These are the same arguments people used to defend Hugo Chávez back in the day. He’s very popular, the military loves him, other politicians are so corrupt, he’s just doing what he has to do in face of American imperialist manipulation, etc.
They are both tapping the same deep vein of authoritarian populism, although nominally at opposite ends of the political spectrum.
El Salvador is not Venezuela as much as you'd like to think we're all the same, it's a totally different political landscape, we had a civil war where 80k people died in a cold war proxy and the guerrillas were consolidated into FMLN and death squad members formed ARENA, nowhere else in Latin America did a communist/capitalist conflict had this outcome, guerillas never became a party anywhere else as a means to end the war, all these deaths, for the very same people who formed political parties and for what?
Endless corruption when they got to power, we're sick of it.
check how the former ARENA candidate for presidency Javier Siman, who's also a high ranking member of ANEP and ARENA's party leader lobbies in the US for support of his own interests, it's not a secret except for the vast majority of people in El Salvador who are not educated enough to research on that, oh btw, who didn't prioritize education for 30 years? You guessed it ARENA and FMLN,
you might call giving most kids in school a populist move by Bukele, but he's actually closing a technological gap by doing that.
They are both tapping the same deep vein of authoritarian populism, although nominally at opposite ends of the political spectrum.