Nayib Bukele is so popular with the US right that his refusal Monday to free a Maryland man with no criminal record mistakenly sent to a supermax prison in a foreign country was greeted by MAGA types as being, basically, badass. The Salvadorian president who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator” was already a Trumpworld darling partly because of his gift for authoritarian showmanship— and his apparent success reducing crime by jailing alleged criminals with little due process. But his US popularity is also the product of a years-long courtship of American right-wing influencers, media, and politicians organized by Damian Merlo, a 50-year-old Miami-based lobbyist who has become, as the Central American newspaper El Faro put it last year, “a sort of ambassador to the Trump-aligned Right” for Latin American leaders. Merlo earned more than $1.5 million for his firm since 2022 by pitching Bukele to right-leaning lawmakers and influencers, as Anna Massoglia reported Monday in her Influence Brief newsletter. Merlo did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones. Bukele’s willingness to accept and indefinitely imprison Trump administration deportees who have not been charged with a crime or afforded any meaningful due process is a policy reward that followed three years of partisan outreach overseen by Merlo. This is a new kind of foreign influence campaign that Trump has made possible: Lobbying that relies on far-right to far-right ideological affinity and aggressive embrace of MAGA messaging to win access and sway with the new administration. Traditionally, many foreign leaders have hedged their bets in the US by hiring lobbyists with ties on both sides of the aisle. But Bukele, who was elected president in 2019, has recently employed only Merlo, a guy who posted a photo of himself wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt just before the 2022 midterms and has dispensed with any pretense of outreach to Democrats. It’s working for now, though the disdain with which Bukele treated critics of Trump’s policies may prove problematic for the Salvadorian president should Democrats return to power in coming years. Merlo got his start in the business of lobbying on behalf of foreign strongmen when he worked as a vice president at Otto Reich and Associates, according to an online bio. That’s the lobbying firm founded by Reich, the Cuban-American extremist exile who played a prominent role in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. From his post as head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, Reich worked with Col. Oliver North to manipulate the US media to generate support for the Nicaraguan guerillas against the Sandinista government. In 1987, a report from the Comptroller General found that Reich’s office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” that were “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.” Reich in 2006 famously praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet claiming that he had “saved Chilean democracy from communist takeover.” Merlo later worked for the International Republican Institute, a right-leaning nonprofit group that has been accused of working to overthrow Democratic governments it dislikes, including Haiti’s in 2004. Still, after striking out on his own, Merlo also worked as a special assistant to Haiti’s former president Michel Martelly, and as a lobbyist for that country. Last year, the US government officially sanctioned Martelly for his involvement in drug trafficking and ties to the armed criminal gangs that have terrorized the poor country. Merlo, who is Argentinian, has also worked for Argentina’s President Javier Milei. According to FARA filings, he began working for Bukele in 2020, helping efforts to boost US investment in El Salvador. Merlo has said that he helped arrange that country’s much-hyped adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a policy which, under IMF pressure, was quietly undone last month. But as a PR stunt, the move was a success, drawing attention to El Salvador as a crypto-friendly outpost, at least according to Merlo. “We call it the Great Rebranding. It was genius,” Merlo told Time. “We could have paid millions to a PR firm to rebrand El Salvador. Instead, we just adopted Bitcoin.” (Merlo has since become a lobbyist for the crypto-currency company Tether.) Merlo in 2023 and 2024 lobbied MAGA figures including Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo.,) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for Bukele, according to Foreign Agent Registration Act filings and news reports. Last November, Merlo met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). Merlo’s recent filing said, vaguely, that all his lobbying contacts were “about the importance of fostering strong dialogue between the US and El Salvador.” Merlo has made himself a fixture in Trumpworld, with appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago—“It’s the place to be and the place to be seen,” he told Fortune last year—accompanying Bukele on a trip to visit SpaceX with Elon Musk, and meeting at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference with Matt Schlapp, chairman of the conference, and Schlapp’s wife Mercedes, who is one of Trump’s former communications directors. > What an honor to join @nayibbukele and @elonmusk – aim for the stars and > you’ll get to mars – maybe meet a few aliens along the way! @SpaceX @Tesla > pic.twitter.com/5XyXKsEQC8 > > — Damian (@Damianmerlo) September 21, 2024 Merlo has also had extensive contacts with right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson. In May last year, the former Fox News host interviewed him, characterizing his leadership as a model for the US. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” Tucker gushed in a post promoting the interview. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.” > President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving > the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI > > — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024 Carlson has been a reliable Bukele booster, even promoting a February interview in which Bukele claimed that “MS-13 participates in Satanic child sacrifice rituals.” The Salvadoran constitution limits the national presidency to a single five-year term. But after taking office in 2019, Bukele systematically purged the judicial system of independent judges and replaced the members of the Supreme Court with his loyalists, who green-lighted his run for a second term. Merlo sprung into action, arranging for MAGA luminaires to attend Bukele’s swearing-in last June. The power grab didn’t stop a gaggle of Americans from celebrating Bukele’s reelection. Trump Jr., his then-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, since nominated as US Ambassador to Greece, Carlson, Lee, and Gaetz were among the attendees. Democratic Reps. Lou Correa of California and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas also attended the inauguration, in a small nod at bipartisanship.  The US visitors were ushered to restaurants and new Google offices, taken on a tour of the newly safe downtown San Salvador, and watched as Bukele—clad in what Time called “a striking suit with a stiff, gold-embroidered collar and cuffs that evoked a cross between Latin American revolutionary war heroes and Star Wars”—was inaugurated for what has been seen as an illegal second term. Merlo celebrated the event as “the hottest ticket in the Americas.” After returning to the US, Gaetz helped form a new El Salvador Caucus in Congress. The former Florida congressman described it as a sort of Bukele fan club, saying it aimed to “nurture and advance the US-El Salvador relationship to encourage strong borders, strong culture, and the strong reforms that President Bukele has put into effect.” “Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well,” Gaetz said. “So that we can experience a triumphant return of safety and prosperity that we once inspired in others.” > “Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the > great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well.” Soon after, Gaetz headed south again to visit the notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration is now sending Venezuelan immigrants and where the president has discussed sending American citizens. Gaetz touted the prison in a slickly-produced video, touted by Bukele on X, that foreshadowed the video of Venezuelan migrants arriving there, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s infamous Rolex-accessorized appearance at the facility. Behind the scenes, Merlo was involved. He appeared in a still shot of a sunglasses-adorned Gaetz standing in a hallway amid cells in a video that CNN used in a story on Gaetz’s visit. “Courtesy Damian Merlo,” the photo’s tagline says. Shortly after Trump’s election last year, Merlo penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald, bashing Joe Biden’s policies and urging the incoming Trump administration to look to El Salvador as a “model” for addressing the root causes of illegal immigration. “President Bukele’s crackdown on crime has made El Salvador the safest country in the region, fueling economic growth and even reversing migration flows,” Merlo wrote. Rubio, whom Trump had just nominated as Secretary of State, “understands this model well, having visited El Salvador and witnessed its success under Bukele’s leadership,” Merlo noted. The op-ed identified Merlo as “a Republican strategist and Latin America expert” and “president of the Latin America Advisory Group, a PR and government relations firm based in Miami.” It did not say that Merlo worked for Bukele. Following an inquiry by Mother Jones, the Herald updated the tagline of the piece with a correction stating that the paper had failed to follow its guidelines on the piece. “The Herald did not disclose in this commentary that Merlo’s company had El Salvador as a client,” the note said. One lobbying priority for El Salvador, promoted by Gaetz and the El Salvador caucus, has been to have the State Department to upgrade the country’s travel advisory to Level One, a designation that ranked the country as a safer tourist spot than many European countries. Last week the State Department complied, upgrading its guidance for El Salvador, long known for its US-trained death squads and MS-13 gangs, suggesting it is now a safer place for Americans to vacation than France. (The advisory presumably is not intended for Venezuelan asylum seekers forcibly sent to El Salvador because they have tattoos.) Announcing the change, Rubio credited Buklele’s leadership as “crucial in improving the security of his country for foreign travelers.”

Donald Trump’s deepening partnership with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, was on display as the two leaders rejected the idea of returning a man mistakenly deported by the U.S. and locked up in a Salvadoran mega-prison. Meeting at the White House, they indicated Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia would remain in Salvadoran custody despite a ruling by the Supreme Court instructing the Trump administration to take steps to return him to the U.S. Trump epeated his interest in sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to Bukele’s prison in El Salvador and said his attorney general was studying the legal feasibility. Trump called Bukele “one hell of a president.” Few media organizations have covered the rise of Bukele, as closely or fearlessly, as El Faro, founded in 1998 as the first digital newspaper in Latin America. In 2020, El Faro began publishing a blockbuster investigation that exposed secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and leaders of the MS-13 gang who were imprisoned in El Salvador. The goal was to reduce violence on the streets and win the gang’s support in mid-term elections in exchange for prison privileges. Some of the MS-13 leaders were eventually released as part of the deal, according to El Faro’s reporting. It was later discovered that during this period El Faro’s staff was the target of a massive cyber attack with Pegasus spyware.  Experts suspected it was a state-sanctioned hack. The Pegasus attack on El Faro was featured in a Reveal episode in September, 2023. In the run up to Bukele’s meeting with Donald Trump, Reveal host Al Letson spoke with El Faro director Carlos Dada about the emerging security alliance between the U.S. and El Salvador and the controversial deal to send deported U.S. migrants to the country’s notorious Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT).  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Al Letson: So I want to start by asking you about this mega-prison, CECOT. It was built after the Bukele administration declared a state of emergency in 2022 to deal with violent gangs which were still controlling large parts of the country. The government suspended some civil liberties, including the right to due process. What are conditions like in that prison? Carlos Dada: CECOT is a poster child of our prison system. It’s a high security prison, built allegedly to exclusively hold gang members. It has been heavily used by Bukele’s propaganda machine, producing, as you might have seen, highly professional videos in which every single image is meticulously taken care of. If you see something from that prison, it is because the regime wants you to see it. But that prison is only one of 32 in our system. So some people have described CECOT as basically a black hole. Is that accurate? I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them. They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. According to President Bukele, they don’t see the light of the sun ever.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. It sounds like from your reporting, the director of El Salvador’s prison system, Osiris Luna, is somewhat notorious. Osiris Luna was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department and also by the Treasury Department for corruption and for allowing the secret agreement with the gangs to take place. We have published several stories about Mr. Osiris Luna’s use of prison resources, including prisoners for his private benefit. Even El Salvador’s police intelligence unit has described him as an important piece of a criminal organization that distributes drugs. His administration of the prison system has brought back systematic torture to our prisons, something we thought was part of our most painful past.  It wasn’t just Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador on March 15th and ended up at CECOT. Who else was on those planes? As far as we know, there are at least four different categories of people who came in those first three flights. One, Venezuelans suspected of belonging to the Tren de Aragua crime organization. Two, Venezuelan undocumented migrants, completely unrelated to this criminal organization. Three, Salvadoran undocumented migrants. Four, Salvadoran members of the MS-13 gang. This included at least one gang boss who was preparing to stand trial in the United States alongside 26 other big bosses of the MS-13, some of them who had been freed from prison by the Bukele administration as part of the secret agreement his administration had negotiated with the gang. Based on El Faro’s reporting, I gather that some of these gang leaders potentially had a lot of dirt on Bukele. That’s right. Bukele made that secret agreement with the gangs five years ago that helped his party win elections. In exchange, Mr. Bukele freed some of the gang bosses, including a few who were facing extradition to the U.S. After leaving El Salvador they were captured in Mexico and sent to the United States where they were indicted. Some of the indictments include allegations of the gang’s collusion with authorities in El Salvador.  We also know that when Mr. Bukele offered Marco Rubio to receive deportees and criminals, he also requested that the gang bosses be sent back to El Salvador, and at least one of them was included in those first flights. Is Bukele asking for the U.S. to deport these gang leaders to El Salvador specifically to bury any information that they might have — I mean, to put them in jail so they can’t tell their secrets?. That’s what we think. As you know, MS-13 is now considered a terrorist organization in the United States. If the trial in New York proves Mr. Bukele’s deals with them, it could potentially be very damaging since it would mean that he had illegal deals with a terrorist organization and also illegally freed some of the terrorist organization leaders. So what happened to the charges that the US had against these MS-13 leaders? We only know of one so far. In this specific case of this one single person, we found federal court documents indicating the Justice Department and U.S. attorney assigned to the case asked the judge to dismiss the charges against this gang leader in order for him to be deported. And that’s what happened. How would you qualify Bukele’s regime? I’ve seen it described as bordering on fascist. I would qualify Mr. Bukele as an authoritarian populist. That is not ideological, but rather a project of accumulation of power. Until recently, Nayib Bukele was a member of the former guerilla party, the extreme leftist FMLN, and benefited from the Venezuelan government’s Alba Petróleos fund. Then quite suddenly he became almost libertarian and started to flirt with authoritarian and extreme rightist movements all over the world, including, of course, the United States. So I would say that his project is not ideological, but rather the complete grab of the state to accumulate power and wealth.  The Trump administration has praised Bukele for slashing crime in El Salvador, and yet just two years ago, the State Department cited reports of arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture. Is the Trump administration ignoring this evidence or is there something in Bukele’s harsh policies that they connect with? I can’t answer that. I think you know much more about the nature of Mr. Trump’s administration. What I can say is that Mr. Bukele is an important figure in this far-right, authoritarian populism all over the world because he has been very successful in grabbing power and still keeping his popularity high. So that makes him a very attractive person for all the people in this movement. For your typical Salvadoran, is life better because of some of the moves Bukele has made to reduce the power of the gangs? Mr. Bukele has effectively taken the gangs out of the communities of Salvadorian people and lowered the murder rate in the country. So life is apparently better, but we know how in exchange for this so-called security, one person or one group of people is grabbing power, dismantling democracy, and there’s no more accountability. He has brought the army back to our political life, which was something we thought was over in 1992 when the peace agreements ended our civil war and built the basis for our democracy. Those pillars that started our democratic life came tumbling down. They are not there anymore. There’s no more checks and balances. There’s a lot of violence still in El Salvador but now it’s been inflicted by the authorities. Police and the army now can make arrests without a judge’s order and hold anyone in prison almost indefinitely. Seventy-thousand people have been detained in these years, which makes El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate, even above the United States. I don’t know of any experience when only through repression you really canceled a violence that has grown out of a society that is not functioning. Let me quote Archbishop Romero, who was killed in El Salvador in 1980. He used to say, violence will not be eradicated unless we address its root causes. And we have to know that gangs are just the most radical, the most horrible, and the most violent expression of a dysfunctional society. But if we don’t address the causes that built a fertile ground for these young kids to become so violent, then we are not solving any problem.

On Friday, Federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis ruled that the Trump administration had failed to comply with a court order requiring it to provide information about what it is doing to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the US government mistakenly sent to one of the world’s worst prisons in El Salvador. When Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign appeared in federal court in Maryland earlier on Friday, he had no information to provide about what his client, the Trump administration, had done to comply with her order.  “Have they done anything?” Xinis asked, according to the Hill.  “Your honor, I don’t have personal knowledge,” Ensign replied.  “OK, so they’ve done nothing,” Xinis concluded.  As a result, Xinis held in her written ruling that the administration has “made no meaningful effort to comply” with her order, even though it is now backed up by a unanimous Supreme Court decision. The judge is now requiring the government to provide a daily status update that details where Abrego Garcia is and what the Trump administration is doing to bring him back to the United States. How the Trump administration responds has the potential to deepen a constitutional crisis. Some of the president’s top aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have made clear that they do want Abrego Garcia to return to the United States. It remains to be seen how the courts will respond if the administration continues to stonewall. On Friday, Trump appeared more willing to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision. “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I have great respect for the Supreme Court The case began last month after Abrego Garcia, who is married to a US citizen and is the father of their three children, including a 5-year-old with autism, was sent to a Salvadoran megaprison in what the administration concedes was an “administrative error.” Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador because an immigration judge had previously ruled that he could not be sent to the country because he was more likely than not to face persecution there.  In response to a lawsuit brought on Abrego Garcia’s behalf, Xinis ordered earlier this month that he be brought back to the United States—rejecting the Trump administration’s claim that it didn’t have to do anything to fix its mistake because Abrego Garcia was no longer in US custody. The Trump administration quickly brought an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to try to overturn Xinis’ ruling.  On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that largely upheld the lower court by holding that the Trump administration should “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. It added that the government should “be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” Xinis quickly followed up by ordering the government to provide information by Friday morning about the current location of Abrego Garcia, what steps it may have already taken to facilitate his return, and what additional steps it is planning to take to bring him back.  But the government did not do so. As Xinis wrote in her Friday decision:  > During the hearing, the Court posed straightforward questions, including: > Where is Abrego Garcia right now? What steps had Defendants taken to > facilitate his return while the Court’s initial order on injunctive relief was > in effect…? Defendants’ counsel responded that he could not answer these > questions, and at times suggested that Defendants had withheld such > information from him. As a result, counsel could not confirm, and thus did not > advance any evidence, that Defendants had done anything to facilitate Abrego > Garcia’s return. This remained Defendants’ position even after this Court > reminded them that the Supreme Court of the United States expressly affirmed > this Court’s authority to require the Government “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s > return. The Trump administration’s first daily update is due on Saturday at 5 p.m. Eastern. It will be back in court on Tuesday.