Who Is getting rich in Bukele's El Salvador?



A select group of people is getting very rich in today's El Salvador ruled by Nayib Bukele.  Using tourism development funds and tax policy measures, the Bukele government is allowing an assortment of real estate developers, crypto-investors, and the Bukele family to acquire significant real estate holdings and wealth.  

Such policy measures were on display again on February 20 when El Salvador's Legislative Assembly convened without proposals on its agenda.  Then the Nuevas Ideas-controlled body voted to suspend the rules to vote on a new development loan.  Without prior sharing of the underlying documentation, the Assembly voted to approve borrowing $114 million dollars for highway and infrastructure projects for Surf City 1.  "Surf City" is the branding for tourism development along El Salvador's Pacific coast, with phase 1 rolled out from Puerto La Libertad to El Zonte, also known as "Bitcoin Beach."

The area which will be benefitted by this new loan, has already produced development and soaring real estate prices, after millions of dollars of investment in the coastal strip by the government.   The loan improves infrastructure in a region already flush with cash, while rural regions throughout the rest of the country see little or nothing.     

The real estate bonanza for those who hold title to properties in the area, or who have the capital to build real estate developments, hotels and apartment buildings, grows out of recent surges in tourism. The government announced that the country received 17% more tourists in 2024 than the year before, for a cumulative 81% increase from 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The growth in tourism flows from the buzz about the country in social media, the improved public security situation in the country over the past ten years, and visits home from members of the diaspora.  As a result, there is growth in hotel bookings, AirBNB rentals, restaurants, and tour operators.  

Nowhere has this produced more riches for real estate developers and speculators than the beach town of El Zonte. For example. an 814 square foot beach front studio apartment in El Zonte is listed for sale at $480,000. An investigation published in El Faro describes the inflation in prices in the former sleepy surfing beach town before the COVID-19 pandemic:

Between 2015 and 2020, the average price of land per square meter in El Zonte, one of El Salvador’s most popular beach towns, was $34.33 U.S. dollars, according to a sample of 50 sales and purchases reviewed by El Faro. But between 2021 and 2024, that figure rose to $80.61, an increase of 134.8 percent since the passage of the Bitcoin Law in 2021. In six luxury projects offered in January 2025, the price can soar to $1,058.57 per square meter.


A current real estate ad


Similar real estate inflation is seen elsewhere along the coast and in western San Salvador and its western suburbs, where apartment buildings and developments catering to ex-pats and the Salvadoran upper class have increased significantly.

One family real estate company with close ties to the Bukele government has been profiting with high end apartment developments with ready approvals from the administration.  An article in Revista Factum, titled Family building luxury apartments prospered under Bukele government, reported:   

The Guerrero family, which is building more than 1,200 apartments in exclusive areas, has increased its income in the last five years. It has done so under the protection of the Nayib Bukele government, which has allowed it to build without presenting environmental impact studies in projects that touch water recharge zones or are in ecological conservation areas. The Guerreros, best known for being the owners of the Cardedeu hotel, on Lake Coatepeque and in the center of San Salvador, are suppliers to the State and have also received loans for $ 7.1 million from the state Mortgage Bank. One of the buildings they are currently building is on a plot of land in Nuevo Cuscatlán that they bought from a company linked to Bukele.

The investigation describes a variety of real estate developments of the Guerrero family, whose luxury apartments routinely start at $100,000 and go up from there.   

One of the properties of the Guerreros, is the Cardedeu hotel, located in the historic center of San Salvador.  Like the properties in Surf City, this hotel and other real estate developments have greatly benefited by virtue of another of Bukele's signature tourism promotion projects in El Salvador, the "revitalization" or some would say "gentrification" of the historic center of San Salvador. 

Historic Center of San Salvador

Prominent among the real estate investors in the historic center are those linked to the crypto industry.   Another Revista Factum article, titled Bitcoiners bought historic buildings in downtown San Salvador for more than $7 million, explains:
Three influential crypto-investors and friends of the ruling party bought four buildings in tourist areas of the Historic Center of San Salvador, totaling $$ 7,475,000. Among them is Giancarlo Devasini, a leading figure in the world of cryptocurrencies worldwide as well as Max Keiser, who acts as a presidential adviser on bitcoin. These purchases occurred between July 14, 2023 and July 26, 2024, after a law approved by the Legislative Assembly went into force that gives tax exemptions to investors in that area. Since their arrival in the country, these investors have registered several companies in the Registry of Commerce related to hospitality and digital assets.
Devasini and Keiser are not the only ones taking advantages of the tax incentives in the historic center.  So are the brothers of Nayib Bukele.  Journalist Jaime Quintanilla, writing in investigative journalism site No-Ficcion.com, describes their acquisition and renovation of a building located right between Plaza Barrios and Plaza Libertad:

A company founded and run by two of Nayib Bukele's brothers bought an art deco building in the historic center of San Salvador for $1.3 million two and a half months after the president ratified a law granting tax exemptions to new investors in the area. A luxury restaurant now operates in the building, while existing shop owners in the historic center complain of pressure from the authorities to close their establishments.

That restaurant, La Doña Steakhouse, bills itself as "The new home of the best meats in the historic heart of San Salvador."  

As persons seeking fine dining or a boutique luxury hotel come into the historic center, the traditional occupants of these civic spaces are being forced out.  The informal vendors of the Historic Center will not be finding jobs in the new Starbucks, or in the cafes and restaurants the City hopes will locate there. They will not be offering guided tours to visitors off of cruise ships.  Instead, they will hope to find another place, a market stall or a slice of sidewalk, where once again they can hope to sell enough each day to feed a household.  So far this has happened to thousands of these informal vendors, in order that the arriving tourists and Bitcoiners need not walk past those "who only eat if they can sell."  

The awarding of tax exemptions is also promising to fatten the bottom lines of companies related to the crypto-asset industry.  El Salvador now offers big tax incentives to the crypto crowd. Not only are gains from buying, selling and trading crypto assets not subject to taxation, neither are related crypto-activities like Bitcoin mining or staking. 

Chief among these tax exempt beneficiaries will be Tether Limited, issuer of the Tether crypto-currency, which has announced plans to relocate to El Salvador after having a received a license from the government as a digital asset services provider. The cryptocurrency has a market capitalization today of $141 billion, more than 4 times the entire GDP of El Salvador.  The company posted a net operating profit of $1.3 billion in the second quarter of 2024.  Clearly the fact that Tether will be exempted from every conceivable Salvadoran tax on those billions is an important consideration in the move.  

For example, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly passed a law last year exempting from taxation buildings taller than 35 floors. This was a strangely specific law, and hard to imagine the public policy objective behind it.  But recently it was disclosed that Tether is planning a 70 story skyscraper, to be the tallest building in El Salvador.  Tether's operations will similarly be free of income and capital gains taxes on its crypto transactions.  Relocating to El Salvador will benefit Tether from lax oversight from a country which has no experience regulating capital markets and digital assets.

It is not the case that El Salvador is luring a major employer into the country.  Tether indicates that it has plans to increase its workforce to a total of 200 employees in 2025.   (That should be about 3 employees on each floor of the Tether skyscraper).    

President Bukele and his family have not disclosed their Bitcoin or other crypto-holdings, so we do not know how much his efforts at hyping Bitcoin and other digital assets is helping his own personal worth.  But we do know that the president, with an official monthly salary of roughly $5200, which he professes not to take, has managed with his family to become another leading group of wealthy real estate holders in the country.   

Public records reveal some of this increase in wealth according to a report in Expediente Publico:

The two well-known companies of the Bukele family reflect the increase in assets since their initial investments, before Nayib Bukele entered politics. The best year for the company Corporación Logística de Servicios was 2023, when it closed with $6,220,399.99 dollars [up from $11,428 in 2003]. Meanwhile, the Bukele Group, which started with assets of $2,000 in 2016, began to increase its balance a year after the pandemic. In 2021, it reached $783,928.07. A year later it rose to $5,182,211.17 and in 2023 it reached $6,804,557.05.

An extensive investigation through real estate and financial records by Jaime Quintanilla last year revealed that Nayib Bukele, his family and inner circle became major landowners in El Salvador during his first term in office:           

Nayib Bukele and his inner circle acquired 361 hectares, 92 percent of their holdings, during his first term, according to official records. In 2023 alone, they accumulated, through different companies, two properties on the shores of Lake Coatepeque, a sugar cane farm, and the land where “Bean of Fire,” the Salvadoran president’s gourmet coffee brand, is grown. Since June 2019, Bukele’s wife, mother, and siblings have personally purchased 16 properties in exclusive areas. The new properties total a value of 9.2 million dollars. The Supreme Judicial Court has declared the public versions of the current president’s asset declarations to be confidential.

In July 2024, Bukele announced that he had a new project -- growing and selling coffee from volcanic hillsides in El Salvador, on his newly acquired finca named Hacienda Dorada.   

Bukele then opened a boutique cafe and store at the country's government-owned international airport.  Bean of Fire coffee is now sold from a prime location which all departing air passengers must pass by.  The terms of any agreement to lease that prime space have not been disclosed to the public.  But more than anything, the former ad-man turned president is using his particular genius at branding and his social media reach to profit through his new venture.  Bukele's coffee is not cheap -- he's selling it for $50 per pound.


[It does not appear that Bukele has submitted his coffee to blind taste-testing or the Cup of Excellence event, so we do not know if any independent reviewers would say the coffee is as good as its hype and marketing.  Reviews of the coffee on Amazon.com are mixed, even from those who reviewed it after receiving it for free.]  

The vast majority of Salvadorans are never going to buy $50 per pound coffee, or ever live in the luxury developments supported by tax incentives, coastal road improvement and tourism promotion.   Indeed, the spending priorities of the current government seem to have little to do with improving the lot of low-income Salvadorans except for a kind of trickle-down economics based on letting the rich get richer.

Bukele's rule in El Salvador is only lifting a select group of ships on its tide of economic investment.  Those who have will have more.  Those who have little will have less as the cost of housing and food stuffs go up with little help from the government.  The minimum wage has not been increased in four years, the government is decreasing its funding of healthcare and public education in the current budget, the poverty level has increased, and the only public university is being starved of funds.   




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