Bukele’s Close Friend Wins Contract in A.I. Health Experiment

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On May 18, the government of El Salvador contracted services for its A.I. health program from a pharmacy chain run by Erick Geovanni Vega. He is a former executive of a business group tied to Venezuelan state oil money, as well as a Bukele insider in both political and personal terms.

Vega, a doctor, is the CEO of Farmacia La Esperanza. He manages this pharmacy chain through the company World Real Estate El Salvador, which in 2026 became one of the main providers of the government’s A.I.-based Doctor SV app, running on Google’s Gemini system.

The contract, signed with World Real Estate El Salvador, lists services including the “storage, distribution, dispensing, transportation, and inventory management of prescription medications in the Doctor SV program.”

According to the public procurement system Comprasal, the window for Hospital El Salvador to receive bids lasted only three and a half hours, until 5:00 p.m. on April 24. Out of 14 bids, Vega’s pharmacy chain was selected.

Doctor SV is an app that uses artificial intelligence and telemedicine services. It is one of the Bukele administration’s main initiatives to replace thousands of primary-care health professionals laid off since 2025, as part of a fiscal adjustment prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

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Hospital El Salvador is implementing the telemedicine project with support from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF). The government is using a $77 million loan to finance purchases for the Doctor SV app and to pay personnel providing care via video calls to patients in El Salvador.

According to public business records reviewed by El Faro, World Real Estate El Salvador went from declaring $2,000 in assets in 2017 to $1,260,715. As of 2026, the company operates five locations in western El Salvador and one in the capital, San Salvador.

Vega is also linked to a network of companies with assets totaling $19 million. The first is the spa Tendencias By Joseline Toledo, owned by his current partner, a beauty content creator and stylist. The spa runs through the company Beautiful Image and is advertised in the state newspaper, Diario El Salvador.

Vega and Toledo were invited to the inauguration of Bukele’s second term on June 1, 2024. The couple were in the VIP section of the National Palace, reserved for diplomats and U.S. guests, including from the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.

The second is the real estate development and construction company Constru-services, which declared just under $17.3 million in assets in 2024. The company has personnel ties to the ruling party Nuevas Ideas.

On August 14, El Faro sought comment from Vega via text messages and emails. He didn’t respond.

Close ties

In August 2021, a Spanish tabloid published photographs of Nayib Bukele and his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez, on vacation in Ibiza with Erick Vega, a doctor who has been with Bukele since 2012, when he first entered politics as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán.

Vega keeps a low profile, but his family members hold top posts in the ruling party Nuevas Ideas, the Office of the President, the Office of Foreign Investment Management, and the Office of the First Lady.

Vega’s sister, Cristy Asencio, is the National Secretary for Women’s Affairs for Nuevas Ideas and the national coordinator of the Office of Social Welfare, led by First Lady Rodríguez.

Asencio’s husband, Salvador Antonio Gómez Góchez, is the former president of the El Salvador Export and Investment Promotion Agency (Proesa), which has helped implement Bukele’s Washington lobby. This included hiring Argentine lobbyist Damián Merlo, who made inroads with the MAGA movement.

Vega’s brother-in-law is the presidential commissioner for Salvadorans abroad.

Vega’s ties to the ruling family are also personal: Nayib Bukele is the godfather to one of his sons, from his previous marriage to Diana Echeverría, niece of the fugitive businessman Enrique Rais.

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Bukele and Vega also share a political mentor: FMLN leader José Luis Merino, known within the party by his guerrilla pseudonym, Ramiro Vásquez. Merino inherited control of party finances in 2006, after the death of former guerrilla commander Schafik Hándal.

Merino jump-started Bukele’s political career, allowing him to run for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012 and setting up a television channel with Bukele to promote his image. Funding came from Alba Petróleos, the Salvadoran subsidiary of PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company founded by Hugo Chávez.

The FMLN leader also mentored Vega in business, appointing him deputy manager of companies launched in El Salvador thanks to a massive influx of dollars from the oil bonanza of Venezuela’s Chavista regime.

In 2018, Vega set up a medical practice at Cader Hospital in Santa Ana with a low-interest loan from the Medical Association Cooperative, an organization that advocates for the rights of healthcare workers and is now facing attacks from the Bukele regime, which has refused to recognize its leaders’ credentials.

Former FMLN leaders now in exile describe Vega in his early days in the party as a young man of modest means from Atiquizaya, who studied medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) in Havana, Cuba.

“Young millionaires don’t get into that scholarship program; Cuba selects poor or low-income people from foreign countries to study medicine,” said a former FMLN leader who knew him and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals against his family in El Salvador.

After completing his studies in Cuba, Vega returned to El Salvador and began working as an assistant to Merino. “He was a young man who carried Ramiro’s [Merino’s] briefcase to his meetings,” said a second former FMLN leader.

Merino has been in the sights of U.S. authorities for years. In 2019, the State Department accused him and his brother Sigfredo of diverting over $400 million through shell companies in Panama. Three years earlier, Marco Rubio called Merino “a top-notch money launderer and arms smuggler for the FARC.”

Corruption probe

Under Merino, Vega’s influence grew. He served on the boards of three companies in the Alba group and, in 2017, publicly appeared as deputy manager of Alba Petróleos de El Salvador.

The latter is a company within the eponymous Alba group that once operated dozens of gas stations, and allowed Venezuelan leadership to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars from PDV Caribe and PDVSA to El Salvador.

From September 2016 to November 2019, he was the general and administrative attorney for APES Inc., the main offshore company in Panama owned by the Alba group in El Salvador.

Meanwhile, he stepped into politics. In April 2019, on one of his first trips as president-elect, Bukele visited Dominican President Danilo Medina. According to official photographs of the visit, Vega was part of the delegation.

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By then, Alba properties were under investigation in El Salvador. On May 31, 2019, the anti-corruption prosecutors raided the offices of 23 Alba companies as part of a money laundering probe. The raid took place one day before Bukele’s inauguration.

That investigation, shepherded by Attorney General Raúl Melara, reached a dead end when Melara was removed from office in a coup against the Judiciary on May 1, 2021. The Attorney General’s Office never filed formal charges in the Alba probe.

The ruling party imposed a former Alba Petróleos employee, Rodolfo Delgado, as the new attorney general. He ultimately buried the investigation and dismantled the Anti-Corruption Unit. Its former head prosecutor, German Arriaza, is in exile.

This article appeared in the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here for more journalism translating Central America.