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During Joe Biden’s presidency, one issue seemed to bring together the leaders of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: their rebuffing of U.S. corruption sanctions with sovereignty rhetoric and calls for multipolar relations. In 2022, Bukele tellingly compared Biden’s influence in Central America to the United Fruit Company.
Those times of narrow unity are over: As El Salvador and Guatemala eye deals with Trump to receive regional deportees, Honduras promotes a regional anti-deportation front, and Nicaragua, comparing Trump to the Ku Klux Klan, bites its tongue on possible CAFTA sanctions. Solitary Panama, which complained to the U.N. of Trump’s threats of military force, retorts that its control of the canal is “non-negotiable”, but also conceded that they will cut ties with China’s “Belt and Road” program.
In El Salvador on Monday afternoon, Bukele said he would receive and imprison Salvadoran deportees from MS-13 and Venezuelans from the Tren de Aragua gang. He also “offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.”
That latter offer would receive swift legal challenges. “The United States cannot legally banish Americans — such authorities died centuries ago,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. “There’s not even a hint of a possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever.”
Moreover, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to San Salvador cemented Trump’s alliance with Bukele from the symbolic —such as Donald Trump Jr.’s attendance of Bukele’s 2024 unconstitutional inauguration— to anti-migration cooperation, expanding on Trump’s first term. They also signed a memorandum on “peaceful nuclear cooperation”.
Bukele expressed to Trump, as recently as Monday, his disdain for USAID financing of human rights and press organizations whom he calls the “opposition”. As civil society organizations in the region saw their U.S. funding frozen, Rubio accused the agency of “supporting programs that upset the host government[s] with whom we’re trying to work.”
That rhetoric would have seemed broadly welcome in Central America in years past. During the Biden administration, Presidents Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, Bukele, and Xiomara Castro of Honduras each accused U.S. officials —without presenting evidence— of plotting with their opponents against their governments.
Salvadoran officials are also eager to recuperate a half-dozen senior MS-13 leaders on trial in the United States — including Élmer Canales Rivera, or “Crook,” whom the Bukele administration illegally released in 2021, amid its gang negotiations, and helped escape El Salvador. Mexican authorities caught him in November 2023 and put him in U.S. custody.
Ambassador to Washington Milena Mayorga revealed on Salvadoran TV on Tuesday that “the president was forceful and told Rubio: ‘I want you to send me the leaders of the gangs who are in the United States.’ He told him [Rubio] exactly: ‘We want you to deport to us the leaders of the gangs.’”
Arévalo the diplomat
On Wednesday in Guatemala City, President Bernardo Arévalo offered to receive 40 percent more deportations, up from around 14 flights a week, and promised to expand diplomatic and commercial relations with Taiwan. In return, Rubio announced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will support port construction and other projects including a metro system that Arévalo has promised. Rubio also said he would issue waivers to unfreeze USAID funding for anti-drug cooperation.
In Guatemala, frozen USAID projects totaling $275.38 million dollars include programs for human trafficking victims and unaccompanied migrant children, “transparency and justice”, and agriculture. “They are going to position issues relating to economics and security,” predicted Guatemalan international analyst Roberto Wagner before Rubio’s visit.
Rubio’s policy thinking about Guatemala is less cut-and-dry than El Salvador or Nicaragua. In Trump’s first term, his pulling of support for the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) undercut the defunct U.N.-backed commission. But in late 2023, as the OAS condemned a coup effort in Guatemala, Rubio signed a bipartisan letter condemning Attorney General Consuelo Porras’ attacks on the election result. He did not meet with Porras on his trip.
Despite skepticism among some U.S. Republicans toward Arévalo, he has seemed eager to smooth over any misgivings. Contrasting with Colombia, two U.S. military planes landed their first deportation flights in Guatemala without incident on January 24.
For weeks, officials have met with the Trump team to court the administration’s support. On Thursday, Guatemalan Ambassador to Washington Hugo Beteta will attend the ultraconservative National Prayer Breakfast, which was once a hub for anti-CICIG lobbying. “The democratic stability of Guatemala has been at the center of the conversation with the new administration,” Beteta told Prensa Comunitaria. “Destabilizing Guatemala, the country with the most inhabitants in Central America, could lead to a scenario like Venezuela, where people decided to migrate north.”
The Guatemalan administration, which last year closely echoed Biden’s rhetoric on “safe and orderly migration,” and hosted a regional summit on the issue in May, has announced a “Return Home” humanitarian aid and labor force reintegration program.
In the remittance-underpinned economies of Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, polls show unemployment and the cost of living as top concerns. Jaime Solares, coordinator of the Jesuit Network for Migrants, told El Faro English that “no migrant wants to stay in Guatemala because they do not have the economic conditions to live here.”
“In the long run,” says Ana María Méndez, director for Central America of the Washington Office on Latin America, “these [Trump deportation] policies would exacerbate the main structural cause of migration: countries’ economic situations.”
Goldilocks in Panama
Declassified documents newly published by the National Security Archive reveal that in 1975, two years before the Torrijos-Carter Treaty was signed to turn the canal completely over to Panamanian control in 1999, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reflected on the U.S. hold on the canal: “This is no issue to face the world on. It looks like pure colonialism.” He added: “Failure to conclude a treaty is going to get us into a cause célèbre, with harassment, demonstrations, bombing of embassies.”
In Panama City last week, where the U.S. invaded in 1989, protestors met Marco Rubio’s arrival with flag-burning. The José Raúl Mulino administration soon announced that it would step up deportations and immigration enforcement of the Darien Gap, a perennial pledge. In addition to his announcement of the Belt and Road withdrawal, Mulino highlighted a previously announced audit of Chinese canal presence.
In his January Senate confirmation hearing, Rubio suggested Panama could be violating the canal treaty, and declared Chinese commercial presence “a direct threat to the national interest and security of the United States.” Once in Panama, he lowered his tone. “I did not feel a climate of controversy or disrespect at all,” Mulino said. “I felt a very proactive climate on both sides and, above all, very willing to resolve any doubts.”
But Trump himself bristled, announcing that he will call Mulino on Friday: “They’ve agreed to certain things, but I’m not happy with it.”
“This U.S. administration’s clear disdain for international law concerns me greatly: not only commerce, but their negative stance toward multilateralism,” former Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís (2014-2018) told El Faro English.
“While Trump presents McKinley and Roosevelt as the pioneers of a heroic ‘America’ on the cusp of global progress, in their own time important voices in El Salvador had much to say about them,” wrote Salvadoran historian Héctor Lindo in a recent op-ed in El Faro English. “The very thing Trump admires was cause for anxiety, resentment and hostility.”
Just as Panama resorted to the U.N. for support on the canal, Honduras has called for regional opposition to Trump’s deportation offensive. After urging the U.S. president to reconsider, and threatening to revoke U.S. military bases, on January 27 Castro convened an emergency summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) —a forum excluding the U.S. and Canada— to discuss migration and regional “unity”.
But by the next day, the CELAC emergency session had unraveled: Castro, the current president pro tempore, cancelled the meeting citing “the systematic opposition of member countries who have privileged principles and interests different from those of the Latin American and Caribbean community.”
With civil society under official attack across Central America and now in Washington, Trump’s return to the White House could pose one more hurdle for the development of a grassroots democratic agenda in the region. “We need to get serious about making democracy function,” added Solís. “Otherwise we will be dragged by global currents contrary to the continuity and development of democracy.”
This article first appeared in the February 5 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
