El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly passed a constitutional reform overnight, removing presidential term limits, sparking concerns that the move could allow President Nayib Bukele to remain in power indefinitely.
Watchdogs and critics of the self-described "world's coolest dictator” said they've seen this coming for years, watching Bukele's administration slowly chip away at democratic institutions, attack opponents and consolidate power in the president's hands.
Bukele, who regularly posts streams of tongue-in-cheek remarks on social media, remained notably silent Friday. His government didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
"It's not surprising. But that doesn't mean it's not severe," said Claudia Ortiz, one of the country's few remaining opposition lawmakers. "The implication of this is more concentration of power, more risk of abuse of the rights of Salvadorans ... and the complete dismantling of all democratic checks and balances.”
On Thursday night, Bukele's New Ideas party and its allies approved changes to El Salvador's constitution, which were jammed through Congress by the party’s supermajority.
Damian Merlo, a U.S. lobbyist and consultant hired by Bukele's administration, defended the changes, noting that many European countries don't have term limits, and said the move only gives Bukele the option of reelection, not an automatic extension of his mandate.
"It’s up to the people to decide who the leader will be," Merlo said. "It’s been made very clear by the electorate they are very happy with the president and his political party - and this move represents the will of the people of El Salvador.”
Ortiz, the opposition congresswoman, called the defense "absurd,” and said that Merlo was citing countries - Germany and France - with democratic systems of government answering to the countries' parliaments. In El Salvador, power is now entirely concentrated in the hands of Bukele, she said.
Bukele, 44, was first elected president in 2019 after founding the New Ideas party, casting aside the country's traditional parties, thoroughly discredited by corruption and lack of results. Bukele's highly controlled messaging of beating back the country's gangs and rooting out corruption have gained traction in El Salvador, especially as homicide rates have sharply dropped.
But critics say many of the moves he has justified as tackling corruption and violence have actually whittled away at the country's democracy.
Over the years, his attacks on opponents and critics have gradually escalated. In recent months, things have come to a head as Bukele has grown emboldened by his new alliance with U.S. President Donald Trump. A number of high profile arrests and a slew of other actions have forced more than 100 members of civil society - lawyers, activists and journalists - to flee their country as political exiles in the span of months.
This year, watchdogs have warned that Bukele has ramped up his crackdown on dissent, emboldened by his new alliance with Trump.
The recent constitutional reform has fueled a new wave of criticism by civil society in the Central American nation, with leaders saying that Bukele's government has finally done away with one of its last democratic norms.
Roxana Cardona, a lawyer and spokeswoman for the Movement of Social Justice and Citizen Control, said "a democratic state has been transformed into an autocracy.” Cardona was among those to provide legal representation for Venezuelans detained in El Salvador and other Salvadoran youth accused of being gang members.
"Today, democracy has died. A technocracy has been born. Today, we live in a dictatorship,” she said.
Others, like human rights lawyer Jayme Magaña, said the idea of alternating power, crucial in a country that still has decades of civil war and dictatorships of the past simmering in its recent memory, has been broken. Magaña said she worried for the future.
"The more changes are made to the system of government, the more we see the state’s repression of the Salvadoran population intensifying,” she said.
