‘World's coolest dictator' gets a White House visit. What it means for Bukele, Trump and U.S.

Yahoo

13-04-2025

Last Tuesday, the State Department upgraded El Salvador's travel rating to a coveted Level 1, a long-sought goal of President Nayib Bukele that designates the country as one of the safest places to travel on the globe.
On Monday, Bukele will receive another cherished American gold star: an Oval Office visit with President Donald Trump that will showcase El Salvador on the world stage and solidify his burgeoning alliance with the most powerful leader in the free world.
The White House visit is a significant achievement for Bukele, whose authoritarian tactics to remain in power were condemned by the Biden administration just a few years ago. For Trump, the kinship is politically useful: Bukele is key to helping him carry out the mass deportations of migrants he relentlessly promised voters on the campaign trail.
'For Bukele it is a validation from the United States. The picture will show to the world that he is not in [the] same club with [Daniel] Ortega and [Nicolás] Maduro,' said Edwin Segura, a journalist and university professor in San Salvador, referencing Latin American leaders long viewed as pariahs. 'For Trump, I think, it's showing the type of political leader he expects: someone willing to collaborate with his plans.'
The White House said the focus of the meeting will be on the U.S. partnership with El Salvador to use its super-max prison to house alleged Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members. The mid-March flights of hundreds of Venezuelans to the notorious CECOT terrorism center sparked a multi-week court battle over the cursory process the Trump administration used to move them there.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously last week that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was accidentally deported to El Salvador due to an administrative error.
But the administration has given little public indication that it would pressure Bukele to release Garcia. On Friday, Leavitt noted the court asked the government to 'facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return.' On Saturday, a State Department official declared Garcia 'alive and secure' but 'detained pursuant to the sovereign domestic authority of El Salvador' in a court filing.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to Bukele calling Garcia's detention 'neither legal, ethical or beneficial to the interests of the peoples of the U.S. and El Salvador.' New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the first Dominican American to serve in the U.S. House, requested a visit to check on Garcia's health.
'The meeting debunks the U.S. government's claim that it has no say over Abrego's fate now that he is in Salvadoran custody,' said Elisabeth Malkin, deputy program director for Latin America and Caribbean at the International Crisis Group.
READ MORE: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to visit White House Monday
The outcry from Democrats around Garcia's case is unlikely to deter Trump from highlighting the pair's hardline measures to crack down on illegal immigration and crime. Bukele, who has billed himself as 'the world's coolest dictator,' sees his 'iron fist' approach to gang violence as critical to luring investment and tourism to the tiny country of 6 million people.
'Because of the dramatic improvement in public safety in the Central American country,' said Gustavo A. Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University, 'investment opportunities are increasingly attractive for Americans.'
Just as he boasts about receiving deportees from other countries, Bukele may also use the meeting to receive more clarity about how Salvadorans in the U.S. will be impacted by Trump's mercurial immigration policies. Whereas the Trump administration has removed temporary protected status for several Latin American countries, he has kept the program in place for El Salvador, even as the State Department has classified it as among the world's safest countries.
Still, with nearly 2.6 million living in the U.S., Salvadorans are the third-largest Hispanic group in the country and portions of the population may be vulnerable to mass-deportation efforts. According to the World Bank, U.S. remittances account for nearly a quarter of El Salvador's gross domestic product.
Left unclear is whether Bukele will use the exclusive setting to attempt to request relief on Trump's 10% across-the-board tariff, which could push up El Salvador's historically low inflation rate, a data point Bukele has been trumpeting on social media.
'Trump likes it when other leaders seek him out to make deals, whereas Bukele is interested in the meeting to protect his own and his country's interests. Bukele will want to address the tariffs,' predicted Sonja Wolf, research professor at the School of Government and Economics at Panamerican University in Mexico City, who has written extensively about Bukele.
Bukele, who landed at Joint Base Andrews on Saturday, has a personal performative flair that aligns with Trump's taste for pageantry. The visiting president released a nearly 2-minute video chronicling his arrival that included shots of the two countries' flags, U.S. military color guard, and of course, Bukele himself, exiting his plane and into a black SUV, dressed in all black and dark sunglasses.
The visual is meant to underline Bukele's feat of achieving a top-level U.S. alliance for a country suddenly punching significantly above its weight in global affairs.
Critics worry that other anti-democratic actors will be taking cues from Bukele to curry favor with this particular president.
'It does send a signal to world leaders around the globe, whether they're democratically elected or not, that this sort of behavior — the flouting of the rule of law, the undermining of democracy — that transactional nature of statecraft, it's now open season for all of that,' said Ned Price, a State Department spokesman during the Biden administration.