Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez (b. July 24, 1981, San Salvador, El Salvador), a Salvador politician and businessman who became the 43rd president of El Salvador, beginning on June 1, 2019. He became the first president since Jose Napoleon Duarte (1984–1989) not to have been elected as the candidate of one of the country's two major political parties: the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).
Bukele served as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan for three years from 2012 to 2015, and then served three years as mayor of San Salvador, the nation's capital, from 2015 to 2018. After winning both mayoral elections as a member of the FMLN, in 2017, Bukele was expelled from the party. In 2018, he established his own political party: Nuevas Ideas (NI). He sought to run for president in the 2019 election with the center-left Democratic Change (CD) party; however, the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) dissolved the CD, forcing Bukele to instead run with the center-right Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) party. He won the election with 53 percent of the vote.
El Salvador's murder rate decreased to historic lows during Bukele's tenure, falling by over 50 percent during his first year in office. Although Bukele attributed the decrease in murders to his deployment of thousands of police and soldiers to gang strongholds and an increase in prison security, his government has been accused by the United States of secretly negotiating with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) to reduce the number of murders. After nearly 80 people were killed by criminals during a single weekend in March 2022, Bukele's government has since arrested over 71,000 people with alleged gang affiliations, leading to accusations of human rights violations being committed by El Salvador's security forces. However, Bukele's crackdown on gangs was credited as effectively "decimating" them, resulting in a nearly 60 percent decrease in homicides in 2022.
Bukele has maintained high approval ratings among Salvadorans throughout his tenure but has been accused of governing in an authoritarian manner. In February 2020, Bukele was criticized by the opposition for sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to encourage the passage of a bill that would fund additional purchases of equipment for the police and armed forces.
In May 2021, Bukele led a move to fire the attorney general and five supreme court judges of El Salvador, which the United States Department of State and Organization of American States (OAS) denounced as democratic backsliding. Following the approval of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador in September 2021, protests against Bukele's government took place. His announcement that he would run for re-election in 2024 led to criticism by constitutional law experts and organizations that presidential re-election violated the country's constitution.
Bukele has been critical of other Latin American leaders, including Daniel Ortega, Nicolas Maduro, and Juan Orlando Hernandez, calling them "dictators".
Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was born on July 24, 1981 in San Salvador. He is a son of Armando Bukele Kattan and Olga Ortez de Bukele. According to The Times of Israel, Bukele's paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem while his maternal grandmother was Catholic and his maternal grandfather was Greek Orthodox. His father later converted to Islam and became an imam.
Bukele studied law at the Central American University, but later ended his studies and founded his first company at the age of 18. Bukele came to own Yamaha Motors El Salvador, a company that sells and distributes Yamaha products in El Salvador. He also became the director and president of OBERMET, S.A. de C.V. in 2011.
Bukele was born into a Christian household, although his father converted to Islam later in life. As the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, Bukele's religious beliefs were a controversial subject in the 2019 election, with an image surfacing showing Bukele praying at the mosque in Mexico City. In February 2018, The Times of Israel published an image of Bukele "in deep reflection at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City." Bukele has three younger brothers — Karim, Ibrajim, and Yusef — as well as four half-sisters and two half-brothers on his father's side of the family.
Bukele has publicly stated he considers himself a believer in God first rather than religion. In a 2015 interview he said that "I am not a person who believes much in the liturgy of religions. However, I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in his word, I believe in his word revealed in the Holy Bible. And I know that God does not reject anyone because of their origins."
Bukele married Gabriela Rodriguez, a psychologist and educator, on December 6, 2014. In 2018, Bukele told the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, that Rodríguez has "Jewish-Sephardic blood". The couple has one child, named Layla, who was born during Bukele's presidency in August 2019.
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