Hey, What Deals Did America’s Tinpot Dictator Make With El Salvador’s?
The kind where Bukele gets everything he wants, of course!
ProPublica has been killing it during these crapulent times, and they’re out with another longform banger to answer the question, just what did El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele get in exchange for helping Trump disappear 300-something immigrants into his mega-prison?
More than money, it (allegedly) turns out: Bukele also got protection from US money laundering investigations, an indefinite delay of extradition of criminals from El Salvador who are wanted in the US, and a return to El Salvador of prisoners from the US who know about certain mutual-aid deals Bukele made with the MS-13 gang. The New Yorker has also been on this story; though not many other places seem to have picked it up. But with our own country getting a fascist makeover, one can’t pay attention to everything!
You remember Nayib Bukele, the greasy dictator who has been building massive mega-prisons, and hopes someday to maybe even put American citizens in them? He’s been imprisoning people like crazy down there since being elected in 2019. Now El Salvador’s got more than 110,000 people currently in prison, the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than triple even the United States’s. Journalists, lawyers, activists, fruit sellers, people who overcook fish, straight to jail. For nearly three years and counting, El Salvador has been in a Bukele-declared state of emergency over “gang violence,” which allows the regime to disappear anyone, including children, into torture prison with no evidence or any process. And that is what it does.
In a normal world no American president would be caught touching such a guy with a 10-foot-pole, much less hugging them in the Oval Office like some kind of a long-lost hermano, but here we are.
Buleke’s bio offers lots of things he and Dear Leader have in common, and not just because Bukele looks like AI following a prompt to “draw Don Junior, but oilier.”
Bukele is a self-made dictator, and proud of it. He claims a 90 percent approval rating, but that’s only because if you don’t approve of him, guess what? Jail! Right to jail!
This clip sure is getting a workout lately!
In 2020, Bukele sent armed soldiers into the El Salvador legislative assembly to hold guns to politicians until they agreed to accept a $109 million loan from the US to militarize El Salvador’s police some more. The irony! And then El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice stopped him. So then the next year Bukele got control of the Salvadoran Legislature, and it removed five members of the court who had constrained him, and replaced them with yes-judges. After that on his Twitter page (because of course he has one) he began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” because cool people always refer to themselves as cool, that’s how coolness works, and if you disagree, straight to jail.
We feel like we’re special in America, but in the rest of the world, extremely uncool and even mockably lame tinpot dictators take over countries all the time.
Anyway Bukele also loves the crypto! In 2021 he made Bitcoin El Salvador’s official currency and legal tender along with the US dollar, which has been the official currency since 2001. He set up geothermal Bitcoin mining operations in the jungle, rushed out a Bitcoin wallet app for citizens and Bitcoin ATMs, and required every business to accept said magic beans.
And in December 2023, the Legislative Assembly passed a law that let people buy Salvadoran citizenship by donating Bitcoins to El Salvador. Sound like anybody you know peddling Golden Visas with every crypto purchase of a condo in his new Middle Eastern skyscraper? Or giving them away to El Chapo’s ex wife and family members?
But, Bukele’s Bitcoin takeover was a big flop. The wallets were buggy, rolling out new ATMs was expensive, only about a fifth of citizens ever used it, and it ended up costing the country about $375 million. And then the government had to ditch the requirement because the IMF refused to lend El Salvador any money otherwise.
So, where were we, oh yeah, what is Bukele getting out of accepting America’s disappeared deportees into his prison, besides the pleasure and inspiration of being Trump’s number-one best Central American friend and about $20,000 a year per prisoner? Was this more than a money deal?
ProPublica says yes! Before Trump 2.0, the US was investigating Bukele’s alleged corruption with a multi-agency law enforcement team called Joint Task Force Vulcan. A task force started in 2019, BY THE WAY, at the behest of old GUESS WHO himself, and the investigation continued into the Biden years.
And what do you know, the task force found some corruption! It appeared that money from USAID was being laundered and diverted to MS-13, and also Bukele’s political campaign. Also Bukele had made a deal with gang leaders to bury the people they were murdering deeper so it would look like the murder rate was down and the government was helping crime.
In exchange for all that digging, the gang leaders endorsed Bukele and turned out they vote for him. Also they did not want certain members extradited to the US, and prostitutes and big-screen televisions for gang leaders in prison. And that’s what they got! At least the extradition part. Bukele’s regime avoided the extradition of wanted MS-13 gang members into the United States for prosecution, including ones accused of ordering the murders of US citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent, in some cases releasing them from prison entirely instead of turning them over.
AND Bukele has been able to get MS-13 members in the United States returned to El Salvador, conveniently before they could testify in US courts about the deals he made:
Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.
Joint Task Force Vulcan has now been re-directed to focus on Tren de Aragua, and the administration has disbanded its money laundering teams, Task Force KleptoCapture, the Department's Kleptocracy Team, and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, and replaced them with the general wish and hope of “elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations,” as if pursuing money laundering was not the most obviously effective way to do exactly that.
MS-13, by the way, was founded in the US, it is an export from here to there. You’re welcome for all the guns, El Salvador!
Well, this story is probably already too long, and you are asleep by now, dear reader! If not you should check out those two articles, because they’re nuts. And sounds like we’re headed towards being a little bit El Salvador ourselves!
[ProPublica / New Yorker archive link]
Bukele's regime, with the mass incarceration, holding guns to the heads of lawmakers, deals with criminal gangs, never-ending state of emergency because "gangs", and Bitcoin fascination sounds suspiciously like Trump's wet dream of how to run a country. Or a more streamlined version of Project 2025.
OT: The Homunculus said he won't call Gov. Walz about the Minnesota murders.
Stay classy, you senile old rapist. Shit, Baron Harkonnen had better manners.