In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The U.S. was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as the Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: some of those prisoners were U.S. informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post,
"To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department's arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
"Rubio's extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele's demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump's early months in office."
Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal's Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.
Eyes on El Salvador
These days, it's all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:
- Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
- Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump's case;
- Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, "enemies of the people" and "domestic terrorists";
- Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he'd like to do.
Oh, and it doesn't matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it's Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strong man, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world's coolest dictator -- and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.
Copyright 2026 Rebecca Gordon
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