El Salvador Perspectives

  Nayib Bukele was one of the Latin American leaders who accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to attend an inaugural meeting of the “Shield of the Americas” at the Trump-owned Doral golf course in Miami.    It was a convening of a dozen politically-aligned, conservative led countries in the Americas, saying they would work together to combat drug trafficking. Trump has had a focus on drug cartels and gangs in Latin America as a justification for many of his actions in the region including the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, blowing boats out of the water off the coast of South America, and closing US borders to asylum seekers.   Trump want his allies in the region to permit the US military, and their own militaries, to act freely in pursuit of those who get labelled narco-terrorists Al Jazeera reported : But as he signed a declaration to cement that commitment, Trump signalled that it came with the expectation that cartels would not be confronted with law enforce...

San Salvador fire A collection of recent news from El Salvador. Fire in San Salvador Claims Five Lives in Historic District Blaze  (Tico Times, Feb. 14, 2026) -- A major fire in the historic center of San Salvador killed five as it tore through warehouse space, business and residences.  The burned-out block is two blocks south of Plaza Libertad, part of the zone gradually being gentrified into a tourist destination by the current government. ( More at EDH ).  Shakira’s 5-show El Salvador residency fuels Bukele’s push to remake the country’s image  (AP, Feb. 13, 2026) -- A five-concert “residency” by singer-songwriter and superstar Shakira in El Salvador’s capital builds on Nayib Bukele ’s years long effort to use events such as surfing competitions and the Miss Universe pageant to mold the Central American country’s international image as a safe tourist destination. Trump to host Latin American leaders in Miami on March 7 (AFP, Feb. 12, 2026) -- Donald Trump wi...

Last week El Salvador and the US signed a new trade agreement .   El Salvador agreed to a number of measures designed to make it easier for US producers to get their goods into the Central American country in return for removing the 10% tariff Trump imposed in the spring of last year. One provision involved opening up access to minerals in El Salvador to the US according to  Reuters : The United States and El Salvador signed an agreement on Thursday aimed at encouraging investment in the exploration and export of critical minerals, which U.S. President Donald Trump has described as essential to economic and national security. The deal signed in Washington would allow U.S. companies to operate across the critical-minerals supply chain in El Salvador.... Bukele has highlighted the presence in El Salvador of minerals such as rhenium and silicon, recently added to an expanded U.S. list of critical minerals that guides Washington's priorities for clean energy, defense and manu...

Data from the US and Salvadoran governments show the impact which the mass deportation regime and anti-migrant rhetoric of Donald Trump is having on Salvadorans living in the US.   Many more people are being arrested in the interior of the US so they can be deported to El Salvador, while there was a dramatic drop in the number of Salvadorans caught crossing the southern US border.  Official statistics from ICE show that immigration arrests of Salvadorans in the US increased sharply in 2025 after Donald Trump took office.  Data produced to the Deportation Data Project from Freedom of Information Act requests record 10,698 arrests of Salvadorans from January 1 through October 15, 2025, in comparison to 4,967 arrests the year before.  This represented a more than 100% increase in 10 1/2 months compared to the full year 2024 arrest figures. Deportation flights to El Salvador have likewise surged.  According to the ICE Flight Monitor at Human Rights First, 175...

The March 15, 2025, US deportation flights, which brought hundreds of Venezuelans and a few dozen Salvadorans to El Salvador's CECOT prison, continue to be in the news.  The Washington Post disclosed more details about the deal between Washington and Bukele, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio's promise to undo agreements with cooperating witnesses from MS-13 who were ready to testify about bargains between the Salvadoran government and the gang.   Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal  (Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2025) --  "in promising to terminate the informant arrangements, current and former Justice Department officials say Rubio threatened to undercut years of work by U.S. law enforcement to apprehend and secure the cooperation of high-ranking members of one of the world’s most deadly gangs." Rubio's deal had its origins in earlier dealings with El Salvador led by then-ambassador Ron Johnson:  An American ...

Donald Trump has put in place his campaign promise of massive deportation of undocumented persons in the US.  Those expulsions included 1600 Salvadorans in the month of May, and that number is on an upward trajectory.  The number of Salvadorans living in the US is estimated at 1.4 million.  Of these, 741,000 lack legal immigration status in the US according to data from the Migration Policy Institute . Contrary to narratives coming out of Washington which paint the deportees as gangsters and criminals, several stories of Salvadorans sent back to the country of their birth provide a different reality. This week Yessenia Ruano and her twin daughters arrived in El Salvador. Yessenia had found herself forced to self deport after living the last 14 years in the US. Her options for relief from the immigration court system had ended. Her young girls are both US citizens. Yessenia had made a life for herself as a teacher's aide in a public school in the Milwaukee area. She ...

The weekend of March 15-16 saw the first implementation of Nayib Bukele's offer to the United States to act as the offshore jailers of persons Donald Trump wants to expel from the country. During the visit of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador in February, Bukele offered to not only to take back Salvadorans from the US, but also to accept deportees from other nations, and even to imprison US citizen criminals for a fee. From the State Department press statement  at the time: Multiple agreements were struck to fight the waves of illegal mass migration currently destabilizing the entire region. President Bukele agreed to take back all Salvadoran MS-13 gang members who are in the United States unlawfully. He also promised to accept and incarcerate violent illegal immigrants, including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country. And in an extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country, President Bukele offe...

With the US presidential election a little more than nine weeks away, El Salvador is watching closely. President Nayib Bukele has his closest ties to members of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, but Trump is a fickle friend. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is likely to continue current US policy which now presents a friendly face to El Salvador and no longer denounces Bukele's trampling over principles of rule of law and judicial independence.  Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, and several high level officials came to El Salvador to meet with Bukele’s government. Trump was happy because of Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration. Bukele cooperated despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status and calling El Salvador ...

 In 2019, after he was elected president in El Salvador for the first time, Nayib Bukele made his first public appearance not in El Salvador, but at the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.   On Thursday, Bukele made a return trip to speak to conservatives in Washington, this time as a featured speaker at CPAC , the Conservative Political Action Conference.  The conference is attended by pundits, activists and politicians from the Trump wing (which is almost the entirety) of the Republican party. The BBC summarized some of Bukele's remarks: Mr. Bukele told the conference that the next US president must have the will and courage to do "whatever it takes" to overcome the "dark forces" that he said were trying to control the US. He received loud applause for when he attacked institutions including what he called "corrupt judges" and fake news in both his country and the US. He also repeatedly cast an undefined group of "g...

Embed from Getty Images For the last two weeks, news media coverage of Central America has focused on "caravans" of Hondurans making their way north from towards the US.   The Salvadoran media is closely following the progress of the caravan from Honduras and reporting all the threats being made by US president Donald Trump.   Now a similar small caravan has left El Salvador and another one is purportedly forming. President Salvador Sánchez Cerén spoke about migration and the caravans on a visit to Cuba. The Salvadoran president stated that migration was a human right which ought to be respected.   He stated further that his government was "totally opposed" to Trump's vision on migration and that Salvadorans were an important part of the US economy. On Sunday the media began airing reports of a caravan leaving El Salvador.   The group, which had been organized through Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages, left San Salvador after meeting at t...

US government policies, which have separated children from parents, have resulted in victimization of some children, including sexual abuse of three minors, according to Salvadoran officials this week: The government of El Salvador said the three, ages 12 to 17, were victimized at shelters in Arizona, and it asked the U.S. to make their return a priority.  “May they leave the shelters as soon as possible, because it is there that they are the most vulnerable,” Deputy Foreign Relations Minister Liduvina Magarin said in San Salvador on Thursday.....  Magarin gave few details on the three cases other than to say they involved “sexual violations, sexual abuses.” She said her government is ready with lawyers and psychologists to help the families, adding: “The psychological and emotional impact is forever.”  “It’s unbelievable that children who were fleeing violence here were met in the United States with the worst violence a child could encounter,” said Cesar Rios,...

The US news media continues to be filled with immigration stories concerning asylum seekers from Central America and the impact of Trump's zero tolerance and family separation policies.  Many of those stories feature refugees from El Salvador: From the New Yorker,  An Asylum Seeker’s Journey from El Salvador to Arkansas, and Back Again .  A Salvadoran youth narrates on a video his flight from El Salvador only to be denied asylum under Trump and deported back to an uncertain future in El Salvador. From the Los Angeles Times, Beaten and raped in El Salvador, a domestic violence survivor finds little hope for asylum in U.S.    Describes the situation of a Salvadoran woman who fled after being beaten and raped by her boyfriend.  She now faces highly uncertain prospects of remaining in the US after Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed prior law to limit situations where domestic abuse victims might receive asylum. From NBC News,  'Where are you?' M...

El Salvador has one of the highest percentages of its native born population currently living in the United States.   Estimates vary, but if there are approximately 2 million people originally born in El Salvador living in the US, then approximately 1 in 4 people alive who were born in El Salvador live in the US.  As a result, the actions of new US president Donald Trump on immigration and border security have major implications for El Salvador. Although media attention has focused on the impact of Trump's executive orders from January 25 and January 27 on Muslim immigrants and refugees, the effects of the orders are more far-ranging and will have immediate impacts on Salvadoran migration. There is currently a significant flow of children and families from El Salvador towards the US, seeking asylum as they flee violence and gangs in the country.   Nearly 14,000 Salvadoran children and family members were detained at the US border in October and November 2016 alo...