Marco Rubio's Deal With El Salvador Even More Evil Than You Thought
The devil always wants to dance!
We already knew back in March that President Donald J. Trump had made some kind of very dark quid pro quo with the dictator presidente of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele: millions of your tax dollars to El Salvador in exchange for the country accepting deportees into El Salvador’s notoriously brutal prison, CECOT, where hundreds of people have died. And then Bukele and Trump hyucked together in the Oval Office that El Salvador should build five more mega torture prisons, just for Americans, har har!
The administration rushed to deport hundreds of people to El Salvador, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia by mistake, racing to get the plane in the air before a judge was able to stop them. You remember all of that, about 600 corruption scandals ago.
And now it turns out that behind the scenes the deal was even dirtier than it seemed at the time. The Washington Post reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio made another secret agreement with Bukele: to turn over nine members of MS-13, ones who were informants that had made deals to cooperate with the US government. Not just any informants, either, but ones who had dirt on how Bukele allegedly met with top members of MS-13 numerous times between 2012 and 2015, while mayor of San Salvador, and quid pro quo-ed them to reduce the number of “public murders” to help himself get elected president, in exchange for plushy prison conditions or release.
In one instance, a Bukele official even hid a gang member who went by Crook de Hollywood in a luxury apartment, then gave him a gun, and drove him to the Guatemalan border. He eventually wound up back in the US, where Joe Biden’s DOJ picked him up again in 2022.
Not only that, “US authorities suspected Bukele’s government had used U.S. Agency for International Development programs to benefit MS-13’s leaders, according to three people familiar with the investigation.”
Oh hey, remember how Rubio actually has three jobs? Trump made him the Acting Administrator of USAID, and also the Acting Archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), so, the person responsible for determining if records may be, or have been, unlawfully destroyed. How convenient! They sure aren’t going to find evidence to back up those claims now!
Obligatory disclaimer: “Bukele has repeatedly denied negotiating with gang members. ‘How can they put out such an obvious lie without anybody questioning it?’ he tweeted after the Treasury Department under the Biden administration sanctioned two Salvadoran officials for their roles in alleged gang negotiations.” But Lordy, there are even tapes.
Anyway, funny how Trump wants to coup Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for allegedly controlling the Tren de Aragua gang, in spite of the US government’s own intelligence assessments saying that he does not. But when it came to Bukele, Trump said, that guy keeps it gangster, so I’ll make a deal with HIM! Makes you wonder what kind of a deals Maduro, or Gustavo Petro of Colombia, might have turned down to make Trump now be trying to go to war with them.
But anyway, the DOJ tearing up the agreements it made to not send these prisoners back to El Salvador is a big fucking deal. It certainly ends however many cases the informants had been helping the government with, as they would not have been made informants if DOJ didn’t believe it needed their testimony. It flushes away years of investigative work, some of which started under the first Trump administration at his direction, by the way. And it sure as shit will make it harder for DOJ to make a deal with any informant ever again. Seems like this regime is not actually too interested in trying to dismantle MS-13 or fight crime after all.
What more, DOJ has not kept its deal with Bukele, either. They sent one of the prisoners he asked for back to El Salvador, César “Grenas de Stoners” López Larios, two days after Bukele and Rubio chatted on the phone, and Rubio assured Bukele that Pam Bondi was going to go rip everybody’s deals up. But perhaps because the media in both countries and judges caught whiff of the stench of the deal, the other eight are still in US prison with uncertain fates, expecting to possibly be returned to be tortured and/or killed in El Salvador at any minute. A judge in New York has put a hold on the deportation of one of them, Vladimir “Vampiro” Arévalo Chávez, a possibility Bukele had worried about on his call with Rubio. But “Rubio assured Bukele he would get his men and stressed that the American public cared little about the fate of Salvadoran gang members, officials said.” And yes, the men are surely no saints, the worst of the worst, MS-13 does stuff like murder teenagers by slicing them up with catwoman claws. But you’re not going to bust a criminal gang by using some HVAC installer father of four as a witness.
So why did Trump and Bukele make a deal? Trump needed somewhere to take all of the deportees, somewhere rogue enough to not give too many shits what some judge in the US might say. And Bukele needed somebody to kibosh this explosive story that threatens his “cool dictator” legitimacy back home.
And Marco Rubio ... who knows what motivates that guy. Remember when he once had a shred of credibility, and some life in his eyes? Now he’s destroyed whatever was left of his reputation, a husk of a man. His eyes are flat, hollow frying pans, he is pallid and losing his hair, and he always looks miserable. Making a trato con el diablo never turns out to be as fun as it looks in the cartoons!
[Washington Post gift link / indictment]
Still thinking about how easy Rubio's confirmation went. *green barf emoji*
So weird for Rubio to be engaging in the kind of conduct the exile community has accused the Castro government of for nearly 70 years.