Podcast: United States Tip-toes Around Military Cooperation with El Salvador

This is the transcript of episode 85 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

HEGSETH: The new motto of the A3C is we do bad things to bad people. That’s the mentality I want to have inside this room.

GRESSIER, HOST: That’s U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week in Panama addressing the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, or A3C. He said Honduras and Guatemala are playing ball on joint military operations within their territories. El Salvador was conspicuously absent from his remarks.

I’m your host, Roman Gressier. On today’s episode: Trump tip-toes around El Salvador military cooperation, Honduras calls the end of TPS a “humanitarian crisis,” and Bukele touts the arrest of a fugitive Salvadoran gang leader.

From the studios of El Faro English, this is Central America in Minutes.

U.S. military in Central America

The Trump administration launched the A3C in March, bringing together more than 20 countries across the Americas to fight what Washington calls “narco-terrorism.”

This was Hegseth’s second visit to Panama in two years. He announced that Colombia joined the coalition and that joint military operations would be launched on Colombian soil against organizations Washington considers terrorist groups.

Hegseth touted Operation Southern Spear, the operation striking vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific since last year, purportedly to counter drug trafficking. He announced that the operation will be transferred to a SOUTHCOM joint task force.

The secretary of defense strongly praised Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, calling him “a model for the hemisphere” for resisting pressure from China and strengthening canal cooperation with the United States.

He also claimed the governments of Honduras and Guatemala have agreed to joint military strikes on their soil, which Guatemala’s defense minister downplayed as training in an interview with El Faro English in June.

But the major omission from Hegseth’s speech was El Salvador and President Nayib Bukele, even though several Salvadoran security officials were present.

El Salvador’s cooperation in Operation Southern Spear has become crucial, but also legally explosive. As we covered last week, reports from The New York Times and the Washington Office on Latin America indicate U.S. boat strikes received logistical support from Salvadoran soil.

[rel1]

El Salvador not only hosts U.S. attack and patrol aircraft which, according to The Times and others, have monitored strikes against vessels. Its Navy has also quietly received survivors at sea after they were detained by U.S. forces.

Had Hegseth publicly acknowledged this cooperation in Panama, he would have formally exposed the Bukele government’s role in alleged arbitrary detentions and covert transfers in international waters.

Those operations are now under scrutiny in the U.S. Congress over allegations of human rights violations and enforced disappearances.

Since early in the Biden years, Bukele has used rhetoric of absolute sovereignty. The U.S.-led Shield of the Americas initiative is built on the principle that “sovereignty is not an obstacle, but a foundation,” said former DHS secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump appointed to lead the program.

For Bukele, Washington’s silence allows him to continue cooperating militarily with Trump under the radar. Like with the removal of Venezuelans to El Salvador last year, the political price of appearing to serve as a logistical arm of the White House could be high.

TPS ends for Honduras, Nicaragua

On the heels of a Supreme Court decision in favor of the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security just confirmed the termination of Temporary Protected Status for more than 2,000 Nicaraguans and 51,000 Hondurans living in the United States.

Last week, DHS General Counsel James Percival, confirmed the decision on X. He announced that TPS is up for people from Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela and another ten countries.

DHS said people with TPS should leave the country under threat of deportation.

This despite an ongoing appeal against the cancellation for Nicaragua and Honduras that was filed in California’s Ninth Circuit in February.

But the writing is on the wall. The U.S. Supreme Court decision against Haitian and Syrian TPS recipients set the stage for the termination of TPS for other countries. Analysts broadly expect this trend to continue.

According to the Pew Research Center, the wave of cancellations affects an estimated one million people who had TPS as of March 2025.

The Central America cancellations are setting off alarms even among Trump allies.

The Honduran Ambassador to Washington, Roberto Flores Bermúdez, called it a “humanitarian crisis,” adding: “We have never been in a situation like this before.”

Honduran President Nasry Asfura, a close Trump ally, tried to blame the cancellation of TPS on poor relations with the previous Honduran administration. He asked the U.S. government to review each deportation case.

“We have to prepare ourselves,” Asfura said, and get ready “to open our doors” to returning former TPS recipients.

[newsletter]

In Nicaragua, co-presidents Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo haven’t said anything about Nicaraguans facing deportation in the United States.

On the contrary: They’ve been mostly quiet amid tensions with Washington since the invasion of Venezuela in January. And they’ve made multiple concessions to Trump on migration, receiving third-country deportees and reinstating visas for Cubans.

TPS remains in effect for 273,000 immigrants, including El Salvador, at least until September 9. DHS has given no public indication of what it will decide for El Salvador.

Capture of fugitive gang leader

On August 11, El Salvador’s Security Minister, Gustavo Villatoro, announced the arrest in Mexico of a fugitive Salvadoran gang leader. The man in question is Remberto Colindres Rajo, who goes by the alias “Liro.”

But Villatoro omitted an important detail: Liro was no stranger to Nayib Bukele’s government. In fact, he claims officials from his administration intervened to help him leave El Salvador.

In May 2025, El Faro published a series of interviews with two leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios gang: Liro and Carlos Cartagena, or “Charli.”

The men spoke on camera for the first time about years of dealings with Bukele, dating back to early in his political career.

They talked about how their gang intimidated voters to favor Bukele and his former party, the FMLN; how they hid gang victims’ bodies to keep the official homicide count down; and how government officials helped both men escape El Salvador under the state of exception.

Liro recounted that, just two weeks after a sweeping suspension of constitutional rights was installed in El Salvador in March 2022, Carlos Marroquín, Bukele’s chief representative in negotiations with the gangs, contacted him. 

Marroquín not only warned him about the mass arrests that quickly ensued. He also helped him reach Guatemala through a blind spot on the border.

Which is to say, the government of El Salvador claims to have taken a hard line against the gangs, but the secret release of a series of top leaders paints a different picture.

[rel2]

The interview created such a firestorm in El Salvador that El Faro quickly learned of at least seven arrest warrants targeting our staff members.

And in recent days, Bukele’s security minister, Villatoro, used the announcement of Liro’s arrest to lodge an accusation against El Faro.

He avoided directly mentioning the newsroom but shared a screenshot from the interview on X. He claimed El Faro had offered Liro asylum in Mexico in exchange for doing the interview.

Which is untrue at face value, our editorial board wrote this week. El Faro does not and cannot offer asylum to anyone in any other country. Those protections are granted by governments, not journalists.

“In El Salvador,” they wrote, “a security minister truly interested in combating criminal networks would find them right under his nose. Instead, his fight is against those exposing the truth about a mafia regime.”

This episode was written by Gabriel Labrador, Leyrian Colón Santiago, Graciela Barrera, and Yuliana Ramazzini. Editing by Roman Gressier and sound design by Omnionn.

Listen to Central America in Minutes on the KPFA Pacifica Evening News and participating Pacifica Network radio stations. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.