El Salvador wants America’s prisoners. And its tourists.

It was the image of an up-and-coming travel destination that El Salvador and President Nayib Bukele want to show the world. But that’s not the version of this Central American country that most people are seeing in the news.

Bukele has invested millions of dollars into developing his country’s tourism appeal with infrastructure projects such as Surf City and Surf City 2, including new highways and other public spaces along the Pacific coast. The Tourism Ministry has estimated that the projects will generate 500,000 jobs and $4 billion over a decade, Reuters reported.

Perhaps better known than El Salvador’s beaches and volcanoes, though, is the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT by its Spanish acronym.

Over the past few months, coverage of Bukele’s partnership with the Trump administration to house detainees from the United States has led to the spread of images of the crowded confines across social media and cable TV. The news has left some wondering whether a visit signals their support for Bukele’s government or whether a trip to El Salvador is safe despite the State Department’s recently lowered travel advisory.

In early February, the Trump administration made a deal to send more than 200 immigrants from the U.S. to CECOT. The U.S. government has said the prisoners belong to dangerous gangs, yet none have faced trial, and some of their relatives have denied the allegations. The Supreme Court said the government must facilitate the return of one wrongly deported man, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García, but both President Donald Trump and Bukele have refused. Trump has raised the idea of sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador and other countries.

With every update, images of CECOT circulate: shackled, crouching men with shaved heads packed into conditions said to violate human rights. They are not only those transported from the U.S. but also tens of thousands of El Salvador’s own convicted criminals, as well as men still going through the court system.

For now, Salvadorans working in tourism say there hasn’t been an impact to their business, and they hope the deal won’t disrupt the industry’s trajectory. Representatives for the Salvadoran minister of tourism declined multiple requests for an interview.

Last year, the Central American country, roughly the size of Massachusetts, welcomed a record 3.9 million tourists, according to statistics reported by the Tourism Ministry. That figure grew from 3.4 million in 2023, which was a significant growth from pre-pandemic levels. The tourism sector represented about 6.4 percent of El Salvador’s gross domestic product in 2019, when Bukele was elected president. It rose to 14 percent in 2024.

Bukele still maintains strong approval ratings with constituents, and his bet on tourism appears to be working. Some international travelers may need more convincing.

In the gray depths of winter on the East Coast, El Salvador sounded like the answer to a spring break riddle: Where could we go surf that’s warm, not too crowded and not too expensive during my teacher husband’s week off from school?

Flights to El Salvador were much cheaper than those to other American spring break favorites, such as Puerto Rico, Costa Rica and Mexico. Plus, we’d read about its immaculate point breaks and delicious pupusas. And that it was allegedly safe again.

After we booked our flights and a surf camp in El Sunzal, the news cycle intensified. A few weeks out, I emailed our hotel to cancel, worried about the ethics of the visit.

“I can assure you that our surf camp in El Salvador is in a very calm part of the country, but I still understand your concern,” a staff member replied.

Ultimately, we went ahead with our trip to see the country beyond the headlines.

‘The Singapore of Latin America’

On a sunny Friday morning in San Salvador, Alfredo Avalos drove me in his red Nissan to the capital’s historical downtown for a tour. We parked and walked around the major landmarks, such as the National Theater and Metropolitan Cathedral, where Archbishop Óscar Romero’s tomb rests in a cool, dark hall belowground.

Avalos, the owner of Explore El Salvador, grew up nearby. He pointed out the many renovations taking place along wide avenues where thousands of street vendors used to set up shop. His parents were vendors, too, before opening their own brick-and-mortar pupuseria 50 years ago.

After 20 years of guiding, business for Avalos had never been better. Yes, the pandemic had shut down tourism completely; he delivered food from his family’s restaurant to get by. But once the world reopened, requests for tours started to return. In the past two years, “it has skyrocketed,” he said.

El Salvador suffered through a brutal civil war through the 1980s and ’90s, and severe gang violence into the 2000s. By 2015, the country was the world’s murder capital. Like many Salvadorans, Avalos says, his family had to pay gangs monthly extortion, plus hire a private security guard to protect the pupuseria; the total could have paid for two employee salaries. Once Bukele became president, Avalos said, the gangs immediately stopped coming to collect and haven’t shown up since.

“It’s a fact that people are coming because people feel safer,” Avalos said.

A ‘gold star’ from the State Department

In April, El Salvador joined Singapore as one of America’s 20 partner countries whose citizens can apply for Global Entry membership. That same month, the U.S. State Department upgraded El Salvador from a Level 2 safety rating to a Level 1, the least dangerous, on par with Argentina, Australia and Greece. “Gang activity has decreased over the last three years,” the website now reads. “This has caused a drop in violent crimes and murders.”

On X, Bukele said El Salvador received “the U.S. State Department’s travel gold star: Level 1: safest it gets.”

The Canadian government, however, advises its citizens to “exercise a high degree of caution in El Salvador due to the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws and violent crime.” The United Kingdom warns that “some embassies have struggled to get consular access to their citizens.”

Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, who is executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights in Boston and has Salvadoran clients, warns the same.

“I wish I could be in a position to recommend El Salvador because it is a beautiful country, and the tourist infrastructure, although limited, could play a vital role in helping the development of the country and lifting people out of poverty,” Espinoza-Madrigal said.

International SOS, a risk mitigation company, ranks El Salvador as a “medium travel risk,” the same as Nicaragua but riskier than Costa Rica and Panama. That’s for the potential for “petty and opportunistic crimes” like robbery, tropical storms and hurricanes, and “infrastructure deficiencies” that could “complicate internal travel and communications,” according to the company’s summary.

“El Salvador’s making progress, taking steps,” said Tyler Hosford, security director for International SOS. “I won’t say it’s the safest place in Central America right now.”

While Bukele is being rewarded for reducing crime, Hosford notes how Rodrigo Duterte was similarly praised for his harsh approach to the Philippines’ war on drugs when he was that country’s president. Duterte now faces charges of crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court.

I reached out to a handful of U.S.-based travel agencies to see whether they’ve heard any concerns about, or had a drop in requests for, trips to El Salvador. No one had.

“The only story that comes up is, ‘We’re so happy that it’s a safe place to travel now,’ which it is,” said John Montgomery, co-founder of Landed, a luxury travel company that plans custom trips in Latin America and Antarctica. “It’s the same thing that happened with Colombia maybe 10 years ago.”

New reputation as ‘a hidden gem’

In the early 2000s, Ricardo Rivas saw El Salvador’s potential as a surfer’s paradise. He left a career in dentistry to work with a surf tourism company in California that took travelers to Central America. Now he’s the general manager of the travel company Epic Surfing Adventures and the owner of Hotel Los Mangos.

Over the years, Rivas struggled to sell the destination at international travel trade shows he attended with the Tourism Ministry. They had world-class waves, beautiful photos and a passionate sales pitch, “but the answer at the end was always the same: ‘It’s kind of dangerous out there, no?’” Rivas said.

Even when El Salvador was suffering from its infamous gang violence, Rivas said he never had issues with his tour groups traveling between surf spots — except for a CD player that was stolen from the car one time.

“Everyone thought you would get to the airport and there would be a gang member waiting for you,” Rivas said.

In 2021, Rivas noticed a shift. He was in Paris with his family and struck up conversation with a stranger who asked where they were from. When they answered El Salvador, the follow-up wasn’t about the country’s painful past or crime; it was about bitcoin. The country was the first to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender, in 2021, despite pushback from residents. Rivas saw that foreigners were starting to associate El Salvador beyond its darkest issues.

His clientele started to change, too.

“The other day, I saw a kid from Beverly Hills taking a surf lesson,” Rivas said.

Improved infrastructure has helped bring in major surf competitions; in April, Surf City was a stop on the World Surf League Championship Tour and host of the International Surfing Association World Longboard Championship. Francisco Interiano, CEO of a local property management group, said surfing has “put us in the international spotlight,” spurring the construction of apartment buildings and hotels, but “it’s only the beginning.”

“We’re like Costa Rica 30 years ago,” he said. “This is a hidden gem still.”

More than a prison

In El Zonte, my husband and I stayed at a calm hotel a few blocks from the beach where you could smell ripe mangoes that had just fallen from their trees. In El Sunzal, we surfed with expert Salvadoran instructors who’d competed internationally. People told us that they feel completely free now but also live in fear of doing anything wrong that could land them in jail. At dusk, we ate perfect ceviche and watched families play in the ocean.

Throughout the trip, we heard praise and criticism for Bukele.

Rivas has concerns over El Salvador accepting prisoners from the U.S. He said he recognizes that countries have the right to enforce immigration laws, and if you violate them, there could be consequences. But “regular immigrants should not be taken to those terrible jails,” he said.

Interiano hasn’t had any cancellations for his beach and lake house rentals in protest, and although he doesn’t know the specifics of who’s in prison or why, he does wonder where the outcries of human rights abuse were when Salvadorans were being oppressed by gang violence.

The U.S., of course, has its own issues with mass incarceration. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. has about 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Montgomery estimates that El Salvador accounts for maybe 5 percent of Landed’s travel business in Latin America. Most of the interest is from Americans who have family there, have interest in moving or want to visit as part of a larger trip in the region.

Montgomery thinks that’s a shame.

“I would think that if we could send people to see how special the culture is and how rich and textured and beautiful this little nation is, they’ll come back with different images and can help spread the news, that it’s not just a big prison,” he said.

Rivas expressed something similar.

“Come support the local economy, support the local businesses,” he said. “I would not punish local American businesses for things that Trump is doing.”