In a sunset in front of the lake, two men look at each other and smile. “Friends”, titled Nayib Bukele his image with Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in Coatepeque (El Salvador). After clicking the Chamber, the ads arrive: the Central American president has offered his megacárcel, the so -called terrorism confinement center, for prisoners convicted in the United States; On the other hand, the Republican government has committed to helping him develop nuclear energy in the country. “Thank you very much, president,” Rubio writes in X, after defining the meeting as “very productive.” “Wonderful,” Elon Musk also points, “Great Idea.” Publications, which were shared thousands of times, celebrate the implementation of a new alliance in the region. He had to wait a few years, but the spring of Bukele and the US has already begun.
Marco Rubio’s visit to El Salvador – martuated on the first tour of the American for Latin America – has crystallized months of approaches. Last year, Bukele was one of the guests of honor to the Conservative Political Conference (CPAC), had meetings with Musk (which he called “one of the great minds of our time”) and openly supported Trump’s return to Trump to can. The two leaders share business and ideological circle. Enemies of what they call speech Woke –In which human rights, feminism or environmental concern are included – and defenders of the “hard hand” policy, the two men lead the offensive of the ultra -right. His alliance seems inevitable, now they seek to make it, from either side, profitable.
“Bukele has been preparing for this moment for five years. He opted that Trump would be back, put many resources doing lobby For him, ”explains the Salvadoran researcher Manuel Meléndez to El País:” Very few world leaders celebrated Trump’s victory rather than Bukele, it is what he has been longing for, it is a very good time for him. ” The Central American president, who was re -elected last year, faces his second much more armored mandate, in a position that Trump’s support can end up strengthening.
The president controls all the powers of the State: the Executive, the Legislative and also the judicial one, which allows him to pass without constitutional reforms, such as the one authorized by his re -election. No one inside El Salvador can oppose the Bukele clan without consequences. At the same time, it continues to enjoy immense popularity, some rankings place it with an approval above 90%. “It is a very popular and very authoritarian government, which seems at times invincible, but that certain threats are left: one of them is a legal scandal in the US,” says Meléndez, who works in a doctorate on democracy and government in Harvard , “One thing is that The lighthouse (Digital Medium) Revea the pact with the gangs and another is that there is a sentence related in an American court. This does not let Bukele sleep. ”
The researcher believes that a priority objective for the president is to achieve extradition to El Salvador of the leaders of the imprisoned maras in the United States, such as Crook, knowledgeable about his government’s negotiations with gangs, which Bukele has always denied. Another key goal of its relationship with Trump, points out, would be to achieve a cut of US cooperation funds with those who survive independent newspapers and associations in the country: “The few counterweights that remain in El Salvador have survived by these funds. Bukele knows that if the US withdraws their support, these actors that are very uncomfortable could disappear. ” The Salvadoran president himself said that this issue was one of the first of those who spoke with Trump when he won the elections last year. “If ‘the only thing’ that Bukele achieves in his relationship with Trump are those two things, it is a huge victory,” says the researcher.
In addition, the Salvadoran leader faces in this second term a new challenge: economic pressure. Just achieve support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in exchange for stopping considering Bitcoin as official currency in El Salvador, but the situation in the country remains complex. “The Salvadoran economy is fragile, has enormous challenges to fight poverty and inequalities,” explains Elodie Brun, from the College of Mexico, “achieving the help of the United States to obtain support in a bilateral or multilateral way can be a priority.” Along the same lines, says Leandro Morgenfeld, of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina: “Bukele has a very strong financial need. And nothing is done in the IMF without the US approval, which is the only one that has the right to veto. Bukele’s total submission is to achieve this support. ”
An outsourced prison
Bukele continues to presume to have ended the maras and insecurity in the country, after having imprisoned more than 83,000 people (the legal relief organization estimates that more than 3,000 were arrested arbitrarily, without any link with gangs). Deaths for torture and lack of medical attention in prisons have shot themselves: prisoners are starving, accused without evidence and without a right to a trial within Salvadoran prisons. But none of these complaints of human rights violations of local and international instances care about Bukele, much less Donald Trump.
The Republican Government has received Bukele’s proposal to outsource in El Salvador part of the US prison system with open arms. “In an extraordinary gesture never before any country,” Marco Rubio wrote. “His commitment to accept and imprison criminals from any country, including those of violent gangs such as MS-13 and Aragua Train, will make the United States a safer country,” said the Secretary of State, without contemplating any of the questions legal that opens this proposal, in which they are “including American citizens and legal residents.”
“This proposal can also clear a dilemma for Trump about mass deportations, which is what to do with those migrants who cannot return to their countries of origin,” says Brun, an expert in international relations of Latin America. In addition, the researcher mentions other benefits for the American of this “propitious relationship”: “Part of Bukele’s power is symbolic, because it is a figure that inspires extreme right leaders, that serves Trump, who also should have how many more possible allies ”.
Because the link between the two cannot be understood without the Latin American framework. The Republican has entered his second term with a very aggressive speech, which includes from the threat of tariffs to Mexico and Colombia (in addition to Canada) until his verbiage of annexing the Panama Canal. “The relationship between Bukele and Trump must be read as part of Trump’s initiative to put a wedge to the main governments of the region, break political coordination and try to counteract Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Chile, which are in hands of social democrats or left -wing governments with him, ”says Leandro Morgenfeld, which coordinates the US Studies Group of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).
On this divided board, Trump has the staunch support of Javier Milei, who since he was elected president of Argentina has traveled nine times to the United States (one of them for the taking of possession of the Republican); and with that of Daniel Noboa, from Ecuador, or Santiago Peña, in Paraguay. “It is a sign of how the Trump corollary of the Monroe doctrine operates: threats to governments that are not submitted and very neocolonial initiatives for those who do, as in Argentina and El Salvador, who are doing a follow -up to US policies,” Morgenfeld points, also a professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
“You have to raise the sustainability in the time of this relationship,” opens the scene Brun, “as with many Trump’s alliances, because they are very complicated characters. Everything seems to indicate that they will get along, but their agendas are not always the same. It is difficult to see it at this time, but it could be hypothetically a limit on human rights or even Gaza, because Bukele is a descendant of Palestinians, although he hates Hamas because he is a Christian, his dad became Islam. I don’t think they have the same position. ” It is still soon, for now, the idyll just begins.
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