Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele easily wins reelection, Mexico notches key 2026 World Cup hosting duties, and Chile faces two national tragedies.
Bukele Coasts to Victory in El Salvador
Latin America’s most predictable election this year has nearly come to a close. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele handily won reelection on Sunday after a contest that featured no strong opposition. As of late Thursday, the Salvadoran election authority’s website showed Bukele had earned 83 percent of the votes, with 70 percent reporting, forgoing the need for a runoff.
However, by that point, the website calculated that only 5 percent of votes for the country’s unicameral legislature had been counted. In a leaked recording published by El Faro, the head of El Salvador’s electoral authority said she suspected someone—she did not specify who—may have acted to deliberately stop the count. Authorities turned to hand-counting ballots for both the presidential and legislative elections by midweek.
Despite the glitch, observers expect that Bukele’s party, New Ideas, will maintain its legislative majority, in part due to redrawn congressional districts that favor the president. But Bukele is also genuinely popular: The Salvadoran president has earned widespread support for measurably improving public safety through hard-line policy.
During his first term, Bukele’s government carried out sweeping arrests of anyone suspected of being involved in gang activity. More than 1 percent of El Salvador’s population is currently incarcerated in a system advocates say often sweeps up innocents and denies many people the right to a fair trial. Yet the policy’s impacts are tangible: In just three years, El Salvador’s homicide rate dropped from being one of Latin America’s highest to one of its lowest.
Enjoying high approval ratings, Bukele moved to run for reelection. Although El Salvador’s constitution prohibits consecutive presidential terms, the country’s Supreme Court—which Bukele’s legislature had packed with friendly judges—in 2021 greenlit the possibility of his bid. Democracy watchdogs warned that Bukele was setting a dangerous precedent by removing checks on executive power.
Rather than deny those claims, some members of Bukele’s government have argued that democracy is not all it is cracked up to be. “To these people who say democracy is being dismantled, my answer is yes—we are not dismantling it, we are eliminating it, we are replacing it with something new,” Vice President Félix Ulloa told the New York Times before the vote.
Bukele’s overwhelming victory raises questions that will ripple through Latin America, where crime and gang violence remain persistent issues. The first is to what extent other leaders will try to imitate Bukele’s security policies—and whether they will be successful. So-called Bukelismo has already become a polarizing buzzword in the region.
In neighboring Honduras, President Xiomara Castro has since December 2022 granted police expanded powers to detain crime suspects, to mixed results. A December 2023 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that violence against civilians in Honduras “continued unabated” last year despite the policy; the Association for a More Just Society, a Honduran human rights group, found that extortion rose in 2023.
New Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has taken an aggressive approach to fighting gangs that analysts say resembles Bukele’s in some ways. Noboa is responding with military force to a string of gang attacks that shook the country in recent weeks, and he has seen his popularity rise in the initial aftermath of the government offensive. Still, Ecuador’s gangs are richer and more powerful and thus harder to dismantle than El Salvador’s.
One apparent result of Bukele’s policies is that northward migration from El Salvador dropped during his tenure, as measured by arrivals at the U.S. southern border.
U.S. officials have emphasized corruption in Central America as a root cause of northward migration, but its role as a push factor is difficult to quantify. At least in El Salvador, insecurity appears to be a much clearer driver of migration. That may explain why the Biden administration, which has called out democratic regression in countries like Guatemala and Venezuela, mellowed its tone toward Bukele as his reelection bid approached.
Upcoming Events
Wednesday, Feb. 14, to Sunday, Feb. 18: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits Egypt and Ethiopia.
Wednesday, Feb. 21, to Thursday, Feb. 22: G-20 foreign ministers meet in Rio de Janeiro.
What We’re Following
Milei’s machinations. Argentina’s Congress rejected President Javier Milei’s flagship economic reform bill on Tuesday in a major defeat for the new leader. Milei has already carried out parts of his libertarian agenda through executive action, devaluing Argentina’s currency and firing some government employees. But bigger steps, such as privatizing state-owned companies, require congressional backing.
Amid the legislative drama, Milei focused on policy he can control, diving headfirst into various culture wars. On Tuesday, he traveled to Israel and announced Argentina would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, aligning with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government amid its war with Hamas. On Wednesday, a group of lawmakers from Milei’s party announced they would seek to reverse Argentina’s 2020 legalization of abortion.
Brazil investigates coup-mongering. Brazilian police executed search warrants across the country on Thursday as part of an investigation into alleged efforts by former President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies to carry out a coup following Brazil’s October 2022 presidential election. The court order that authorized Thursday’s searches said Bolsonaro himself helped edit a proposed order to arrest a Supreme Court justice and call new elections rather than respect the results of the vote.
Bolsonaro was ordered to turn in his passport within 24 hours. Asked to comment on the operation, he told Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that he was suffering “relentless persecution.” The probe is the latest in a series of investigations into Bolsonaro’s conduct surrounding the 2022 election, which he lost to Lula. Bolsonaro has been sentenced for spreading false information about election fraud in a separate case and barred from running for public office for eight years.
After Bolsonaro lost the 2022 vote, he did not enact the alleged order to arrest a Supreme Court justice. Fierce U.S. pressure warned him against rejecting the results of elections, FP’s Robbie Gramer reported at the time.
Azteca Stadium in Mexico City is seen on Dec. 17, 2023.Agustin Cuevas/Getty Images
Preparing for kickoff. The opener of the 2026 World Cup will be played in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, FIFA organizers announced this week. Mexico, the United States, and Canada will jointly host the tournament, with other group-stage games taking place in Mexico City as well. Azteca has a distinguished legacy. The stadium was the location of the finals of both the 1970 and 1986 editions of the World Cup. It’s also where Argentine striker Diego Maradona scored his iconic yet controversial “Hand of God” goal.
Question of the Week
Who won the 1986 World Cup final in Mexico City?
The team did not win again until 2022.
FP’s Most Read This Week
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- What South Africa Really Won at the ICJ by Sasha Polakow-Suransky
In Focus: Chile’s Tragic Week
The Presidential Escort Regiment No. 1 escort the coffin with the body of former Chilean President Sebastián Piñera in front of the National Congress palace in Santiago on Feb. 7.Pablo Vera/AFP via Getty Images
Forest fires that burned across central Chile last weekend had killed more than 120 people by Monday, making it the deadliest natural disaster to hit the country since a 2010 earthquake. Scientists say the El Niño weather pattern and rising global temperatures have combined to make Chile’s forest fires unusually large and dangerous in recent years. The blazes were deadlier than Maui’s 2023 fire and California’s 2018 Paradise fire.
The government in Santiago had already declared two days of national mourning due to the fires when another tragedy occurred on Tuesday: Former two-time conservative President Sebastián Piñera died at the age of 74 in a helicopter accident. Three more days of mourning were declared, and Piñera was honored with services throughout the week.
“President Piñera helped make great agreements for the good of the nation,” President Gabriel Boric said in a statement. “He was a democrat from the very beginning.”
Piñera’s respect for democracy will be one of his enduring legacies, economist Marta Lagos wrote in El Mostrador this week. After a right-wing military dictatorship ruled Chile for over 15 years, Piñera was among the Chileans who voted for a return to democracy. He became the first right-wing president elected in Chile’s democratic period, governing from 2010 to 2014 and again from 2018 to 2022.
“He established very respectful links with presidents who believed differently than him,” centrist former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, Piñera’s contemporary, told NTN24.
Piñera was a billionaire businessman, protecting pro-market tenets of Chile’s economy and leaving behind a fortune thought to be around $3 billion. During his second administration, he faced widespread anti-government protests that brought Boric and other former student demonstrators to national prominence. In 2019, he agreed to demonstrators’ demand that Chileans be allowed to vote on a constitutional rewrite.
With Piñera’s political skill, he could have become president a third time, Lagos wrote. But Piñera’s flavor of democratic conservatism lagged in the last election compared to the far-right variant of José Antonio Kast, who openly praises Chile’s dictatorship. Piñera’s relative moderation may be falling out of favor again.