Surf City, Safe Streets, Sick Dictator

Also known as: Surf, Skate, Papusas: El Salvador

I went to El Salvador in December with two friends and no expectations beyond surf all day everyday with no wetsuits. We landed in El Tunco — or “Surf City,” as the government now brands it — a one road, coastal town. That one road features cobblestone and a barefoot, near-constant procession of surfboards under tanned arms. Arms originating from countries all over the world.

Shots from El Tunco, Surf City. Walking down side alleys and the beachside boardwalk.

It was touristy, sure, but not yet overrun. No cruise ships, no all-inclusives. A few hostels, some excellent little restaurants, choco-bananas on sticks, handmade jewelry stands, and yes, everything was cheaper than America. The streets were swept clean every night. The bars were fun but never truly chaotic. Even the most “tourist” activities — waterfalls, volcano hikes — never drew more than a couple dozen people.

It felt like getting somewhere right before everyone else did.

Friends and family back home were less charmed. My phone buzzed constantly with variations of the same message: Are you safe? El Salvador, after all, had been labeled the murder capital of the world not that long ago. Six years, officially. Closer, if you ask people who lived it.

And yet, I felt astonishingly safe. Safer than in most American cities. Safer than parts of Europe. Safer, statistically, than Canada. I walked home alone at night in a bikini top, surfboard under my arm, without fear.

What unsettled me wasn’t danger. It was how recently danger had been real.

More than once, locals — not strangers, but friendly shop owners, bartenders, people who asked where I was from and meant it — said some version of the same thing:

If this were five years ago, you couldn’t do that.

You would’ve been robbed.

You would’ve been raped or killed.

They didn’t say it as a warning. They said it as fact. Calmly. Casually.

Not if this were the 1800s.

Not before the war.

Before 2020.

When I was a teenager. When Instagram already existed. When the world I know was fully formed.

That temporal closeness is what rattled me. El Salvador didn’t feel like a country emerging from distant history. This is a country freshly rewritten. 

Photo taken at sunrise at "El Espíritu de la Montaña" (The Spirit of the Mountain). This is the summit of the Conchagua volcano, near La Unión, with views of the Gulf of Fonseca, surrounding islands, and the convergence of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

The architect of that rewrite is President Nayib Bukele — a man who once jokingly referred to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” and has since stopped joking. Bukele’s government declared a state of exception, suspended civil liberties, and incarcerated tens of thousands of people under sweeping anti-gang policies. Entire neighborhoods were emptied. Prisons filled. Due process is a bit more optional.

Human rights organizations call it mass incarceration. Many Salvadorans call it freedom.

Or as one put it, “our dogs have rights and now our women do too. I just got out of jail for two weeks after I touched one’s ass at the club.”

Homicide rates have collapsed. Streets once ruled by extortion are now walkable. Parents let their children play outside. Businesses stay open after dark. Surf competitions draw international crowds. Tourism has increased by 400%.

In 2023 alone, El Salvador welcomed millions of visitors and billions of dollars in tourism revenue. Surf City is no longer a backpacker secret — it’s a state-sponsored vision, polished and exported.

And it works. That was my uncomfortable truth.

Left to right: photo in San Salvador, the capital city. Photo taken on top of the Santa Ana Volcano looking at the volcanic lake (still have no clue what that means), and a photo taken walking from the Sunzal surf break in El Tunco over to the neighboring beach.

I drank beers at sunset with Australian surfers who raved about the waves and the safety. I ate pupusas next to Europeans planning to stay for months. I watched Salvadoran families reclaim public space — parks, sidewalks, beaches — places that had once been controlled by fear.

It is possible to hold all of this at once: that Bukele dismantled gangs and dismantled democratic safeguards; that people feel safer and many were imprisoned without trial; that the streets are peaceful.

What complicates this further is how El Salvador has entered American political rhetoric. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited Bukele’s approach as proof that gangs “run the streets” of the United States and that America should emulate El Salvador’s model — mass arrests, militarized policing, limited due process. El Salvador becomes both warning and aspiration, depending on who’s speaking.

That framing flattens the reality I saw.

El Salvador’s transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came after decades of civil war, U.S. intervention, deportation policies that exported gang structures back to Central America, and a society pushed to the brink. Bukele didn’t invent the crisis — he seized the moment it created.

Walking through El Tunco, it was easy to enjoy the result without confronting the method. Surf at dawn. Papaya smoothies. Sunburned shoulders.

The absence of fear was loud.

What does it mean to vacation inside a political experiment? To benefit from policies you would protest at home? To feel safer because thousands of others were disappeared into prisons you’ll never see?

You wont find any clean answers from me. Obviously. I am the twenty-two year old blonde tourist who was merely searching for a good wave. 

I know only that El Salvador felt peaceful in a way that felt haunted. That safety arrived quickly, forcefully, unevenly. That progress can coexist with repression. That tourism can thrive atop trauma.

Surf City markets freedom. But freedom, I learned, depends on who you are, where you stand, and when you arrived.

I left El Salvador with a higher chance of skin cancer, stronger arms, and unease. Not because I felt endangered — but because I didn’t. Safety, when achieved at such speed, leaves a wake. And El Salvador is swimming in it.

Top left moving right: Lucian Scher inside the sea cave in El Tunco, Two Lucians on a night out in El Tunco.-- Lucian #2 had just won Cambio to my dismay (we are drinking Pilseners, as we did with every meal), me looking out at sunrise at the spirit of the mountain. The three of us, same location. Me surfing La Bocana, the beach break of El Tunco known for its shortboarding.