A former El Salvador anti-corruption prosecutor said that, in an attempt to extend its power, President Nayib Bukele’s administration ended its unit’s investigation into the government’s alleged dealings with violent street gangs. This would have occurred at a time when the United States is intensifying pressure on the Central American country regarding these negotiations.
German Arriaza, who headed an anti-corruption unit in the Salvadoran Public Ministry, said his team compiled documentary and photographic evidence that the Bukele government sealed, in 2019, a pact with the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs to reduce homicide rates and help the ruling Novas Ideias party win the February legislative elections.
It is the first time that a former Salvadoran official has publicly accused the Bukele government of closing a deal with gangs, which for at least two decades have plagued the country with often brutal extortion and murder. The closure of Arriaza’s investigation and his flight abroad had not been reported until now.
Last December 8, the US Treasury Department also said that negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the gangs had taken place and imposed sanctions on two government officials who would have headed them. The initiative was part of a series of actions taken to mark the Summit of Democracy led by President Joe Biden.
The US is stepping up pressure on the Bukele administration against what Washington calls undemocratic practices such as the weakening of the judiciary. Two sources told the Reuters news agency that a US Justice Department task force fighting MS-13 crimes in the US is preparing criminal charges against two Salvadoran officials for their alleged participation in the talks.
The government removed Arriaza from his post in May 2021, according to his transfer notice, which Reuters had access to, after a purge launched by Bukele’s legislative allies that ousted five Supreme Court justices and the Salvadoran attorney general, replaced by figures loyal to the government.
Then, according to Arriaza, a Salvadoran prosecutor and two US Justice Department officials, the investigation was closed. Arriaza said that, fearing government retaliation for opening the investigation, he immediately went into exile, and members of his team, known as the Special Anti-Mafia Group (GEA), either went into exile or were transferred.
“It was our investigations that led the government to dissolve the anti-corruption unit,” Arriaza said, speaking from a location outside El Salvador that he asked not to be named.
Bukele’s press office and the Salvadoran Public Ministry did not respond to requests for statements about Arriaza’s work and the fate of his inquiry. The president has often denied media reports and allegations by oppositionists that the government had negotiated a truce with the gangs.
Arriaza’s unit produced a report of an investigation that began in 2020 and was based on wiretaps, images taken by security cameras, photos and seized documents. According to the former prosecutor, this material showed that the deputy justice minister, Osiris Luna, and another government official, Carlos Marroquin, went to prisons to negotiate a secret pact with the gangs. The US Treasury Department made similar claims.
Arriaza says his unit discovered that Luna and Marroquin, the head of a welfare agency, offered the gangs better conditions in prisons, money and other benefits. In return, the criminals would lower the murder rates and provide electoral support for Bukele’s party in the elections.
Reuters had access to 129 pages of the report. US authorities confirmed the authenticity of the document, whose existence was first reported in August by the Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro. Luna and Marroquin did not respond to repeated requests for statements, and Reuters was unable to find any legal representatives for them.
US sanctions against the two have intensified existing tensions between El Salvador and Washington, which sees Bukele increasingly authoritarian.
Many MS-13 members have been convicted of murder and drug trafficking in US cities, and several of the gang’s leaders have been indicted for terrorism in the Eastern District of New York. US officials say the gangs ordered assassinations in the country from inside prisons in El Salvador.
Arriaza said he came under pressure in May, when Bukele’s party won the election, replaced the attorney general and removed high-ranking judges.
He said he was called to a meeting on May 5 with the new attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado, who asked him what actions his unit was taking against the government.
Hours after giving Delgado detailed information about his investigations, including the inquiry into the gang negotiations, Arriaza received a written notice, to which Reuters had access, that he would be transferred to El Salvador’s prosecutors’ school to carry out duties of advisor. It was not possible to obtain statements from Delgado on the case.
Arriaza said that immediately after the May 5 meeting, he was prevented from accessing his office, computer and files and that on the same day he left the country to live abroad. He said he feared reprisals from the Salvadoran government due to investigations carried out by his team.
“I’ve been a public prosecutor for over 18 years, I’ve prosecuted corruption cases across the political spectrum — politicians, judges, police officers, gang members, drug lords — but this was the first time I felt I had no choice but to let the country.”
Bukele, one of Latin America’s most popular leaders, has sued members of previous governments for negotiating with gangs in exchange for political support.
Rumors of a truce between Bukele’s government and the gangs began to circulate when the country’s homicide rate dropped about 50% in the year after he came to power in June 2019. Bukele attributed the drop in homicide to his policies public.
The report that Reuters had access to features prosecutors’ transcripts of alleged audio messages from gang members’ phones, handwritten demands allegedly by the gangs, and logbook notes detailing which detainees government officials allegedly met. The report also describes Luna’s alleged attempts to destroy evidence from prison meetings.
The material includes footage taken by security cameras that apparently show Luna on several occasions entering two prisons, accompanied by people whose faces were hidden under ski masks. Investigators reportedly identified one of the masked ones as Marroquin.
The team’s report also details investigations into misappropriation of prison funds and illicit expenditures linked to the pandemic by various government ministries.
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