Latest news with #MS-13
San Francisco Chronicle
8 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California pioneered modern gang surveillance. Trump may be exploiting it
Six years before he was wrongly deported to a foreign prison over unproven gang ties, Kilmar Abrego Garcia got a firsthand lesson in American gang intelligence. In March 2019, Abrego Garcia stood outside a southern Maryland Home Depot chatting with three fellow day laborers when local police arrested them. Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime or accused of one. But he was placed on a list of 'verified' gang members, something he discovered at an immigration hearing a month later. According to his attorneys, Abrego Garcia left El Salvador as a teen to escape the gangs that threatened to kidnap and ransom him. The evidence that he belonged to one of them came down to who he was with and what he wore. The practice of labeling him originated in California, the first U.S. state to legally define gangs and equate them with terrorist organizations. The Prince George's County Police Department, which arrested Abrego Garcia and handed him to federal immigration authorities, said a confidential informant told them that Abrego Garcia belonged to MS-13, an international gang started by Salvadorans in 1980s Los Angeles that was partial to bull horns as a symbol. That Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie when he was arrested indicated he 'was a member in good standing,' an arrest report stated. The first Trump administration lost its bid to legally deport Abrego Garcia. The second Trump administration circumvented the legal process. In 2019, an immigration judge determined that Abrego Garcia was more likely to be a victim of gang crime than a purveyor of it, and granted him protection from future deportation. On March 12, three days before President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming the U.S. was at war with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, ICE agents arrested Abrego Garcia on his way home from work. The sheet metal worker had his autistic 5-year-old son in the backseat. Over the next four days, Abrego Garcia's attorneys say, he was moved to different locations in different states, questioned about gang affiliations, allowed two phone calls to his wife and flown to El Salvador, where he was frog-marched into a maximum-security prison for terrorists known as CECOT. At least 287 other U.S. migrants have experienced the same fate, though immigration advocates and attorneys suspect there are more. 'Many of these families really had their loved ones disappear,' Michelle Brané, a Biden administration immigration detention ombudsman who now leads the family reunification nonprofit Together & Free, said during a video briefing. 'It's just literally what it looks like to these families.' Numerous federal judges have recoiled at the White House's interpretation of U.S. law, issuing injunctions both preliminary and permanent against its invocation of the arcane Alien Enemies Act of 1798, threatening it with criminal contempt for not complying with orders to return migrants and directing it to do everything it can to bring back Abrego Garcia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is attempting to deport scores of others for disputed gang affiliations. Attorneys for the detained immigrants say their clients are actually victims or potential victims of the gangs they're accused of belonging to. Some have had relatives killed; others say their sexual orientation would make them targets. While the administration initially chalked up Abrego Garcia's deportation as an ' administrative error,' it has since doubled down on claims that he belongs to MS-13, releasing his 2019 arrest report and offering as ' bombshell ' evidence a 2022 traffic stop in which Abrego Garcia was released with a warning. Attorneys for the banished migrants say Trump's actions are illegal. Civil libertarians say they are also a foreseeable, if extreme, extension of California's decades-long efforts to track criminal street gangs in computerized databases that have been found to be riddled with errors, assumptions and, in some cases, falsified reports. The state has tried to undo much of what it pioneered across the country — including the use of flawed gang intelligence in deportations. But the reforms are falling into a growing loophole, says a Southern California attorney who is trying to close it. Law of the land The grandson of a high-ranking Los Angeles and Newport Beach police official, Garcia-Leys already thought that cops placed too much stock in their own judgment. But it wasn't until the westside native moved to the lower-income, tightly packed Watts neighborhood in southern L.A., to teach at the lowest-performing high schools in the county, that he saw how heavily perception weighed in gang policing. 'In Watts, nobody trusted the police to do the right thing ever,' said Garcia-Leys, now the executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Orange County, where he pursues local and statewide policing reforms. 'And it was just because they mistreated people, their demeanor, and they didn't seem to care if they got the right person.' Garcia-Leys said his students were resigned to their reality. They kept little more than a buck on them for their two-a-day 'pocket checks' — robbed by the gangbangers waiting for them outside of school, searched by the gang officers closer to home. 'It's the exact same sort of intimidation and harassment, and you'd experience it first at the hands of the gang and second at the hands of the police,' Garcia-Leys said. 'They were actually making the problem worse.' Garcia-Leys started his teaching career in 2001, four years after L.A.'s approach to gang policing became the California standard. He left teaching in 2010, after that standard had been adopted nationally. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department created the nation's first computerized database of suspected gang members in 1987, a year before California adopted the nation's first law defining street gangs and creating stiff penalties for belonging to them. A decade later, L.A.'s database was the template for CalGang, a statewide intranet system that quickly became the country's most widely used gang database. To be entered into CalGang, individuals have to meet just two criteria on a nine-item checklist. They included: self-identifying as a gang member; being arrested with gang members; associating with gang members; being identified as a gang member by a reliable informant; being identified by an untested informant; frequenting gang areas; displaying gang signs; wearing gang attire; and having gang tattoos. CalGang ballooned into what critics contended was an indiscriminate dragnet of communities of color. In 2010, more than 235,000 people were logged in CalGang as active gang members — 41,000 of them living in L.A. — with up to 200 items of personal information about each individual. A 2015 study in the Journal of Forensic Social Work found that it didn't result in a reduction of gang-related crime in L.A. In Sacramento County, where the sheriff's and police departments managed their own databases, the low threshold and broad criteria resulted in expansive lists of mostly Black and brown boys and men, who could be and were labeled gang members for wearing their high school colors, making or appearing in rap videos, or being fans of the rap-rock duo Insane Clown Posse. One Sacramento man spent more than a decade mistakenly validated as a member of the gang responsible for shooting him. Another Sacramento man had his gang validation extended five years after he was pulled over while wearing a Sacramento Kings hat. A 2016 state audit found widespread problems with CalGang, including a lack of oversight, unjustified and inaccurate entries, and data privacy violations. But the system had already influenced federal immigration authorities. Not only did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have 'read-only' access to CalGang between January 2006 and October 2016, it modeled its own gang database, called ICEGangs, after California's, according to a September 2024 paper by UC Irvine criminologists. A third-year law student at UC Irvine in 2016, Garcia-Leys co-authored a paper about the ripple effects of CalGang's unreliable intel on immigration proceedings — used to fast-track deportations, justify detentions and withhold legal status from otherwise eligible Dreamers. Wrongful gang allegations also show up in wrongful convictions. At its July 2024 meeting, the California Victims Compensation Board granted financial restitution to two different men wrongfully convicted of gang-related murders in 2001. One was Ronald Velasquez, who was awarded $1.2 million after losing 8,587 days to a wrongful first-degree murder conviction. Abraham Villalobos was granted $788,000 for a wrongful conviction of second-degree murder with a gang enhancement, for which he spent 5,629 days incarcerated. Before the conviction was overturned in March 2024, Villalobos was deported to Mexico. Opting out of reforms Over the past decade, the California Legislature has attempted to correct the embattled CalGang system by mandating a notification and appeals process for the people entered into it, and shifting oversight from the L.A.-heavy law enforcement representatives on the executive board and advisory committee to the state Department of Justice. Assembly Bill 90 in 2017 prohibited information in shared gang databases from being used for immigration enforcement purposes, under threat of access being suspended or revoked. The reforms have had intended and unintended consequences. The number of accused people in the database has plunged 87% since the end of 2017, when there were almost 104,000 entries. And people are getting auto-purged from the system at higher numbers than they're being added. Still, CalGang entries have a high failure rate. In 2024, the state DOJ audited 675 gangs identified by law enforcement agencies, and found that 154 — more than a fifth — didn't meet its standards for qualifying as a gang. Another 60 audits were still pending. Racial disproportionality remains an ongoing concern. Of the 13,691 people in the database, 69% are Hispanic and 28% are Black. Comparatively, 40% of California's population is Hispanic and 6% is Black. White individuals made up 6.9% of the 13,691 people in CalGang in September 2024 — the same percentage as six years earlier. 'It highlights the bias in the system, that white gangs typically aren't considered gangs,' said Mike German, a former FBI agent and author of 'Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within.' 'There's a tendency because of the bias that's inherent in the system to view white crime as the acts of individuals while holding collective blame when they're nonwhite crimes.' The number of law enforcement agencies using CalGang has also plummeted. At the time of the 2016 state audit, 92% of law enforcement agencies said CalGang was the only gang database they used. Today, only 10 of California's roughly 600 law enforcement agencies are active users, according to the California Department of Justice's response to a public records request. Garcia-Leys fears this means that many agencies have instead chosen to operate internal gang databases to avoid state oversight. 'They should not be sharing their databases but we don't know if that's the case,' he said. 'Here's the problem, right? Nobody's using CalGang anymore.' He's circulating a legislative proposal to close what he describes as the 'shared database loophole,' to make sure these ad hoc databases can't be used to fuel Trump's extraordinary renditions. He said it's drawn lawmaker interest but, because of the summer session deadline, could be a couple years away. In response to public records requests, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, an early CalGang administrator, said it does operate a shared database accessible by state and regional agencies. The San Francisco Police Department, whose notorious 'Chinatown Squad' in the late 1800s was the first 'ethnic crime' police force in the U.S., said it does not track gangs. And the Los Angeles Police Department — which got kicked out of CalGang in 2020 for falsifying records — said it does not document suspected gang members, contract with software vendors to do so or train its police force how to document gang members. Los Angeles police are still training the nation's gang officers, however. The LAPD is well-represented among the leadership of the L.A.-grown California Gang Investigators Association, whose 33rd national conference in Anaheim in August has some two dozen planned classes dedicated to 'the street gang problem.' They include seminars about gang enforcement operations, investigating minors, Black gangs, the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and one called the 'Tren de Aragua Menace.'
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
The shadowy rise of Trump's favorite ally: El Salvador's Nayib Bukele
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. Bukele's deal with MS-13 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. Trump's 'Vulcans' 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. Comandante Ramiro 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 Cuscatlan, 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, Nicolas 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 Cuscatlan - 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. Bukele's MS-13 ties 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 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 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." The devil's 'apostle' and the former mayor 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 the highest-ranking Salvadoran official 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.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The shadowy rise of Donald Trump's favorite president: Nayib Bukele
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
USA Today
2 days ago
- Politics
- USA Today
The shadowy rise of Donald Trump's favorite president: Nayib Bukele
The shadowy rise of Donald Trump's favorite president: Nayib Bukele 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 interviews and documents reviewed by USA TODAY. Show Caption Hide Caption HFR Who is Nayib Bukele, the controversial El Salvadorian president? HFR President Nayib Bukele rose to near-total control of El Salvador on a tide of support from the very gang he's credited with defeating. 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. Bukele's deal with MS-13 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. Trump's 'Vulcans' The most important U.S. source on Bukele's MS-13 ties is a task force created during Trump's first administration. El Salvador's president Bukele says he won't return Maryland man In a meeting at the White House, Nayib Bukele told President Trump he would not return the mistakenly deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia. 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. Comandante Ramiro 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. Bukele's MS-13 ties 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.' The devil's 'apostle' and the former mayor 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 the highest-ranking Salvadoran official 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.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Deported alleged gang member Abrego Garcia 'will never be on American streets again,' DHS says
The Department of Homeland Security doubled down on Wednesday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant and suspected MS-13 gang member deported to his native country of El Salvador, "will never be on American streets again." The agency's remarks came amid criticism from U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., who tried to visit Garcia on Memorial Day. Ivey initially posted a video on X about the attempted visit, saying that he represents Abrego Garcia, and that the Salvadoran government stonewalled his efforts. Maryland Democrat Ivey Furious Not Given Access To Kilmar Abrego Garcia In El Salvador He urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday to present evidence in court that Garcia is an illegal immigrant. Democrats have maintained that Garcia was denied due process when he was deported despite being in the United States for years. "Let us be crystal clear: Kilmar Abrego Garcia will never be on American streets again," a Homeland Security post on X states. "Advocating for an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, human trafficker and wife beater over ACTUAL Maryland constituents victimized by illegal alien crime is appalling." Since his deportation, several Democrats have attempted to visit Garcia in the El Salvadoran prison where he's being held to conduct wellness checks. Read On The Fox News App Dem Immigration Talking Points Fizzle As Dark Picture Of Abrego Garcia Emerges The Trump administration has pointed to evidence that Abrego Garcia was involved with MS-13 and human trafficking. It has also cited court documents detailing Abrego Garcia's alleged physical abuse of his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura. Meanwhile, Democrats describe him as a "Maryland man" who was not given his due process in court before being deported. "If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap. Let his lawyer and I check on him," Ivey said in his video message. "I'm the congressman who represents Kilmar and I came all the way down from the United States after we contacted their ambassador, after we made formal requests through our ambassador to the El Salvadoran government, and we came here to visit him today." Fox News Digital has reached out to Ivey's article source: Deported alleged gang member Abrego Garcia 'will never be on American streets again,' DHS says
