The Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, has turned his foreign policy into a balancing act between two great powers. In March 2019, before taking office, he traveled to Washington and despised China: “They don’t play by the rules. They are not a democracy, but they interfere in your democracy,” he said in English before a conservative audience. Six months later, already installed in the presidency, he celebrated an agreement with a “sister nation”: more than 500 million dollars in non-refundable cooperation from Beijing for infrastructure projects that would reinforce his popularity.
Seven years later, in March 2026, Bukele will attend an anti-Chinese congress invited by Donald Trump, whom he considers his closest ally. Like a chameleon, the president has known how to change color more out of convenience than ideology, analysts say. “Bukele, like all Latin American presidents, is trying to navigate difficult times: on the one hand, he needs to maintain commercial, political and security relations with the United States and, on the other, with China, a potential investor,” says Margaret Myers, senior advisor at the Inter-American Dialogue.
The diplomatic relationship between San Salvador and Beijing was incipient when Bukele visited Washington in 2019. Just a few months earlier, in August 2018, former president Salvador Sánchez Cerén had broken with Taiwan to establish official ties with the People’s Republic of China. Bukele then questioned that decision, warning about “debt traps” and loss of sovereignty. But he soon changed his tune: in December 2019 he traveled to Beijing accompanied by his brother and advisor Karim Bukele, and sealed a $500 million agreement to build the National Library, a gigantic building that serves as a tourist attraction in the center of San Salvador, and a stadium that promises to be the largest in Central America.
The Chinese ambassador to El Salvador, Ou Jianhong, publicly thanked Karim Bukele for the mediation, to whom she attributed the success of the visit. Paradoxically, months before she had not even been invited to the presidential inauguration.
Chinese investments in El Salvador remain limited: barely 5% of foreign direct investment between 2018 and 2021, according to the IMF. What has grown is the import of Chinese products, especially in the automotive sector, where Beijing already surpasses the United States, Japan and Mexico, traditionally the country’s main suppliers, after increasing its sales by 400% compared to 2016 levels.
Experts affirm that something similar has happened with the other Central American countries, which are seeking permanent investment from China. “China has a great need to export due to its excessive production capacity. In that sense, no matter how small a country is, it will never see it as a customer to be despised,” Myers said.
Between 2019 and 2024, Bukele’s Executive has had three meetings with representatives of Xi Jinping‘s Government to achieve a Free Trade Agreement, which would generate the conditions for China to establish, for example, factories in El Salvador; However, the agreement has not yet been finalized. During the covid-19 pandemic, China donated more than six million Sinovac vaccines to El Salvador. Bukele publicly thanked Xi. The Chinese Embassy announced in January the donation of 344,000 computers and tablets for Salvadoran students. “We want to work together to deepen educational cooperation,” the institution wrote from its X account.
Bukele has used the relationship with China as a counterweight to Washington. During Trump’s first presidency he cultivated close proximity with the White House. But with the arrival of Joe Biden, the State Department included officials close to Bukele on corruption lists and relations cooled. The Salvadoran president then turned towards Beijing.
El Salvador offers China its few natural resources. In December 2024, Bukele eliminated the ban on metal mining in El Salvador amid widespread rejection by the population. Inhabitants of the Santa Marta community, one of the towns with the greatest mining potential in the country, have denounced movements of Chinese companies in the place. This information has not been confirmed by official entities.
According to Nestor Hernández, the Salvadoran director of the Confucius Institute, the body that promotes Chinese culture, language and traditions in El Salvador, “China does not seek to displace the United States in its relations with El Salvador, it seeks to do trade. It does not seek to have a cultural presence like the United States has or anything like that.”
Convenience as a rule
With Trump’s return to the White House, Bukele has regained harmony with Washington. The renewed closeness has coincided with a weakening of investigations promoted by the US Attorney’s Office, in which members of the MS-13 in custody in that country could provide information about their pacts with the Salvadoran Government. At the same time, Chinese cooperation continues—library, stadium, donations of school equipment—but the Salvadoran president is now aligning himself with Trump’s agenda, even offering his country as an extension of the American prison system. Washington has sent dozens of people detained by anti-immigrant raids to the Central American country.
The leader who in 2019 warned that China “does not follow the rules” operates today in a gray zone where the main rule is convenience. As Myers summarizes, “Latin American countries must think more carefully about their relations with China. If they cooperate on sensitive issues for the United States, such as security, the reaction can be strong. But China also does not know very well how to protect the investments it has already made. The tension is high.”
