The audio recordings of conversations held between Ernesto Castro and Alejandro Muyshondt at Casa Presidencial —the Salvadoran President’s Office— provide an important piece of the Bukele regime puzzle.
At the time that these conversations took place, in August 2020, Castro was serving as Nayib Bukele’s private presidential secretary, and Muyshondt as his national security advisor. The casual, everyday way that two officials close to the president spoke privately of committing illegal acts, of intercepting the communications of journalists and opposition politicians, and of protecting, for the benefit of their boss, the President of the Republic, various public officials under investigation for corruption or drug trafficking, provides yet another alarming confirmation of the mafioso character of the men responsible for installing a dictatorship in El Salvador.
“Let our bad guys be our bad guys,” Castro told Muyshondt after the security advisor warned him about corruption in the government. “It’s the outsiders who want to fuck with us.” The phrase defines the regime’s agenda to a tee: to protect its own —even if they are drug traffickers, corrupt officials, or criminals— and to persecute its critics, especially journalists.
Castro’s words were not spoken in the abstract; they have a shocking concreteness in the context of the conversations, with regard to protecting their own and persecuting “the outsiders.”
Muyshondt warned the private secretary that agents from the United States and from El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office —which at the time was not yet under Bukele’s control— had questioned the protections provided by the Salvadoran government to then-GANA party legislator Guillermo Gallegos, who was under investigation for drug trafficking, and to the director of El Salvador’s Bureau of Prisons, Osiris Luna Meza, who is accused of serious acts of corruption.
The president’s private secretary said in the recordings that the State Intelligence Agency (OIE) had informed them of “transfers involving [Gallegos’] accounts abroad,” but told Muyshondt that Gallegos is Bukele’s friend, and that therefore nothing should be done: “He is a good friend of Herbert [Saca] and a good friend of Nayib,” Castro detailed.
In August 2020, the Police Intelligence Sub-Directorate (SIPOL), an office of the National Civil Police (PNC), had already profiled Bureau of Prisons Director Osiris Luna as the operator of an organized criminal network that included Congressman Gallegos. The agency also profiled Herbert Saca, who served as an advisor to President Antonio Saca and had become quite close to Bukele. In the organizational map of the criminal network created by SIPOL, Gallegos is identified as a drug trafficker and Osiris Luna as a drug distributor recruited by Gallegos. Herbert Saca, the police report reads, “is under investigation in the United States for his links to drug traffickers.” Both men operated, and continue to operate, under the protection of President Nayib Bukele.
Muyshondt oversaw a team of 15 people —paid using public funds— who were tasked with spying on and attacking critics of the regime, disseminating lies on social media, and defaming journalists. In the audios revealed last weekend, the former national security advisor even brags about having taken down the Revista Factum website through an attack on its servers. In other words, it was a government program to disseminate lies, control public opinion, and attack critics.
Indeed, the very purpose of these meetings was to install, at the request of the President’s Office, a parallel and illegal intelligence center for wiretapping journalists and politicians. “By doing this, we can have a lot of different ways of keeping the man happy, these are things that the man needs,” explains Castro, a person who has spent decades cultivating his obsequiousness to the Bukele family. He knows he is proposing something illegal, and so does the security advisor, but they don’t seem to care. Muyshondt even explains that they have a protocol, which he calls “Hiroshima,” to prevent the Attorney General’s Office from discovering evidence of their activities in the event of a raid.
It is strange that Muyshondt would have recorded these conversations, in which he confesses his own crimes, too. One might assume he was trying to protect himself from something — that he distrusted the very people with whom he had become politically associated.
According to the recordings, which are the basis of journalist Hector Silva’s exposé, Muyshondt had already warned the private secretary that Bureau of Prisons Director Osiris Luna, together with Luna’s mother, had created a corruption ring and were freely appropriating funds from ASOCAMBIO, an entity created by the Ministry of Security to manage prison commissary stores. He also said he talked to Bukele’s brother, Ibrajim, and the president of the ruling Nuevas Ideas party, Xavi Zablah, who is also the president’s cousin, and warned both of them of Gallegos’ links to drug trafficking. Instead of distancing themselves from the accused, the Bukele family shut the doors on Muyshondt.
We know what happened next: Bukele expelled the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIES), which had been investigating corruption related to government contracts during the pandemic. Nuevas Ideas swept the 2021 legislative elections, and then Bukele dismissed the Attorney General. The new AG appointed by the president shuttered the special unit investigating high-level corruption and shelved those investigations. Osiris Luna remains in charge of the Bureau of Prisons; Gallegos and Herbert Saca (and his functionaries, like Ernesto Sanabria) are still in Casa Presidencial; Ernesto Castro is president of the Legislative Assembly; and Alejandro Muyshondt is dead.
Muyshondt’s death in February 2024 followed his arrest and subjection to beatings and torture, as revealed by Revista Factum in a recent documentary. His fall from grace most likely began right after these conversations in 2020. Muyshondt insisted on resisting corruption and his allies stopped taking his calls. When no-one in Casa Presidencial would listen to him, he began publicly denouncing officials for acts of corruption. He was arrested in August 2023. Bukele himself announced his arrest, accusing him of revealing government information.
Muyshondt was held in solitary confinement and tortured in the regime’s prisons. He died there, devoured by the system of criminal impunity and the mafia that he had helped to empower. A mafia that continues to persecute its critics and opponents while protecting the allies whom its own police have profiled as drug traffickers and agents of corruption. A mafia that controls El Salvador’s present, and seeks to control our future.
