The following is a transcript of episode 49 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
FOPPA: 18th Street is acting with the support and collusion of certain police leaders and structures in the government. And MS-13 knows it.
GRESSIER, HOST: Recently, on the podcast TanGente, Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa, a former Guatemalan prosecutor and tax chief, accused upper echelons of the government of working in cahoots with the 18th Street gang —you might have heard of them as Barrio 18— in Guatemala.
Days later, Foppa revealed that 20 top leaders of the gang had broken out of prison. All but one of them are still on the run. It seemed to be case in point.
Arévalo's “worst crisis” to date
For almost two months, Guatemalan authorities didn’t make a peep about the escape of 20 gang leaders from the maximum-security prison Fraijanes Two, facilitated by public officials.
The silence was broken on October 11, when former prosecutor Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa posted about it on social media. The Ministry of Governance, which oversees the police and prisons, confirmed the events 48 hours later.
JIMÉNEZ: I’m not going to evade reality, nor do I intend to gloss over it. What happened in Fraijanes II is a very serious failure of the prison system. There’s no valid explanation. It definitely shouldn’t have happened.
GRESSIER: That’s Minister of Governance Francisco Jiménez at the press conference where he announced the dismissal of the director of the prison system and a prison warden, as well as the recapture of one of the twenty escapees and a reward of three million quetzales —about $391,000— for information leading to the capture of the others.
Even the deputies of Raíces, a political party still in formation that split away from the now-cancelled ruling party Semilla, demanded that Jiménez hang his hat. It was as clear a display as any of the rift between Arévalo and his former confidant, prominent legislator Samuel Pérez, as we identified in episode 36.
Arévalo wasn’t even in the country. He was in Europe on a diplomatic trip and hadn’t said anything in public.
Two days later, President Bernardo Arévalo accepted Jiménez's resignation and dismissed two deputy ministers under pressure from many sectors. Some observers called it the worst crisis of Arévalo’s 20 months in office — and that’s saying a lot for an administration that survived a coup effort and faces constant deadlock with the high courts, congress, and attorney general.
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Guatemalan prisons are at 400 percent capacity, according to 2024 data. Last year, 100 guards were accused of smuggling illegal items. Between June and August 2025, guards were taken hostage in seven riots. One of them was killed.
This year, an extortion center was also discovered in El Infiernito, or “Little Hell,” a prison along the Pacific coast. Following several prisoner transfers, homicides increased for the first time in 16 years.
Last week, in what looked like a page torn from Bukele’s playbook, Arévalo announced a new maximum-security prison exclusively to hold gang members. According to the government, some 3,000 gang members are currently incarcerated, while another 9,000 members and collaborators remain at large.
The Trump administration, which has positioned itself as a close ally of Arévalo, harshly condemned the escape of the 18th Street leaders.
The news of their escape broke just two weeks after the U.S. government designated the gang as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” alongside MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and a series of Mexican cartels — some of them with a presence in Guatemala.
Late last week, Arévalo tried to bounce back. He appointed a hard-nosed former judge, Marco Antonio Villeda, as his new minister. Villeda was an appellate judge for High-Risk Tribunals, handling major organized crime, corruption, and impunity cases and ordering asset forfeiture of powerful Guatemalans.
His nomination was applauded by anti-corruption groups and other prominent justice system operators, like exiled judge Érika Aifán.
In Guatemala, where the high courts themselves have been repeatedly accused of grand corruption and top judges are chased out of the country, eyebrows were raised last year when the Supreme Court transferred Villeda from his court.
Now, Villeda will oversee the police and prisons. In a split vote, the Supreme Court granted him a six-month leave from the bench on Wednesday. And former minister Francisco Jiménez won’t be in Guatemala for it all to unfold.
He told newspaper Prensa Libre that he would stay to face any criminal charges brought against him following the prison break. “I think it’s important to face the accusations,” Jiménez said. But by Thursday afternoon, Jiménez had already left the country.
Loosened money laundering controls
Last, we turn to El Salvador. On October 7, the Bukele-controlled legislature passed a new anti-money laundering law that in fact significantly loosens financial controls, as our colleague Andrés Dimas reports.
First, the law states that financial institutions like banks may not deny “financial inclusion” —that means bank accounts and credit— to individuals identified in journalistic articles, or even who have faced money laundering charges — without a separate review from the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office.
And it increases the amount of money that can be brought into the country without justifying its origin from $10,000 to $15,000.
Now, the number of categories of companies and individuals required to report transactions has been reduced from 20 to 10. The regulation excludes all domestic and foreign companies and businesses, as well as domestic and international investors.
Construction companies, exporters, private security companies, pharmaceutical companies, hotels, travel agencies, transport companies, remittance companies, business associations, and companies in which the state has a stake are exempt from reporting their operations.
Companies and investors, both from El Salvador and other countries, are no longer required to report transactions.
Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado voiced support for the new law. He said that under past legislation bank accounts were arbitrarily frozen. “Someone would get some digital newspaper to write a novela, and that novela would be used by compliance officials to exclude certain individuals,” he said.
El Faro revealed in October 2022 that, before Bukele illegally installed him as attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado spent two years as the lawyer for an MS-13 collaborator accused of money laundering, who was acquitted months before his appointment.
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But while the Bukele regime loosens some controls, they’re tightening others. The state has total discretion over who is subject to heavy taxation of foreign donations under the new Foreign Agents Law.
Affected groups are already leaving the country. In recent weeks, amid a wave of exile to avoid imprisonment, the human rights organization Cristosal, digital outlet GatoEncerrado, and the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association (APES) are among those who closed up shop in El Salvador.
Others have rolled the dice and decided to enroll as foreign agents. But at this point, nobody in El Salvador questions that it’s Bukele —and Bukele alone— who owns those dice.
This episode of Central America in Minutes was written by Gabriel Labrador and Roman Gressier. Sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.