El Faro English shines a liight on Central America. Subscribe to our newsletter.
With the capture in Chiapas, Mexico, of César Humberto López Larios, alias “Greñas,” in early June, the entire Ranfla Nacional, or leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 in El Salvador, are now reportedly back in U.S. or Salvadoran custody. The Eastern District of New York is set to try 27 of them on Trump-era “narco-terrorism” conspiracy charges.
López had been on the run since he was released from pre-trial detention in October 2020, writes MS-13 researcher and El Faro contributor Carlos García in a report for El Faro English, while facing charges including two counts of homicide. Mexican prosecutors provided no information on the circumstances of his capture and transfer to the U.S.
The Bukele administration had negotiated with the Ranfla, as well as leaders of the rival 18th Street gang, for three years for a reduction in homicides. When the collapse of those talks in March 2022 led to a record spike in killings, the legislature responded within hours by enacting the state of exception still in effect today.
The U.S. Justice, State, and Treasury Departments hold that these negotiations took place. The Treasury sanctioned Bukele’s two top negotiators in December 2021 for their participation, while an indictment unsealed last year asserted that Bukele protected gang members from extradition and released one from prison without finishing his sentence.
“Eleven [ranfleros] remain in El Salvador,” writes García, “though Salvadoran authorities have not shown images of any of them since the state of exception began [in March 2022].”
El Faro journalist Carlos Martínez adds that “they have shown irrelevant, unknown members of the structure. The Ranfla’s whereabouts are an enormous mystery.”
Steven Dudley, director of InSight Crime and author of a 2020 book on the origins of MS-13, presses further: “It is very difficult to ascertain even who is in custody and who is not,” he asserts. “Something is holding the Salvadoran government back with regard to transparency and U.S. cooperation.”
U.S. prosecutors requested the extradition of 15 MS-13 leaders in 2020. The Supreme Court has denied at least four of these petitions, García notes. In January 2024, the Bukele-controlled Assembly stripped the Supreme Court of most extradition powers, handing them to the Attorney General’s Office led by loyalist Rodolfo Delgado.
Low-hanging fruit
Nine of the indicted leaders stand accused of forming the so-called Mexico Program allegedly to build relationships with Mexican criminal groups, and U.S. authorities have arrested in Mexico at least four of the seven defendants in their custody, writes García.
Dudley asserts that Mexican authorities are taking advantage of a legal gray area —removing select gang leaders to the United States rather than shipping them back to El Salvador— to amass political capital: “It is absolutely low hanging fruit for Mexico to win favor with U.S. law enforcement and State Department allies.”
“The gang problem is one that the Mexicans do not want to have; it is very much a second- or third-tier security problem there,” especially behind the cartels, Dudley adds.
As the indictment suggests, gang leaders now facing trial for alleged transnational drug crimes —it will take at least one or two years for that to happen— may give statements on their dealings with Bukele, but Dudley expects court records to in any case be tight-lipped.
“These cases will play out mostly in private. There is not a great history of the U.S. being forthcoming about information on sitting foreign presidents, whether it's Uribe in Colombia or Aristide in Haiti. Even when they leave power, we don't get a lot of information; it ends up being sealed.”
Central to the Justice Department plan are the terrorism charges. “That strategy was hatched during the Trump Administration under [former AG] Bill Barr to extend jurisdiction not only geographically, but also do things like wiretap without permission from the local government,” notes Dudley. “When they filed the charges I talked to the architects of the strategy, and that is their logic.”
The drug trafficking component is flimsier: “You’ve got a more than 40-year history of a gang with an organic structure to move drugs, and there are no cases, because they don’t do it. Recent events indicate that they are attempting to enter this market, but these are new developments. So what did the U.S. government have at their disposal to charge these guys? Terrorism was the low-hanging fruit. They don’t have much else.”
Claims of high treason
Within MS-13, a deeper crisis is also reaching a boiling point: the old-guard leadership appears to have lost all standing with its own ranks under the state of exception. Internal relations appear to have frayed by the perception that the heads had been negotiating with the government for personal rather than collective gain.
Gone are the days in 2012 when, in a rare press interview during the gang truce brokered by the Mauricio Funes administration, the Ranfla now on trial scoffed at the idea that they could fall apart: “Would you break up your family?” they snapped in a lengthy conversation newly translated by El Faro English. “The Mara Salvatrucha will not be disbanded.”
“Gang members who have spoken with El Faro currently depict the Ranflas as traitors,” says Martínez.
This is not a new sentiment: An El Faro investigation in January 2023, relying on gang sources and leaked police documents, revealed how frictions between leaders and ranks over the substance of negotiations with the Bukele administration nearly derailed those accords in November 2021, as gangs vented frustrations by committing dozens of murder
Those internal tensions also help explain the Bukele administration’s release of MS-13 leader Élmer Canales Rivera, alias “Crook” —also now in U.S. jail— one week after those murders, as a measure to steady the ship.
The state of exception accentuated the gangs’ internal rifts as authorities enforced a policy of hunger in prisons, reports of systematic torture emerged, and over 80,000 people have been jailed without the right to defense, often on grounds like “looking nervous”.
“All of those people [once subordinated in the gangs] have declared themselves independent, without having to obey anybody — neither the Sureño system of California, nor much less the Salvadoran system,” says Martínez.
A recent investigation by the Mesoamerican consortium Redacción Regional showed gang members scattered across the region, living in squalid conditions to avoid deportation.
“In the eyes of the gangs in other countries affected by what happens in El Salvador —Guatemala, Honduras, or even in the United States— those figures [the former gang leaders] are imagined to be responsible for destroying families,” he explains.
Community harms are a particularly sensitive subject for the former gang leaders, who insisted since the 2012 truce that the main motivation to negotiate with Salvadoran governments was to curb violence, improve living conditions, and minimize state repression for their loved ones and communities.
But for decades, Salvadoran gangs did just the opposite: they committed murders, kidnappings, and disappearances; tortured, raped, and displaced; and extorted their communities with a vicegrip on daily life. Under the state of exception, their presence in the streets was dismantled, as El Faro revealed in February 2023.
“The gang that we interviewed [in 2012] no longer exists,” stresses Martínez. “Those leaders no longer exercise the power that they had then. Their former gang is now undergoing an extremely complex mutation, the result of which is very difficult to anticipate.”
This article first appeared in the July 5 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
