In the first months of the Trump administration, the U.S. president found a close ally in El Salvador leader Nayib Bukele, particularly by making a deal to quickly deport Venezuelan migrants believed to be Tren de Aragua gang members and house them in the country's mega-prison known as CECOT. But despite Bukele often making himself the face of the fight against gangs and violence, a new investigation reveals he may have cut a deal with the leaders of the MS-13 gang in the early years of his presidency.
The bombshell investigation comes from ProPublica, which gathered information from a long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 as an effort to dismantle the gang's leadership and later expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with the gang in the early years of his presidency.
According to ProPublica, Bukele's allies blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force.
The report from the U.S. government was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump's request in 2019.
Further, the investigation suggests that the Bukele government may have diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds.
The list of names revealed Bukele, as well as other senior officials and their relatives, were involved in that scheme.
"Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit businesses where MS-13 is involved," the agents wrote. The people on the list "are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns, and MS-13 has received political funds."
The alleged pact between the Salvadoran government and gang members is nothing new. In fact, previous Salvadoran administrations had made agreements to improve prison conditions and shorten sentences of convicted gang leaders in exchange for tamping down crime, World Politics Review reports. And even before Bukele became president in 2019, an El Faro investigation revealed that Bukele himself also made deals with gangs while serving as mayor of San Salvador.
However, the actual deals that Bukele's government made with gang members went much further, willing to renegotiate violence inflicted by the gang, USAID grants and electoral votes, World Politics Review reports.
The new report comes as the U.S. and El Salvador remain in a close relationship due to the Central American country's willingness to help with the Trump administration's anti-immigration policies and rhetoric.
Earlier this year, President Trump and President Bukele sat down in the Oval Office in the White House to celebrate their new, extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to take Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members into their maximum security prison.
Likewise, one of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's first foreign visits was to El Salvador to meet Bukele. In that visit, they discussed immigration and gang violence and laid the groundwork for what would become a highly contested and legally challenged deportation plan.
"We can send them, and he will put them in his jails," Rubio said after his trip of migrants of all nationalities detained in the U.S. "And, he's also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States even though they're U.S. citizens or legal residents."
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