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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acronyms -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Power, Politics, and Exclusion -- 2. Mano Dura -- 3. Creating Folk Devils -- 4. Contesting Mano Dura -- 5. Peer Rehabilitation and Empowerment -- 6. Reason, Religion, and Loving-Kindness -- Conclusion -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

In June 2019, Nayib Bukele, a former mayor affiliated with the former guerrilla movement FMLN, became president of El Salvador at the head of a new party allied with a splinter faction of the right-wing ARENA party. Capitalizing on the corruption scandals that tainted the two major parties, the youthful businessman rode to victory on an anti-sleaze platform. He has made Twitter his government's main communications platform, using symbolic politics to achieve high public approval ratings. But the president spurns openness and transparency in government, is hostile to the media, and openly defies the legislature and the judiciary, putting democracy at risk.

Nayib Bukele rode to power as a youthful reformer with an anticorruption agenda. Now he is displaying an authoritarian streak and undermining transparency.

Postwar El Salvador's media sector has grown and diversified, particularly with the rise in digital news outlets. However, media ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a few powerful business groups whose commercial pursuits prevail over the public interest. Although media corporations benefit from generous advertising budgets, they have proved complicit with successive governments, irrespective of the party in power. The little investigative journalism that exists has helped expose public corruption and offered a more fair-minded picture of the country's powerful gangs, but it has not spurred an overall production of more critical and responsible information coverage. Rather than supporting the fight against the impunity of those who engage in corrupt practices and perpetrate human rights violations, the media help old and new elites in resisting structural reforms and offer platforms for personal and political. Fake news sites run the risk of deepening existing levels of political polarization and imperiling El Salvador's still fragile democracy.

A vivid account of the criminal violence ravaging Central America shows why many migrants have fled to the United States—and how Washington's policies are deeply implicated in their plight.