El Faro English translates Central America. This article first appeared in our newsletter. Get our reporting in your inbox.
El Salvador switched the pocket it draws from to pay for Washington lobbying efforts to draw close to President Donald Trump.
But the new pocket is just as shielded from public oversight as the last.
Since 2022, Bukele had cut the checks from the Office of the President’s secret expense account, known as the partida secreta, which has been scrutinized for years as a nest of corruption.
According to U.S. FARA filings, starting in June 2025, he began paying for his lobbying through Compañía de Luz Eléctrica de Ahuachapán, (CLEA), a private subsidiary of the Compañía Ejecutiva del Río Lempa (CEL).
The parent company, CEL, is the autonomous public institution responsible for power generation in El Salvador.
The Salvadoran government signed a new contract with the Latin America Advisory Group on May 31 for a seven-month “government relations consultancy.” They made the first payment a few days later.
Between June and August, Latin America Advisory Group received 57 percent — $260,000 U.S. dollars, in four payments, DOJ records show. The contract is worth a total of $455,000.
Since January 2022, the firm has received over $2.2 million from the Treasury Ministry, according to DOJ records.
The Florida-based firm has represented countries such as Haiti and politicians such as Argentinian President Javier Milei when he was running for office.
The sole administrator is the man who signed the contract: lobbyist Damián Merlo Debernardi, a U.S. citizen born in Barcelona to Argentinian parents.
The documents do not state his salary; they only show the total his company receives. But since 2022, he has had an official email address from the Office of the President of El Salvador.
Although the contract was set to expire on December 31, Merlo’s firm reported on February 2 that its contract with El Salvador remained in force.
Blitz on Washington
El Faro reporting has shown how Bukele, after hitting turbulence with the Biden administration, refocused his lobbying strategy on MAGA politicians.
The payments to Latin American Advisory Group cover the last three years of the Biden administration and the first year of Trump's second term.
Merlo’s firm has lobbied senior officials at the White House, State Department, National Security Council, and U.S. Embassy in El Salvador, as well as the U.S. Senate.
El Salvador has improved its position with Washington since Trump’s return, cooperating on deportations and, just last week, announcing a new trade deal.
Podcast: Bukele Celebrates a Hardly-Reciprocal Trade Deal with Trump
DOJ records also show contact with journalists from top U.S. outlets.
Merlo’s firm describes a strategy to “position key narratives of the Salvadoran government in the international media.”
In August 2024, Bukele was on the cover of Time Magazine. The day before, and the same day, he emailed the journalist who interviewed Bukele.
A year later, Merlo attended Bukele and Trump’s April 2025 meeting in the Oval Office, alongside key figures in Bukele’s entourage and cabinet.
Around that meeting, he messaged journalists at CNN, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, Bloomberg, Politico, Mother Jones, and others.
Merlo also attended the inauguration of Bukele’s second term on June 1, 2024, where he met with a half-dozen members of the U.S. Congress.
Opacity by design
CLEA, the state-controlled company now footing the bill for Bukele’s lobbying, is opaque by design.
It was founded over a century ago, in 1896, to market electricity in El Salvador. It was acquired by the state in 1991.
The fact that it is a state-owned enterprise structured under private commercial law means it operates in a gray area, bypassing certain regulations.
The Law on Access to Public Information applies to all public offices, including the parent company CEL.
But subsidiaries such as CLEA can evade ethics reviews and prevent or limit the disclosure of financial information and contracts by asserting business secrecy.
In recent decades, poor oversight of CEL subsidiaries led the Court of Accounts to propose reforms in 2019 to subject them to controls, but they were rejected.
El Faro asked Merlo and CEL why his lobbying services are now paid through the electricity company, and whether his client offered him an explanation. Neither responded.
Ties to Bukele’s circle
Given the lack of controls, CEL, El Salvador’s electricity generator, has played an outsized behind-the-scenes role in major national projects of one government after another.
According to a 2024 CEL report, CLEA has assets on paper only worth $3 million. The national budget currently hovers around $9 billion.
CLEA is one of the owners of Diario El Salvador, Bukele’s state propaganda outlet that he relaunched in 2020.
It is also the parent company of Chivo Wallet, the government’s troubled Bitcoin project with which the government began promoting Bitcoin to the Salvadoran public in 2021.
Another of its subsidiaries, Empresa Transmisora de El Salvador (ETESAL), was investigated by the defunct OAS-backed anti-corruption commission CICIES.
This is because ETESAL owns 40 percent of COATL, a company investigated by the CICIES for selling Covid-19 supplies to the state at alleged five-fold markups.
The Bukele government gave COATL the contract in 2020. In 2018, the company was headed by current Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro, Revista Factum found.
At the time the contract was awarded, Castro was Bukele’s private secretary.
In 2021 and 2022, the vice president of COATL was Claudia Juana Rodríguez, a close Bukele operative whom he made his presidential designee as he ran for unconstitutional reelection in 2023.
A government security advisor told El Faro in 2022 that ETESAL and other agencies secretly pay legally unjustified salary supplements —known as sobresueldos— to public officials.
El Faro revealed that ETESAL made nine monthly payments of $5,000 in 2021 to a company run by the mother of current Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado.
Delgado signed a contract with ETESAL to provide consulting services on money laundering prevention. During those months, Bukele illegally imposed Delgado as the country’s top prosecutor.
The Venezuelan connection
Under Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), the subsidiary Inversiones Energéticas (INE) paid $34 million to a company called Infitorr to import Russian fuel.
In 2012, all of Infitorr's assets were transferred to Alba Petróleos, the Salvadoran subsidiary of PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, as a result of a seizure for unpaid debt.
Alba Petróleos was later raided and investigated for broader accusations of money laundering. It would make loans and then never recover them.
Video: How Bukele Spent Billions in Secret Slush Funds
Under Bukele, state secrecy regarding public spending became the norm. As for his renewed lobbying, documentation is publicly unavailable in El Salvador.
The new contract does not appear on the CEL transparency portal, nor is there even a mention of Merlo’s company or the word “lobbying.”
The portal only states that two consultancies were contracted from January to May 2025 for $715,525.
The information is only accessible because the DOJ publishes it by law every six months.
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