Does Bukele Have a Pact With MS-13?

Not many illegal immigrants are as useful to politicians these days, on both sides of the aisle, as “ M a r y l a n d man” Kilmar Ábrego García, who was born in El Salvador. The Trump administration deported him to his homeland on March 15, despite an immigration-court order prohibiting it because a federal judge found Mr. Ábrego García harbored credible fears for his life there.

A debate is raging about who he is, what rights he has under U.S. law, and whether it’s legally and ethically necessary to get him back to the U.S.

Yet the intense focus on Mr. Ábrego García’s fate has distracted from a far more important U.S. national-security issue. Namely, why does Secretary of State Marco Rubio treat Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele as a hero, even though a 2022 Justice Department indictment charging 13 alleged MS-13 members also alleged that Mr. Bukele has a pact with the Salvadoran gangs to protect them?

A second pressing question is why Justice filed a March 11 motion to dismiss the 2022 charges against one of the alleged ringleaders of MS-13. Four days later the department stuck him on a plane to San Salvador. The U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District said it was because “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh” the U.S. interest in prosecution. But that sounds like bureaucratese for doing a favor for Mr. Bukele. By sending Cesar Humberto López-Larios to El Salvador, the Trump administration has likely silenced a witness who could have testified as to whether Mr. Bukele has an MS-13 alliance.

In its 2022 indictment the Justice Department found that MS-13 operates in “the Eastern District of New York, El Salvador, Mexico, and elsewhere in the United States and the world.” It further alleged that “tens of thousands” of MS-13 members worldwide are involved in “murder, robbery, and assault, as well as other criminal activity, including narcotics trafficking, extortion, witness tampering, and witness retaliation” as well as “terrorism.”

The 2022 indictment describes the organization’s hierarchy, rules, financing and methods of controlling territory from prison. It explains the “truce” that El Salvador worked out with MS-13 from 2012-15 to reduce gang violence. When that agreement collapsed, MS-13 launched a bloody retaliation against Salvadoran society.

Mr. Bukele denies making any deals with the gang. But after his February 2019 election, the indictment alleges, new negotiations began: “The government representatives secretly attending these meetings at the prisons often wore masks and refused to identify themselves when entering the prisons in violation of prison rules.” MS-13 leaders who weren’t in prison attended meetings inside the prisons. “These MS-13 leaders also wore masks and long-sleeved shirts to hide their tattoos and identities, were provided with official identification cards identifying them as intelligence or law enforcement officials, and were escorted by El Salvadoran prison officials.”

Gang leaders in El Salvador have told investigative journalists that Bukele lieutenants negotiated with MS-13. The in-

dictment asserted that the criminals negotiated “financial benefits, control of territory, less restrictive prison conditions,” “control” over “ legislative and judicial changes” and “reduced prison sentences.” The gang leaders “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador” to help the government “ by creating the perception” that the murder rate was declining. “In fact, MS-13 leaders continued to authorize murders” but the bodies “were buried or otherwise hidden.” The gang leaders also agreed to use their power to drum up support for Mr. Bukele’s New Ideas party candidates in the February 2021 legislative elections, the indictment said.

When the New Ideas party won supermajority control in those elections, Mr. Bukele removed the attorney general and five members of the El Salvador Supreme Court. He replaced all six posts with loyalists. That would have been crucial in managing MS-13 witnesses who could have spilled the beans about his deal with the gang.

Take the case of alleged high-ranking MS-13 gang member Elmer Canales-Rivera. He’s charged with “terrorism offenses,” along with 13 others, in a separate indictment unsealed in the Eastern District of New York in January 2021. His case is referenced in the 2022 indictment. It notes that Mr. Canales-Rivera was arrested in El Salvador in June 2021.

In July 2021 the U.S. requested his extradition. “Thereafter,” according to the Justice Department, “the government of El Salvador”—with its newly initiated Bukele attorney general—“released Canales-Rivera from custody.” In a November 2023 letter to the Eastern District Court, the U.S. attorney asserted that high-level Salvadoran officials “escorted” Mr. Canales-Rivera, housed him in “a luxury apartment” and gave him “a firearm.” They then drove him to the northern border “where arrangements were made with a human trafficker” to smuggle him into Guatemala. For two years he was a fugitive, but he is now in custody in the U.S.

It remains a mystery why the Bukele government released Mr. Canales-Rivera despite the U.S. extradition request. Even more of a mystery is why Mr. Rubio doesn’t seem to mind.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady