On July 3, 2024, the Legislative Assembly hired 35-year-old Guillermo Antonio Figueroa Santos as a technical assistant. Figueroa Santos is a business partner of deputy Víctor Manuel Martínez Santana, an alternate legislator who, for several years before the state of exception, negotiated with the three main gangs of El Salvador on behalf of the administration of Nayib Bukele.
Martínez Santana and Figueroa Santos are founders, shareholders, and administrators of Be Cool Entretenimiento, S.A de C.V, a company created on March 27, 2019, which reports its activities as production and marketing of food, beverage sales, and restaurant and entertainment services.
According to documents from the Commercial Registry, two other people are also listed as founders: Juan Carlos Benítez, a Salvadoran living in San Francisco, California; and Carlos Ovidio Rosales Mejía. Be Cool Entretenimiento’s initial capital was $2,000, divided into 20 shares, each with a par value of $100.
Martínez Santana, the alternate legislator, subscribed to five shares worth $500, but only paid 35 percent of the subscription: $135. The rest of the shareholders paid 5 percent of the remaining shares, or $25. They elected Figueroa Santos as sole administrator and Martínez Santana sole alternate administrator, according to the company’s articles of incorporation.
Be Cool Entretenimiento was founded in March 2019, just one month after Bukele won the presidential election. During the campaign, Martínez Santana negotiated with the gangs for electoral support in favor of Bukele, which, after the electoral victory of Nuevas Ideas, allowed gang leaders who were free to illegally enter maximum-security prisons. On July 5, 2019, for example, Director of Prisons Osiris Luna entered the Zacatecoluca prison with several hooded individuals. Salvadoran prosecutors concluded that among them were the director for the Reconstruction of the Social Fabric, Carlos Marroquín, and the alternate deputy Martínez Santana.
It was not the first time that Marroquín and Martínez Santana represented Bukele in negotiations with the gangs. In November 2014, when Bukele was campaigning to be mayor of San Salvador, he also engaged with them. The agreement with these criminal groups was in force between 2015 and 2018, when Bukele was mayor. During that period, Marroquín worked in the Municipal Unit for Social Fabric Reconstruction, while Martínez Santana worked as coordinator of Arte X.
Government Negotiator with Gangs Aided in Transnational Jailbreak
In May 2025, El Faro interviewed two leaders of the Revolucionarios faction of the 18th Street gang on their negotiations with Bukele. Charli, a well-known gang leader who was captured and released without explanation by the Bukele administration during the state of exception, explained that the exchanges began when he was a mayoral candidate and that, once in office, he gave the gang about 20 stalls in his failed municipal project known as the Cuscatlán Market. Liro, another gang leader whom the Bukele administration took out of the country in an official car to Guatemala to escape the police, confessed that his gang threatened communities so that Bukele’s party, at the time the FMLN, would win the 2015 municipal elections.
While negotiating with the gangs for their full support for Bukele’s new party, Nuevas Ideas, in the 2021 legislative elections, Martínez Santana registered as a candidate for alternate to Suecy Callejas, a prominent Nuevas Ideas legislator who, in her seventh month as vice president of the Legislative Assembly, received a $210,000 loan from the state-owned Banco Hipotecario, according to an investigation by Redacción Regional.
In the February 2024 legislative elections, Martínez Santana was reelected as alternate deputy for San Salvador. Five months later, his business partner Figueroa Santos was hired as a technical assistant by Amílcar Geovanny Zaldaña Cáceres, a former Deputy Minister of Transportation of the Bukele administration and Nuevas Ideas legislator representing Santa Ana. After the election, Zaldaña Cáceres posted the names of his assistants on his X account, including Figueroa Santos.
Negotiator and entrepreneur
Over the last decade, El Salvador’s three main political parties have negotiated with gangs to manipulate elections. However, the Attorney General, Bukele loyalist Rodolfo Delgado, has only brought legal proceedings against the traditional parties Arena and the FMLN. Investigations against Nuevas Ideas have not prospered; Delgado dismantled the special prosecutors’ unit investigating Bukele and the ruling party.
Bukele officials who led the negotiations with the gangs have become entrepreneurs and have even received awards for “the promotion and dissemination” of human rights.
On May 12, 2021, Carlos Marroquín, Bukele’s chief gang negotiator, partnered with a then 36-year-old student named Vladimir Antonio Hernández Argueta to create the company Centro Integral de Salud y Movimiento, registered as CISMO, S.A de C.V. The company was founded with $10,000 USD, divided into 100 shares of $100, according to commercial records.
The documents detail that Marroquín paid $9,000 to acquire 90 shares, while Hernández Argueta paid $1,000 to register the other ten shares in his name. In its first year of operations, the company’s assets grew by a factor of five, reporting a total of $49,362.75 on its balance sheet.
Hernández Argueta is the legal representative and sole administrator, while Marroquín is the alternate administrator. Between September and December 2021, just four months after its founding, the company posted on Facebook about activities with the municipalities of Zaragoza, in La Libertad, and Cuscatancingo, in the department of San Salvador, all governed by Nuevas Ideas. “During the medical campaign carried out in coordination with CISMO, more than 50 people, mostly elderly, were treated, receiving physiotherapy, psychological, and general medical care,” the Cuscatancingo City Council posted in September. Marroquín is a resident of Cuscatancingo.
On December 20, 2021, the then mayor of Zaragoza, César Godoy, posted on Facebook: “Once again, the Zaragoza City Women’s Unit, together with CISMO, held a recreational care day at the Giuseppe Angelucci nursing home.” CISMO added: “We were at @alcaldiadezaragoza_sv training the work team on interpersonal relationships and work stress.”
U.S. Treasury sanctions
In late 2021, when Marroquín was doing business at CISMO, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned him for “leading and facilitating secret meetings with gang leaders.” In leaked audio published by El Faro, Marroquín admitted that, in his role as government negotiator, he personally took MS-13 gang leader Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook,” out of prison in El Salvador and transported him to Guatemala, despite the fact that Canales still owed 40 years of his sentence in El Salvador.
Government Negotiator with Gangs Aided in Transnational Jailbreak
In August of that same year, Marroquín obtained a loan from the state-owned Banco Hipotecario for $167,000 to purchase an apartment, two parking spaces, and a storage unit in the Residencial Las Nubes, in the upscale Escalón neighborhood of San Salvador. The apartment is located in one of three buildings in the residential complex that belongs to the jurisdiction of Cuscatancingo.
In December 2025, the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman (PDDH) awarded Marroquín the National Prize for the Promotion and Dissemination of Human Rights. Ombudswoman Raquel de Guevara, an official convicted of nepotism, presented the award to Marroquín and other officials from the ruling party who work in institutions such as the Migration Directorate, the Ministry of Health, the Mayor's Office of San Salvador, the Ministry of Agriculture, and even the National Civil Police, an institution facing widespread reports of arbitrary arrests and torture under the state of exception.
“Thank you for every effort of solidarity, for every word and action that seeks to protect life, accompany suffering, promote justice, and sow hope. You embody the true meaning of public service and civic engagement,” said de Guevara. The ombudswoman has publicly mocked the imprisonment of Cristosal anti-corruption lawyer Ruth López and remains silent about other political prisoners.
El Faro requested comment in emails to Marroquín, Zaldaña Cáceres, and Martínez Santana. Emails were also sent and requests were made on the social media accounts of the companies CISMO and Be Cool Entretenimiento. None replied.