Bukele in the Shadow of Trump

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Nayib Bukele’s gamble paid off. During the years of Democratic rule under the prior U.S. administration, the Salvadoran president threw the full weight of his lobbying efforts behind Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In January of this year, Trump won, and returned to power. Bukele won with him, and now feels more powerful and protected than ever, as he demonstrated throughout 2025, a year that culminated in the Salvadoran leader’s latest authoritarian assault: modifying the constitution and the electoral calendar to legalize his re-election in 2027, when Trump will still be in power.

Bukele enjoyed an idyllic first year as president, when the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador was the Trump-appointee Ronald Johnson, whom Bukele affectionately called Ron, and with whom the president would dine on crab in Miami Beach or stroll along a Salvadoran lake with his family. Bukele even invented a new presidential medal, the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán, to honor his friend Ron, designating it the greatest decoration ever conferred by the Salvadoran state. In 2021, Trump left the presidency and his ambassador left Central America. Joe Biden took his place, and that same year, at the end of May, Jean Manes, who had served as ambassador under Obama, returned to El Salvador. This time, she was named chargé d’affaires, but was nevertheless still the highest-ranking U.S. official in the country. And unlike Johnson, who avoided criticizing Bukele at every turn —even when El Faro revealed the president’s 2020 pact with the Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13)— Manes viewed Bukele’s efforts to widen the cracks in El Salvador’s already fragile democracy with suspicion. It didn’t take long for tensions to reach unprecedented levels, and in May 2021, it all fell apart, after Bukele staged an illegal coup against the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and ousted the attorney general, who was investigating corruption in his government, a mere four months after Trump’s ambassador had left his post.

By that point, Bukele was already showing his true colors: a year earlier, in February 2020, surrounded by soldiers, he had occupied the Legislative Assembly in an apparent effort to pressure the deputies, who were not yet his devoted subordinates, to approve a security funding package that they had been slow to pass. El Faro would later reveal, however, that this intervention was in fact more of a publicity stunt, aimed at distracting from a crisis of filthy water gushing out of the taps of homes across the country.

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In the early days of the Biden administration, the U.S. tried to press Bukele to take a more moderate approach. It might not seem like it now, looking back in retrospect, but those first few months marked an abrupt shift in Washington’s tone in the region.

During his first term, Trump had delivered on his campaign promise, securing aggressive anti-migration measures in exchange for his silence on corruption or abuses of power in Central America. Biden proposed the opposite, at least at first: intensifying the work of a U.S. task force that would support Central American prosecutors in combating organized crime, and supporting democracy and the fight against corruption in the region.

Especially when he could sense there was room to maneuver, Biden promised to take a stronger stance: “We’ll have our differences with the Bukele administration,” U.S. national security advisor Juan González said in an interview with El Faro, immediately adding: “Any leader who is not ready to fight corruption will not be an ally of the United States.”

On May 1, 2021, Bukele handpicked his attorney general and Supreme Court magistrates. Jean Manes returned on May 26, this time to put out fires. Less than four months after Biden had taken office, El Salvador had already elected new legislative deputies, and Bukele had won a qualified majority in the Legislative Assembly. He accumulated all the power and made it clear that he would not back down. That same year, on June 11, Bukele’s attorney general ordered a raid on the offices of the prosecutors who had spent years investigating the president’s corruption and pacts with gangs.

Clearly, President Bukele, who had enjoyed his honeymoon with the first Trump administration —going so far as to ask the U.S. to fire a contractor who was investigating his government’s links with MS-13— was no longer interested in restraint, especially now that the Americans were asking him to exercise it.

Manes knew that the contractor was dismissed in an attempt to bury evidence of corruption and the president’s pacts with organized crime, as Prensa Comunitaria revealed in 2023 and ProPublica further reported in 2025. Shortly after returning to the embassy, the diplomat took action: Manes had the CIA station chief in El Salvador dismissed because he was “too close to Bukele,” according to official documents also published by ProPublica.

Bukele had gone from Trumpian idyll to Democratic enmity. And things got worse from there. On July 1, 2021, the U.S. State Department published its “Engel List”—a catalog of officials the department has identified as corrupt. The list included Bukele’s legal advisor, his chief of cabinet, the director of his prison system, and his ministers of security and agriculture. In less than six months since Johnson’s departure, Bukele’s relationship with the United States had gone from smiles and seafood dinners in Miami to public accusations of corruption and criminal pacts.

Bukele responded with a lengthy post to social media disparaging the list as a political ploy aimed at covering up Central America’s true corrupt officials. He concluded his tirade with: “Sorry, but I for one am not fooled. Thanks for the list, but in El Salvador we already have our own.”

In September, the judges appointed by Bukele performed a constitutional reinterpretation worthy of Cantinflas, ruling that he could run for reelection in 2024 despite four articles of the constitution explicitly stating otherwise. Manes reacted by comparing Bukele’s strategies to the playbook used by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to perpetuate himself in power. Chávez, an icon of the left, and Bukele, the new standard-bearer of the right.

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In November 2021, Manes announced at a press conference that the U.S. would no longer maintain dialogue with Bukele’s government, and that she would be leaving the country. “Why should I stay here if we don’t have a counterpart at this time?” she said.

A few days later, ex-ambassador Johnson posted a photo on social media of himself, his wife, Bukele, and Bukele’s family standing together in front of a Christmas tree, accompanied by a message that read: “It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele.”

The cards were all on the table: everything had broken down with the Democrats, and Bukele would go all in on Trump’s return to power.

After two years passed with no U.S. ambassador in El Salvador, in January 2023, the Biden administration sent William Duncan, a veteran diplomat with more than 30 years of experience in the Foreign Service, to represent his government in the country. From then on, relations between the Embassy and Bukele were cordial once again, but the Salvadoran president’s commitments would not change: Trump was his candidate. Between April and June 2023 alone —months before Bukele unconstitutionally registered as a candidate for reelection in October— the Salvadoran government donated $325,000 to the Latin American Advisory Group, a consulting firm that boasts Argentine lobbyist Damian Merlo, a close frind of the U.S. far right, as managing partner.

In April 2022, Bukele chose not to renew a contract, worth more than half a million dollars, with the office of well-known lobbyist Thomas Shannon, Obama’s undersecretary of state and later a co-chair of the influential think tank Inter-American Dialogue. His firm, Arnold & Porter, had also represented the previous Salvadoran government, led by Salvador Sánchez Cerén, in Washington. Shannon helped Bukele rebuild relationships with senior State Department officials, Democrats in Congress, and major U.S. newspapers. These were days when relations between the two governments were still languishing in the aftermath of Manes’ departure.

Favorable winds

On June 1, 2024, Bukele dressed like a national hero, in a long black frock with embroidered gold trim, and directed the crowd that had gathered in the National Plaza to raise their hands and repeat his words: “We swear to defend our national project unconditionally, following each step to the letter, without complaint. And we swear to never listen to the enemies of the people.”

In the presidential election in February of that same year, Bukele, violating the constitution he swore to uphold, declared himself the winner before official results had been announced. By early June, he was facing widespread criticism from Democratic senators and congressmen in the U.S. while the MAGA movement sent a strong message of support via its delegation at the inauguration, which included Donald Trump’s eldest son. Bukele’s old friend Ronald Johnson was also in attendance, as was former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, who had lent Bukele his microphone in 2021, when the Salvadoran felt friendless in Washington. Florida Republican representative Matt Gaetz, along with Utah senator Mike Lee, turned up as well. Trump was also placing his bets on Bukele.

Two and a half years after Bukele’s dramatic break with Manes over the Supreme Court coup that would ultimately result in the certification of his reelection, the country was already his. There was not a single government office left that would challenge his absolute rule. And the Biden administration caved, too. On the day of Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, head of the well-oiled U.S. deportation machine, arrived in El Salvador to congratulate Bukele, who accepted his hand with a smile. “As President Bukele embarks on his second term, I want to express the United States’ dedication to supporting the growth and prosperity of El Salvador through continued bilateral cooperation,” Biden’s representative posted.

That day, what El Faro had been reporting for months became undeniably clear: the U.S. president, his secretaries, his advisors, and his diplomats had decided, halfway through Biden’s term, to stop criticizing Bukele’s reelection. It was too difficult a task, and in any case a futile one, officials in Washington told El Faro at the time. They knew that the Salvadoran president would not back down, nor would the voters who supported him. He was too popular to challenge, too viral, too connected to voters in California, Maryland, and Long Island.

On the day of Bukele’s second inauguration, there were still five months to go until the U.S. elections. “We don’t jail the opposition here,” Bukele said in a video posted on social media and featuring his guest of honor, Donald Trump Jr.—an allusion to the corruption charges that would lead to Trump’s conviction a few weeks later, for bribing a pornographic actress and falsifying financial records to hide the payments.

While the two men exchanged words, El Salvador’s National Civil Police and Attorney General’s Office, under Bukele controls, were preparing terrorism charges against former leaders of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the left-wing party that had launched Bukele’s political career a decade earlier. The evidence presented in support of the charges consisted of a few photographs of some firecrackers —the kind typically used in marches in El Salvador— and the trial, like all sensitive trials in the Bukele era, which have resulted in charges against more than 87,000 people, was declared a state secret.

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And so, amid congratulations and smiling photos with MAGA supporters, the night of November 5, 2024 arrived, and Trump defeated Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Before the U.S. media announced his victory, Bukele was already applauding Trump’s return. He announced via X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, a major funder of the Republican candidate’s campaign, that he had called Trump to congratulate him. Bukele used the opportunity to denounce “the sometimes noxious effects of U.S. aid funds” and the role of “NGOs backed by Soros” in El Salvador.

By the end of 2024, Bukele found himself in an unbeatable position: in total control of the country, and with a powerful friend in the north.

The spectacle of prison guards

Bukele and Trump have met in public two times. The first was in September 2019. Bukele was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where he delivered his first speech to world diplomats, taking a selfie from the podium and lamenting that “this assembly format is becoming increasingly obsolete.” During his trip, the Salvadoran president reserved his praises for his U.S. counterpart: “We’re hoping that this meeting will only strengthen our relationship even more. And I think it will, because, you know, we’re—President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool too,” Bukele said, standing next to the U.S. president, amid laughter from his audience at the U.N. “We both use Twitter a lot, so you know, we’ll get along.”

Nearly six years later, in April 2025, when the two men met again at the White House, Bukele was Trump’s guest of honor, their respective power circles surrounding them on sofas. On the Salvadoran side were Communications Secretary Sofía Medina, the wife of Bukele’s first cousin, Xavier Zablah Bukele, who himself is the president of Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party; advisor Sara Hanna, a Venezuelan who prides herself on having more power than Bukele’s cabinet while holding no formal public office; El Salvador’s ministers of defense and security, key players in the machinery of the state of exception, Bukele’s most internationally known policy; and three members of the president’s diplomatic corps: Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill, Ambassador to Washington Milena Mayorga, and the lobbyist Damian Merlo. Seated on the U.S. side were Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio —colleagues and rivals in the upper echelons of MAGA— as well as Attorney General Pamela Bondi. Behind them, among others, stood Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the lead architect of the administration’s crackdown on the country’s migrant population, which includes hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans living without papers in the United States.

The meeting lasted 43 minutes. Bukele and Trump jumped from topic to topic like a pair of Fox News commentators—moving, for example, from the incompetence of the press to the participation of transgender athletes in women’s athletic competitions—laws that, in Bukele’s words, “allow men to abuse women in sports.” But a more nuanced reading of the meeting sheds some revealing light on their relationship: Bukele spoke for a total of only three minutes, and his longest utterance never came to a minute. Most of his contributions, in fact, involved short responses to Trump’s jokes, or minor add-ons to something the U.S. leader said. From the middle of the public meeting onwards, Bukele did not speak at all, and it was Trump or his entourage who responded to the press and said whatever they wanted. Bukele just stood there, smiling, watching his leader put on a show.

These hierarchies had already become clear months earlier, in July 2024, when Trump was the Republican candidate and had said, at his party’s national convention, that while Bukele claimed to have solved El Salvador’s crime problem, he was really just sending all the country’s criminals to the United States. Bukele, who has attacked other presidents on social media, settled in this case for posting a short message to avoid further confrontation: “Taking the high road.”

Nevertheless, while Bukele may have been little more than a smiling spectator, the meeting in Washington made the dynamic that could already be sensed undeniably clear: Trump would protect Bukele and his authoritarian excesses so long as the Salvadoran remained loyal to him.

A month before that meeting, in February, Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, visited Bukele in El Salvador. After having their picture taken on a balcony looking out over Lake Coatepeque, Rubio and Bukele announced that they were working on an agreement that would see Bukele rent out El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison to the United States, allowing Trump to send as many alleged criminals there as he wanted.

One month later, in March, seven flight arrived from the United States carrying 200 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization, and MS-13. The spectacle on Salvadoran soil was a carefully staged production orchestrated by Bukele’s propaganda machine that featured Salvadoran police and prison guards dragging the men away, forcing them to their knees, shaving their heads, and locking them behind bars.

It was only after that performance was over that Trump would welcome Bukele to the White House. First, Trump made Bukele fulfill his audacious promise. Then, he let him sit next to him in Washington.

As 2025 comes to a close, the agreement between Rubio and Bukele to send prisoners to El Salvador is still not public, but various U.S. media outlets and reports from humanitarian organizations have published several scandalous details about the pact.

CNN revealed that one of Bukele’s brothers wrote emails to Michael Needham, Rubio’s advisor and chief of staff, offering a 50% discount for each prisoner sent to El Salvador if the United States would agree to extradite the nine MS-13 leaders captured in Mexico by Vulcan, a U.S. joint task force. In an interview with a Salvadoran television station, Milena Mayorga, Bukele’s ambassador in Washington, confirmed that a key point in the agreement was precisely the return of those gang members. And one of them, a historic leader of MS-13 named César Humberto López Larios, alias “Greñas,” was on one of the flights that arrived in March.

This was the first sign of good faith from the Trump administration, which forced the former head of Vulcan and current federal prosecutor in New York, John J. Durham, to ask the judge in the case to dismiss the charges against the man they had been pursuing for years. After succeeding in extraditing Greñas, whose arrest had cost thousands of U.S. tax dollars, the Trump-controlled prosecutor’s office requested the same for Vladimir Antonio Arévalo, alias “Vampiro,” another gang leader — but this time, the defense attorneys demanded in court that prosecutors explain the “geopolitical reasons” for requesting the dismissal of these cases in the United States. The judicial process is ongoing, and Vampiro’s lawyers are convinced that if the charges against their client are dismissed in New York, and he is sent to El Salvador, his life will be in danger and the seven gang members who remain will sooner or later be sent there as well, including Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook,” whose illegal release from Salvadoran prison in November 2021 is the greatest living proof of the secret pacts between Bukele and MS-13.

In November of this year, Human Rights Watch published a report detailing the torture suffered by Venezuelans detained at CECOT, many of whom were not criminals at all, but simply undocumented migrants detained in the U.S.

In October, The Washington Post revealed that Rubio had offered to nix the cooperation agreements that some of these gang leaders had made with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in exchange for providing information about their pacts with Bukele. The Post noted that Crook had even offered U.S. prosecutors videos and other evidence.

This incredibly shady and opaque international agreement was consolidated in 2025 and remains in effect today: Bukele offered Trump his torture mega-prison; Trump, in exchange, offered Bukele immunity in U.S. courts.

Bukele understood the degree of license the United States gave him in 2025, and has unleashed his most repressive year since coming to power. The state of exception has remained in place since March 2022, El Salvador’s prisons are full of innocent people, and in May, the regime imprisoned several environmental activists, a constitutional lawyer, and one of the country’s most prominent human rights defenders and a vocal critic of government corruption, Ruth López. Bukele’s Legislative Assembly also passed a “Foreign Agents Law,” imposing a 30% tax on any organization or person deemed part of that category and thereby suffocating civil society organizations and independent media. Between May and June, after police surveillance and harassment targeted them in their homes and it was revealed that the regime was preparing arrest warrants for several El Faro journalists, in retaliation for publishing information about Bukele’s gang pact, nearly 50 journalists fled the country, including the Salvadoran Journalists’ Association (APES), which moved its operations outside the country’s borders. The Salvadoran exodus has been massive in 2025—the year Bukele decided to expel his critics from the country.

But it wasn’t until the last day of July of this year that Bukele, through his deputies in the Legislative Assembly, would fulfill his latest and greatest wish, now that he finds himself under Trump’s protective wing and far from the sanctions against his officials from Washington, or the scathing comparisons with Hugo Chávez from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador: one day before Salvadorans went on vacation for the Fiestas Agostinas holiday, Bukele’s Legislative Assembly, in less than six hours, amended the constitution to approve indefinite presidential reelections. Bukele can now be reelected as many times as he wants. But even this was not enough. Bukele wants to be reelected while Trump is still in power. So, together with the reelection reform, the Assembly moved the date for the upcoming presidential elections from 2029 to 2027. It was calculation of time: Trump leaves office in 2028.

Bukele, who has backed Trump before, is doing so again, trusting that there will be no complaints coming from the White House when he decides to remain president of El Salvador for a third consecutive term, thanks to a sham election process that he already fully controls.

*Translated by Max Granger