New evidence of the close relationship between Presidential Designee Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara and Nayib Bukele is that, in 2011, when he stepped down as president of an ad agency to run for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, she took his place at the company. Rodríguez also kept him on the payroll the next year as she went to work for him at the mayor’s office (2012-2015). After Bukele was later elected mayor of San Salvador (2015-2018), she became treasurer, and received $1.2 million from the capital city Mayor’s Office during Bukele's tenure there.
The two have remained close collaborators since then. This November 30, the Legislative Assembly appointed Rodríguez as presidential designee for six months, during which time Bukele will campaign for reelection despite the fact that the Salvadoran Constitution repeatedly prohibits it.
In September 2011, six months before the Nuevo Cuscatlán mayoral election, Rodríguez was appointed president and legal representative of the ad agency NRA S.A. de C.V. Bukele had served as president of the agency for the two preceding years. In 2011 and 2012 alone, when he was both candidate and mayor, NRA paid Bukele $24,738.41 USD for professional services and salary payments, according to income statements presented by Bukele to the Treasury Ministry and newly obtained by El Faro.
That year, when Bukele launched his candidacy for the office, he declared to the Treasury that the NRA paid him $21,232.81. He also reported $2,555.56 from Obermet, a separate ad agency and political incubator of the Bukele family that received multimillion-dollar contracts during the FMLN administrations in institutions like the National Administrator of Aqueducts and Sewage (ANDA) and the National Council for Children and Adolescents (CONNA). The director of Obermet, too, was Rodríguez.
When he took office in Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012, Bukele announced that he would donate his municipal salary to the scholarship fund. What the then-mayor did not say was that he would continue to receive income from NRA, the business directed by Rodríguez, who was hired as financial director of the Nuevo Cuscatlán Mayor’s Office. Rodríguez —who, according to her CV, studied business administration at Francisco Gavidia University and is a registered accountant— was both a municipal employee working for Bukele at the time and the president of the agency that economically sustained him.
Also in 2012, Bukele formally declared income from NRA to the Treasury Ministry of $3,515.60. This reported income was so low that, at least on paper, Bukele could have claimed a return of $395.20. El Faro could not confirm whether he did in fact file that claim. But that year, in a display of his financial holdings at the time, he personally wrote a check of $100,000 in January to a man named Eduardo Andrés Ujueta Santos, according to the Probity Unit of the Supreme Court of Justice, which later examined Bukele’s increase in patrimony as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán and later San Salvador.
Ujueta sold property in the upscale San Salvador neighborhood of Escalón to the company Mov-i for $315,000. The administrator and legal representative of Mov-i at the time was Claudia Juana Rodríguez. While there is no formal relationship between Mov-i and Bukele, the company paid his credit cards. Another company that covered his credit payments was Obermet, the ad company legally represented by his brother Karim. Bukele did not declare those payments —income— to the Treasury Ministry.
For this investigation, El Faro obtained a copy of the income declarations that Bukele presented from 2007 to 2018 from a source in the Treasury Ministry who requested anonymity, citing reasons of personal safety. In 2007 and 2008, Bukele did not declare income. The documents also show that from 2011 and 2012 his main source of income was NRA, the business run at the time by Rodríguez.
El Faro requested an interview with Rodríguez on December 11 via email, but she did not respond. Press Secretary Ernesto Sanabria return a message over WhatsApp asking about the payments that Bukele received from NRA as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Nor did the president respond to an email sent to an address that he provided on his income statements.
Investigated by the AG
With Rodríguez at the head of the ad agency NRA in 2012, more employees of the Bukele family took company positions: Héctor Manuel Velásquez and Mario José Ricardo Rodríguez Fuentes, the brother of Claudia Juana Rodríguez. These two men founded Starlight, the parent company of the television channel TVX that —as El Faro revealed this October— received funds from the secret budget of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén.
As part of an investigation into the presidential budget, prosecutors found that Starlight received $420,688 in secret payments from the Sánchez Cerén administration from 2015 to 2018. When they asked Conan Castro, Legal Secretary of the Presidency, for records of payments to the company, he responded in April 2020 that they had no such records. In a subsequent search of records from the National Center of Records and Treasury Ministry, prosecutors found no listed justification for the payments to Starlight: “[Records] do not reflect that the company made sales to the Presidency or any other state institution that could have justified the payment received.”
The Attorney General’s Office named NRA in its report, citing Claudia Juana Rodríguez as the director and legal representative, Héctor Manuel Velásquez as vice-director, and Mario José Ricardo Rodríguez Fuentes as alternate director. Prosecutors also noted that Rodríguez had served as financial director of the Nuevo Cuscatlán Mayor’s Office and, when Nayib Bukele became mayor of San Salvador in 2015, he appointed her treasurer of her new office. According to company records, Rodríguez continued directing NRA while working as treasurer, until she was replaced in April 2018 by Ibrajim Bukele, one of the current president’s brothers who makes government decisions despite holding no formal position.
While at the San Salvador Mayor’s Office, Rodríguez made significant financial headway. Last week the digital news site Gato Encerrado published an investigation that revealed that she received unjustified payments totaling $1.2 million from that Mayor’s Office when Nayib Bukele presided there. In her final three weeks as treasurer the payments increased, and she received checks for a combined $230,000 that were not authorized by the municipal council. Two and a half months later, in August 2018, Rodríguez was named chief financial officer of Nuevas Ideas, the party founded by the Bukele family.
Two former prosecutors who investigated the secret budget of Sánchez Cerén told El Faro that the trust between Bukele and Rodríguez began with the president’s father, Armando Bukele. One of the sources, who similarly spoke on condition of anonymity for reasons of personal safety, recalled: “It’s not that she gained the president’s trust from being at his side in the mayor’s offices. She had worked for years in one of his father’s businesses, (...) as we learned in the course of another investigation that had nothing to do with the secret budget.”
Prosecutors also connected the ad company NRA to the cloning in 2015 of La Prensa Gráfica and El Diario de Hoy to spread false information. The Attorney General’s Office concluded that six people who supposedly worked for Nayib Bukele carried out the attacks from within an ad agency called Blue Group, creating the false sites to post content that ridiculed the owners of the newspapers. In the case file, the name “Nayib Bukele” appears next to the contact number that ordered the attacks. Attorney General Douglas Meléndez never brought a formal accusation against Bukele, despite his name appearing in technical reports alongside other current officials in his government. One of those mentioned was Sofía Medina, the current communications secretary of the Presidency. The case file lists Medina’s phone line as registered to NRA S.A. de C.V.
According to La Prensa Gráfica, at the time of their investigation prosecutors found at the time that Medina’s phone line had already been canceled. She did not respond to a request for comment over WhatsApp for this article. A court later dismissed charges against these six individuals, who now work for the Bukele administration in different areas.
Omnipresent behind the scenes
Since 2019, during the Bukele presidency, Rodríguez has assumed multiple key financial roles. She was named chief financial officer of the Presidency, was appointed as head of the Directorate of Municipal Works, an agency centralizing funds to municipalities, and substituted chief of cabinet Carolina Recinos as coordinator of the Council to Administer the Special Fund of Resources from the National Telecommunications Administration (FANTEL). Her brother was appointed president of the Central Reserve Bank.
In November 2020, Rodríguez also replaced Legislative Assembly President Ernesto Castro in the coordination of the board of directors of the Emergency Committee, tasked with managing $2 billion in loans to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S. Foreign Agents Registry (FARA), she appears as the delegate of the Presidency in signing contracts to improve the image of the Salvadoran head of state in Washington, D.C.
She is now center-stage in Salvadoran politics. On November 30, at the president’s request, the Assembly appointed her as presidential designee, after four years of failing to meet the constitutional requirement to fill the position and without following legal protocols in her selection. She has yet to appear before the press or make any public statements regarding her new position. Ruling-party legislators claim she was sworn-in in private.
Legislators also approved a decree allowing Bukele to maintain immunity from prosecution, the Presidential Battalion security detail, and other presidential prerogatives while he illegally participates in the February presidential election. Bukele claims that Rodríguez will make all decisions until interim head of state until June, when he plans to be sworn-in to a second term, but the decree granting him this leave of absence also indicated that Bukele would “of course not forfeit the position that he holds.”
