doing this, yeah, he's like working towards. his dream of Bitcoin, like, powering El Salvador. And by the time he is finally, like, consolidated power. And as you said, he sort of, like, completed his auto coup. We hit the Bitcoin winter. Exactly. And the entire thing goes down.

And I want to sort of run through this really quickly because I think this is a really important piece of this. So the Bitcoin Beach experiment, obviously, it's a massive failure. 60% of the, of people who are pulled, so they only. ever used the wallet that they the the the the the chivo wallet and the chief o atms because they were giving them free money it was hacked multiple times obviously um and buckelay then says he's going to buy the dip um this is like early 2020 uh he decides that he wants to start a bitcoin city which is a tax haven which is obviously uh going to be at the base of an active volcano because that's what you would do

if you're a really cool guy is you start a bitcoin city inside of a volcano um And this is how he pitches it to Silicon Valley. The Oceanside Bitcoin City will get its revenue from a value-added tax and the city will have no income, property, or capital gains taxes, invest here and earn all the money you want. If all he really needed to add there was tariffs and you would basically have like a almost identical economic policy to the one that is destroying America right now. And if you're curious, dear listener of like what this amounted to, it amounted to a lot of just. destroyed forest land and people's homes, which were demolished for a city that still does not really exist. Yeah, it was a frisbee.

Like, there was a, there was a photo of Buckele presenting it with an architect. And it's literally a golden frisbee with, like, some, some, like, mounds and stuff. So people are making fun of him for presenting literally like a golden tortilla as his proposed city. But, like, yeah, it's, that was Bitcoin City. That is a crazy, crazy thing. Bitcoin fluctuates essentially, now it's almost like one to one with like the SMP 500 or something, but it is constantly going up and down. It is, it is a useless as legal tender because its value is constantly changing.

Yeah, that's what we were trying to explain at the time. I was working for a newspaper and we were trying to say to people, okay, there's at least three things that you require in money. One, that's universally accepted. Two, that it can be divisible. So you cannot use a cow because you cannot split a cow behalf. And three, that is that you can print. predicted. Right. Have you ever tried to buy anything with with a crypto coin before? Yes, I tried and it was not possible. I tried it in McDonald's once and I had a colleague who went to government offices to try to pay her water bill and her electric bill in El Salvador.

And she was told that they never even brought the machines. That's so funny for them to like so yeah, it wasn't possible. It was I think I tried a supermarket once and they say they didn't know how to use it. So this is all like. you're going to accept it tomorrow. They didn't tell people how to do it. They did not explain how it worked. I remember at the time I was working at the newspapers, and one of the people in the cleaning staff came up to me and said that she was really worried because she wanted her salary in dollars, and that she was afraid that the president was going to make everyone receive her salary in Bitcoin.

Okay, so just a hugely arrogant misstep. And now he needs something to reassert control. Do you feel like his blunder with Bitcoin leads him to pivot really hard into the state of emergency and start dealing with the gangs? Do you feel like those things are connected? I think, I mean, the beginning of the state of emergency stems from breaking the pact with gangs. But it's not a separate thing. On September 15th, 2021, all right, so this is another important thing to consider. El Salvador celebrated its bicentennial.

like the Independence Declaration in 2021. And I think Bucale was planning something massive for that day. You know, the city hall in San Salvador and the main square, one of the three that he renovated. And that day, it was Independence Day, 15th of September. There was a massive protest. And the things people were protesting against were Bitcoin, human rights violations,

and the removal of Supreme Court justices. Okay. Almost 40,000 people. march the streets. Wow. That day. This is hugely embarrassing for the PR president, I imagine, as well. To the point that he had to cancel every public event.

That rips. That's so sick. That rips. Get fucked. His bicentennial celebration ended up being him inviting all of the diplomats in El Salvador to the presidential palace, and he started scolding them. For the first time, he looked weak. This is only a week after Bitcoin is in full effect as legal tender in El Salvador.

Yeah, so this is like chaos for him. It's chaos for him. He lost it. There's this colleague of mine in El Salvador, Carlos Martinez, who once said to me, Bukele flees forward. You know, like when you flee a situation, you go, you go where you're coming from. He flees forward. And that, that I think, is a good way of explaining how Buechle solves his problems. He's like, Let's go to the next thing then. And in this case, that fleeing is cracking down on gangs, which really means cracking down on everyone's basic rights. But this is also the moment around 20, 23, when he opens a massive prison called the Centro del Confinamento de Terrismo or Sikot. And this is part of a policy that he calls Manodora, Iron Fist.

Yeah. And this is how Time magazine, this is how the New York. New York Times describes it. Bucolet's policy of Mano Dura, Iron Fist, drove an aggressive crackdown on vicious gangs that has jailed 81,000 people and led to a precipitous drop in homicides. After decades of violence, fear, and extortion, citizens can move freely in former gang-controlled red zones, lounge in parks, go to those three plazas that he renovated. That's my addition there.

And go out at night. And right after the break, we're going to talk about what happens when you build a gigantic prison and you start throwing lots and lots of people in there, which is the Trump administration comes calling. A lot of what we've been covering has been how Buckelay has kind of followed and updated the playbook of how to install a dictatorship. Take advantage of a new technology, install a government that operates on loyalty, not ideology, care more about image than reality. But now let's talk about his dark new twist. hiding his crimes against humanity, he turned them into propaganda, which I do think is extremely novel. Way before Sikod started as a prison, way before it even began building it, he published pictures that were taken by a lot of outlets in the world of like hundreds of prisoners, semi-naked,

all really tight with each other. And that was his way of showing people like, I am tough on crime, I'm tough on gangs. And remember, El Salvador has been deeply card by gangs. He's speaking to the emotions of an entire country that hates gangs and wouldn't be bothered if tomorrow one prison mysteriously set on fire and people die. Like, people want revenge. And Bokele understands this. The problem is, Buckele negotiated with gangs for the first part of his government.

The first half, up until March 22, there were open negotiations with gangs that involved reducing homicide rates in exchange for financial benefits for gangs in exchange for businesses for them to run. This deals continue until March 22 when the government failed to comply with some of those conditions. And then the gangs launched the bloodiest massacre. One of the gangs launched a bloodiest massacre that we've seen since the end of the Civil War. So 87 people were murdered.

And this is not gang members. It's what we call civilians. Yeah. Regular people were killed. 87 of them. 62 people in one day. This is a tiny country. There's 6 million people in El Salvador.

And it just, you had 62 people murdered on one day, horrible day. And then they called Congress. They called a Congress session. And they declared a state of exception, state of emergency. Which is effectively the state of emergency means that Salvadorans are forfeiting three basic fundamental rights. You lose your rights privacy. You lose the right to be informed of what. like the charges when they arrest you.

Oh. And you are not entitled to have a lawyer with you immediately. Those, that's bad. Those are all bad. And they increase the period in which you can be arrested before they present in front of a judge. Then, you know, we start seeing pictures of like 500 people arrested in one community and massive raids and sweeping up entire neighborhoods. Nothing in middle class areas. This is some straight up Starship trooper shit.

This is like, This is like, I'm doing my part. And they're just like detaining. I mean, are these, I imagine these are just like random people getting swept up in this stuff. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah. So there are estimates that up to 30,000 could be innocent.

So, like, 40% of the people Buckele has arrested in the last three years under state of exception have nothing to do with gangs. Over 90% of people have been accused of illicit associations. Just knowing. Knowing people. It's not murder. It's not rape. It's not extortion. It's just people who are accused of being part of an association that's illicit.

Right. They have taken environmental activists. They have taken people from the opposition. They have taken a lot of people that have nothing to do with gangs and had zero affiliation. And now you see an image that you saw in the Civil War. So in the Civil War, something that was very typical is seeing mothers outside the Human Rights Commission at 5 a.m., waiting to be the first ones in to find out where their children are, if they are still alive, if they are being held in a prison, if they are, whatever they are. This is happening again.

So the gangs are sort of like, I mean, obviously, like some are clearly getting swept up and thrown in sea cup, but a large, there is some sort of collaboration with who is being swept up. Well, that's what we think. Like, we haven't seen prominent gang leaders. We have seen young people. We have seen people who work in the fields. We have seen a lot of workers being arrested. We have seen people if you're unlucky enough to have tattoos and have dark skin and live in a poor community, you are under risk of being arrested. So that is what we're seeing in El Salvador at the moment.

Well, that's a perfect transition to what we're seeing now in America. When the reality of governing is more complicated than making promises, these guys will always turn to demonstrations of force and the effectiveness doesn't matter because appearing strong as the whole point. And now Trump and Buckelay are closely connected, something Buckelay has wanted for a really long time. When COVID happened, Bucle was taking hydroxychloroquine to please. He's on the horse paste. But now in Trump 2.0, with only sycophants around both of them, their fascist romance could really get started, you know. Obviously, the Trump administration loves demonizing poor people and brown people and gay people and queer people and any. of the state that they come up with, and they saw a great opportunity with Naïbe Bukle and his

network of gulags. You talked about the image of sort of the mothers trying to go to the station to figure out like where their children are, where their sons are, and that is now something that is happening here. We are where people are being detained and disappearing into a system and many of them are innocent, or at least not guilty of any kind of crime that would warrant being sent to a foreign country's prison. But just for people who may have been sort of swarmed by the news of all of this in the last few months, here's the timeline here. February Bucle meets with Secretary of State

Marco Rubio, and they signed the agreement to put American prisoners in Seacot, and they pay El Salvador six million dollars for the privilege. Rubio tells reporters at the time, in an act of extraordinary friendship to our country, El Salvador has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world. Then he says, Buckelay has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residence, which is one of the most horrifying statements that any American politician has ever said out loud, I think. In March 2025, a month later, the U.S. deports 200 people to see caught without trial, saying they're gang members. They're using our

own version of sort of a state of emergency. We're not quite there yet, but they did find, do you know about this? Do you know about how old the law is they're using? 1798, right? The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify it. Judges are trying to stop it. They're not listening to the judges. And like you said, if you now are brown, if you have tattoos, if you live in low income

areas in America, you are at risk here. The person who's probably gotten the most attention from all of this is Kilmar Abrago Garcia, who is detained on March 12th due to an administrative error. The Supreme Court has upheld a lower court order to return him. He is still not returned. And then, do you know about the margarita thing? Yeah, yeah. He met Chris Monholland, right?

The Maryland senator. This is a typical Buckele stunt, you know, a typical Buckele came out. Yeah, talk us through the Margarita thing. I think this is a very important sort of portrait of Buckelay's psychology. Pictures taken in a hotel, the poolside area in a hotel, who's probably staying there, and they brought Kilmer Abrago there to finally meet the senator of the state he was living in Maryland. Sort of having a really serious conversation. Apparently, he said that he's heavily traumatized by the time he spent in Saccout.

At some point, in the middle of a meeting, there's a waiter that comes with a few glasses that are like, they have like, you know, salt on the rim. Then they take pictures. People from the government take pictures, and they post it. And Buella says, well, here's the senator and the gang leader having, because obviously he's a terrorist in the eyes of the propagandas and everything. And they're saying, well, they're having margaritas, poolside in a hotel. Son of a goddamn bitch.

That's a thing. Like when you're not, when your intentions are not bad, you don't think of all of these optics. But the Buckele government is always trying to see how to shift the optics. And that's a thing. Like if you're, they are more invested in the communications than all the rest of the people are. So that's why they're good at these things. I want to read one final quote from Buckelay about this before I sort of get your final thoughts here. And by final, I mean like the story is still going.

But, you know, so Bucolet was asked about, you know, what to do with Abrago Garcia. And he told NBC, how can I return him to the United States? Like if I smuggle him into the United States? And he's saying this in the Oval Office next to Trump. by the way, who was just like, I don't know, sitting there kind of like, he does that little waddle thing, you know, like, meh, you know, of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterous. And then he asked if he would release Obriga Garcia in El Salvador and he said, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists. The question I want to sort of end on here is like,

is this the future? Like, is it like, because to me, I look at this stuff and I, and I, and I, and I, And I listen to you sort of talk about his rise in El Salvador. And it's so one to one. Not so much with Trump 1.0, but Trump 2.0, it feels so linked to me. And I am, I think you've done to me what I typically do to our guests on this show because now I'm completely totally freaked out and feel insane. So if you want to talk me off the ledge, that's totally fine. if you want to talk me off the ledge, that's also fine. But what do you, like, is this the future of democracy in this part of the world?

Like, is this where we're, is this it? Like, I don't know. I don't know what to make of this. I think it is. I think that it's weaponizing frustration. I think it's, it's weaponizing frustration. There was no hesitation was the worst part. No, he didn't even, yeah.

Guys, listeners, when you hear that, there will be no edit. That is an immediate. Yes. Yeah. They're weaponizing the frustration of people. They are, they understand that you need to paint an enemy, they need to create a perfect enemy at all times, someone who is perfectly evil and has no good side to it. And that's terrorists, you know, and that's why, like, gangs have been, I feel like COVID and gang violence have been, like, gifts that Buckele has received. Because, because these are problems that have have, very little nuance. People are always ready to combat an evil virus or, you know, terrorism. And it's very easy to say at any given point that if you have questions against the war and terrorism, you're enabling or you're protecting or you're defending terrorists. The vice president of El Salvador said in the beginning of the state of exception,

when people started questioning the arbitrary arrests, he said that in times of war, any sort of questioning is treason. And that is what you're doing. They are creating overly simplified scenarios. Buckele and Trump, they present themselves as like the people who are vindicating, you know, a nation that has been heavily attacked, heavily, you know, disrespected. So if you criticize them, you're not criticizing Trump or Buckele. You're criticizing the idea of a prosperous America or if a prosperous al-Savre. But the way I see Bukele, I don't know if you remember that cartoon Freakazoid,

but Freakazoid in the 90s was the guy that consumed all of the internet. Right. And the internet in the 90s was very benign. So what happens when you consume all of the internet? Well, you become Freakasoid in the 90s, you know, this weird character who believes he's fighting crime, but he's just so strange. What happens when you consume all of the internet? All of its trends and all of its dark sides in a moment.

in a more dangerous era, are you personally afraid to go back to El Salvador? Does it concern you? I'm not planning to go back, no. No, I've told my family, like they come a couple times, but I'm not going back. Because at the same time,

the nature of this is very unexpected and erratic. You don't know if they're... We used to think that there were some outlets and some targets too big to fail, but they've gone. Buckele went after one of his top. advisors and tortured him and had him die in prison. So there's no too big to fail here. And I don't want, and I'm also not too big in El Salvador. I could easily be like, or anyone could easily

be arrested and thrown into prison, see them die there. And no one would do, no one would, you know, do much about it. So. Well, dear Liz, I want you to take everything you've heard today. Imagine that you are Ricardo 10 years from now. And every time he said El Salvador, he was saying the United States of America. And then I want you to think about that because I do think our two countries are now linked in what I think is one of the greatest shames in human history. Seacot is a nightmare. Seacot is a genuine nightmare. And our countries are now linked in that shame. And I want to thank you for coming on and talking about this and like being willing to sort of not humanize Buckelay, but sort of help us understand where he comes from and what this means and why we have found our two countries connected like this because there will be history books. They won't be published in El Salvador or America, but they'll be published elsewhere.

And they'll be pretty goddamn damning. So, yeah, once again, thank you. Thank you for coming on. If people want to follow you online, where can they do that? Well, thanks for having me. Just one more thing. Everyone's talking about Seql and how horrible it is, and it is horrible. Oh, no.

Is there a worst thing? It is not the worst. God damn it. What are you talking about? I would dare say it's probably one of the best prisons in El Salvador. What are you talking about it? Yeah, yeah. It's a vanilla.

Goddemeanor of prisons. Sorry about that, guys. But yeah, so if people want to follow you, where can they follow you? you. So you can follow me mainly in Twitter as where I post most things. It's DOC A-V-E-L-A-R. So doc, because I'm a fake dog. I'm a lot of my last name. So DOC-A-V-E-L-A-R. Thank you again. This was this was as delightful conversation as something like this could be about what we talked about. Like a shooting in an elevator. Thanks, guys. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email.

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