Nayib Bukele may be Palestinian, but the dictatorship he has built in El Salvador is very much made in Israel. From arming his security forces to supplying him with weapons and high-tech surveillance tools, MintPress explores the Israeli influence helping to prop up the man who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

Since Bukele’s ascension to the presidency in 2019, Israeli exports to El Salvador have been rapidly advancing, growing at an annual rate of more than 21%. This increase consists primarily of weapons. Salvadoran forces are well supplied with Israeli hardware. The military and police use the Israeli-made Galil and ARAD 5 rifles, the Uzi submachine gun, numerous Israeli pistols, and ride in AIL Storm and Plasan Yagu armored vehicles.

Some equipment Salvadoran forces use comes free, courtesy of Israeli sources. In 2019, an Israeli NGO, the Jerusalem Foundation (a group that builds illegal settlements on Palestinian land), announced that it would donate $3 million worth of supplies to the Salvadoran police and military.

For others, however, the Bukele administration is paying top dollar, meaning that this relationship is extremely profitable for the high-tech Israeli defense sector.

In 2020, the Salvadoran police paid around $3.4 million for one year’s use of three Israeli spyware products. These tools include GEOLOC, a program that intercepts calls and texts from targeted phones, and Web Tangles, which uses individuals’ social media accounts to build up files on people, including using their photos for facial recognition. A third, Wave Guard Tracer (marketed in some regions as Guardian), tracks users’ movements through the GPS on their phone.