The Trump Card

He once derided them as “animals” in a law-and-order address in Brentwood, Long Island; he vowed to dismantle them by creating a special task force, Vulcan; earlier this year, he declared them a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The uncomfortable truth is that Donald Trump received information that Nayib Bukele, an ally who once praised him as “nice and cool”, was in fact secretly negotiating with the Mara Salvatrucha-13 for electoral support and a politically expedient reduction in homicides — all while lying to the public about the reason for the drop in violence in El Salvador. Before El Faro revealed it to the world in September 2020, Trump’s administration dismissed the information of the pact outright. Until they could no longer do so.

That is to say: Trump knew first.

That account takes the front page of this fourth issue of El Faro English’s digital magazine, Central America Monthly. It is the account that Carlos Martínez distills into this month’s exclusive, The Naïve Betrayal of Osiris Luna. Building on recent New York Times reporting, read how Vice Minister of Security Luna met in August 2020 with U.S. representatives to reveal the existence of a government agreement with gangs. Luna asked for their protection, but one DOJ official told him that the evidence he provided, from prison logbooks and intelligence reports, was a non-starter.

Trump —representatives of his government, certainly— knew first.

Here is another uncomfortable truth: When they tossed the information, the world learned of it anyway. Today, while the White House sets about dismantling the work of Joint Task Force Vulcan at Bukele’s behest, Martínez explains that “the documents compiled by Vice Minister Luna and at first dismissed by U.S. officials ended up in the hands of El Faro and formed the basis of the investigation that exposed the agreements between MS-13 and the Bukele government.” As Central American communities in the United States continue to weather Trump’s gang rhetoric, we share Óscar Martínez’s 2017 chronicle, When the Mara Salvatrucha Defeated Trump on Long Island: While the president of the United States traded on a transnational bogeyman, MS-13 fed on lonely New York teens. Martínez observed: “The story of the Mara Salvatrucha, which took root in L.A. decades ago, unfolds anew on Long Island.”

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Perhaps no less illuminating about the new regional state of affairs is our interview with Dominican Ambassador Josué Fiallo, former president of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States: In a recent conversation with El Faro English in Guatemala City, Fiallo warned that Trump 2.0’s “playing arm-twisting to get artificial majorities” and simultaneous threats of withdrawal compound a long-brewing financial and political crisis at the OAS, the beleaguered diplomatic stage of the Americas. “I believe that the OAS is at its worst moment in history,” asserts the diplomat. “It could be on the verge of total collapse.

”This month, we offer you three more tools to understand Donald Trump’s Central American lieutenant. In a special podcast episode, One Week Watching Bukele on Prime Time TV, we try to answer two questions: How did he remake El Salvador’s flagship television channel, not far from PBS, into the voice of the government: a space without dissent, without opposition, without debate? How many times can broadcasters utter his name in 22 hours? (Yes, we counted.) Second, the editorial board sounds off: Just how good at stealing is the administration of the man who once promised to personally imprison anyone who “steals a cent”? (Hint: exceedingly.) Third is Ramiro Guevara’s decade-spanning chronicle of a broken promise: Bukele without the L, the G, the B, the T, or the Q (trans batons included).

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Lest we become overfixated, last is a hopefully radical change of scenery. In our section for photography, 2025 World Press Photo recipient Carlos Barrera traveled to the Guatemalan border town Asunción Mita, past which he and most of our newsroom —and dozens of our colleagues— must not return, for threat of arrest. Following the footsteps of a coyote and a propane smuggler, Barrera photographed daily life, from the mundane yet glimmering to the sinister and banal, in a place where immigration restrictions are an afterthought. We invite you to spend some time at A Blind Spot between Guatemala and El Salvador. Finally, together with Illinois State University anthropologist Kathryn Sampeck, in a newly translated Tertulia that she authored in El Faro squarely a decade ago, travel to the nearby Izalcos and recall the last time you ate chocolate. She asks: Did you know you were speaking Pipil?

In this second issue that we produced as a newsroom mostly in exile, we strive to take you deeper into the smoke-filled back room without wallowing in it. After sitting down with issue four of Central America Monthly, if you find value in this exercise in seeking sharper journalistic answers to key questions in our region, consider becoming a crowdfunder to support journalism translating Central America. On the 15th of every month, we promise to keep bringing you uncomfortable truths.

A third time, for good measure: Trump knew first.