The Trump administration is attempting to dismiss criminal charges against MS-13 leader Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez with the intention of deporting him back to El Salvador. Arevalo-Chavez’s attorneys allege that Trump is doing a favor for President Nayib Bukele, who previously requested that nine MS-13 leaders in U.S. custody be deported back to El Salvador.
This was reportedly part of bilateral negotiations between the Trump and Bukele administrations to use CECOT, the notorious maximum security Salvadoran prison, to hold migrants detained by immigration enforcement authorities.
The news comes after the Justice Department dismissed charges against another top MS-13 leader, Cesar Humberto López-Larios or “Greñas,” on March 11. López-Larios was facing similar charges and also had knowledge of an alleged pact between Bukele’s government and the gangs. On March 15, he was deported to El Salvador to be detained at CECOT.
Bukele was accused in 2021 by the Biden administration of making a now-collapsed deal with several major gangs. Despite this, Trump has repeatedly praised Bukele, saying on April 13 that the Salvadoran president was doing a “fantastic job.”
In 2015, as a candidate for mayor of San Salvador, Bukele allegedly began secret negotiations with two factions of the 18th Street gang, the Sureños and the Revolucionarios, and the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 gang.
These gangs essentially wield local control over parts of El Salvador, and were thus able to allegedly help Bukele win the mayoralty, and in 2019, the presidency. In return, the gangs were given money, control over parts of San Salvador, freedom to commit crimes like extortion and murder and the ability to visit prisons which gang leaders operate out of.
Arevalo-Chavez was allegedly a negotiator with the Bukele government on behalf of MS-13, so his sworn testimony in a U.S. court could still be damaging to Bukele, and by extension, President Donald Trump.
Critics believe that the efforts to deport Arevalo-Chavez are to prevent him from cooperating with the federal government and to limit the information officially recorded about Bukele’s ties to gangs in El Salvador.
On April 1, federal prosecutors requested to dismiss charges against Arevalo-Chavez for “sensitive and important foreign policy considerations.” They also cited “geopolitical and national security concerns,” saying they wanted to allow El Salvador to “proceed first with its criminal charges against the defendant under Salvadoran law.” The case’s court records were unsealed on May 22.
Arevalo-Chavez’s attorneys claimed that the attempt to dismiss charges “appear[s] to be an effort by the government to support a ‘deal’ with El Salvador to assist Bukele in suppressing the truth about a secret negotiation he had had with MS-13 leaders in return for our government using El Salvador prisons.”
In April, a federal judge prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from taking Arevalo-Chavez into their custody, and he currently remains in the US, facing federal charges of racketeering, terrorism and conspiring to commit narco-terrorism.
In January, El Faro, a Central American news agency, interviewed two former leaders of the 18th Street Revolucionarios on camera, Carlos “Charli” Cartagena and an anonymous gang member known as “Liro Man” or “Tasmania.” The interviews, though in Spanish, were posted on YouTube with English subtitles.
Liro Man had less power in the gang than Cartagena, but significant influence over parts of San Salvador. He detailed how gang members intimidated Salvadorans into voting for Bukele.
“The gang had to tell people: go ahead, you’re going to tell your mom, you’re going to tell your uncle, you’re going to tell your nephew, you’re going to tell your grandmother, you’re going to tell your wife and your wife’s family that they have to vote for Nayib. If you don’t do it, we’ll kill them,” Liro Man said.
He also said that people representing the opposition party were kidnapped or had their IDs taken. According to Liro Man, the election was essentially rigged; his gang handled the ballot boxes and influenced the people responsible for counting votes.
When asked if he thought Bukele’s victory in these elections was partly due to the efforts of the 18th Street Revolucionarios, Cartagena said that around “75%” to “80%” was because of the gangs.
Leaders of both MS-13 and the 18th Street factions also received a quarter of a million dollars, which, according to Cartagena, were used as a “personal fund.”
Both Cartagena and Liro Man also described how their main contact inside the Bukele administration, Carlos Marroquín, would warn them before police operations targeting their neighborhoods.
Bukele allegedly had three main negotiators who dealt with the gangs: Marroquín, Deputy of the Legislative Assembly, Dennis Salinas and Congressman Víctor Martínez Santana, also known as “Scar.” The three men were identified by the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office’s Anti-Mafia Group, which was later dissolved by a prosecutor appointed by Bukele. Its workers were subsequently forced into exile.
After he won the presidency in 2019, Bukele’s administration made arrangements with the gangs through Marroquín to reduce homicides in the country and coordinate lockdown efforts during the pandemic.
The government permitted gang extortion of citizens and facilitated members entering maximum security prisons to meet with gang leaders. They also allowed them to commit murder, so long as the bodies of their targets were never found.
Liro Man told journalists at El Faro, “Marroquín said, ‘Without a body there is no crime.'”
Homicide rates in El Salvador declined drastically beginning in 2015 to a record low of 1.9 per 100,000 inhabitants last year, though it began excluding cases in which police officers killed alleged gang members in 2022. Yet during Bukele’s first administration, official data on missing persons was declared to be a state secret and later, non-existent.
During the pandemic, the gangs asked the government to allow them to control their communities. While Salvadoran authorities enforced lockdown procedures and distributed government relief elsewhere, the gangs were allowed to take on this role in their territories.
“We asked them. Why? Because we were going to have the police inside our neighborhood 24/7,” Liro Man said.
The deal between the government and the gangs collapsed in March 2022 after MS-13 murdered 87 people in a single weekend, the bloodiest day post-war in El Salvador’s history. The pact, which lasted through a massacre in April 2020 that left 76 people dead and another in November 2021 that killed 45 people, finally broke and Bukele declared a state of exception.
Amidst the chaos, 83,000 Salvadorans, many of whom had no criminal records or arrest warrants, were put in prisons around the country. Some remain detained and hundreds died in prison without ever getting their day in court.
Yet Cartagena and Liro Man were able to flee the country. Marroquín helped Liro Man get through a blind spot at the border, where he escaped to Guatemala. Cartagena was initially apprehended, but after a mysterious phone call, was let go hours later.
In 2021, the Treasury Department sanctioned Marroquín and another top Bukele official, Osiris Luna Meza, for “corruption,” noting that they, “led, facilitated, and organized a number of secret meetings involving incarcerated gang leaders, in which known gang members were allowed to enter the prison facilities and meet with senior gang leadership.”
They said that these “covert negotiations between government officials and the criminal organization” were intended to secure the deal between the Bukele government and MS-13. The department also alleged that Bukele “provided financial incentives to MS-13 to reduce gang violence in exchange for ‘political support.'”
