Podcast: Bukele and Washington: Honeymoon, Breakup, and Back Together

The following is a transcript of episode 52 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

GRESSIER, HOST: In front of the cameras, Bukele bids farewell to his ally: U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson. It’s January 18, 2021, and the ceremony is taking place at Casa Presidencial. The president presents him with a new award, the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán, created especially for him.

Bukele calls him a friend, thanks him for his support, and says he “very much doubts” that he’ll be able to have the same relationship with whoever Democrat Joe Biden appoints to replace him.

BUKELE: Until less than two years ago, El Salvador and the United States were practically enemies. You remember all the expressions of support for the Venezuelan regime, the multiple condemnations of the United States by the government of El Salvador, and even the unfortunate “Yankee, go home” banners at events held by the previous government.

GRESSIER: That farewell marked the end of an era: that of its close alliance with the Republican administration. Days later, Joe Biden took office in Washington, and soon after, relations with El Salvador began to become strained.

MANES: We use different tools, such as the one I have, that allow us to take immediate action against actors who are abusing their power for personal gain.

GRESSIER: Now in 2021, interim ambassador Jean Manes is speaking on Salvadoran television. She’s discussing the Engel List, which was one of Biden's first steps in response to civil society demands for an anti-corruption fight in Central America. The U.S. government singled out officials close to Bukele for embezzlement or undermining democracy. It was the first open rift between the two governments. It wouldn’t be the last. Or the worst.

BUKELE: If they’re not listening to our side of things, they must be listening to the opposition... they’re biased.

GRESSIER: This statement by Bukele to the diplomatic corps in El Salvador wasn’t just a complaint: he responded with a warning shot of his own. Bukele knew how far he could push the envelope, and Washington hadn’t yet decided whether to let go or hold on.

This is a special November episode of Central America in Minutes. Today: Washington and Bukele in three acts: honeymoon, breakup, and and back together.

A Budding Relationship

BUKELE: We can say with complete certainty, with complete conviction, with complete assurance, and with the irreversibility we expected when we came to stand on this podium, that we won the San Salvador Mayor’s Office.

GRESSIER: Rewind a few years. In 2015, Bukele won the mayoralty of San Salvador and began to project himself beyond his party, the FMLN. A year later, U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes arrived, and with her began his first link with U.S. diplomacy.

Manes represented the foreign policy of the Obama administration, which was preaching dialogue and cooperation with the region. Washington offered funds to Central American governments in exchange for a commitment to strengthen their institutions, curb corruption, and reduce migration.

It was a simple equation: if public money wasn’t squandered, people would have more reasons to stay.

When Attorney General Douglas Meléndez was elected in December 2015, with the support of ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that had dominated politics since the 1990s, Washington welcomed the decision. He was the candidate backed by the Embassy, according to two sources consulted by El Faro who worked in the Attorney General's Office at the time. The U.S. government financed armored cars for the “Group Against Impunity,” a large team of prosecutors handpicked by Meléndez.

Before long, the top prosecutor began to make waves. In his first months at the helm of the Attorney General's Office, files were no longer kept under lock and key, and old allies of those in power began to appear in investigations.

NEWS ANCHOR: Douglas Meléndez was sworn in as Attorney General, replacing Luis Martínez. Three years have passed since then, during which time former presidents, businessmen, former Attorney General Martínez himself, and former officials have been prosecuted for corruption.

GRESSIER: At the time, the Constitutional Chamber was made up of “the Fantastic Four,” a nickname given to the magistrates because of their independence. In less than a decade, they abolished the Amnesty Law protecting war crimes and declared the partida secreta, a presidential slush fund, unconstitutional.

This was no small feat in a country used to obedient judges.In this television interview more than eight years ago, two of them, Sidney Blanco and Rodolfo González, explained how they understood the use of public money:

BLANCO: All public funds diverted for other purposes are illegal. Therefore, no law states that officials can be granted extra salaries or bonuses.

GONZÁLEZ: Let it be clear that no president of the Republic or private secretary of the Presidency has the legal authority to give money to ministers or officials of other institutions that are not theirs.

GRESSIER: Amid this sense of progress, a new president arrived in Washington.

FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. He won't be inaugurated until January, but word has just reached the New York Hilton.

GRESSIER: Manes stayed on as ambassador when Trump came to power in January 2017.

FMLN SPOKESPERSON: It was decided to impose the maximum penalty on Nayib...

GRESSIER: Bukele found a way to engage in politics outside the traditional parties when he was kicked out of the FMLN.

In 2018, he launched his presidential bid. First with Nuevas Ideas, the movement he founded himself. But, because the deadline to do so with his new party had already passed, he moved forward with the old swing party GANA. A new cast for a country that was already beginning to turn.

BUKELE: As you’ve seen, the same old people started their campaigns months ago, violating the law with impunity. They have always said so and think it’s normal. The same thing happens with corruption: when they come to power, they steal, because that is what they have always done. They see corruption as something normal; they’re the same old people, and we’re fed up with their way of doing politics. But now we have the opportunity to leave them in the past and look to the future.

GRESSIER: In July 2019, Ambassador Jean Manes ended her mission in El Salvador and Bukele bid her farewell at the Presidential House. During those first months, they maintained a close relationship. Manes had been a key figure during his political rise and continued to appear at his side at official events.

Sources in Washington told El Faro English in 2021 that it was she who had introduced him to Trump's White House as an ally of the new government. She would return to San Salvador two years later, with a democratic crisis, unprecedented since the peace accords, in full swing. The friendly tone between Manes and Bukele would be short-lived.

Uncommon Friends

GRESSIER: When Jean Manes’ successor, Ronald Johnson, left El Salvador in January 2021, it was already a different country. Bukele’s government was under suspicion of Covid-19 corruption. Investigations into pacts with gangs were quietly advancing within the Attorney General's Office, and evidence was beginning to reach the halls of Washington. Even so, that afternoon, the president and the ambassador embraced for the cameras.

BUKELE: The truth is that today is a sad day because our friend is leaving.

GRESSIER: Johnson had landed in El Salvador in September 2019. A former CIA officer and retired military man, he experienced combat in El Salvador in the 1980s as an “authorized military advisor.” Starting in 1984, he led a Special Forces battalion in Panama, according to his public profile.

From the beginning, Bukele and Johnson got along. In public, they addressed each other by their first names: Ron and Nayib. In the early months, Johnson appeared alongside the president at conferences or eating lobster at a restaurant in Miami. It was an unusual closeness between an ambassador and a head of state.

Trump was looking for an ally in Central America. Someone who could sign hard-line measures to contain migration from the region. In El Salvador, that migration had a known root cause: gangs. For years, extortion, threats, and murders had forced entire families to flee the country.

He found an ally in Bukele. Within months, the Salvadoran government announced its own border patrol and signed an immigration agreement that was never actually implemented, but which Washington billed as a success. That closeness coincided with the first signs of absolute power in San Salvador.

[rel1]

On the night of February 6, 2020, Bukele appeared on national TV alongside Johnson. They announced a work visa agreement for Salvadorans, but the message abruptly changed tone. At the end of the event, Bukele addressed the country to demand that lawmakers approve a $109 million-dollar loan for his security plan.

He said that if the Assembly did not meet on Sunday, “the people” had a constitutional right to insurrection. Johnson listened in silence. Bukele convened an extraordinary legislative session for February 9, the day he entered the Assembly surrounded by soldiers.During the takeover, a crowd summoned by his team waited outside. From the steps in front of the building, he told them:

BUKELE: I asked God and he told me to be patient.

GRESSIER: He wouldn't dissolve the assembly that day. While the country was still trying to understand what had happened, Bukele called a private meeting at a house in Las Piletas, an exclusive residential area. They sought to gauge the political cost of February 9 and the international reaction it had provoked. Officials from his inner circle arrived at the house, along with Ambassador Johnson. No one else from the diplomatic corps came, according to an investigation by El Faro.

The Constitutional Chamber was harsh: Mr. President, stop using the Armed Forces to put democracy at risk.

The reaction from the United States, not so much. On Monday, February 10, Ambassador Johnson wrote on Twitter that he didn’t approve of the presence of the military inside the Legislative Assembly, and that he was relieved that everything had ended without violence.

Over time, in Washington, Ambassador Johnson downplayed the incursion as more peaceful than it actually was. After his time in San Salvador, from his home in Florida, he became an important ally of Bukele in consolidating support with the Republican Party in Miami and Washington.

Now, despite doubts about his role in El Salvador and criticism of his closeness to Bukele, Johnson is ambassador to Mexico, a key post in U.S. diplomacy.

Quarantine Clashes

TELEMUNDO: Starting today, El Salvador is also quarantined. The president announced the suspension of classes across the entire country.

GRESSIER: March 11, 2020. A month after the infamous February 9, the world ground to a halt. El Salvador, too. The government deployed soldiers and police to the streets to ensure that no one left their homes during the quarantine.

The Constitutional Chamber declared unconstitutional a series of executive decrees restricting basic rights like mobility and assembly. Attorney General Melara went on to order an investigation into the use of public funds and irregular purchases in several ministries during the pandemic. But for Bukele, any limit on power stung like betrayal.

The sources in the Attorney General's Office consulted by El Faro English for this episode said that the police received a direct instruction from the Presidential Palace: do not cooperate with the investigations. That’s why the Attorney General's Office decided to work alone, without even notifying the U.S. Embassy, headed by Johnson, because of his close relationship with Bukele.

During those investigations, something came to light that contradicted the official narrative. An elite unit of prosecutors, the Special Anti-Mafia Group, discovered evidence of negotiations between the Bukele government and the gangs.

BUKELE: What we do now is that, we put more in intelligence and less in force. So, when you have a lot invested in intelligence, then you can go and take away the pieces of the structure that make the structure work.

GRESSIER: That's Bukele in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2019, talking about his strategy for combating gangs. But the following year, prosecutors found that a cabinet official, Osiris Luna Meza, had entered maximum-security prisons with hooded men to make deals with the gangs.

In August of that year, Luna arrived at the Joint Border Intelligence Group building in San Benito to meet with US officials. He wanted to request asylum. He agreed to tell them what he knew, but backed down when they explained that he would have to testify against the government he works for. The US agents dismissed him, saying he had no evidence. This is according to a report by Carlos Martínez in the August issue of our digital magazine, Central America Monthly.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Ronald Johnson preferred to talk about something else: migration. He boasted that migration flows had fallen by 81 percent. A supposed success that coincided with a country in lockdown, its population hungry and afraid.

Shifting Tides

BIDEN: America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause: the cause of democracy.

GRESSIER: In early 2021, the political landscape in the United States changed again — and this time, in El Salvador, Bukele lost ground. In Washington, Donald Trump refused to recognize the victory of Joe Biden, who had just moved into the White House. The Salvadoran attorney general, Raúl Melara, believed that this was a different scenario, hoping a new ambassador was about to arrive, giving him oxygen to present the Cathedral case into sweeping corruption to the courts, according to the sources from Melara’s office.

But it didn't take long for Bukele to win again.

BUKELE: El Salvador is breaking all records.

GRESSIER: In the legislative elections of February 28, 2021, his party, Nuevas Ideas, won an overwhelming majority that allowed him to single-handedly dominate the Legislative Assembly.

As soon as they took office, late into the night on May 1, Bukele’s new majority landed an uppercut it could never take back: Sidestepping the actual selection process laid out by the Constitution, they dismissed the Constitutional Chamber magistrates and the attorney general. Without public consultation or legislative debate, Bukele took total control of the state.

Two days later, he urgently summoned almost the entire diplomatic corps in El Salvador for a “private meeting.” For nearly two hours, the president complained about the tone of the statements in which several governments had condemned the Assembly's decision.

Among those in attendance were uncomfortable diplomats, others who remained silent, and one empty chair that stood out more than the rest: that of the interim head of the Embassy, Brendan O'Brien, a no-show.

BUKELE: If they’re not listening to our side of things, they must be listening to the opposition... they’re biased.

GRESSIER: Three days after the coup, on May 4, the State Department declassified a document that marked the first crack: the Engel List. In it, the Biden administration revoked the visas of four senior officials in Bukele's government, including his legal secretary, Conan Castro, who was named for the removal of the constitutional magistrates and the attorney general.

The dismissal of officials in San Salvador caught Washington off-guard.

In January, the Biden administration was just getting started when Juan González, White House advisor for Latin America, told El Faro English: “A leader unready to fight corruption won’t be a U.S. ally.”

[newsletter]

In response to the judicial coup, the United States sent a firm hand who already knew her way around Salvadoran politics. On May 26, 2021, Jean Manes was back. This time as interim, while Biden and the U.S. Congress were still on standstill over who would fill the position permanently.

USAID, the U.S. international cooperation agency, announced that it would withdraw funds from institutions involved in Bukele's coup, such as the National Civil Police, and redirect them to civil society organizations keeping them in check. For a leader like Bukele, this was almost tantamount to a declaration of war.

After releasing the Engel List, Manes' first message was to support the fight against corruption:

MANES: “The recent publication of the Engel List is yet another tool to support Salvadorans in constructing a better future for El Salvador. This vision is only possible if we fight corruption from the root.

GRESSIER: Fast-forward a few weeks. September 15, 2021, was not just any day of the year, nor any Independence Day. It was the bicentennial anniversary of Central American independence. Days earlier, the Constitutional Chamber, newly installed by Bukele, announced that he could seek a second consecutive term, despite multiple prohibitions in the Constitution.

That day, there was a big protest in San Salvador. In a message to the nation, it was no longer surprising when Bukele accused the United States of financing the demonstrators — of interventionism, like Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 2018.

In other words, the relationship was completely broken. The unconstitutional reelection reminded Jean Manes of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. She said so herself. And at the end of November, she announced her departure. She complained, “Why should I stay in El Salvador if we have no counterpart?” Her departure marked the lowest point between Washington and Bukele.

For more than a year, the embassy waited for a permanent ambassador to arrive. In February 2023, Biden sent William H. Duncan, a career diplomat who had been in El Salvador in the 1990s and worked on policy toward the country in Washington. His style was the opposite of Manes: low-key and prudent.

Bukele would later thank Duncan in 2024.

BUKELE: The ambassador arrived at a difficult time in general, but especially in terms of our relations with the United States. It wasn’t the best moment. I honestly didn’t have high expectations for what could be done from then on, and we began to ask him for little things. They repaired the relationship, and it was thanks to Ambassador Duncan.

Parallel Delegations

GRESSIER: On June 1, 2024, while Bukele took office for his unconstitutional second term, there were parallel delegations from the United States. They even seemed to be competing for influence in San Salvador. On one side was the MAGA-sphere: Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Eduardo Verástegui from Mexico. On the other side, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas applauded from the front row.

MÉNDEZ: I think the substantive change has also been due to how President Bukele himself has changed his narrative, and his priorities, beyond the issue of the state of exception. We’ve seen how in his second term, Bukele has begun to talk about God more than in his first term. He has tried to have a very conservative narrative on the concept of family.

He has spoken in the same language of values as the Republican Party, especially the MAGA movement, and he identifies with that. So, I would say that this same transformation that Bukele has undergone is somewhat ideological.

GRESSIER: That’s Ana María Mendez, director for Central America at WOLA, the Washington Office on Latin America. She explains why the United States can coexist with an authoritarian leader while celebrating his security policy. Ideology, rather than democracy, became the meeting point.

[rel2]

Congress has yet to receive Trump's nomination for ambassador to El Salvador. Will he choose a discreet profile, a career diplomat like Duncan, or will he tap an overtly political figure for one of his most important allies in the hemisphere? The link between Bukele and Washington passes directly through the Republican White House, now under the leadership of Donald Trump, and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

And they have made a naked transaction. Bukele receives deported Venezuelans and Salvadorans at the CECOT, while Trump pressures the New York District Attorney's Office to soften cases against MS-13 leaders who could testify in the United States about Bukele's pacts with the gangs. This was revealed in recent reports by El Faro and the Washington Post. The pillars of the renewed relationship are exchanges: security, migration, silence, and impunity.

This is Michael Paarlberg, a political scientist from Virginia Commonwealth University.

PAARLBERG: He [Trump] is nearly 80 years old. No matter what, he will not be president forever. But Bukele made a risky bet: he went all in on Trump personally. Not the U.S. government, not even the Republican Party, but Trump alone. When Trump is gone —and perhaps even before— what happens to Bukele’s deal? Especially if this MS-13 Ranfla case comes out in court.

Bukele has not thought long term. He angered an entire political party, the Democrats, who will not be willing to work with him. If Trump is successful. And if Trump is successful in his plan for mass deportations, which Bukele supports, El Salvador will be getting hundreds of thousands of returned migrants and will be losing remittances from all of them, which still make up about 25% of GDP.

GRESSIER: Even so, he says Trump hasn’t cut a blank check.

PAARLBERG: However, he is not a loyal ally. As long as Bukele does things that benefit Trump politically and financially —such as offering him CECOT as a way to get around U.S. courts, and perhaps offering him some crypto deal that we don't know about yet— Trump will back him. But don’t forget that Trump regards El Salvador and most other countries as shithole countries, and disposable, if they are no longer useful to him.

GRESSIER: Bukele, now a de facto president, has kept his country under a state of exception suspending constitutional rights for three and a half years.

The U.S. press has begun to speculate that the next ambassador will be a political appointment. Trump's former special envoy to Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone, told the Miami Herald in July that there’s a “big pool” of people seeking political appointments to embassies.

He quipped, “I don’t recall seeing people fighting to become the ambassador to El Salvador.”

This special November episode of Central America in Minutes was written by Roman Gressier. Sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.