El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – the “coolest dictator in the world”

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, took power in a landslide in 2019, promising to clean up politics and end gang violence. He also has a taste for cryptocurrency and grandiose schemes

Nayib Bukele
Bukele Earned plaudits by cutting homicide rates, cleaning up city centres and instigating social handouts
(Image credit: © Alamy)

El Salvador made headlines in September when it became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. On the first day of the new regime, the cryptocurrency’s global price slumped by more than 10%, noted the Financial Times. Undeterred by that, or the botched implementation of his trailblazing experiment, president Nayib Bukele tweeted that the small central American nation had increased its holdings. “Buying the dip…” he wrote, adding a winking emoji.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.