Introduction by John Washington

Last summer, Óscar Martínez fled El Salvador. He had come under scrutiny as the director of El Faro, one of the region’s preeminent investigative platforms. In recent years, its reporters had broken many stories – about political corruption, gang violence, forced migration and other subjects – that upset President Nayib Bukele, the self-described “philosopher king”.

After coming to office in 2019, Bukele achieved what his predecessors couldn’t: wresting control of swathes of the country from gangs. He did so by suspending due process, instituting single-party rule, and disappearing tens of thousands into an expanding gulag of prisons. When independent media held him to account, he vilified and clamped down on them. In 2022, using the Israeli-developed Pegasus spyware, government agents hacked the phones of dozens of local journalists, including 22 staffers at El Faro. Their homes were broken into, drones hovered outside their windows, and they received credible tips of their imminent arrest on bogus drug charges. The situation eventually became untenable for Martinez, who moved to Mexico City, where he continues to direct El Faro.

Martinez is the author of four books. The Beast (2014) is a reported chronicle of migration, for which the author criss-crossed much of Mexico and Central America, riding on cargo trains and sleeping in train yards and migrant shelters. A History of Violence (2017) gathers narrative reports on narco-terror and political corruption from across the region. A Hollywood Kid (2019) is a biography of a contract killer that doubles as a Janet Malcolm-inspired reflection on the ethics of journalism.

Bukele, El Rey Desnudo (Bukele, the Naked Emperor) was published earlier this year, and is yet to be translated into English. It is, in some ways, Martinez’s most personal book. Writing from exile, he analyses how the most popular leader in the Americas – Bukele has higher than 80% approval ratings domestically, and is generally admired abroad – rose to power by marketing himself as a saviour, leaning into corruption, forging criminal pacts and violating human rights. A deadly example of the latter is the subject of this excerpted chapter.

Martínez once told me that you know you’re doing a good job as a reporter if you’re pissing off politicians. By that standard, he’s killing it.

The thick sutures like the stitches on a football, each one botched, as if they had been sloppily sewing up a sack of cornmeal, rather than the skin on his head. The bright purple mark around his neck. The last photograph ever taken of Alejandro Muyshondt is a difficult thing to behold. Nayib Bukele’s friend and former national security advisor lasted six months in prison. He was captured on 9 August 2023 and he died, in horrifying conditions, in February 2024, age 46.

Muyshondt’s family members say he and Bukele had known each other since they were teenagers. Both were raised in affluent households. There’s an iconic picture of them, taken in August 2017, back when Bukele was the leftist mayor of San Salvador. They are arm in arm, all smiles, dressed in black protective vests, safety gloves and combat clothing. The brands are Empire and Dye; the shirts cost around $130 and the reinforced trousers a little more. Behind them, the green field is dotted with blue and red structures that look like hideouts.

They weren’t in an actual battle. On the outskirts of the capital, Bukele and Muyshondt were training for a paintball match that would mark the end of the patron saint festivities. The mayor’s team played against – and, as expected, defeated – another led by a popular (and very vulgar) radio host known as La Choly. In the photograph, Bukele holds a paintball rifle. Earlier that day, Muyshondt had given him tactical pointers. They took paintball seriously. Just look at their clothes: they were better outfitted than the Salvadoran police.

Muyshondt had always been a lover of weapons and military equipment – anything he could use to shoot at people. Those closest to him called him ‘Tiro loco’ (loose cannon) because of that passion for guns. One incident illustrates this vividly. In November 2013, a man from San Salvador posted on social media that thieves had stolen his phone and taken pictures with it, which were automatically uploaded to the cloud, disclosing their location: a downtown market stall where stolen goods were pedelled, including car parts, jewellery, watches and electronics.

Straight away, Muyshondt pulled on a black bulletproof vest, combat helmet and gas mask, strapped a 9mm pistol and an AK-47 into his leg holster, and set out to avenge the victim. He is a bear of a man, weighing 15 stone and covered in tattoos. Later he would claim that his plan was to deliver the thieves to the police, but he looked more primed for an execution. When Muyshondt got to the market and started making enquiries, people either laughed or looked terrified. The tomato and potato sellers, barbers and bakers, all responded, unsurprisingly, that they knew nothing.

This vigilante act earned some praise on social media, but a lot of mockery, too. As one commenter wondered: if Muyshondt was that heavily equipped to go after a phone, what would he have packed for a war? The device was never recovered.

In this way Muyshondt became another character in El Salvador’s folklore of violence, even if he never achieved his ideal of justice. Six years after that inept chase, in 2019, the newly elected President Bukele named him as his national security advisor. He carried out his role with characteristic bluster: for instance, posting selfies while flying military drones over the Guatemalan border, which is as porous as Swiss cheese. Nobody paid him a lot of mind. He wrote several letters to the president claiming that his various ideas were falling on deaf ears. “You are much appreciated,” Muyshondt signed off on one of them.

After Muyshondt’s death, a number of media outlets published some of those letters, as well as several voice notes. All these missives reveal a deep need for attention. One voice note records his meeting with a brother and a cousin of Bukele – the latter is the president of his New Ideas Party. Muyshondt tells them they could bypass the legislative elections of 2021 if the results turn out unfavorably. Determined to play the spy, he speaks of Russia, the US and the Cold War; of waging digital “attacks” that would seem to originate in Ukraine or Bulgaria. The Bukeles barely respond, while he rambles on compulsively.

In another voice note, he claims to have boycotted two Salvadoran media outlets, costing them $50,000 dollars. (The boycott occurred, but the loss was much exaggerated.) He begs Bukele’s brother Ibrajim for an invitation to the second presidential anniversary; he understands that they won’t “take pictures of me or anything”, but says “it would feel good to participate”. In 2020 he discusses a spying operation against media houses and politicians with Ernesto Castro, another of Bukele’s childhood friends, who now heads the Legislative Assembly. This occurred right around the time when many journalists were being surveilled with the Pegasus spyware – which the president’s national security advisor evidently knew nothing about. His proposal is far more basic: a phishing operation in which the victim is baited to click on a bogus link.

Muyshondt asks for “a little publicity”. “People think I’m a house plant,” he laments. That was his style: too indiscreet to be a spy. He contacted many public figures, including Angus King, the independent US senator from Maine. In that letter he complained that the US ambassador to El Salvador wouldn’t receive him, that Bukele’s administration was doing “little or nothing … in eliminating corruption, narco activity, or fighting organised crime,” and said that a certain Salvadoran senator was actually part of the Gulf Cartel. Too many messages, too many complaints for a spy.

In July 2023, inexplicably, the enthusiastic presidential advisor took things to another level: he posted a picture on X of some packages, with a note suggesting that they were drugs brought back from Mexico by one of Bukele’s low-level deputies. A month later, Bukele responded, also on X. In a long post, he said two things: first, that Muyshondt had been leaking information to journalists and to the exiled former president Mauricio Funes, who had been convicted on corruption charges in absentia; and second, that his advisor had been captured. (By then, Bukele could regularly be heard vociferating on social media, talking as if he controlled the entire national apparatus.)

The claim about the plot with the leftist ex-president was absurd: Funes had been hiding out in Nicaragua since 2016, three years before Bukele became president, and so three years before Muyshondt would have gained access (if he ever actually did) to classified intelligence. The attorney general’s office, under Bukele’s control, justified the arrest by citing a “secret informant” and distributing two screenshots of supposed conversations between Muyshondt and Funes, which had been published by pro-regime pamphleteers a few days earlier. The administration raided Muyshondt’s house, his partner’s house and his mother’s house. He was cooked.

We expected that he would rot in prison for a few years, until Bukele was satisfied that nobody remembered him. Poor Muyshondt, we thought, the spy career he’d always wanted was over. But we hadn’t yet grasped quite what betrayal meant to Bukele. Muyshondt wouldn’t even survive to see a day in court.

During the six months that Bukele’s old friend was held in custody, his family were never once permitted to see him. They were also kept in the dark about the rapid deterioration of his health. They did not know that he lost 70 pounds; that he had a brain haemorrhage; that he lost the ability to speak, swallow and move half his body after multiple brain surgeries; that he was admitted to the psychiatric ward for weeks; that he wore diapers; or that he could barely comprehend the charges that police officers eventually read out to him. They would only learn these details after his death. The man who so loved to run with military units along the borders of El Salvador had developed, according to doctors, metastatic stomach cancer, hypertension, meningitis, multiple organ failure and distributive shock.

After his family learned that he had been moved from prison to a hospital, his mother begged to know where he was being held so that she could bring him medicine. But a judge, also controlled by Bukele, imposed “total reserve” – in effect, zero transparency – on Muyshondt’s case, citing “national security concerns”. Human Rights Watch eventually declared that such conditions amounted to “forced disappearance”. Muyshondt’s mother made a public plea to the president’s wife: “Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, as a mother, I beg of you. Can you put yourself in my shoes and in the shoes of thousands of Salvadoran mothers and feel the anguish we suffer? What would you feel if you saw one of your daughters like this, between life and death? Wouldn’t you want to hug them? I would.”

She was referring to the mothers of the tens of thousands of people captured by the state since 2022, when Bukele had imposed a “state of exception”, claiming it to be the only solution to the gang problem. By this point it had become clear that a large proportion of those arrested had not had gang affiliations or criminal records, or even any supposed gang tattoos. The police had been making random arrests, sometimes drawing up charges after putting people in jail. Hundreds of bodies – many of them bullet-ridden, mutilated or showing signs of torture – were spat out of prison.

A few of those who survived and were later freed spoke of what they had witnessed inside: men hanging from roof beams; black bags used to suffocate people; women washing their babies with bleach to avoid scabies; guards beating prisoners to death; bodies piled up on patios. “They dragged the sick out to the field,” one remembered. “The guard would whack them in the head and they wouldn’t wake up.” “They were malnourished, like images from concentration camps,” said a 28-year-old metalworker. “I saw how they were so hungry they would lick the floor,” recalled a teacher who passed through four of these centres of cruelty.

In October 2024, a team of international watchdog groups published a report analysing the 2,000 pages of disorganised, barely legible photocopied medical documents that the Bukele administration gave to Muyshondt’s family. There were no cranial X-rays to explain the scars on his head or the cerebral haemorrhage – something that the experts noted was often caused by a traumatic brain injury. In simple terms, Muyshondt probably received a hard blow to the head.

Though the Bukele administration said an autopsy was conducted, it was never shared with the family or made public. The last thing Muyshondt’s mother received was a piece of paper on which the forensic investigator wrote in blue pencil that the cause of death was pulmonary edema: his lungs had filled up with liquid, which can happen after a person is beaten. At the bottom of the page, the investigator clarified that this etiology was “preliminary” and that the matter was still “pending investigation”. Since 2022, around 470 deaths have been reported in Bukele’s prisons. Many of the autopsy reports were similar to Muyshondt’s.

Seven years after that paintball shoot, 183 days since he last saw his family, and with those enormous, mangled stitches covering his head and chest, the former security advisor’s body was handed over to his mother. After seeing it, she sat down on the pavement, barely able to move. “If you go on the internet and ask what a lobotomy is – it strips a person of all their cognitive functions,” she said. “And what was most precious to my son? His intelligence, which they silenced. They silenced it like Klaus Barbie used to do for the Nazis… I thought I had seen evil personified, but no, this goes beyond everything.”