More than three decades after the end of its bloody civil war, El Salvador is now making waves as a destination for tourists—and possibly prisoners as well. In a recent meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele explored an agreement by which El Salvador would accept U.S. deportees of any nationality in its jails, and even extended the offer to include “violent American criminals” currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons.
Bukele, who refers to himself on social media as “the world’s coolest dictator,” has initiated a new focus on beachside tourism, and alongside it, a push toward mass incarceration. In a country where violence peaked at one murder every hour in 2016 and incarceration rates have soared to the world’s highest, Bukele is attempting to rebrand El Salvador as an idyllic surfing paradise.
El Salvador’s scenic coastline has been a hub for surfing culture for decades, having garnered international attention as a filming location for the 1978 cult classic surfing film Big Wednesday. At the same time, it became a fixture in international news and pop culture—even inspiring U2’s song Bullet the Blue Sky—due to the nationwide violence associated with the civil war and its aftermath. Bukele’s marketing efforts are generating buzz among travel publications, whose lofty endorsements have made a point to signal transformation: “El Salvador has shed its past reputation and entered a new era where tourism is safe and booming,” reads one article published in Surfer in 2023.
El Salvador’s Surf City has become a destination that attracts visitors from across the world and hosts glamorous events like surfing championships. On the surface, this strategy appears to be working. The Salvadoran Ministry of Tourism reported 3.4 million visitors in 2023—a 28 percent increase from 2019—with tourism generating $2.8 billion for the Salvadoran economy.
But El Salvador’s tourism miracle appears to depend on an ever-growing rate of criminalization and incarceration of its own citizens, as the same government that sells El Salvador as a haven for surfers and tourists is aggressively expanding its prison system.
Since March 2022, over 80,000 people, including children, have been arrested in El Salvador, including some on dubious charges such as “looking nervous.” This means that, with a population of just over 6.5 million, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. At the beginning of 2023, the country opened its newly constructed Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a mega-prison complex which has a reported capacity of 40,000 prisoners and currently houses more than 14,000.
The scale of its mass incarceration has created miserable conditions for impacted Salvadorans and their families, including intense repression and reports of torture in prisons. While Bukele has framed this approach as a response intended to curb the country’s stubbornly high rate of violence in the aftermath of the civil war, too many innocent people have been swept up in his crackdown.
Even as Bukele sells El Salvador to foreign tourists as a surf paradise, many Salvadorans are fleeing his repression. U.S. immigration officials apprehended nearly 100,000 Salvadorans in both 2021 and 2022. While these numbers have recently declined, they remain relatively high, with more than 50,000 Salvadorans apprehended in both 2023 and 2024.
In 2023, Salvadorans accounted for more than 30,000 U.S. asylum-related cases—the highest of any country—and were likely among the top three asylum-seeking nationalities in 2024. Bukele’s recent negotiations with Secretary Rubio reflect a carceral state that thrives on mass detentions. In currying favor with the U.S. and offering to imprison U.S. deportees of all nationalities, he is essentially trading in mass deportations by providing the U.S. with the prison infrastructure to make them feasible. Mega-prisons conveniently offer the infrastructure for mass deportations.
Bukele appears to believe that more prisons will bring more tourists to El Salvador. With surfing and beachside tourism, Bukele has taken the opportunity to recast El Salvador in a light that is sanitized and even sexy. His playbook isn’t new. Central America’s largest football stadium, Estadio Cuscatlán, opened in El Salvador in 1976, drawing attention away from the country’s upheaval and internal strife in the lead up to the civil war. The stadium conveyed modernization and national pride, just like Surf City. It’s the same script: a “cool dictator” presenting flashy vanity projects that serve as symbols of progress and stability, while nearly a quarter of the country’s population is trapped in poverty and dependent on remittances from relatives abroad.
Bukele’s vision of El Salvador as a surfing paradise built on mass incarceration is a mirage. Gleaming beaches and crime crackdowns mask a reality of deep poverty, relentless migration, and a carceral state now desperately seeking to interchangeably fill tourist beds or jail cells. This contradicts Bukele’s own narrative of progress, revealing that his policies are about control, not stability. For tourism to meaningfully take off, the right conditions must be fostered, especially respect for the rule of law and due process. In support of a brighter future for all Salvadorans, we should reject every effort to make El Salvador a dumping ground for international prisoners.
