This is an introduction to the case files of each of the MS-13 leaders indicted in the United States, which you can browse here. Leer en español.
Donald Trump had been in office for barely a month after winning his first election in the United States and becoming the 45th president of that country when he spoke about the Mara Salvatrucha-13 for the first time. It was December 2016, and in an interview with Time Magazine, which had named him Man of the Year, Trump referred to the murders committed by teenage members of MS-13 on Long Island. In September of that year, five murders committed by the gang on the island had raised national alarm: a 15-year-old Salvadoran boy murdered in Mineola; teenagers Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, beaten to death outside their school in Brentwood; another 19-year-old Salvadoran teenager and a 15-year-old Ecuadorian whose body was found lying in the wooded surroundings of the abandoned Pilgrim psychiatric hospital. Then Trump came to power and turned his attention to the mafia that had grown rapidly in the United States and then in El Salvador since the years of the Salvadoran Civil War: “They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”
That message was mixed with dozens of news reports about what happened on Long Island, with the fresh memory of the wave of 64,000 unaccompanied minors —mostly Central Americans— who had entered the United States in 2014 under the Barack Obama administration, and with Trump’s amplified message. The new most powerful man in the world understood that this had an important effect on his anti-immigration goals, and MS-13 entered the core of his public discourse: “But MS-13 is particularly violent. They don’t like shooting people because it’s too quick, it’s too fast. I was reading —one of these animals was caught— in explaining, they like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals,” Trump said on July 28, 2017, before police officers from the two counties where the murders took place.
He continued in that vein for months, waving his banner of hate toward undocumented migrants through those initials: MS-13. The whole for the part: if the Mara was bad, all migrants were bad.
When Trump first referred to the gang in Time Magazine in 2016, Nayib Bukele was not the all-powerful Salvadoran dictator, but the troubled mayor of the capital city of his country’s former guerrilla group, the FMLN, and was trying to take advantage of his growing fame to get his party to allow him to compete under the red flag in the 2019 presidential elections. By then, Bukele's party had broken a pact with MS-13 that began in 2012, when he entered politics as mayor of a small municipality with little national relevance.
As a good student, Bukele had learned his lessons and began his own pact with that and other gangs in 2014, when he was a candidate for mayor of the capital, still under the banner of the Left.
The FMLN government broke its agreement with MS-13 in early 2015, leaving El Salvador plunged into an unprecedented homicide crisis: 106 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Bukele, for his part, retained those allies who had already learned to make political calculations and understood that they had to bet on the politician of the moment, the man who had all the chips to rise to power.
Bukele Gets Trump to Toss the Work of Vulcan, the Task Force that Pursued MS-13
Nine years after Trump’s first words about MS-13, in 2025, Trump and Bukele would reach secret agreements that used several leaders of that gang, the largest on the continent and the most murderous in El Salvador’s 33-year postwar period, as bargaining chips.
* * *
Before leaving office, Trump created the Joint Task Force Vulcan in 2019, an interagency unit between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and several agencies of the Attorney General’s Office. The group had a single objective: to destroy MS-13 and bring its leaders to U.S. courts.
When they said MS-13, they were referring to the gang in El Salvador. MS-13 is an international criminal organization with a strong presence in the United States, Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, but it was the Salvadoran leaders who organized a different kind of structure that allowed them to transcend their borders, take power away from the original Los Angeles branch, and expand under their command on the East Coast of the United States and in Mexico. Vulcan was after that leadership, not any other.
Vulcan began to do its job. Trump, embroiled in criminal scandals, forgot about MS-13 and entered the presidential campaign ahead of the 2020 election, which he would lose to Democrat Joe Biden.
Bukele had been expelled from the FMLN in 2018 and ran with a right-wing party in the presidential elections, which he won by a landslide in 2019, always with the support of his political partners in MS-13, whom he secretly promised to prevent the extradition of their leaders to the United States, thus boycotting one of Vulcan’s missions.
But Vulcan never stopped doing its job, regardless of headlines or political campaigns.
On January 14, 2021, six days before Trump left office at the end of his first term, and thanks to Vulcan’s work, his administration made public the first indictment against 14 MS-13 leaders, including most of the gang’s most prominent leaders who controlled the criminal group’s activities from prisons and the streets of El Salvador, Mexico, and the East Coast of the United States: Diablito, Crook, Greñas, Tigre, Rata, Colocho, Speedy, Cola, Lucky, Necio, Pavas, Flaco, Trece, and Sirra. Eleven of them were imprisoned in El Salvador, and three were fugitives. The United States intended to prosecute them in the Eastern District Court of New York for various crimes, including terrorism. Indictment CR 20 577 had been filed in December 2020 by the Department of Justice, weeks before it was made public.
By the time the indictment was filed, Bukele had been touting his historic reduction in homicides for over a year, selling it as the result of a secret plan he called Territorial Control Plan, while striving to keep his pact with MS-13 and other gangs hidden, until El Faro made it public in September 2020.
The Biden administration gradually requested the extradition of the 11 leaders imprisoned in El Salvador from Bukele’s government. Then Flaco was also captured in El Salvador, bringing the total to 12. No extradition was granted.
As the months passed, and after MS-13 murdered 87 Salvadorans in March 2022 in protest of broken promises, Bukele’s pact with the gangs collapsed and the Salvadoran president ordered a state of exception, a severe police state, which eventually dismantled the gang in the country and imprisoned one in every 57 Salvadorans without due process and without any basic guarantees, such as the right to the presumption of innocence, to have contact with lawyers within 15 days, or to a fixed term of imprisonment without conviction.
Then, in February 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice, still under the Biden administration, filed a second indictment against 13 other gang leaders: Vampiro, Baxter, Chivo, Big Boy, Cabro, Renuente, Cisco, Mary Jane, Cruger, Indio, Rojo, Veterano, and Snayder.
That second indictment contained a political charge that the first did not have.
The Ranfla Nacional demanded that the government of El Salvador refuse to extradite MS-13 leaders for prosecution, in exchange for reducing the number of public murders in El Salvador, “which benefited the government of El Salvador politically by creating the perception that the government was reducing the homicide rate,” the document states.
Some paragraphs included in that indictment, filed in the same New York court, struck at the heart of the narrative of pacification in El Salvador that Bukele had maintained for years: It accused Bukele’ director of prisons and vice minister of Security and Justice, Osiris Luna, and the director of Social Fabric, Carlos Marroquín, of negotiating political influence and support for the government in exchange for “economic benefits, control of territory, less restrictive prison conditions... for the National Ranfla, the Ranfla in the Prisons, and other MS-13 leaders.”
These meetings with gang members were organized by the Salvadoran government in prison, including the director of prisons and the director of Social Fabric, reads the second indictment, CR 22-429.
This ended up exacerbating the diplomatic conflict between the Biden administration and Bukele. The Salvadoran bet everything, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in political lobbying, to get closer to the more conservative Republican wing, in the hope that Trump would return to power in 2025.
Bukele was right.
* * *
On January 20, 2025, Trump took office for his second term as president. Bukele was the first president to congratulate him on social media. Since then, the relationship has been unbeatable: Trump received him on April 14 at the White House, with much of his cabinet, congratulated him on what he had done in El Salvador with the gangs, and both smiled in a cordial televised meeting, from which the Salvadoran government extracted all the political capital possible.
By then, an unprecedented event had already occurred in which MS-13 once again returned to the political discourse of both: Bukele had agreed to receive 238 Venezuelan migrants, most of whom had no criminal record in the United States, in his mega-prison CECOT. Trumpism, in return, began to refer to the Salvadoran as “a great friend of the United States.”
The Naïve Betrayal of Osiris Luna
Among the Venezuelans, there were also 23 Salvadorans who were accused of being members of MS-13, without any evidence being presented in all cases.
The images showed a heavyset man being dragged by Bukele’s prison guards, kneeling and shaved in front of the government cameras: It was César Antonio López Larios, Greñas, one of the leaders accused in the first indictment, who had been captured in Mexico thanks to Vulcan’s investigations.
It made no sense: A man whom the United States had been searching for for years, in whose search it had invested U.S. taxpayers’ money, whom the Trump administration considered the leader of an international terrorist organization, who had been brought to court in New York to pay for his crimes... was suddenly returned without further explanation to Bukele, who, according to Trump’s own prosecutor’s office, had benefited electorally from agreements with that terrorist organization.
Much of this would later be clarified when the Eastern District of New York, headed by John J. Durham, the man who had headed Vulcan, admitted that Greñas’ return had been due to “geopolitical reasons.” In the days following Greñas’ return, Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States Milena Mayorga cleared up any doubts in a television interview: “The president [Bukele] told [Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state], and he was very emphatic: I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States... He told him exactly that. I think it’s a point of honor.” After Greñas was sent back, eight of the 27 MS-13 leaders remain in prison in the United States, after Vulcan captured them in Mexico.
They have become political bargaining chips between Trump and Bukele: The Salvadoran puts his mega-prison, a legal black hole, at Trump’s disposal so that he can send whomever he wants, in exchange for returning to El Salvador the leaders of the gang with which Bukele sustained a pact for years.
One of those eight leaders is Élmer Canales Rivera, alias Crook, who was illegally released by the Bukele government in November 2021, when he still had upwards of 40 years left on his sentence in El Salvador, before the gang pact was broken and after homicides reported a sharp increase. Crook escaped from El Salvador with the help of the government that now wants him back. He is living proof of the mafia-style agreements between Bukele and MS-13, an organization that in January 2025, under the Trump administration, was designated a terrorist organization, along with Tren de Aragua and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. If anyone made a deal with these organizations, the U.S. justice system has a mandate to prosecute them.
Bukele made deals with MS-13 for years.
As the weeks went by, the Trump administration also tried to return Vampiro, another of those leaders, but the process is stuck in court because the defense has asked for an explanation of what exactly those “geopolitical reasons” entail.
* * *
The profiles presented in this issue explain who these 27 historic MS-13 leaders are, who have become political pawns between the most powerful country in the world and the smallest in Central America.
These 27 men, the youngest 31 and the oldest 60, with criminal records that include murder, kidnapping, rape, robbery, extortion, drug and human trafficking, and planning assassinations of U.S. federal agents, among others, have been leaders of MS-13 for decades. They have negotiated with all the political factions of the postwar era: with the leftist FMLN government, with the right-wing Arena party, and with the sui generis Bukele government.
The most powerful politicians of the last 13 years in El Salvador came to the same conclusion: To govern, it was necessary to ally with these criminals. And they all tried to do so in secret.
To produce this report, we turned to Carlos García, the Mexican researcher and journalist who has spent 15 years trying to understand MS-13 and each of its leaders, traveling between Central America, Mexico, and the United States to interview many of them and build a network of informants like nobody else has. He analyzed indictments, thousands of pages of legal charges in El Salvador and the United States, hundreds of newspaper articles, thousands of pages of confidential police information obtained thanks to leaks from digital activists such as those revealed in Guacamaya Leaks, transparency requests, bibliographies, court records, declassified reports, and interviews with dozens of law enforcement officers, gang members, and victims in different countries.
Some of these 27 gang members were on the international radar for years, with Interpol arrest warrants or on the most wanted lists in El Salvador and the United States; others spent years out of the spotlight and were not part of the narrative in El Salvador, at least at the national level, because they were indeed part of the narrative in the neighborhoods, towns, and villages they terrorized, where their gang nicknames were synonymous with fear.
These profiles contain the barbarity to which these gang members subjected El Salvador, murdering, extorting, and disappearing tens of thousands of people. They also reveal a corrupt justice system that for decades allowed many of these leaders to enter and leave Salvadoran prisons to continue committing crimes.
These documents aim to create a historical record of these murderers, many of whom went from being deported from the United States to negotiating with public officials, giving press conferences from prisons, preaching at Evangelical church services, and forcing Bukele, the most powerful politician in postwar El Salvador, to promise never to deport them to the United States.
Without these men, without these criminals, it is impossible to understand the political history of El Salvador’s fragile democracy and its descent into the current dictatorship. In light of the facts, these gang members are now also indispensable for understanding the methods of the most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump.
Browse the case file of the 27 MS-13 leaders indicted in the United States here.