Bukele & Co., El Salvador’s New Landowning Family

When Nayib Bukele was unconstitutionally re-elected as President of El Salvador in February 2024, he and his family had already become landowners during his first term. In 2023 alone, the Bukele clan acquired 361 hectares, 92% of the land they currently own, through companies run by Bukele himself, or by his brothers, mother or wife. At the end of his last five-year term, they took over the coffee farms cultivating Bean of Fire, the President’s gourmet coffee brand, land housing sugar crops, and two properties with prime views of Coatepeque Lake. The area of these properties is around four times that of El Espino forest, the main protected area in El Salvador’s capital. 

Analysis carried out by Redacción Regional and Focos of 64 property deeds, 10 mortgage deeds and 40 profiles of companies belonging to the presidential family, registered before March 2024, also shows that, since June 2019, when Bukele came to power, people in his inner circle have, in a personal capacity, bought 16 properties totalling 13,371.33 square metres, valued at $1.4 million. These include beachfront properties, apartments and country houses. 

Bukele’s inner circle is composed of his brothers Karim, Ibrajim and Yusef, who, despite having no official role in Government, are his highest level advisors. Karim, for example, has accompanied him on official visits and to openings of major works, such as the National Library donated by China. Ibrajim has served as an envoy, on some occasions receiving public money for these assignments. Yusef played a key role in selecting the Government’s first cabinet, and participated, along with Ibrajim, in planning his brother the President’s gamble on cryptocurrency.

This group also includes the First Lady, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, who acquired two beachfront lots on El Salvador’s Costa del Sol, shared with her close family; and the President’s mother, Olga Ortez.

The Bukele clan’s newly acquired land is split between 34 properties – some obtained through the companies they run and hold shares in, and some acquired in a personal capacity, according to the Real Estate and Mortgages Registry of El Salvador’s National Registries Centre. The family’s land is 15 times the size of the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), the mega-prison in which El Salvador’s President has promised to incarcerate gang members.

The land acquired in 2023 was previously part of farms belonging to historic landowners, such as the Regalado and Hill Tinoco families. The Bukeles took control of it through Corporación Logística de Servicios, with long-term investments in the companies Hacienda Dorada and Santo Tomás Pau, as well as Grupo Bukele, the company run by the President’s mother and brothers.

In the family’s business portfolio, both Corporación Logística de Servicios and Grupo Bukele went from reporting limited assets in recent years, to each exceeding 6 million dollars in 2023, according to official documentation available from El Salvador’s National Registries Centre. 

For eight years, Corporación Logística de Servicios had reported assets of around $14,488.32 until the end of 2021. As El Salvador began a slow and costly recovery from the covid-19 pandemic, this company’s assets jumped to $944,413.28 at the end of 2022. By 2023, they had soared to $6,220,399.99.

Grupo Bukele turned its initial capital of $2,000 into assets of $783,928.07 in 2021, which rose to $5,182,211.17 in 2022. It closed 2023 at $6,804,557.05.

Of the properties acquired since 1 June 2019, 18 are linked to the companies Corporación Logística de Servicios, Hacienda Dorada, Santo Tomás Pau, Grupo Bukele, Lagencia and Prepare. Another 16 are held in the name of the Bukele Ortez brothers, their mother, Nayib Bukele’s wife Gabriela Rodríguez, and other family members.

Before Nayib Bukele became President, the Bukele family was already part of El Salvador’s business elite, owning a total of around 29 hectares over 22 properties acquired in a personal capacity, through companies or through percentage holdings in properties inherited by the family patriarch, Armando Bukele. Their landholding has now multiplied by 12.2 times.

Before Bukele took the reins of the country in 2019, he and his immediate family had amassed approximately 298,243 square metres of property, according to the official data accessible. During his five-year term, they acquired another 3,633,456 square metres.

Redacción Regional and Focos were able to access the preliminary report produced by the Probity department investigating Nayib Bukele while he was Mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán between 2012 and 2015 and the asset declaration provided for his inauguration as President in 2019. At that time, he registered joint assets with his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez, of $2,548,967.35, only $171,423.64 of which were properties. According to official documents, President Bukele was assigned a salary of $5,181.72, which he claimed not to collect.

In July 2024, when we requested the exit reports from the end of Bukele’s 2019-2024 term and his entry report from the start of his de facto management, the judicial authority’s Unit for Access to Public Information announced that this information, which was previously accessible to the public, is now classified. 

The Supreme Court of Justice, compelled by deputies from Nuevas Ideas, classified the public versions of declarations containing the dollar amounts of movable property, real estate, accounts receivable, investments, and debts. El Salvador’s constitution commands the judicial authorities to investigate the assets of officials and establishes that “illicit enrichment is presumed when the increase in the capital held by the official or employee, from the date they took their role until the date they left that role, was significantly higher than they could normally have generated by virtue of the salaries and emoluments they have legally received.”

For this report, we sought reactions and explanations of the acquisition processes for these properties from all members of the Bukele clan, through the offices of the President’s Press and Communications Secretary, Bukele’s government email address, and through the offices of Corporación Logística de Servicios and Grupo Bukele. There was no response.

Hacienda Dorada: coffee production returns to the Presidential Palace

In the mountains of the Santa Ana region, between Coatepeque Lake and Cerro Verde, two of the most important tourist sites in the west of El Salvador, there are seven coffee farms, covering 231 hectares, which make up “Hacienda Dorada”, as the Bukele family have rechristened this land. At the main entrance, a guard in an orange vest explains that since the change in ownership, authorisation is required to access the property. This land is crossed by two streams that spring from the Santa Ana volcano and flow, at a lower altitude, into the Comecayo river, in the same region. In August 2024, local residents claimed that they used to have unrestricted access to this route, which is now closed off by a chain link fence. The guard adds an extra detail, which is repeated by several current and former workers who have used the dirt “roads” surrounding the Hacienda: there is now a military post inside guarding the property. 

The Bukele clan says that this land is planted with nine varieties of coffee, which – at least since 12 July 2024, when Nayib announced to the world that he had become a coffee grower – is marketed in the United States and at shop in El Salvador International Airport under the “Bean of Fire” label. According to the brand’s own website, this “volcano coffee grows on some of the most fertile, mineral-rich soil in the world.”

The history of this land lies in a complex labyrinth of companies, founding partners, directors and legal representatives that links Bukele and his mother to the heirs of Tomás Regalado. Regalado was a military man and coffee grower who became president in 1898 following the coup against Rafael Antonio Gutiérrez, and went on to become one of the most important coffee plantation owners in El Salvador’s history.

I.                     From oligarchs to students

The story begins with the Regalados, one of the most powerful families in the country in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. One of “El Salvador’s 14 oligarch families”, they established their coffee empire in Santa Ana at a time when the grain was the country’s main export. Nowadays, the Regalado family are known as the country’s biggest sugar growers. A century later, their fortune put them among the biggest supporters and donors of Arena, the far-right party in government between 1989 and 2009. 

This landowning family owned coffee farms and vast areas of land in Santa Ana through their company Regpa, S. A. de C. V. and Tomás Regalado Dueñas. Between 2014 and 2017, they decided to sell seven plots of 231 hectares to the companies El Lindo Sueño and Santo Tomás Pau.

El Lindo Sueño was incorporated on 14 May 2014. Its founders were Madlyn Sofía Sánchez Torres and Carlos Lucién Meyer Molina, who were students at the time, according to the identity documents they presented to the public register. The company’s primary purpose, according to the memorandum of association available at the National Registries Centre, was “development, purchase, sale and investment in real estate”.

The company was established with 20 shares with a nominal value of $100. Its memorandum of association also records the election of its first management for a period of seven years. Agricultural engineer, Óscar Armando Martínez Morales was named as proprietor and sole director, and the accountant Salvador Silva Contreras, as alternate director. 

On 26 October 2016, Martínez and Silva, the directors of El Lindo Sueño, founded Santo Tomás Pau S. A. de C. V. in a deed that showed several similarities between the two companies. In November of the same year, they also acquired another plot of 850,689.21 square metres in the name of another company, also owned by the Regalado family.

II. From students to the President and his mother

Between 2015 and 2018, Bukele held the mayor’s office in San Salvador and started to lay the groundwork for his presidential bid, despite being at odds with his party, the left-wing FMLN. At that time, he was also CEO of Corporación Logística de Servicios, a company founded in 2004, with the primary purpose of “marketing communications products”. Bukele’s connection to the companies that own a coffee farm is linked to this other company, which he still controls. At the end of 2022, when he completed his fourth year as President of El Salvador, his role in the business changed from CEO to proprietor and sole director, following a change of company structure. His mother, Olga Ortez, has been the alternate director since this change.

Under his management, according to a provisional filing dated 3 February 2023, the company was granted a mortgage through the approval of a $2.5 million loan from Banco Agrícola to Corporación Logística de Servicios. The document states that this was guaranteed by a first mortgage under which the company El Lindo Sueño held 726,239.50 square metres of land on the farm known as Buenos Aires.

One month later, on 22 March, Banco Agrícola and Salvador Silva, representing the companies El Lindo Sueño and Santo Tomás Pau, signed off the loan for five of the seven coffee farms, for the same amount set in the provisional filing, for a term of 15 years. 

On 18 September, in a telephone call, Silva Contreras denied having any information about the mortgage, despite being the one who signed the document. “I don’t have any information about that. I haven’t signed anything. I can’t give you that sort of information”, he said.

He was later sent a message requesting another interview, but he did not respond. Óscar Martínez Morales was also contacted by phone and text message, and also gave no reply.

The link between the Bukeles’ company and the mortgage-holding companies controlling the coffee farms would resurface at the end of 2023, in a hearing that highlighted the fact that Corporación Logística de Servicios had made “permanent investments” in the companies Hacienda Dorada, for an amount of $3,148,142.64; and Santo Tomás Pau, for $1,825,649.18. They also became related parties of these two companies for the amount of $40,680 and $336,402.45 respectively. 

Non-current liabilities also showed that the company owed Banco Agrícola a sum of $4.2 million in the long term, a debt which had not existed the previous year. The company also had outstanding amounts on three other accounts. One account identified only as “N.B.” owed the bank $971,681.31; another called “STP, S. A. DE C. V.” owed $150; and “MOV-I, S. A. de C. V.”, $929,924.96. The latter is one of the Bukele family’s companies that raises the most questions in relation to the leader of the Legislative Assembly, Ernesto Castro, and the private secretary and former acting president of El Salvador, Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara.

This is how the Bukele family joined the select group of 2% of major coffee producers in El Salvador who own over 100 cultivable plots, according to the country’s National Coffee Institute.

Since Nuevas Ideas, the party founded by Bukele, took control of the legislative assembly, deputies have passed 17 laws relating to the production, foreign marketing, and promotion of coffee, including a $640 million fund for the recovery of the coffee industry. Experts warned of a conflict of interest here, with Bukele approving laws that would now benefit the operating sector of one of his key businesses.

Corporación Logística de Servicios went from languishing in the Bukele business portfolio, to being a goldmine. For nine years, from 2013 to 2021, it recorded no movement in its balance sheet, which remained static at $14,488.32. But 2022 saw its first jump to declaring assets of $944,413.28.

The company currently shares its headquarters, in the Maquilishuat development, with 12 other companies owned by the Bukele Ortez brothers and their first cousins, the family of Xavier Zablah Bukele, Chairman the Nuevas Ideas party.

The other document which directly links the coffee farms to the presidential family is dated 12 January 2024, when, with an agreement made at an extraordinary general meeting, the owners decided to amend the first clause of the Articles of Association to change the name of the company El Lindo Sueño to Hacienda Dorada. The mother of the Bukele brothers, Olga Ortez, acting “in her capacity as special executor of the agreements of the extraordinary general meeting”, signed the deed that formalised the name change.

On paper, that was the day they renamed the property where Bukele can enjoy his new “hobby”, which serves as a distraction from his government activities. Employees of the coffee company, which now has a sales area in El Salvador airport, claim that they were hired in 2022, the period when “the boss”, as they call Bukele, started to shape the commercial strategy.

The former directors of the recently renamed Hacienda Dorada and Santo Tomás Pau, Salvador Silva and Óscar Martínez Morales, remained in their roles in these two companies until 8 March 2023, when “the chair of the annual general meeting set out the need to select the new company management”. The shareholders elected Raquel Abigail Ordoñez Gutierrez, a member of the Nuevas Ideas party, as proprietor and sole director and Jonathan Ernesto Martir Pineda as alternate director.

Ordoñez answered a call on the morning of 19 September, but, when asked about her relationship with Hacienda Dorada and Santo Tomás Pau, said that she reserved the right of reply and did not have time to answer questions.

Ordoñez and Pineda hold the same roles at the two companies, which also share the same AGM secretary, Douglas Alexander Rivas Hernández, who holds the same position at Corporación Logística de Servicios.

On 18 May, Martir Pineda was granted an administrative power with special clauses enabling him to act in the name and behalf of Hacienda Dorada and was also appointed to carry out the respective formalities with the El Salvador Coffee Institute, an institution created during Bukele’s first term in government (2021-2024). 

On 29 August, Hacienda Dorada opened a point of sale in lot 2-100, level two, in El Salvador International Airport. The lease agreement was classified by the Autonomous Port Executive Commission, an institution run by Federico Anliker, a childhood friend of Nayib Bukele, former General Secretary of Nuevas Ideas and cousin of the former Agriculture Minister, Pablo Anliker, one of the first people named in the illegal purchasing scandal during the covid-19 pandemic.

III. Santa Ana coffee in Miami

On 19 February 2024, Hacienda Dorada became a Limited Liability Company (LLC) headquartered in Miami, Florida, USA. This is a strategic market for the producers – it is the largest buyer of Salvadoran coffee in the world. According to statistics from El Salvador’s National Coffee Institute, the US received 49% of exports in 2023.

The names registered as managers of the new company include two names of representatives of Hacienda Dorada in El Salvador: “Raquel A Ordoñez Gutierrez”, the same as the Nuevas Ideas party member, and “Jonathan E Martir Pineda”. According to Florida state documents, FastForward Company LLC and its director Carlos Nahuel Bisio were responsible for registering the Bukeles’ business on US soil. 

The primary address of Hacienda Dorada is a warehouse in Miami-Dade County, 16 kilometres from Miami International Airport. But this is not the only address they use. Ordoñez and Martir also registered personal addresses in Miami. 

The heads of the new Bukele company in the US gave the Florida Department of State the address of an apartment in the exclusive Monarc at Met building. According to Intelius (a website that specialises in providing personal information, telephone numbers, addresses, and criminal and public records checks), this apartment belongs to Bisio.

Zillow, a real estate website, shows that the apartment measures 1,044 square feet, or 96.99 square metres, has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. It also estimates that the monthly rent is $3,760.

The FastForward Company website mentions that the advantages of setting up an LLC include tax flexibility in Miami. “Profits and losses pass through the business into the personal tax returns of the owners” and “alternatively, an LLC can opt to pay taxes as a corporation, which offers possible tax advantages depending on the circumstances of the company”.

The purpose of having legal status abroad, as explained by employees in the “Bean of Fire” production chain, was to be able to sell the product via Amazon. The online shopping giant does, in fact, link the coffee produced by Hacienda Dorada in El Salvador to Hacienda Dorada LLC in Miami.

IV. Presidential coffee

On 12 July, Nayib Bukele unveiled his new role as a coffee grower on social media. Despite this being a personal undertaking, the presidential and Press and Communications Secretary’s accounts echoed the news of the President’s “hobby”. This announcement was made against a backdrop of growing poverty and inequality rates, and unrest over rising prices of basic food items, with the cost of a basic shopping basket having risen by $50 since 2019.

Bukele’s response was to promote his economic recovery plan, and to publicise his donation “(in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the government) of 200 pounds of coffee and 8,000 cups (plus sugar, etc.)” to various businesses. Some of his friends and influencers also received a selection from his coffee harvest to promote on social media.

For those who did not benefit from Bukele’s donations, the only point of sale for the presidential coffee is in El Salvador Airport, beyond customs. Which is to say it can only be bought on the way in or out of the country. “Bean of Fire” is packaged in black tins with gold lettering which provide a little information about who is behind its manufacture and where it is produced. Once it has been harvested in the mountains of Santa Ana, the coffee sold by the Bukele family travels to Buenavista mill, in Juayúa, Sonsonate. This mill is run by well-established coffee entrepreneurs. Its current management consists of Juan Andrés Molins Daglio, José Luis Molins Daglio and Carlos Alberto Funes Mendoza.

The Coatepeque Lake estate

On 1 June 2023, Nayib Bukele celebrated his fourth year as President. In his speech, he announced the start of what he called “the war on corruption”. The first case to be prosecuted was against former president Alfredo Cristiani (1989-1994). Amid accusations against the former right-wing leader, Bukele claimed that “El Salvador will never go back to being anyone’s property”. Later that month, on 20 June, Corporación Logística de Servicios bought two plots of land from Hill Tinoco, S. A. de C. V., one of the companies belonging to the family of the Foreign Minister, Alexandra Hill Tinoco, for an amount of $796,250.

This land is located on a hillside with views of Coatepeque Lake, where you can watch the waters turn turquoise and see Teopán island, which houses presidential properties for use by the family of the sitting premier. According to national records, the two plots are in Villa Coatepeque and include the farm El Porvenir. The Minister’s sister, Irma Roxana Hill de Salaverría, signed deeds alongside Nayib Bukele for the sale of the two plots, which have a combined area of 791,055.07 square metres.

When asked about the sale process, Hill de Salaverría said she had “no reason to give any information”. She did not respond to a later message requesting an interview.

The Hill Tinoco family is well known for being part of El Salvador’s landowning oligarchy and for owning large areas of land in Santa Ana, where they also grew coffee in the last century. According to the newspaper El Faro, they amassed over 2,458 hectares of land in the region of Coatepeque and El Congo. For the expropriation of this land during agrarian reform in 1980, the Chancellor’s family demanded compensation of $254.9 million from the Salvadoran state in 2021.

The plots extend on both sides of Route 10, and down the side of the crater formed thousands of years ago by a volcanic eruption, although they have no access to the lake. Until August 2024, their forests had been preserved with the exception of the area containing farmhouses on El Porvenir and a portion beside it that had been pruned.

Neighbouring the presidential family’s land is a poor community with basic housing, and beside that community, a military post installed in a house painted blue and white, like properties belonging to the State. This military post is new, according to residents in the community, although they can’t recall exactly whether the soldiers arrived before or after the emergency regime was put in place in March 2022. 

At 11:03 a.m. on 26 July 2024, a soldier in military fatigues left his improvised barracks, M-16 rifle in hand. His gaze was focused on a truck that had appeared unannounced on El Porvenir farm, perched high above the crater that forms Coatepeque Lake. All around him, an idyllic landscape that now had a new proprietor: his commander in chief.

Grupo Bukele and sugar plantations

On 2 August, several stretches of calle Antigua Vía de Ferrocarril in Armenia, Sonsonate, were closed. The Department of Public Works was working on the road that leads to two plots of land owned by Grupo Bukele S. A. de C. V., one of the key companies belonging to El Salvador’s presidential family. The Department of Public Works is an institution set up by the Executive to carry out public works that would previously have been handled by mayors’ offices. The institution, run by officials who also serve as leaders of the ruling party, centralised all works and has executed millions of irregular contracts, some of which benefitted companies linked to members of the ruling party.

Grupo Bukele acquired two plots of land neighbouring this zone on 14 June 2023. Together, the two total 503,271.08 square metres with a value of $1.159 million, according to official sales documents. There are a few buildings on these farms, but the majority of the land is used for planting sugar cane.

This land belonged to the Velasco Rivas family and Gliter, one of their companies. When contacted on the afternoon of 18 September, Liliana Velasco refused to give details of the land sale.

The story of Grupo Bukele, the company that brings together Nayib’s three brothers and mother, began in 2016. Karim, Yusel and Ibrajim Bukele together with Olga Ortez founded the company with initial capital of $2,000. In the Memorandum of Association, they established that its primary purpose would be to “buy, sell, lease, exchange, give or receive in lease, deposit, loan, mortgage, pledge or any other type of contract, the company's movable and immovable property”, and that it “may carry out any other (…) industrial, commercial or services activity”.

From 5 October 2021, its management has been in the hands of the Bukele twins Ibrajim and Yusef. Since then, Ibrajim has granted powers to four people who can represent the company. These include Walter Edgardo Serrano Guevara (one of the founders of Nuevas Ideas), the trusted lawyer and notary Claudia Beatriz Juárez Galvez (also a member of the ruling party), Melvin Josué Bolaños Velasquez and Héctor Manuel Velasquez.

On 20 October, Global Motors, S. A. de C. V., another Bukele Enterprise, sold three plots of land located in Loma Alta, Santa Ana Centro, totalling 3,584.58 square metres to its sister company for a price of $750,000. Ibrajim Bukele acted as representative for both companies. 

Months later, on 16 August, Grupo Bukele bought another two properties in the Miramonte development, in Santa Ana Centro, for $370,000. The properties have a combined area of 539.37 square metres and were both owned by Global Motors.

Grupo Bukele’s balance sheet saw another significant hike the following year. At the end of 2022, the company recorded assets of $5,182,211.17. According to the land registries, on 24 March, the company mortgaged the land in Loma Alta, Santa Ana, which it had bought from Global Motors one year earlier, for up to $4,339,000 with Banco Davivienda.

The parent company and a traffic light

In May 2023, the Ministry of Public Works installed traffic lights at the intersection of Avenida Jerusalén and calle La Mascota, on the limits of the capital city, and took out the footbridge that crossed one of city’s busies streets. 

“The traffic lights installed on avenida Jerusalén will only turn red when there are pedestrians waiting to cross the road or vehicles waiting to cross from calle La Mascota”, the Ministry of Public Works posted on social media on 25 May. Traffic on one of the country’s busiest roads only worsened.

Many of the vehicles crossing this intersection are heading toward the two properties owned by Prepare, a company run by the presidential couple. The houses were purchased on 30 June 2023 for $400,000 each. On the same day, Rodriguez took out a 20-year mortgage on one of the properties, in the name of Prepare, for a combined value of almost $960,000, with Banco Cuscatlán. According to the land registry, the first has an area of 1,540 square metres and the second 1,597.27.

Prepare was another of the companies that announced significant growth in their balance sheet. In 2022, they registered $91,921.29 and by the end of 2023 this amount had increased almost tenfold, reaching $1,023,890.23.

The address of the first property coincides with the address where the Bukele family has registered another 12 of its companies, including Obermet, Corporación Logística de Servicios (the company that controls the coffee farms), Corporación del Sur, Lagencia, Hifumi, Grupo Altermedia, and more.

The other 22 properties belonging to the “centre of power”

Since Nayib Bukele entered El Salavdor’s political scene, his brothers and cousins have become his closest advisors, operating in the shadows. When he won his first public office in 2012, Karim Bukele and brothers David and Xavier Zablah formed part of the transition team alongside historic figures from the FMLN, the left-wing party to which Bukele belonged until 2017.

The full siblings (Karim, Ibrajim and Yusef Bukele) do not hold public office, although they are key players and emissaries of the Presidency on matters as sensitive as pandemic emergency fund negotiations, diplomatic visits, and establishing public policies such as the Bitcoin Law.

According to a journalistic investigation, the now defunct Special Antimafia Group of the Republic’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, named them as the centre of power in a criminal structure entrenched in the State in an investigation into dealings with gangs, the theft and sale of food aid products, and the irregular awarding of contracts under the Emergency Heath Programme.

When Nuevas Ideas deputies unconstitutionally replaced the Public Prosecutor Raúl Melara and appointed Rodolfo Delgado, the Special Antimafia Group’s investigations were shelved and the prosecutors working on them went into exile.

One person who worked in the Public Prosecutor’s Office and had close knowledge of this investigation said that “the President’s brothers have no official role, and therefore they have no obligations, but within the power structure, they have the ability to influence the decisions of those below them.”

Nayib’s brothers, along with his mother Olga Ortez, and his wife Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, have acquired 16 properties valued at $1.4 million, according to the National Registries Centre, between September 2019 and March 2024.

On 3 September 2019, Ibrajim Bukele bought an apartment with two parking spaces and two storage rooms in Antiguo Cuscatlán, for a total cost of $166,300. Ibrajim has received public funds for making official visits on behalf of the Government of El Salvador, despite the fact that, publicly, he holds no public office.

Following this acquisition, it was two years before they bought more properties. On 25 March 2021, Karim Bukele bought two plots of land with a total area of 3,339.96 square metres in Talnique, for $60,000.

On 24 February 2022, Yusef bought an apartment with two parking spaces and one storage room in the exclusive neighbourhood of San Benito, for $442,000.

Four months later, Ibrajim Bukele bought the brothers’ most expensive apartment. On 27 July 2022, he acquired 6,961.58 square metres of land on the Palmira development for $431,980.56.

On 9 March 2023, Bukele’s mother also bought a property in the Escalón neighbourhood, valued at $190,000.

In March 2023, during her husband’s first term in government, the First Lady, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, also acquired, together with her family, two plots of land totalling 1,775.14 square metres, on the Costa del Sol in La Paz Centro, at a cost of $26,986.12. In May 2024, traders were evicted from this beach by a court order, and police and municipal officials burnt and destroyed their seafront huts.

Silence from the probity chamber

The judicial authority’s Unit for Access to Public Information (UAIP) has classified public asset declarations by officials, including the President of the Republic. Experts report this as a backward step, a violation of fundamental rights, and concealment of information that facilitates the scrutiny of power.

Previously, the Probity Section of the Supreme Court would draw up a table of public data to provide the information requested, but for the last two years the argument of confidentiality has been used to refuse this kind of request. However, on 25 July, UAIP refused to publish Nayib Bukele’s asset declaration on three grounds.

First, they cited the restriction established in the third section of article 240 of the Constitution with regard to classification and safeguarding of sworn asset declarations. Second, they said that article 6 of the Law on Illicit Enrichment of Public Officials and Employees dictates that “declarations will be kept confidential and classified and stored in a special archive created by the Supreme Court.” Lastly, they drew on point f of article 6 of the Law on Access to Public Information which states that “confidential information is private information held by the State to which public access is prohibited by a constitutional or legal mandate on the grounds of a legally protected personal interest.”

This new interpretation clashes with other resolutions issued by the Institute for Access to Public Information in 2015 and 2016, which ultimately threw out the argument for classification in the case of Rodolfo González, a former magistrate of the Constitutional Chamber. At that time, the highest authority on information provision said that classification referred to confidential data contained in the asset declarations, and ordered that the declarations should be provided, as long as they “cross out or omit the confidential information of the Magistrate Rodolfo Ernesto González Bonilla, such as bank account numbers, the names of his spouse and children, residential or property addresses and vehicle registration numbers”, on 23 July 2015.

“By publishing officials’ asset declarations, we are fostering the ethical principle of transparency. It serves as a mechanism to combat corruption and build the public’s trust, and it is a fundamental element of accountability in our democratic system”, added the Institute of Access to Public Information.

A former magistrate of the Constitutional Chamber who was there in the 2009-2018 period noted that the discussion in the plenary session of the Supreme Court endorsed the provision of the asset declarations of ex-magistrate González, because “people have a right to know information that is in the public interest”.

The former magistrate said that the interpretation of classification as mentioned in article 240 of the Constitution “refers to sensitive data, not assets. Assets should be public. And from there, those criteria start to extend to all information requests regarding asset declarations, with the instruction to delete sensitive data, creating a format for public release.” 

He added: “Refusing to provide asset information means that the public have no clarity about the work of public officials and about possible illicit enrichment. The interpretation that denies the information is a restrictive interpretation that gives precedence to the interests of the individual and goes against the international standard.”

Eduardo Escobar, Director of Acción Ciudadana [citizens’ action], one of the civil society organisations investigating the accountability of El Salvador’s Government, agreed that there has been a backward step on access to information regarding officials’ assets “because denying this kind of information is fostering opacity in public office. It gives officials free rein to make arbitrary decisions, without the press or the public being aware that public affairs are managed in such an arbitrary way. In making the confidentiality argument, the Supreme Court is only promoting this.”