A year ago it made headlines. El Salvador became the first state to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. The decision was supposedly based on the enormous dependence that the country had on remittances from its expatriates in dollars. After the decision, its controversial new president, while the rest of the world looked at the decision with strangeness.
Today bitcoin has lost 50% of its value, transferring this fall to the reserves that El Salvador had deposited in the form of this cryptocurrency. Bukele, as controversial as he is adored in equal parts, continues to defend his commitment. Although, if something is certain, it is that Bukele’s economy is very far from that of the average Salvadoran people, one of the countries with the most differences in income.
How did Bukele make his fortune?
Nayib Bukele was born as Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez on July 24, 1981 in San Salvador, to a Muslim father, named Armando, and a Christian mother, Olga. He is of Palestinian descent on his father’s side. As a young man, Bukele attended the Central American University, where he studied Law. Finally, he dropped out of school to take over one of the family businesses. Later, he would own the Yamaha Motors license in El Salvador for a time.
Bukele’s father was one of the first imams in Latin America and the promoter of several of the mosques that were built in the 1980s on the Latin American continent, an activity that he combined with an important business fleet.
Bukele would start working at Obermet, an advertising agency also owned by his father, and, later, at the multinational agency Saatchi & Saatchi. In both, Bukele was director and the agencies took over the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a party of which Bukele would later form a part.
According to the El Salvador Transparency Portal, Bukele earns an annual salary of approximately $60,000, and has assets of more than $2.5 million.
This is how his political career grew
Bukele began his political career when he was elected mayor of the Nuevo Cuscatlán municipality in 2012. During his tenure, he provided all adults over the age of 55 in the city with a monthly package that covered essential nutritional needs. In addition, he offered scholarships to all students with a GPA above 3.5 to attend any university in the country. It was also significant that the homicide rate in Nuevo Cuscatlán decreased during Bukele’s three years in office.
In 2015, Bukele became mayor of San Salvador, beating out businessman Edwin Zamora. Among the highlights of this mandate is Bukele’s modernization of the city’s infrastructure, including the expansion of highways and the reconstruction of telecommunications lines.
In 2017, Bukele was expelled from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, one of El Salvador’s main political parties. This occurred in response to accusations that he was sowing division within the party.
After this expulsion, Bukele decided to stand in the presidential elections as an independent, emphasizing his discrepancy with the dominant political system. For this, he created the political party Nuevas Ideas; however, the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not give legality to the party. Later, Bukele joined the center-right party Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (GANA).
He won the 2019 presidential election, becoming the first Salvadoran candidate since the 1980s to win the presidency without representing one of the country’s two main parties.
Since then, Bukele has made headlines for his commitment to bitcoin which, for the moment, has not gone well, along with other controversies such as being accused of agreeing with the Maras to stop violence in the country.
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