How Will the Surname Bukele Fare in the Costa Rican Presidential Race?

Monday, January 27, 2025
Gabriel Labrador
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When Nayib Bukele began his de facto term in El Salvador on June 1, 2024, among the hundreds of guests at the inauguration ceremony were a Costa Rican newlywed couple already dreaming of becoming the next presidential couple in Costa Rica in 2026. Johanna Carolina Bukele Hándal, a first cousin of President Bukele, and her husband José Aguilar Berrocal, a psychologist and social program entrepreneur, took a photo at the National Palace and uploaded it to Facebook along with a drawing of the flags of both countries, El Salvador and Costa Rica. The comments on the photo were eloquent: “Next presidential couple,” said one message. “Hopefully one day we can see them in government,” read another. Johanna Bukele and her husband “liked” these and many other similar messages that kept coming.

Johanna Bukele, a Costa Rican citizen, businesswoman, and designer, married Aguilar on February 24, 2024. Aguilar, 46, is a psychologist and social program entrepreneur who has spoken to people in his inner circle about his plan to run in Costa Rica’s 2026 presidential election. Sometimes, in Facebook posts where he is called a future presidential candidate, he jokes about appointing his friends to government positions. When asked if he would be the standard bearer for Bukele’s movement in Costa Rica, he has kept a prudent distance.

In public, in front of journalists, he has not denied his interest in becoming president, but he avoids giving more details, hiding behind formalities: that in order to compete there must first be a party that ratifies him as a candidate. That should happen in the coming months.


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Johanna Bukele (seated, second from right to left) with her cousins. Also appearing in the photo are Xavier Zablah Bukele, the current president of the Salvadoran ruling party Nuevas Ideas, and his brother Francisco (third and fourth from left to right, respectively) and Nayib Bukele and his brothers and other cousins, during a celebration a decade ago. Photo taken from Facebook.


His wife’s surname and his participation in the inauguration in El Salvador have led to doubts in Aguilar's entourage as to whether or not he endorses Bukele’s authoritarian methods. Aguilar has not responded publicly on the matter. The population in Costa Rica, unlike in El Salvador, rejects authoritarianism and values democracy, according to surveys such as Latinobarómetro.

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