How Venezuela and Venezuelans have been a thread throughout Nayib Bukele's political career


The military incursion by the United State on January 3, to arrest Venezuela's dictator-president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, sent ripples throughout Latin America. From El Salvador, president Nayib Bukele backed the capture by US troops.  

Venezuela and Venezuelans have been a thread running throughout Bukele's political career.  His start in politics was partly fueled with oil dollars from the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Today, as he celebrates Maduro's capture, Bukele runs El Salvador surrounded by political advisers tied to Venezuelan opposition figures and opens his prisons to Venezuelans deported by Donald Trump.     

When Nayib Bukele commenced his political career, he was a young, promising politician in the FMLN.  The left-wing FMLN, the former armed guerilla movement turned political party, was a loyal part of the Latin American left led by Cuba and Venezuela.    


Sending subsidized petroleum and money earned from its oil reserves was one way that the Chavez regime in Venezuela sought to support friendly regimes and political parties.  In El Salvador, the recipients of that largesse were tied to the FMLN, and dollars were funneled through a company called ALBA Petroleum with affiliated businesses and shell companies. 

Journalistic investigations have revealed a direct financial link between the young Bukele and his circle of advisers and ALBA money:

Among those who received millions of dollars in loans from Alba Petróleos subsidiaries is current President Bukele in 2013, when he was mayor of the town of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Bukele and companies controlled by Bukele and his family received almost $3 million in multiple loans to publicity companies owned by Bukele, from the Alba Petróleos subsidiary Inverval. Bukele has publicly acknowledged he received $1.9 million in loans from Inverval to buy shares in a company called Starlight, the owner of the Canal TVX TV station.

Douglas Farrah, How To Make a Billion Dollars Disappear, 2020 at 14. 

ALBA money also funded real estate development in Nuevo Cuscatlan while Bukele was a young mayor there. The firm Inverval made large real estate investments in Nuevo Cuscatlán in the luxurious residential area of Garden Hill bolstering the finances of that municipality.  ALBA funds also supported public initiatives of Bukele in the town.   Bukele used his apparent success as mayor as a springboard for his winning campaign to be mayor of San Salvador.

In a press conference, Bukele would state "Being sincere, what business wasn't taking money from ALBA during that time?"

For more on the influence of Venezuelan oil money in El Salvador and on Bukele's early career see:    

Even though Bukele was an FMLN party member and the beneficiary of Venezuelan oil money, early in his political trajectory, he began to distance himself from the doctrinaire left.  He adopted cyan-blue as the theme color for his "New Ideas" campaign, eschewing the red of the FMLN and Latin American socialism.  He portrayed himself as a new breed of politician, not tied to the old guard politics of his predecessors.

As he rose from small town mayor to mayor of San Salvador and then president, Bukele brought with him other members of his circle who had ties to the ALBA money.     

The US placed sanctions on Alba Petroleos in March 2019 related to money laundering as part of the larger Venezuelan conglomerate. And just as Nayib Bukele was taking office in June 2019, agents of then-Attorney General Raul Melara raided the offices of Alba Petroleos and 24 front companies in El Salvador to gather evidence in a purported money-laundering investigation. Melara, however, would be fired when Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party took control of the Legislative Assembly in June 2021, and the lawyer for Alba Petroleos, Rodolfo Delgado, installed in his place. The money-laundering investigation evaporated with the change.

Then as Bukele rose to the Salvadoran presidency in 2019, he surrounded himself with Venezuelan advisers linked to the Salvadoran opposition who functioned as a shadow cabinet. More than two dozen Venezuelan consultants to the Salvadoran government worked largely behind the scenes to advise Bukele. According to El Faro, the pyramid of power in El Salvador has Nayib Bukele at the top with his three brothers as his closest advisors, followed by the group of Venezuelans, who then direct the various actual cabinet ministers.

The leader of the Venezuelan shadow cabinet has been identified as Sara Hanna Georges. She was trained as a dentist in Venezuela, and as a young adult she became involved in opposition politics in Venezuela, protesting the government of Hugo Chavez. She became an assistant to opposition political leader Leopoldo Lopez, who was jailed by the Chavez regime.

Another prominent Venezuelan was the political consultant Lester Toledo. Toledo was contacted to work on Bukele’s presidential campaign in October 2018 by Nayib Bukele’s brother Karim after Sara Hanna recommended Toledo. Together with other Venezuelans, he was a campaign manager for Bukele’s victory in the 2019 presidential election. Later Toledo involved himself in pandemic food distribution in El Salvador and Bukele's 2024 election campaign for an unconstitutional second term.

Read more about the Venezuelan advisers behind the scenes in El Salvador here.

In January 2019, Bukele tweeted:


Dictators like Maduro in Venezuela, Ortega in Nicaragua,  
and Juan Orlando in Honduras will never have 
any legitimacy, because they hold onto power by force 
and do not respect the will of their people. A dictator is a dictator.  
Whether from the “right” or the “left.”

On November 2, 2019, Bukele expelled the diplomatic corps of the Maduro regime from El Salvador. Bukele would publicly call Maduro's 2024 re-election fraudulent, a view shared by the majority of the world.

The next time Bukele and Venezuela were linked in the world news came with Donald Trump's expulsion of more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to land in El Salvador's' Center for Confinement of Terrorism ("CECOT") prison on March 15, 2025.  When Nayib Bukele traveled to the White House on April 14, 2025 to meet with Donald Trump, Venezuelan Sara Hanna was one of his advisers joining the meeting with Trump. 


Although the large majority of the Venezuelans had no criminal records and no links to the Tren de Aragua gang, but were instead persons who had fled from the South American country, they were all tortured together in CECOT.  Read  Venezuelans deported to Bukele’s mega-prison reveal torture and other abuses: ‘They said we would only leave in a black bag’ (El Pais, Nov. 12, 2025); Trump Administration Knew Vast Majority of Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Had Not Been Convicted of U.S. Crimes (ProPublica, May 30, 2025)

Venezuelan families who came to El Salvador to petition for the release of their loved ones, who had committed no crimes in El Salvador, received no relief from El Salvador's Supreme Judicial Court.

On April 20, 2025, Bukele tweeted a proposal to Maduro, offering to return the 252 Venezuelans in CECOT to Venezuela if Venezuela would release 252 political prisoners held in the South American country's jails.

On July 18, 2025, Bukele announced that a deal had been struck to return the Venezuelans back to their home country, in return for Maduro releasing US citizens held in Venezuelan prisons. The New York Times reported:

Ten Americans and U.S. permanent residents who had been seized by the Venezuelan authorities and held as bargaining chips were freed Friday in exchange for the release of more than 250 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador.

The release of the Americans and permanent residents was described by the State Department, while the release of the Venezuelans was announced by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on X.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the U.S. citizens and permanent residents had been arrested and jailed in Venezuela “without proper due process” and called for the “restoration of democracy in Venezuela.”

The capture and imprisonment of the Americans had been part of the Venezuelan government’s efforts to gain an upper hand in negotiations with the Trump administration, while the detention of the Venezuelans in El Salvador played a high-profile role in President Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants.

For at least some of the Venezuelans, who were asylum seekers in the US seeking protection from the Maduro regime, the forced return to Venezuela was a violation of the international human right of non-refoulement.

The public disdain of the Venezuelan regime for Bukele continued on display.  In a speech in July 2025, Jorge Rodríguez, the current president of the Venezuelan National Assembly and brother of acting president Delcy Rodríguez, compared Bukele to Adolf Hitler and Benjamin Netanyahu, decrying the treatment of Venezuelans in El Salvador's prisons.

When the US captured Maduro on January 3, Bukele posted on X a picture of a handcuffed Maduro in US custody to contrast with a 2019 video where Maduro had called Bukele an "imperialist puppet" and declared  "Bukele, if you mess with us you will whither away."  Bukele also retweeted two posts about the July prisoner swap.   Was he signaling that the exchange of imprisoned migrants for political prisoners was part of a larger plan which resulted in Maduro being captured?     

In 2026, Bukele's version of populist authoritarianism is on an upward trajectory.  In Venezuela, the populist aspect had long since disappeared. 

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