El Salvador
El Salvador has seen significant uptick in media coverage after the election of Nayib Bukele, self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator". The world is now aware of the country's Bitcoin adoption, and the increasingly horrifying rates of incarceration.
What is unfolding inside El Salvador is an extreme push into tech fascism, with the ideological and financial support of U.S. venture capital.
Bitcoin Country
In 2021, Nayib Bukele established Bitcoin as legal tender, becoming the first country to do so. El Salvador's crypto economy has advanced alongside its mass incarceration of Salvadorans in concentration camps, and assisted deportations from the United States.
Bukele promised to alleviate the country's severe economic problems and help its citizens escape poverty. The Bitcoin Law was not initially announced in El Salvador, but at a Bitcoin conference in Miami, in English, and to an English-speaking audience. It was quickly met with thousands of protestors in the country’s capital; BBC News reported “The demonstrators gathered in the capital San Salvador on the 200th anniversary of the country's independence, brandishing placards reading ‘No to Bitcoin’ and ‘Respect the Constitution’. They accuse the president of using authoritarian means to tighten his grip on power.”
Since the adoption of Bitcoin, a boom of venture capital activity and crypto tourism has flooded the country as Bukele installed the National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) in late 2022, led by Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert, early crypto adopters and venture capitalists from the United States. Saifedean Ammous, crypto economist, libertarian and author of The Bitcoin Standard, was named economic advisor in 2023.
Bukele continues to court the crypto class, offering citizenship to foreign investors in exchange for $1 million in bitcoin. There is a large influx of monied crypto tourism to the region, including a large number of Bitcoin-related conferences, festivals, pop-up cities and events. He is also giving away full citizenships to 5,000 “highly skilled” foreign workers in technology, science and other fields.
Cryptocurrency is vital infrastructure in the venture capitalist artillery for infiltrating and colonizing underdeveloped nations, creating a financial chasm between its citizens and foreign investors looking to cash in on the country's digital financial system and "tax free" incentives.
Rampant political corruption has unfolded in this environment. Redacción Regional has investigated the corruption of the Bukele administration, reporting "since June 2019, when Bukele came to power, his inner circle has personally purchased 16 properties totaling 13,371.33 square meters valued at $1.4 million: beach ranches, apartments, and country houses... Before Nayib Bukele became president, the Bukeles were already part of El Salvador's business elite, owning a total of around 29 hectares divided into 22 properties acquired either personally, through corporations, or through stakes in properties inherited by the family patriarch, Armando Bukele. Their current land holdings have multiplied 12.2 times." For comparison, El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, is about the same size as the U.S. state of New Jersey with a similar population density.
Bitcoin City
Bukele is building a mega-project, Bitcoin City, similar in design and function to other tech mega-projects like NEOM and various Network State cities. Bitcoin City will be powered by the Conchagua volcano while "volcano bonds" -- Bitcoin-backed, state-issued bonds -- raise financing for the city and Bitcoin mining operations. Already, there has been displacement of residents, and environmental destruction of the country's dwindling mangroves, as the project begins with the creation of a new airport. From the Guardian:
"For the Salvadoran government, the airport isn’t just an isolated project, but one that fits into a grander plan: the 'Bitcoin City'... Bukele envisions a tax-free economic hub, with the airport a key part of making it accessible to international investors and crypto entrepreneurs.
Elmer Martínez’s family was among 225 households displaced from his community, Flor de Mangle, and neighbouring El Condadillo to make space for the 3km runway.
Martínez, a local representative of the movement for the ancestral peoples of El Salvador, and his neighbours were first approached in 2022 by government officials. In the following years, they went through what they considered 'predatory negotiations' for the agricultural-based communities to sell their homes in exchange for 'inadequate compensation'...
... The rising cost of land near the airport has made it almost impossible for small businesses and local vendors to establish themselves in the new economy, leaving many to ponder who will genuinely benefit. Land prices in the area have soared by up to 3,200% since 2000, making ownership unattainable for most residents...
For Martínez and his neighbours, the destruction of the mangroves isn’t just about trees – it’s about survival. 'They turned our home into a cemetery,' he says, looking at the barren land where a freshwater spring once flowed. 'First the forest dies, then the water. Finally, we do too.'"
Photos of the ecocide can be viewed here, documenting the destruction of 300-year old trees as well as springs and rivers.
Jorge Cuéllar, journalist and professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth, stated in the Harvard Review of Latin America:
"In attempts to resolve the economic hardships of ordinary Salvadorans, where crypto, construction and the revival of mining are touted as infallible solutions that will lift all boats, Bukele’s administration has instead deepened inequality by attacking the livelihoods of many, from criminalizing fishermen, displacing communities like Condadillo in La Unión, from expelling informal street vendors to those impacted by the Valle El Ángel megaproject in urban San Salvador that aims to privatize and contaminate a key water source for thousands of locals."
This represents an acceleration of water stress in El Salvador. The Guardian reported in 2019: "El Salvador is the most densely populated country in Central America. It also has the region’s lowest water reserves, which are depleting fast thanks to the climate crisis, pollution and unchecked commercial exploitation. According to one study, El Salvador will run out of water within 80 years unless radical action is taken to improve the way the country manages its dwindling water supplies."
Similar patterns of displacement, environmental destruction and predatory land deals have been seen in other tech mega-project sites, including California Forever in Solano County, California USA; Próspera in Honduras; NEOM in Saudi Arabia; and Starbase in Texas, USA.
Network State sites and special economic zones (SEZs) are multiplying across the globe, creating environments for venture capitalists to set up colonial projects revolving around cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. El Salvador is an advanced example of this model.
U.S. Venture Capitalists and The Network State
Bukele captured a second presidential term in 2024 through unconstitutional means, solidifying the acceleration of crypto and continuing his aggressive "tough on crime" position. In March 2025, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz went to El Salvador to meet with Bukele. According to El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office, discussions included:
Investment opportunities in El Salvador as an emerging regional tech hub focused on freedom technologies
The AI landscape in a post DeepSeek environment
Open source vs proprietary models in AI
An ever lower barrier to entry as prices fall
Education as key to rapid progress in technology
Marc Andreessen is a key financier of Pronomos, the venture capital firm responsible for funding many Network State sites. He is also an investor in the Network State site California Forever.
The CEO of Próspera, the Network State site in Honduras, visited El Salvador in 2023, stating "I’m excited about the possibility of bringing the Próspera vision to El Salvador and being part of that success!" Próspera is also funded by Pronomos Capital.
Tether, one of the biggest crypto companies, moved to El Salvador in 2025 and plans to built a 70-story headquarters in San Salvador. Per the Guardian, "the regime allows crypto firms to operate tax- and regulation-free – and has taken advantage of further tax breaks to accumulate real estate in downtown San Salvador alongside transplanted U.S. crypto influencers and members of Bukele’s family."
Like other countries in the tech fascist axis, El Salvador is making significant progress in its transformation to an AI and crypto economy. El Salvador is on track to become one of the first sovereign artificial intelligence hubs, recently launching an AI Lab Initiative. It has agreed to purchase NVIDIA B300 computing chips, highly advanced AI chips that "will be housed in El Salvador's National AI Lab" and will require the construction of more data centers.
The effort is spearheaded by El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office: "Stacy Herbert, director of ONBTC, explained that negotiations with NVIDIA began in July 2024, following a visit to Silicon Valley led by Ambassador Milena Mayorga and CEL President Daniel Álvarez. The meeting took place within the framework of the drafting of the Law for the Promotion of Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, approved in February of this year."
The expansion of data centers around the world, like crypto mining facilities, has come under fire for their extreme consumption of energy and water usage, leading to environmental concerns and negative consequences for those living in their vicinity. "According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the 'in-house' or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported... AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Goldman competitor Morgan Stanley’s research has made similar findings, projecting data center emissions globally to accumulate to 2.5bn metric tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030."
Across the world, communities are fighting back against data centers, including in the US, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Chile, Uruguay, Bangladesh, and others.
Opening El Salvador to this kind of foreign investment and exploitation, technological development and free-market capitalism, comes at a steep cost to the nation's land, natural resources and essential human rights.
Relationship with Israel
Israel's relationship with El Salvador spans decades, with Israel supplying El Salvador's right-wing dictatorships against leftist opposition throughout the 1970s and 80s. From 1975-1979 alone, Israel supplied 83% of El Salvador's military defenses and trained what later became El Salvador's secret police, referred to as "death squads".
Associations between Bukele and Israel began in 2015 when Israeli ambassador to El Salvador referred to then-mayor of San Salvador, Bukele, as a "partner for collaboration".
Once elected to his first term, Israel gifted the country with military equipment, while exporting an increasing amount of fire arms, tanks and armored vehicles. According to an investigation from Mint Press News,
"Since Bukele’s ascension to the presidency in 2019, Israeli exports to El Salvador have been rapidly advancing, growing at an annual rate of more than 21%. This increase consists primarily of weapons. Salvadoran forces are well supplied with Israeli hardware. The military and police use the Israeli-made Galil and ARAD 5 rifles, the Uzi submachine gun, numerous Israeli pistols, and ride in AIL Storm and Plasan Yagu armored vehicles. Some equipment Salvadoran forces use comes free, courtesy of Israeli sources. In 2019, an Israeli NGO, the Jerusalem Foundation (a group that builds illegal settlements on Palestinian land), announced that it would donate $3 million worth of supplies to the Salvadoran police and military. For others, however, the Bukele administration is paying top dollar, meaning that this relationship is extremely profitable for the high-tech Israeli defense sector."
The Israeli spyware Pegasus is also extensively used in El Salvador. Citizen Lab and Access Now conducted a joint investigation and found:
"We confirmed 35 cases of journalists and members of civil society whose phones were successfully infected with NSO’s Pegasus spyware between July 2020 and November 2021...
Targets included journalists at El Faro, GatoEncerrado, La Prensa Gráfica, Revista Digital Disruptiva, Diario El Mundo, El Diario de Hoy, and two independent journalists. Civil society targets included Fundación DTJ, Cristosal, and another NGO.
The hacking took place while the organizations were reporting on sensitive issues involving the administration of President Bukele, such as a scandal involving the government’s negotiation of a 'pact' with the MS-13 gang for a reduction in violence and electoral support... The hacking of Salvadoran civil society organizations with Pegasus mercenary spyware reflects a familiar pattern observed time and again in authoritarian societies: the use of advanced technology to frustrate and interfere with this essential component of a democratic society. In this case, the hacking also fits within a broader trend of abusive targeting and attacks against civil society in El Salvador."
Pegasus has previously "been accused of enabling authoritarian regimes" and ordered to pay out over $167 million in damages from hacking into 1,400 WhatsApp user accounts in 2019.
Mass Incarceration
Surveillance tech and military equipment is wielded against Salvadorans under Bukele's state of exception- a declaration which restricts constitutional rights, including due process, to expedite incarceration of residents regardless of any proof of criminal activity. "Through these irregular proceedings, large groups of people can be imprisoned at the same time and are not prosecuted as individuals." The United States, under the Trump administration, has agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million dollars for accepting 300 deported migrants from U.S. soil, while conflicting statements about which country holds authoritative power over those deported from the U.S., into CECOT (the Terrorism Confinement Center) is ongoing.
Those arrested are thrown into prison where they endure severe conditions and mistreatment. The elderly and the disabled are denied necessary medical care, and many die within the prisons, their bodies later dragged out of their cells like "animals". Meanwhile, actual gang members are said to have direct relationships with government officials, including Bukele's administration, who has been accused of striking deals with gang leadership to reduce gang violence and keep crime statistics low; via the Associated Press in 2022: “The U.S government alleges Bukele’s government bought the gangs’ support with financial benefits and privileges for their imprisoned leaders”. The many structural factors that lead to increases in crime and violence go unaddressed and are further exacerbated by forcing the disappearance of the nation's residents, political dissenters and deported migrants.
Socorro Jurídico Humanitario indicates confirmed fatalities under mass incarceration have reached 430 people. Salvadoran-American journalist, Daniel Alvarenga, speaks to Global Voices Latin America about the extent of violence and human death toll:
"I think Bukele needs to be tried for crimes against humanity when all of this is over and done. So far, we know that there are nearly 400 people who have died in his prisons with no due process. Organizations like Socorro Jurídico Humanitario say that though they've counted almost 400 dead — that's confirmed. The real number could be over 1,000."
El Faro, a crucial Salvadoran independent press, has faced state suppression and persecution, forcing some of its reporters into exile. El Faro has continued to document the impact of the authoritarian administration, stating in a July 2025 editorial:
"Dictators dream of ruling over a territory inhabited by people whose only political act is to applaud the tyrant. Critics, opponents, and those who insist on limiting their power by subordinating it to constitutions and laws have no place in their fiefdom. For them, there are only three options: exile, prison, or death.
All three mechanisms of suppression are active in the dictatorship that Bukele is building in El Salvador. Since the state of emergency began three years ago, more than 400 people have died in Salvadoran prisons, many of them under torture. More than 85,000 Salvadorans have been arbitrarily detained and, for the first time since the end of the civil war, prisons are holding dozens of political prisoners.
Thousands of Salvadorans —judges, human rights defenders, environmentalists, trade unionists, journalists, lawyers, businesspeople, opposition politicians, and simple critics of the regime on social media— have been forced to leave the country to avoid falling into the black hole of Bukele’s prisons...
Almost two years ago, El Faro declared itself a newspaper in resistance against the dictatorship and its instruments for silencing us. By then, we were already legally exiled in Costa Rica. Now exile has also reached a significant part of our staff, dozens of colleagues, representatives of civil society, and human rights defenders."
Additionally, 40 journalists have fled El Salvador just in the month of June 2025, with numbers growing rapidly and exiled people including non-profit workers, academics, lawyers, activists, and water defenders. According to Voz Pública, 130 people have gone into exile since 2020.
Conclusion
Since 2021, El Salvador has served as a model and testing ground for the exploitation of countries in the global south by venture capitalists, the crypto economic system, and foreign interests. The history of imperial oppression, caused by meddling empires, has created a landscape that is ripe for violent exploitation and hyper-capitalist experimentation.
El Salvador shows what happens under crypto colonization: the transition to crypto states, mass incarceration and political repression, corruption, and the selling of the country to foreign investors. The rise of authoritarianism, state torture and murder is inseparable from the rise of crypto and the tech economy in El Salvador.