Washington is putting a number on its affection for Nayib Bukele. On August 21, the State Department called the Salvadoran president "one of our most valued partners in the region" and confirmed the two countries are preparing a bilateral economic summit to build on their trade, security and migration ties. No date has been announced.
The praise lands on top of a relationship that already runs through nearly every arm of U.S. foreign policy, from tariffs to prison contracts to nuclear energy. It also arrives as human rights monitors are compiling one of the bleaker ledgers of Bukele's tenure, a tension the State Department's announcement does not address.
A Reciprocal Trade Deal Already in Force
The economic groundwork for a summit was laid on January 29, when U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Salvadoran Economy Minister María Luisa Hayem signed a reciprocal trade agreement layered on top of the existing CAFTA-DR framework. Experts convened by the Inter-American Dialogue describe the pact as restoring duty-free access for Salvadoran textiles and apparel while erasing a 10% tariff the U.S. had imposed the previous year, effectively making El Salvador a preferential trading partner. The United States already buys more than three in ten of the country's exports, by far its largest single market. The deal also unlocks financing tools such as the Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation for critical-mineral projects, a priority since El Salvador reversed its ban on metallic mining in 2024.
How fast the Salvadoran economy is actually growing depends on whose numbers are used. One Dialogue contributor put the International Monetary Fund's 2026 growth estimate at roughly 2.5%, while the World Bank's most recent outlook puts growth for the same year at 3.2%, projecting a slowdown to around 3% over the medium term. Either figure sits inside a broader financing story: El Salvador is currently drawing on a $1.4 billion International Monetary Fund lending program that, per a Congressional Research Service brief, required Bukele's government to scale back the bitcoin experiment it launched in 2021.
Security and Deportations Anchor the Alliance
Trade is the newest layer of a partnership built primarily on migration and security cooperation. That foundation was set in February 2025, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to San Salvador and announced a package of agreements under which Bukele committed to taking back Salvadoran gang members and to jailing dangerous American criminals inside Salvadoran facilities. The same visit produced a memorandum on civil nuclear cooperation between the two governments.
Deportations have accelerated since. Salvadoran migration figures reported by NBC News show the United States removed 5,033 Salvadorans in the first quarter of 2026, nearly double the 2,547 recorded over the same three months of 2025. Bukele's willingness to hold U.S. deportees — including hundreds of Venezuelan men sent to the country's Terrorism Confinement Center — has turned him into what a PBS NewsHour report called a linchpin of the administration's removal operation.
A Human Rights Ledger Washington Isn't Highlighting
None of that cooperation comes free of cost, critics argue. El Salvador's state of exception, declared in March 2022 and renewed roughly four dozen times since, has produced more than 91,000 arrests, according to a 2026 congressional hearing notice, with detainees routinely denied legal counsel and some dying while in custody. Human Rights Watch's latest country assessment is blunter, describing "widespread abuses, including mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture and ill-treatment of detainees."
The Washington Office on Latin America has separately condemned constitutional changes pushed through by Bukele's legislative supermajority that permit indefinite presidential reelection. Those reforms followed a wave of legal pressure on government critics: in September 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered protective measures for anti-corruption lawyer Ruth López and constitutional attorney Enrique Anaya, both held in isolation for months after publicly criticizing the government. Some members of Congress have pressed Rubio directly on the subject; in a September 2025 letter to the secretary, a group of senators warned that uncritical praise for Bukele risks normalizing the erosion of democratic checks elsewhere in the hemisphere.
What Comes Next
None of that appears to be slowing Washington down. The State Department is framing the coming summit as the logical next step in a relationship that already spans trade, security, migration and nuclear cooperation — a bet that deeper economic integration will outweigh the reputational cost of standing this close to a leader whose domestic record remains fiercely contested.
