The shadowy rise of Donald Trump's favorite president: Nayib Bukele

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WASHINGTON − Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele owes his support in Washington to a controversial agreement to hold hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the U.S. in a notorious prison – and to a reputation for having broken the back of the MS-13 gang.
"We are not going to stop until we capture the last remaining terrorist,' he vowed in 2023, more than a year into his war on El Salvador's gangs. Recorded murders fell under Bukele's watch from 2,398 in 2019 to 114 in 2024. Salvadorans, Donald Trump said last month, 'have a tremendous president."
But that's just part of the story.
Bukele rose to near-total control of El Salvador on a tide of support from the very gang he's credited with defeating, according to a U.S. federal indictment, the Treasury department, regional experts, and Salvadoran media.
In March, Trump's Justice Department dropped terrorism charges against Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios, an alleged top MS-13 leader, and returned him to El Salvador before he could potentially reveal Bukele's deals in an American courtroom.
Lopez-Larios, one of MS-13's self-styled '12 Apostles of the Devil,' isn't the only person with potentially damaging information on Bukele.
USA TODAY has learned that a former president of El Salvador's national assembly – who is also familiar with gangland negotiations – was seized by U.S. immigration officers in March and awaits deportation to his homeland, where he was convicted in absentia for illicit gang dealings.
Leaders of MS-13 negotiated with Bukele ahead of his 2019 presidential landslide and gave him a sometimes violent get-out-the-vote effort in 2021 legislative elections, the U.S. Justice Department has alleged.
The 2021 victory gave Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party a legislative supermajority that allowed the term-limited president to cull the country's supreme court, oust the attorney general, and blow through El Salvador's constitution to run for and win a second term.
In return, MS-13 leaders received prison privileges, financial benefits − and a ban on extraditions to the United States, U.S. prosecutors, Salvadoran media, and people familiar with the negotiations told USA TODAY.
An examination of Bukele's past shows how a gifted young politician, who once described himself as 'a radical leftist,' rose to power with the help of a Communist guerilla commander, Venezuelan oil money – and a winning deal with MS-13's bloodstained leadership.
'There are serious allegations that Bukele purchased peace by making deals with the gangs that Trump says he's at war with,' said former Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who once headed the State Department's democracy and human rights office.
"We are grateful for President Bukele's partnership and for CECOT – one of the most secure facilities in the world – there is no better place for these sick criminals,' White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, referring to the prison holding thousands of MS-13 detainees and hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the U.S.
Jackson didn't address questions about Bukele's collusion with MS-13. The Salvadoran embassy did not return a message seeking comment.
The most important U.S. source on Bukele's MS-13 ties is a task force created during Trump's first administration.
Joint Task Force Vulcan was launched in 2019. It was staffed by bloodhounds from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, the DEA and others with one mission: 'To destroy MS-13, a vile and evil gang of people,' Trump said at the time.
Vulcan tore into the task. While winning terrorism and drug indictments against MS-13's Ranfla, or board of directors, investigators discovered a group that was closer to an armed insurgency than a traditional street gang.
Drugs? Of course. Human trafficking? Naturally. But also: Trained strike battalions, rocket launchers, and power over life and death stretching from New York's Long Island to Central America, prosecutors said.
The U.S. lawmen also found Faustian bargains had been made with MS-13 by El Salvador's old-guard political parties, who were desperate to lower a stratospheric murder rate – and by Nayib Bukele, the self-styled reformer who had promised to clean things up.
Bukele, the son of a businessman, dropped out of college and worked in advertising before he gained the attention of the FMLN, the political party of El Salvador's former communist insurgents.
In 2011 he won the mayoralty of Nuevo Cuscatlán, just outside the capital. Despite a population of just 8,000, Bukele used the town as a megaphone. Exploiting social media in ways new to El Salvador, he was seen as a progressive newcomer and caught the eye of the man who would serve as his political godfather.
Jose Luis Merino was a Communist guerilla commander during El Salvador's bitter 12-year civil war and became a deputy minister for foreign investment after FMLN won the presidency in 2009.
Merino was the party's main link to the governments of Hugo Chavez and, later, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, which used oil money to support leftist movements across the region.
Some of that cash went to the young mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán – Bukele has acknowledged that businesses he controlled received $1.9 million originating from a Venezuelan-Salvadoran oil company that experts say was controlled by Merino. He described the funds as legitimate commercial loans.
Audits later determined the oil company had doled out $1 billion in unrecovered loans to entities related to Merino, according to a 2020 report.
Merino is among several Bukele associates – including Bukele's chief of cabinet, his press secretary, his gang reintegration coordinator, and his prisons director – placed under U.S. sanctions for corruption and 'actions that undermine democratic processes or institutions' during Joe Biden's administration.
In 2016, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida, called Merino a key enabler of a leftist Colombian narco-insurgency, blasting Bukele's patron as 'a top-notch, world-class money launderer, arms smuggler for the FARC.' Rubio accused Merino of 'millions of dollars of laundering for the FARC as well as corrupt Venezuelan officials.'
Bukele was elected mayor of San Salvador in 2015, a traditional springboard to the presidency, and broke with the FMLN two years later. Merino, whose nom de guerre was Comandante Ramiro, abandoned his old comrades and backed Bukele, who was elected president in 2019.
El Salvador's leaders had been making deals with the gangs for years, trading leniency in prison and on the streets for a reduction in homicides that reached a high of 6,656 in 2015.
Bukele took the deals to new heights.
A 2022 U.S. federal indictment based on Vulcan's work alleged MS-13 leaders held talks with all of the country's political parties 'including without limitation negotiations in connection with the February 2019 El Salvador presidential election' – in which Bukele took 85% of the vote.
After Bukele's victory, his administration met secretly with imprisoned MS-13 leaders. MS-13 members who were not incarcerated were brought into prison meetings with government ID cards 'identifying them as intelligence or law enforcement officials,' the indictment said.
In those talks, gang leaders 'agreed to provide political support to the Nuevas Ideas political party in upcoming elections,' the U.S. Treasury department said, while announcing sanctions on Bukele's top negotiators.
MS-13 demanded an end to extraditions, shortened sentences, and control of territory. In return, the gang agreed to 'reduce the number of public murders…creating the impression that the government was reducing the murder rate,' the indictment says. 'In fact, MS-13 leaders continued to authorize murders where the victims' bodies were buried or otherwise hidden.'
Human rights groups found that, even as El Salvador's official murder rate fell, reported disappearances went up – a trend that started before Bukele was elected president.
Bukele, who sold himself as a trailblazer, used the same playbook as his predecessors – only more effectively, people familiar with the operation said.
The Salvadoran president's gang associations go back to his time as mayor of the capital, San Salvador. El Faro newspaper reported on a December 2015 phone call that police intercepted between two MS-13 members in which one brags that he's prepping for a meeting with top aides to San Salvador's mayor – Bukele – at a shopping mall Pizza Hut.
'Monday at 10 at Multiplaza, we're all meeting up,' one says. 'The mayor already knows…he said 'Yeah.'' After the meeting, El Faro reported, police stopped the two Bukele aides and released them without arrest.
The cozy dealings appeared to end in March 2022, when three days of violence took 87 lives in the tiny Central American country. Bukele declared a temporary state of emergency that's been renewed every month since, and El Salvador's prison population swelled to 110,000; many of these detainees have been charged with 'illicit association.'
One person who, prosecutors allege, knows plenty about Bukele's deals with MS-13 is Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios, an original member of the gang's '12 Apostles of the Devil.' Until recently, Lopez-Larios was based in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn awaiting trial on charges that included plotting terrorist attacks in the United States.
But on March 11, John Durham, then-interim U.S. attorney for New York's Eastern District, asked federal Judge Joan Azrack to drop the charges. Durham, who earlier led the Vulcan task force, cited 'sensitive and important foreign policy considerations.'
Six days later, Lopez-Larios was seen among dozens of Venezuelans being dragged off a deportation flight and processed in El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison. The White House hailed his deportation.
'It's very telling that the price Bukele demanded' for imprisoning U.S. deportees at CECOT 'was the return of these MS-13 leaders who were poised to testify in court,' Malinowski said. (Trump has touted a reported $6 million payment to Bukele's administration for holding the deportees as a bargain.)
Another top MS-13 leader, Elmer 'Crook de Hollywood' Canales-Rivera, remains in U.S. custody, though people familiar with the case fear he too could be returned before trial. The Bukele administration secretly freed Canales from a Salvadoran prison in November 2021, gave him a handgun, and dropped the alleged terrorist at the Guatemalan border, U.S. prosecutors said.
Task Force Vulcan tracked Canales to Mexico. He was captured and deported to the U.S. where he awaits trial.
A person familiar with the case said that, like Lopez-Larios, Canales was directly involved in negotiations with Bukele – describing him as Bukele's crown jewel.
Another Bukele opponent who may soon return to El Salvador is Norman Quijano, who served as president of the national assembly and is a former mayor of San Salvador.
Quijano fled El Salvador in 2021, hours before his parliamentary immunity expired, and sought political asylum in the United States. He was convicted in absentia of seeking support from MS-13 and the Barrio 18 gang in a failed 2014 run for president with the conservative ARENA party.
Now 78, Quijano is one of the highest-ranking Salvadoran officials to be convicted of gang ties in prosecutions that experts say have targeted the opposition while sparing Bukele's associates.
A person familiar with Quijano told USA TODAY the politician had paid for gang support in his 2014 run – but he was outbid by Bukele's then-party, the FMLN, which paid more than double what Quijano could raise. Quijano lost by a whisker with 49.89% of the vote.
Quijano was tried by Salvadoran Judge Godofredo Miranda. In February 2020, Miranda ruled in a separate case that he could 'infer' the FMLN's 2014 gang negotiations 'particularly impacted the election for mayor of San Salvador at the time,' which Bukele won before later breaking with the party.
'It is therefore mandatory to verify the existence of any close contacts between the MS gang and the current Cabinet,' the judge wrote of Bukele's presidency.
ICE agents arrested Quijano on March 6, days before the Trump administration dropped charges against MS-13 leader Lopez-Larios. Quijano is being held at a Texas detention facility. His attorney couldn't be reached; family members did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The shadowy rise of Trump's favorite ally: El Salvador's Nayib Bukele