Salvadoran President’s Dark Secret Allegedly Behind Deal to Hold Deported Migrants in “Mega” Prison
When Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in March 2025 to send several hundred Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the tradeoff for Salvadoran Pres. Nayib Bukele was unclear. But on March 30, 2015, Dropsite News reported a clue: The deal included repatriation of Salvadoran gang members, preventing them from implicating Bukele in corrupt secret negations with the gang had they remained in the U.S. and had their asylum claims heard in an immigration court.
Bukele offered space to hold U.S. immigration detainees at CECOT, one of the world’s largest prisons, in February 2025, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Mar. 2025, p.45.] On the day that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the offer, Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill Tinoco also announced a deal with the U.S. to provide nuclear power technology to the small Central American nation. Repatriation of gang members from the U.S. apparently sweetened the deal.
“One of the worries that Bukele had is what these gang leaders could say in U.S. courts,” said Washington Office on Latin America’s Ana María Méndez Dardón.
Bukele has been accused of secret negotiations with gangs after his 2019 election, promising better prison conditions for incarcerated gang leaders in exchange for their promise to reduce the country’s sky-high murder rate and support his Nuevas Ideas party in 2021 legislative elections. They delivered on those promises, but the deal apparently broke down in 2022, leading to mass arrests of gang members, who swelled the nation’s prison population from just over 37,000 in 2020 to more than 105,000 three years later—including some 40,000 held at CECOT. Meanwhile the official homicide rate fell from 38 per 100,000, one of the world’s highest in 2019, to just 1.9 per 100,000 five years later, when it was one of the world’s lowest.
The government has since been accused of looking the other way as corruption engulfs the country’s prisons, which have been under a “state of exception” suspending civil rights since 2022. Prisoners and watchdog groups claim that guards size up prisoners for their financial resources, extorting money for phone calls, letters and even conjugal visits. One political prisoner told an El Faro journalist that he paid $30,000 for a four-day hospital stay; he wasn’t sick, he just wanted to visit his family and consult with his attorneys. While he was there, uniformed prison guards stood watch around the medical complex, he said.
The U.S. reportedly retains other Salvadorans in custody who might incriminate Bukele. “The U.S. government is running its foreign policy, as always, to benefit themselves,” said Salvadoran human rights attorney Ivania Cruz. “They are not going to hand over everything Bukele wants.”
Sources: CBS News, Dropsite News, El Faro
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