Gang leaders freed by Bukele government tell El Faro how government cut deals with them over years

Today the world is paying attention to Nayib Bukele, the president-jailer who cut a deal with the US to imprison persons the US sought to deport.  Now the world may learn more of Bukele's back story since  the journalists at El Faro have released video interviews of two leaders of the 18 Revolucionarios gang, one of three gangs which long controlled neighborhoods throughout El Salvador.  They describe how Bukele's team has made deals with gang leaders throughout the Salvadoran president's political career, up to the rupture with the gangs marked by Bukele's imposition of the State of Exception in El Salvador.

The interviews were conducted by Oscar and Carlos Martinez, journalist brothers who have been reporting on the gangs and their dealings with politicians and government officials for more than a decade.  They published the interviews in a series of long video segments here.

One of the two gang members is Carlos Cartagena López, aka "Charli de IVU", a leader in the Barrio 18 Revolucionarios gang, who first came to the world's attention in 2005 in the BBC documentary 18 With A Bullet.  Twenty years later, as a fugitive from justice (who tells the El Faro journalists how authorities set him free when he was captured in the early weeks of the State of Exception), Charli describes how the gang made sure through multiple election cycles that the people in neighborhoods they controlled voted for Bukele.

Much of the information corroborated earlier El Faro reporting about how persons on Bukele's team worked with the gangs to get Bukele elected and to get his pet projects in the center of San Salvador completed.  But there was also new information about how the gangs helped Bukele by keeping persons confined to their homes during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they controlled the micro-businesses which were part of the CUBO youth empowerment centers in various communities.  

A central go-between for the dealings of the Bukele government with the gangs was Carlos Marroquin, today the chief of the "Social Fabric Directorate" in the national government.  According to the interviews, Marroquin would tip the gangs off to upcoming police activity, arrange for gang members to visit their leaders within Salvadoran prisons, and when the State of Exception began, even get one of these men out of the country through an unmonitored border crossing.

With the help of an AI tool, I have generated a detailed English language summary of those interviews which you can read here.

The interviews have produced the usual attacks on El Faro from Bukele's followers on social media.  But in an apparent escalation, El Faro's founder Carlos Dada announced May 3 that they had received credible evidence that the Salvadoran attorney general's office was preparing arrest warrants for El Faro journalists.

Bukele has not responded to the allegations in the interviews.  He has a practice of never engaging directly with journalistic reports about corruption in his government, or his officials cutting deals with the gangs.  Instead, he simply posted on X a video of himself and his wife Gabriela walking out to a balcony above adoring crowds, with the caption "Afraid of what? If we have already converted our country into the safest on the continent."