A text-as-data analysis of how Bukele's government constructed and coordinated its public narrative — and what independent media said instead. 162k tweets, 140k news articles, 2015–2025.
Before Nayib Bukele, El Salvador was one of the most dangerous countries on earth. In 2015, the country recorded 103 homicides per 100,000 people, the highest rate in the Western Hemisphere. Gang extortion was so widespread that small businesses paid protection fees as a matter of survival. Ordinary Salvadorans avoided whole neighborhoods. The political establishment — the right-wing ARENA party and the left-wing FMLN, trading power since the 1992 peace accords — had no credible answer.
Bukele won the 2019 presidential election with 53 percent of the vote in the first round, the first candidate in Salvadoran democratic history to win without a runoff. A former publicist and mayor of San Salvador, he ran as a genuine outsider against both parties. His appeal was not ideological. It was anti-institutional: he promised to dismantle a corrupt system that had failed working-class communities for three decades.
The security improvements under his administration are real. After the Estado de Excepción was declared in March 2022, homicide rates fell from 53 per 100,000 in 2018 to approximately 2 per 100,000 in 2024. Many Salvadorans who could not previously walk in their own neighborhoods describe a transformation in daily life. Bukele's approval ratings have not meaningfully declined despite sustained international criticism — because the criticism often comes from people who were not the ones afraid.
"When human rights organizations criticize prison conditions, Bukele frames them as wealthy elites who prioritize criminals' rights over honest citizens' safety. The argument lands because it contains a grain of truth."
From the paper: Section 2.3What distinguishes Bukele from a conventional security-focused leader is his mastery of spectacle. A former publicist, he self-labeled "the world's coolest dictator" on social media, deployed slick propaganda videos to brand CECOT — a 40,000-capacity megaprison — as a symbol of state power, and announced Bitcoin legal tender at a theatrical beachside event with pyrotechnics. Governance, for Bukele, is inseparable from performance. That is precisely the communicative mode that spin dictatorship theory predicts.
This project uses computational text analysis to ask whether that performance leaves a measurable footprint in government language — and whether the gap between what the government says and what independent media reports can be quantified at scale.
Drawing on 162k government tweets and 140k news articles, the analysis finds three patterns consistent with what Guriev and Treisman (2022) call spin dictatorship: coordinated messaging, agenda-setting without accountability language, and narrative construction at scale.
After Bukele's loyalists took over the Asamblea and FGR in May 2021, those accounts began speaking like him.
On May 1, 2021, Bukele's new legislative supermajority dismissed El Salvador's Constitutional Court and Attorney General within hours of convening. We measure the linguistic impact of that capture by computing cosine similarity between each institutional Twitter account and @nayibbukele before and after the takeover. Every account converged — but the captured institutions converged most.
The two accounts whose leadership was most directly replaced show the largest jumps (both +52%). The FGR's smaller increase (+26%) reflects a natural floor: prosecutorial language is structurally constrained by legal terminology. That it converged at all is notable. Spin dictatorship theory predicts exactly this: captured bodies adopt the captor's vocabulary.
This finding quantifies something previously documented only qualitatively. Communicative convergence may be a more sensitive early-warning signal of authoritarian consolidation than formal institutional change — messaging can shift before legal structures fully align.
| Account | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| @AsambleaSV | 0.293 | 0.445 | +51.9% |
| @FGR_SV | 0.253 | 0.319 | +26.1% |
| @PresidenciaSV | 0.404 | 0.613 | +51.7% |
| @Gobierno_SV | 0.540 | 0.698 | +29.3% |
Cosine similarity to @nayibbukele. Computed over unigram frequency vectors after stop-word removal.
Government tweets discuss the crackdown — but almost never use the words "arbitrary," "innocent," or "torture."
During 2022–2024, we compare how often key terms appear in government tweets versus domestic media articles (per 1,000 units). The pattern is asymmetric: the government actively uses security vocabulary (pandillas, terroristas) but systematically avoids the language of rights and accountability.
The government is not silent on the Estado de Excepción. It actively uses security vocabulary. But the avoidance is selective: it targets precisely the sub-vocabulary that invites accountability. Government tweets use "tortur-" at 1% the rate of independent media. They use "arbitrar-" (arbitrary) at 2% the rate.
This pattern — actively engaging a topic while systematically suppressing accountability language about it — is what Guriev and Treisman (2022) describe as positive agenda-setting. The frame is constructed, not absent.
| Term | Gov / 1k | Media / 1k | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| pandill- | 92.0 | 119.4 | 0.77× |
| seguridad | 64.2 | 195.2 | 0.33× |
| excepci- | 26.8 | 118.6 | 0.23× |
| derechos | 14.5 | 158.9 | 0.09× |
| capturado | 20.7 | 60.7 | 0.34× |
| arbitrar- | 0.9 | 41.2 | 0.02× |
| inocente | 0.9 | 23.9 | 0.04× |
| tortur- | 0.2 | 19.1 | 0.01× |
Gov tweets n = 34,084; media articles (domestic) n = 14,101. 2022–2024.
"Bitcoin" spiked in 2021 then disappeared. "Pandillas" tripled after the Estado de Excepción. "Derechos" quietly declined.
Term frequency per 1,000 government tweets by year reveals a government that adjusts its vocabulary in response to political events — not gradually, but in sharp discrete jumps. Bitcoin dominates 2021 messaging then nearly vanishes. Gang vocabulary triples after March 2022. Accountability terms like "derechos" (rights) and "democracia" hold flat or decline while security vocabulary rises.
| Term | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 ↑EDE | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pandill- | 9.6 | 14.0 | 12.5 | 44.2 | 76.3 | 51.9 | 86.5 |
| excepci- | 0.7 | 3.7 | 1.8 | 24.7 | 29.8 | 27.5 | 16.2 |
| seguridad | 41.9 | 38.1 | 44.9 | 57.0 | 66.9 | 75.8 | 48.5 |
| bitcoin ⚡ | 0.0 | 0.0 | 24.7 | 4.7 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 2.4 |
| derechos | 16.6 | 14.5 | 11.4 | 16.8 | 14.1 | 10.0 | 2.8 |
| corrupci- | 11.9 | 3.9 | 16.9 | 14.5 | 24.7 | 10.6 | 14.6 |
| democracia | 2.0 | 1.4 | 2.9 | 1.4 | 2.0 | 3.3 | 1.2 |
| N tweets | 13,707 | 17,278 | 13,767 | 16,250 | 10,262 | 7,572 | 2,473 |
Rate per 1,000 tweets across all five government accounts. Blue column = Estado de Excepción declared. Red labels = accountability terms (derechos, democracia).
All visualizations are built from the raw corpus data. Government and media vocabulary is compared using log-odds ratios with Dirichlet smoothing (Monroe et al., 2008). Event framing windows are ±30 days around each event.
For each key event, which words appear far more in government tweets vs. independent media? Compare the CECOT opening, the Bitcoin launch, the institutional capture of May 2021, and more.
Log-odds ratio analysis: which words does each government account use far more than the others? @FGR_SV's prosecution templates vs. @nayibbukele's global-positioning vocabulary vs. @AsambleaSV's procedural normalization.
Strategy and target heatmap. When does he delegitimize vs. deflect vs. mock? Which critics (HROs, foreign governments, press) get which treatment?
Track how key political terms rise and fall across accounts and years. Bitcoin's 2021 spike, pandillas tripling after the Estado de Excepción, derechos quietly declining.
El Faro vs. La Página vs. El Mundo vs. Diario Colatino. Which words does each outlet use far more than the others?
How does news coverage of key terms shift over time across domestic and international outlets?
Recurring two-word phrases reveal structural patterns: FGR prosecution templates, Bukele's international positioning, AsambleaSV procedural boilerplate.
"Régimen de excepción," "derechos humanos," "centros penales" — the phrases that define critical coverage. Compare across outlets.
Log-odds analysis of the most uniquely identifying two-word phrases per account and outlet. What does each source say that no one else does?
When does Bukele ramp up attacks on international critics? Volume spikes track key political stress points: the May 2021 coup, EDE criticism, IMF pushback.
Delegitimize, deflect, mock, or threaten? Which strategies does Bukele deploy against HROs vs. foreign governments vs. international press?
Head-to-head comparison of government vs. media vocabulary for each event window, displayed as a symmetric diverging chart.
The framing analysis centers on eight moments where government and media narratives diverged most sharply. Red markers indicate democratic backsliding events.
First president since the peace accords elected without ARENA or FMLN. Runs on anti-corruption, social media-first strategy. Wins 53% in the first round.
Bukele surrounds the Asamblea with troops to pressure passage of a security loan. First major constitutional crisis; international condemnation.
Daily Twitter dashboards become a central communications tool. Emergency decrees concentrate executive power. Bukele's approval holds above 80%.
New legislative supermajority dismisses the Constitutional Court and Attorney General on Day 1. Both accounts shift messaging within weeks. IACHR condemns the move as a violation of constitutional norms.
El Salvador is the first country to adopt Bitcoin nationally. Government frames it as a development breakthrough. The IMF and international investors express concern. "Bitcoin" spikes to 24.7/1k tweets — then nearly vanishes by 2023.
Constitutional rights suspended after a gang violence spike. 80,000+ arrests — the largest per-capita mass incarceration in the Western Hemisphere. Government: historic security success. Independent media and Amnesty: arbitrary detentions, deaths in custody, systematic torture.
The Terrorism Confinement Center (40,000 capacity) is launched with a government propaganda video set to driving music. Bukele tours international leaders through it. Human rights organizations document beatings and overcrowding.
Wins by a historic margin. The Constitutional Court that permitted his candidacy for a second term was composed of his own 2021 appointees. International observers note unfair advantages despite calling the vote technically free.
Assembled from six source streams: government Twitter, GDELT BigQuery, HuggingFace datasets, direct outlet crawls, URL repair via the Wayback Machine, and internationally-filtered press. Cleaned, deduplicated, and filtered for political relevance to El Salvador.
| Account | Role | Tweets |
|---|---|---|
| @AsambleaSV | Legislature | 54,466 |
| @FGR_SV | Public prosecutor | 36,519 |
| @Gobierno_SV | Executive comms | 33,370 |
| @PresidenciaSV | Executive comms | 30,438 |
| @nayibbukele | President personal | 6,995 |
Collected via Twitter/X API v2 full-archive search. Budget constrained to $30 total; full timeline pagination per account. Corpus spans 2015–2026.
| Source stream | Articles |
|---|---|
| HuggingFace (El Mundo, EDH) | 85,912 |
| International press (Reuters, DW, Guardian…) | 30,849 |
| Original scrape (sitemaps + GDELT) | 8,815 |
| Repaired URLs (redirects + Wayback) | 8,157 |
| New outlets (Factum, Foco STV…) | 5,904 |
Built with Python, Plotly, WordCloud, and pandas. All visualizations are self-contained interactive HTML. Spanish tokenization strips URLs, @mentions, hashtags, and applies a 3-character minimum token length with a comprehensive stop-word list.
This project tests predictions from Guriev and Treisman's (2022) theory of "spin dictatorship": the idea that contemporary autocrats govern primarily through narrative control rather than violence. Spin dictators are predicted to show coordinated messaging across institutions, positive agenda-setting that avoids accountability language, and social media attacks on international critics rather than physical repression.
All three predictions find support in the Salvadoran corpus.
Course project for Text as Data, Spring 2026.