Gang Truces and The Axis of Autocracy
Less than six months before the 2024 presidential election, the Biden Administration arrested Cesar Humberto Lopez Larios, a high-ranking leader of the El Salvadoran gang MS-13. You would think that the Trump Administration would be delighted to make a spectacle of prosecuting Mr. López Larios in order burnish his tough-on-crime credentials and brag about how he is keeping scary foreign gangs off American streets. But instead the Trump Administration has quietly dropped all charges against López Larios and sent him back to El Salvador. According to a federal agent quoted by CNN, “It’s a historical loss. He was a potential high-level source. And he doesn’t get to face US justice.”
If you look at an indictment filed against MS-13 gang leaders in New York in 2023, the Trump Administration’s decision to send back López Larios looks even more shady. Trump isn’t sending López Larios back to El Salvador because he wants to get touch. He’s sending López Larios to shut him up, to prevent him from testifying in American court about the mutual defense compact between the Trump Administration, the El Salvadoran dictatorship of Nayib Bukele, and their mutual partners in MS-13.
A crucial bit of context is that El Salvador went through a civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992. After 1992, the two sides of that civil war later became the basis for the political party system in El Salvador. On one side was ARENA, the right-wing political party founded by Roberto D’Aubuisson, the military leader who founded El Salvador’s infamous death squads. On the other side was the FMLN, a left-wing political party tied to the armed leftist guerrillas who fought against the government and its death squads.
According to the 2023 New York indictment against MS-13 leaders, both FMLN and ARENA had made secret backdoor agreements with MS-13. In 2012, FMLN brokered a truce between MS-13 and its main rival, the 18th Street gang, to reduce homicides inside El Salvadoran territory. In exchange, MS-13 received “transfers to less secure prisons, improved prison conditions, conjugal visits, cash payments, and other benefits and privileges.” In addition, both ARENA and FMLN agreed to give special benefits to the Ranfla Nacional, the “board of directors” of MS-13’s top leaders, in exchange for votes for their candidates.
In 2015, probably due to financial pressure from the Obama Administration exercised via foreign aid, the “truce” between MS-13 and El Salvador’s two major political parties collapsed. According to the indictment, the collapse of the truce meant that members of MS-13 were also ordered to increase violence in the United States. A top MS-13 leader Juan Antonio Martinez-Abrego, nicknamed “Mary Jane de Hollywood,” was brought into direct activities in the United States, including using drug profits to buy money for weapons to be used against El Salavadoran police.
The gang violence that ensued after the collapse of this truce paved the way for the victory of the Nuevas Ideas party in the 2019 elections and led to the ascendance of El Salvador’s current autocratic leader Nayib Bukele. American right-wingers would have you believe that Bukele is merely a populist who knows how to do what’s necessary to fight crime, but the reality is much more corrupt.
Bukele is not fighting MS-13. He is in cahoots with them. After the 2019 El Salvadoran elections, members of Bukele’s government put masks on to hide their identity and began conducting secret talks with MS-13 inside El Salvador prisons. When members of the government were asked by prison officials to identify themselves, Bukele’s associates openly violated the prison regulations and refused to do so. In addition, members of MS-13 were also allowed to wear masks and cover up identifying tattoos, sometimes with assistance with prison staff. MS-13 also pledged to support candidates of Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party.
Later in February 2021, during the first few weeks of the Biden Administration, INTERPOL put out a Red Notice for MS-13 leader, Elmer Carnales-Rivera (a.k.a. “Crook de Hollywood”). Carnales-Rivera was finally arrested in El Salvador in June 2021, but when the Biden Administration requested Carnales-Rivera be extradited to the United States, Bukele’s government released him from custody instead, in defiance of both the United States and INTERPOL.
The 2021 action by Bukele to release Carnales-Rivera from prison, which deliberately undermined the Biden Administration’s crime-fighting efforts against MS-13, strongly parallels current actions by the Bukele government to pervert the El Salvadoran prison system for right-wing partisan ends. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen has been barred from access to El Salvador’s prisons, even though several Republican politicians have been allowed in for the purpose of making authoritarian propaganda pictures.
Donald Trump wants Fox News to keep telling his brainwashed political base that Daddy Trump is keeping grandmas safe from scary foreign gangs, but the reality is that Trump and his dictatorial ally Bukele view a group like MS-13 as a violent autocratic group useful for keeping the populace in line. They are not adversaries; they are merely counterparties in a mutual defense pact among different flavors of autocracy.
We ask ourselves why Trump’s mass deportation dragnet goes after so many “undeserving” targets: Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, the gay makeup artist deported for his tattoos; Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the father of an autistic kid who wore the wrong Chicago Bulls cap; Merrill Gutierrez, the teenager with zero criminal record who got deported because an ICE agent said “Take him anyway.” We shouldn’t be doing mass deportation at all, but the targeting of the so-called undeserving, the disproportionality of it all, is the entire point. Trump’s immigration crackdown has no real purpose in improving public safety. If he “solved” the crime problem represented by MS-13, he would no longer have his secret weapon for holding the populace in fear, which justifies prolonging his autocratic rule. The immigration regime that Trump has created with Nayib Bukele is simply a corrupt bargain among dictatorial men that solves nothing.