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Former presidential security advisor Alejandro Muyshondt asserted to Ibrajim Bukele, the brother of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and to Xavier Zablah Bukele, the president of the Nuevas Ideas party and cousin of the president, that he and his collaborators had plotted various criminal strategies to launch a cyberattack against the computer system of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) amid the legislative elections held on Feb. 28, 2021. He spoke with Zablah in February, before the election, and with the president’s brother in May and June, months after the vote, in which the ruling party gained a two-thirds supermajority of the Legislative Assembly.
This was all registered in secret audio files taped in secret by Muyshondt himself. In the expletive-laden conversations, Muyshondt states that he has prepared strategies to “crash” the TSE computer system; “burn” computers; “launder money” through bitcoin to buy “packages” that would saturate the system until it collapsed; and that he had “stolen” the source code of the Tribunal. Despite this, neither the president's brother nor the leader of the ruling party make him see that what he is proposing implies an illegal conspiracy. Zablah is the only one to present a concern: he says he is afraid they will be discovered and that they will be viewed as “the bad guys”.
As recent journalistic investigations have shown, Muyshondt used to secretly record his interlocutors, even in conversations with the Presidency. El Faro has obtained some of these recordings, whose origin is the same as those published by journalist Héctor Silva in the Guatemalan outlet Prensa Comunitaria.
El Faro was alerted to the existence of these recordings by Muyshondt himself, shortly before his arrest in August 2023. The recordings, he said, were his “life insurance”. He was captured after publicly denouncing cases of corruption and drug trafficking within the ruling party's ranks. He died in state custody in February 2024. His relatives have denounced that his corpse showed serious signs of torture.
On Wednesday, October 2, El Faro sought comment and sent interview requests to the Communications Secretary of the Presidency, Sofía Medina, and to the president of Nuevas Ideas, Xavier Zablah, but they did not respond. As a norm since the start of Bukele's presidency in 2019, public officials and ruling party members have not given statements to El Faro prior to publication.
“We oversaturate that shit and, forget it, there is no count here.”
The conversation between Muyshondt and Zablah has been pinpointed by El Faro to Feb. 9, 2021, exactly one year after President Bukele took over the legislature with soldiers to demand the approval of a loan. They are accompanied in that conversation by Xavier Zablah Bukele's brother, David. At one point in the conversation, Muyshondt mentions his interlocutors’ last names: “You guys are [from the] Zablah Bukele [family].”
After commenting on President Bukele's decision to change his Twitter profile picture on Jan. 26, 2021 to that of the fictional character “General Aladeen”, from the comedy “The Dictator”, Muyshondt turns to why he believes that in the February 2021 elections the TSE was preparing to commit fraud. “I identified the fraud on December 14,” he says. Xavier Zablah responds: “Yes, yes, you were able to do it.” Muyshondt continues: “There has been time to correct those errors. The TSE has refused, and you met... you met with the pee-en-cee [PNC; in reference to someone from the National Civil Police], and one of my team members was there, the engineer Raúl Torres, and there I showed those sons of bitches that that shit was totally flawed,” he said.
Then Muyshondt reveals to Zablah where his conclusions come from: “Well, on December 14, I stole the source code of that shit (...) completely, and I told you and N (”en“) and (inaudible)....”
The source code is the set of lines of text with the instructions that a computer must follow to run an application or a program.
Muyshondt is referring to the fact that he illegally stole the code with which the TSE had been working on the software that was supposed to be used in the computers on Feb. 28, 2021. That night, digital technology was used for the first time in each Vote Reception Board (Junta Receptora de Votos, JRV). That means that the people working in each JRV were able to manually count the votes but, for the first time, they had the help of a computer to process and sort the data, and thus allow the preliminary results to be made known quickly, the same night of the elections.
However, on December 14, when Muyshondt had allegedly detected irregularities, the TSE had not finished designing the source code. It was completed only at the end of January, one TSE technician who was working on the computer equipment told El Faro, asking not to reveal his identity for fear of retaliation. The source explained that what was used in December was a prototype.
In the audio, Muyshondt also exposes to Zablah and David the real problem he foresees: If the results of the election were not what the ruling party expected, its own base, which he refers to as “that mob of assholes,” would create chaos.
“As for national security, if they commit fraud, the country goes to hell, because there will be no way to stop that mob of assholes from setting fire to the TSE,” he tells Zablah.
“That's my point,” replied the president of Nuevas Ideas. “I told him directly: I don't think we are going to post on Twitter or Facebook: 'Go and cause trouble'. No. Now it's not Nayib, everyone is on their own... They themselves will send everything to hell.”
Muyshondt insists that such a scenario could be dangerous for Bukele's image: “And with something like this we put the national security of the country at risk. Shit... internationally... what interests me is to protect the president because if there are mobs, the Executive is going to have to use the police, and then Nayib will no longer be Saint Nayib, but rather ‘Shit, they threw us to the police and this and that; we just want to help…’ Do you know what I'm saying? Not about the national security part but the part that can affect him. Anyhow, according to reports we know that the TSE refuses audits,” he insists.
The concerns of the then-presidential advisor are consistent with the climate of distrust toward the TSE laboriously promoted by Bukele's supporters. Since the end of 2020, in commercials and interviews, there was a media bombardment by different actors: President Bukele, allied legislators from GANA, leaders and candidates of Nuevas Ideas, the official propaganda media Diario El Salvador and Noticiero El Salvador, media held by CONAB such as Diario La Página and Órbita, as well as many YouTubers and pages of departmental and municipal headquarters of the Nuevas Ideas party, according to a tracking of publications by El Faro.
Muyshondt then he proposes possible solutions to the problem, comparing the electoral scenario with the Cold War: “So what I sent you is like Russia and the U.S.: they had nuclear arsenals and peace was maintained because one could destroy the other, only in this case it does not have the same cost as a nuclear arsenal, it is only a line of defense that if the TSE committs fraud, we crash the whole fucking system, but what is needed is [to have] power, because we would be throwing more than 300 gigabytes per second at that shit, we would slam it.... there is no way that the data can be transferred at that speed because there is nobody here, nobody... Because we would be injecting the system, with the five contracts, it would be 1.5 terabytes, that speed doesn't exist here. Maybe Tigo can give it to all their customers... but no, we oversaturate that shit, and forget it, there is no count here. That is the first path, what I told you. We made the calculation (...) Raúl [Torres, one of his collaborators] told me: ‘Look, the more the better: if you can, six.’ And I told him: ‘No, too much money.’ I said, ‘Let's keep it to five.’ It was the 600 for five, right?”
It is unclear exactly what he meant by these “contracts”. Muyshondt next proposed a plan to sign these “contracts” leaving as little trace as possible: “I have to launder the money, I have to transfer it to Bitcoin [at this moment, Zablah and David burst out laughing]... I mean, I am going to buy Bitcoin from another account, I am going to pay with Bitcoin, and there is no trace whatsoever. In other words, the last thing I want is a shitshow with the law.”
Then the security advisor moves to plan B: “The other line of defense that we have, and that I have worked on in a more raw way, I'll show you... everyone has a USB.” Zablah interrupts: “In fact, to hack the system...” but Muyshondt does not let him finish: “If you have a computer we can try, a computer that you don't care if we use, hard disk and all, motherboard... a USB, fuck... I, I'm a little crazy, I have the key to enter the servers, fuck, I have it here...”. Daniel is surprised: “That shit is intense!”
The audio records them handling devices, possibly a computer. Muyshondt is showing them something: “You have to leave it charging for three seconds... [A clicking sound is made like the hammer of a gun without a bullet] Then you've already burned the computer. So, walking around with this, fuck, it looks ugly, besides you have to walk around with this to charge it.” “Yes,” replies Zablah. And Muyshondt proposes an answer to this apparent problem: “Then the other solution is to leave it direct and go around burning the computers, which, fuck, we remove capacitors and all that shit and with this we burn the computer. But if we order these, they don't detect it, they don't know about it.”
It is then when the president of the official party, Bukele's cousin, raises his first objection: “What concerns me the most about this is, one, really, and I swear to God, I wouldn't want to do it, I simply wouldn't want to do it. Two... suppose it's necessary to defend something they are doing wrong, it's not because of us. Two, the problem is that we don't have enough capable people to be able to (...) There are going to be too many eyes, there are going to be too many people, we don't have tables (...) the majority (...) so I feel like…” Muyshondt interrupts: “Like they will say something to you?” Zablah picks back up: “Uh, it's not necessary, but it is very complicated. Of course, there is a big difference between that and this, and it's very funny and cool [laughs], but it's bullshit (...) Do you know what I'm afraid of? That they are going to catch one of us doing that, us stopping something bad that they are doing, and that will be the narrative: They are going to say that we are doing something bad, when we are not. That’s it. (...) Let's not leave them the slightest ability to say: 'Look at them... we found this' (...) It's not like that, but that's what they are going to think. In fact, anyone would think that.”
The president of the most powerful party in the country, after stating that he did not want to launch a cyberattack against the election results, expresses his fears, but does not directly ask Muyshondt to discard the idea.
It is Muyshondt who takes the option off the table: “Ok. This is ruled out, then. The other thing is undetectable, because the attacks would not come from here, they would come from Ukraine, from Bulgaria, fuck, from different places, they don't even know from where.”
As an example of this method, he cites denial-of-service (DOS) attacks that he claims to have successfully carried out against the media: “With one of these contracts, when the guys from [Revista] Factum were talking shit about Nayib, we left Factum out for a month [the Zablah brothers laugh again]... Those dudes had to invest about 50 thousand bucks for what they have now as a server [they laugh again]... It was expensive for them; they had to lose about a month of ads, plus the 50 thousand bucks they had to invest... GatoEncerrado is another one that spent a month out... as for El Faro, they have it in a fortress...”
Factum and GatoEncerrado suffered attacks like those described by Muyshondt in the conversation, but the former advisor exaggerated the effects of his maneuver. Ezequiel Barrera, the founder of GatoEncerrado, confirms that, between July 21 and 28, 2020, his outlet suffered a cyberattack that caused the digital magazine to be off the web for 48 hours, after publishing an investigation in which it was revealed that the Minister of Health, Francisco Alabí, favored his family with contracts during the pandemic. Revista Factum, through its director, César Castro Fagoaga, also confirmed that the outlet was attacked in October 2019, causing the magazine to be offline for seven days.
Both journalists confirm that their outlets were targeted with DOS attacks. These occur when a computer network succeeds in saturating a website with traffic in order to make it inaccessible to legitimate users. As seen in this article, Muyshondt used to exaggerate or simply lie about the effectiveness of his methods in order to score points with the political figures closest to President Bukele.
Muyshondt was willing to launch an operation the moment he received precise orders: “In case Vladimir or Zero-One give the word, or whatever you tell me, they say: ‘Look, son of a bitch, let's give it to those sons of bitches.”
As evidenced by recorded conversations recently published in other reports, the advisor also mentioned to Xavier and David Zablah that he had a security protocol in place in case the Attorney General's Office, which at the time was not yet in Bukele's hands, carries out an operation. “We in the office (...) have a Hiroshima protocol. We know that the Attorney General's Office is on our tracks... So, while the son of a bitch is keeping himself busy at the entrance, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa!” He makes a sound like things exploding. Everyone laughs.
David is surprised once again. “This motherfucker... ha, ha, ha. I've only seen that shit in movies.” Muyshondt explains, “What I'm afraid of, fuck, is that they'll find me and there will be a show again, like… in 2019.”
The advisor refers to his arrest by the Police in September 2019, three months into Nayib Bukele’s presidency, for expressions of violence against women.
“We crashed the system in order for there to be a manual count”
El Faro accessed two other conversations between the then-security advisor and President Bukele's younger brother, Ibrajim Bukele, part of the president's inner circle, who was also involved —despite not having any official appointment— in plans to convert Bitcoin as a legal currency in El Salvador.
Both conversations between Muyshondt and Ibrajim Bukele occurred after the February 2021 election. The first, this outlet determined, occurred between May and June of that year. Although they briefly address the electoral issue, much of the conversation focuses on the creation of a local cryptocurrency. That year, El Faro published videos of three meetings in which very similar topics were discussed and in which three people who appear in this audio participated: Muyshondt, his collaborator Raúl Torres, and Ibrajim Bukele. These conversations occurred on May 27 and June 4 and 7, 2021. The Bitcoin Law was approved on June 9 and did not include the creation of a new cryptocurrency.
In this conversation with Ibrajim Bukele —in which Muyshondt is accompanied by his collaborator Raúl Torres and an unidentified woman— the security advisor complains to Ibrajim that the Secretariat of Innovation, an office of the Presidency, never receives them: “Only when Vladimir and Fabrizio run into something do they turn to us,” he complains. Vladimir Hándal and Fabrizio Mena were appointed as secretary and undersecretary of Innovation in June 2019. They served in those positions until January 2023.
Muyshondt, to prove that his team of computer scientists was better trained than the staff of the Secretariat of Innovation, then repeats to Ibrajim his claim made months earlier to Xavier Zablah: “We stole the source code of the TSE in December and discovered that there was fraud.”
“Yes,” Ibrajim replies.
Muyshondt continues: “I alerted Vladimir. Nobody listened to us. Nobody did anything about it. 15 or 20 days before the elections, they shouted fraud. And indeed, there was going to be fraud. But we prepared with our team. We took over the TSE system for X amount of days to force a manual count.” This is a statement that he had not made to Zablah in the prior conversation reported in this article. But it is also false given that computers were also used at vote-counting tables.
Muyshondt cites this as a sign of the effectiveness of the unit he was coordinating. Ibrajim barely pays attention to the comment. But it was yet another exaggeration of the scope of his work to a member of the president’s inner circle. The technician who spoke with El Faro stated that the source code was designed completely at the end of January 2021 and that no computer had the software up to 24 hours prior to the election. There were two test schedules on February 7 and 14, but, as the technician explained, what was used on those days was “a prototype to make corrections.” The source explained that the prototypes were preliminary versions. As tests were carried out and faults were detected, the IT team corrected the code and refined it as election day approached.
The technician recalled that, before February, too, the computers had been run using test source code, a prototype. “The code hey say was leaked is not what they say it was,” he said. When asked if he considered that the prototype code had any type of error that would make any party conclude or suspect that there was going to be cheating, the technician responded: “No, it was impossible; what happened was that they didn't understand the code and that's why they said there was going to be fraud. They couldn't manipulate anything, and so they tried to discredit it,” he said.
The source added that in any electoral process it is normal for there to be cyberattacks, but noted that, in the case of 2021, no attack was significant. “Many of the attacks were made in the wrong direction, where there was nothing. The box where the computers were was sealed right after putting the code in the machine, because it had a board [JRV] number. And that was the only place it worked.”
In other words, the technician asserts that, even if they had stolen the source code, every computer had the instructions to work only at their specific Vote Reception Board.
Muyshondt also lied by claiming that, thanks to the alleged theft of the source code, they had forced the TSE to adopt a manual vote processing method, without using technology. The February 28 election did in fact use digital technology and the transmission of preliminary results that same night was considered successful.
The second meeting, at least as heard in that audio, was only between Muyshondt and Ibrajim. El Faro dates it on June 2, 2021 because, during the 65-minute recording, there is a specific time peg: “Yesterday were Nayib's two years.”
Muyshondt complains to Ibrajim about what he perceives as his exclusion from public events, in reference to the session of the Legislative Assembly in which President Bukele gave his state-of-the-nation address. “There are certain things in which it would feel good to participate. I don't mean having my photo taken or anything like that. But, damn, Nayib's two-year mark is something that, I say, they didn't include us,” he complains.
Ibrajim tries to calm him down by assuring him that it's not personal: “They didn't invite several people. We even arrived with my brother and he didn't have a seat. I had to tell Nayib to get a vice minister in,” he argues.
But Muyshondt is not satisfied: “Without sounding arrogant, you won the elections because we put our efforts together.”
Ibrajim responds: “I know.”
“And we crashed the system so that a manual count would be done,” Muyshondt lies again.
Ibrajim responds that not even the entire cabinet was invited, but Muyshondt replies: “I feel excluded. I mean, Ivania Hándal [was there]. And what the hell has that asshole done?” he said, in reference to the secretary for youth of Nuevas Ideas. He even questions the relevance of the newly elected legislators: “Even the deputies, the majority have won because of the N iin Nayib,” he says.
Ibrajim answers: “Everyone won because of that.”
