One of the authors of Nayib Bukele’s strategy to draw close to the Make America Great Again movement in the United States is Argentinian advisor Damian Mathías Merlo Denebardi. Merlo is registered with the U.S. Justice Department since January 2022 as a lobbyist on behalf of the Office of the President of El Salvador via Latin America Advisory Group LLC, where he is a managing partner.
U.S. public records show the payments he received for a slice of this work. Between April and June 2023, Merlo’s firm took in five transfers of $65,000 USD each, totaling $325,000, for at least nine months of labors by that point on behalf of the Bukele administration. At the time of filing he was set to receive a sixth outstanding payment, thereby reaching $390,000, but the records available online do not state whether this latter check was issued. On February 13, Merlo submitted documents to the Justice Department stating that his contract with the Salvadoran Presidency was set to end in under four months, on May 31, 2024.
While the Salvadoran government’s own public-information portal does not provide information on his contractual duties, the U.S. documents record his lobbying to strengthen relations between El Salvador and the United States, chiefly by reaching out to Republicans in Congress and right-wing influencers supportive of Donald Trump. These documents also reveal a photocopy of the contract he signed in January 2022 with Claudia Juana Rodríguez de Guevara, at the time Bukele’s private secretary.
Documents filed under the Foreign Agents Registry Act (FARA) record at least 15 meetings with conservative U.S. politicians, some of whom traveled to San Salvador for the inauguration of Bukele’s unconstitutional second term. Among them is Florida Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. One report filed by Merlo listed one text message, four emails, and an in-person meeting with Salazar —a former journalist who is close to right-wing movements in the hemisphere and has endorsed Donald Trump for president this year— in May and June 2023.
Salazar appeared at the National Palace for Bukele’s inauguration alongside Venezuelan advisor Sara Hanna, an important operative in the president’s inner circle, as well as Colombian politician Carlos Felipe Mejía, who is close to former President Álvaro Uribe. After the ceremony, Salazar posed for a picture with Bukele, writing online that “we need a Bukele in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua”.
Merlo, a foreign policy advisor to the Bukele brothers, bills himself as a sort of ambassador to the Trump-aligned Right. El Faro asked the Communications Secretariat of the Presidency via phone call and text messages if the meetings recorded in the U.S. FARA reports were held to invite a MAGA delegation to Bukele’s inauguration, but the Presidency did not respond.
While Merlo has yet to report his 2024 lobbying activities to the Department of Justice, he met in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland with Matt Schlapp, chairman of the conference, and Mercedes Schlapp, who from 2017 to 2019 was the director of strategic communications for the Trump White House. They attended Bukele’s June inauguration alongside former U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson (2019-2021), Merlo, and Donald Trump Jr., a surrogate for his father and executive of the Trump Organization.
The FARA reports also show that Merlo has met with far-right influencers Tucker Carlson and Emmanuel Rincón. They record communications with the office of U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who also attended Bukele’s inauguration, and with other conservatives who did not attend the swearing-in, such as Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. Rubio, a prominent member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee key to Republican policymaking in Latin America, has criticized the Biden administration’s sanctions imposed on members of the Bukele administration and in the last two years has promoted a thawing between the U.S. Embassy and the Bukele administration.
These public records on the Salvadoran lobby in Washington point to public funds invested by the Bukele administration in an ongoing and concerted effort to strengthen ties with the U.S. Republican Party.
