In March 2023, the Salvadoran Court of Accounts drafted a sentence ordering six employees of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAG) to return $60 million for food shipments not received for the Public Health Emergency Program (PES). The program, created in 2020 to bring food packages to vulnerable households during the pandemic, was used to make multimillion-dollar payments to foreign shell companies and suppliers that were not in the food business, including for products that were never delivered. The sentence exonerated former Minister Pablo Anliker, who approved the suppliers and ordered the payments, but blamed his subordinates, who were supposed to register the products received.
El Faro compiled all the invoices of irregular purchases: All of the orders were indeed signed by Anliker and the director of procurement, Lorenzo Corpeño. The judges determined that Anliker signed off on the direct contracting of the suppliers that ended up violating their contracts, but the draft sentence only condemned the six technicians: subordinates who under orders of Anliker and Corpeño made the payments for batches of food that were not received.
The lawsuit, which was served in August 2021 with a statement of objections by Court of Accounts auditors against the officials, questioned Anliker and a dozen employees for $133 million in unliquidated purchases. The Court found no evidence that the goods had been received. The $133 million represents 51 percent of the budget for the delivery of food packages in 2020. However, by early 2023 the judges had reduced the final amount in question —in addition to the number of responsible officials— from $133 million to $60 million: that amount was estimated as the shortfall of food not received.
The draft judgment contains 63 pages and is dated Feb. 27, 2023, two days before the State would lose the ability to demand restitution of public funds from the officials and employees. The document is signed by Judge Guillermo Suncín and Acting Judge Napoleón Domínguez.
Two sources from the Court of Accounts told El Faro that they had not been notified of this sentence before time expired, and that there were appeals requesting that the trial be declared lapsed. Suncín and Domínguez did not respond to multiple interview requests since July. The process is in the hands of the Court’s Chamber of Second Instance, which handles appeals, but El Faro was unable to verify whether the appeal was admitted. The Court’s communications department also did not respond to interview requests.
Anliker, a childhood friend of Bukele and founder of the ruling party Nuevas Ideas, directed the ministry from President Nayib Bukele’s first day in office, June 1, 2019, until April 7, 2021, when he was demoted to deputy minister of Agriculture, a position that also had immunity from prosecution. He left without further explanation two months later, on May 31, 2021. On July 1, 2021, he was sanctioned by the U.S. Government for “his involvement in acts of corruption and for having appropriated public funds for his personal benefit”, according to the description of the Section 533 Anti-Democratic Actors Report that justified his inclusion in the Engel List.
The documents and testimonies presented at trial proved the responsibility of Anliker and Corpeño in the main decisions of the PES: the selection of suppliers, the transfers of millions of dollars without requesting the required guarantees for the final delivery of the products, and also the lack of internal controls to guarantee the reception of the products as a condition to make the payments. In spite of all these negligences, on February 27, 2023, the judges of the Chamber drafted a judgment absolving Anliker and Corpeño from reimbursing public funds using “emergency purchasing guidelines”, a five-page document prepared by executive order at the Treasury Ministry, shortly after the decree of a national emergency in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, to disregard public procurement protocols.
Based on that guideline, the Court reasoned that Anliker decided the list of contractors without the need to justify that they had the capacity to fulfill the contracts, but that if these suppliers defaulted it was the contract administrators, who had no decision-making power, who were responsible for non-compliance. Thus, the Court moved to hold six Ministry employees responsible for $60 million in missing products. These amounts changed thanks to reports prepared by MAG employees, which were sent between August 2021 and March 2023, and which were mostly accepted by the judges, except for those that do not correspond with the records of entry of products at the General Directorate of Customs.
Among the employees named responsible are Élmer Arturo Amaya Quintanilla, a former financial director dismissed in 2020 who could not have access to information for his legal defense because the purchase files were sealed; Carlos Jesús Argueta Orellana, who had already passed away. The Court of Accounts proposed to ask the relatives or heirs of Argueta Orellana, who have never worked for the institution, to answer for the embezzlement. Amaya and Argueta's heirs were in the process of being convicted, along with four other employees, for $8.8 million of the $60 million.
Whenever a trial is declared lapsed, the Court of Accounts must notify the Attorney General’s Office and request an investigation to determine whether or not there was foul play in allowing the expiration. But the law does not establish deadlines. Former judges of the Court interviewed by El Faro say it has been common for files to remain in limbo and, as the magistrates change every three years, for casework to accumulate without a decision on whether to admit them or refer them to investigators.
From August 2021 to August 2023, the period of Anliker’s trial, those responsible for deciding whether to hear the appeal were the president of the Court and two magistrates of Second Instance: Roberto Anzora, María del Carmen Martínez Barahona, and Julio Guillermo Bendeck. In August 2023, the Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly elected Bendeck and José Rodríguez Flores as new magistrates; as president, they chose ruling party member Roxana Soriano. She was only in office until September 2024, when she was appointed president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, leaving the post vacant.
It is unclear whether Soriano and these magistrates made a decision regarding the trial. El Faro sought Anzora's version but he responded, through the secretary of the place where he currently works, that he no longer works at the CCR. The former president of the CCR, Roxana Soriano, was called and a message was left on December 9, but at press time there was no response. On Thursday, December 5, the Attorney General’s Office and the MAG were contacted to reiterate a request for an interview or comment for this publication, but at press time there was no response either.
Reduced liabilities
Auditors originally found a shortfall of $20 million for undelivered powdered milk, tuna and canned chicken from foreign suppliers. Of this money, on March 1, 2023, three years after the purchases occurred, the Chamber believed that two suppliers, whom the MAG paid $12 million, never delivered the goods: $7 million to the offshore company Aroum Group Inc., in the British Virgin Islands, and $5.1 million to Marhel Group, in Mazatlán, Mexico. According to testimony, the Ministry asked Aroum Group for an explanation in March 2021, and was answered by company representative Cristina Manzano. She explained that the invoices for the milk “reported a different grammage value than the contracted one, which generated a discrepancy in the invoiced amount,” wrote the Ministry. “She sent corrected invoices.”
With this, the Ministry told the Court there had been no overpayment to Aroum Group. “It was an error by the Supplier when invoicing the supply of milk,” the Ministry responded in writing. As for Marhel Group, judges used customs documents to determine that the MAG paid this second company $1.65 million for product not received, plus $3.4 million for excess payment for canned chicken and tuna.
MAG contract administrators also submitted receipts and other documentation accounting for $1.2 million in macaroni purchased from a Brazilian company and $7.8 million pending liquidation. On these grounds, the draft sentence reduced the $20 million in liabilities to $12 million, and ordered repayments: $3.3 million from the heirs of Carlos Jesús Argueta, from Ezequiel Urías Aguilar and Amilcar Landaverde, who were contract administrators, and from Teresa Uribe, the institutional treasurer. It also ordered Amaya, the former financial director, to pay back $8.8 million.
For the largest segment of contracts, 43 purchases for which the MAG paid $123 million, the Ministry only had provided documents to prove that it received products worth $13 million, leaving a shortfall of $110 million. But the judges ultimately reduced this liability by more than half, to $45.7 million.
Some $6 million of this money was reduced following a financial audit, even though the judges did not explain which products accounted for that reduction. The judges slashed another $56 million, despite lacking documentation showing that batches of product from three contracts were in fact received by the MAG: another contract with Aroum Group, another with Marhel Group, and a third with the firm Tdx Trading. The judges determined that, since they would be sentenced for the $12 million in the prior claim, it was appropriate to acquit — even though one claim had to do with paid product that did not enter the country and the other with product for which there were no reception certificates to prove that, after passing through customs, it was received by the MAG.
The second argument was that the emergency procurement guidelines allowed contract administrators to unilaterally prepare product reception certificates after the fact. The contract administrators presented proof of receipt dated between Aug. 1, 2021 and Feb. 28, 2023, for products purchased in March and April 2020. Proof of receipt dated more than a year after the purchases took place was also cited to dismiss irregularities regarding reportedly undelivered products from three more suppliers: the accounting firm Castillo Guevara y Asociados, for $293 thousand; the company Trade Winds, for $409 thousand; and La Granjita, represented by Carmen Yolanda Menéndez Quezada, for $1.77 million. The Chamber accepted these documents, except for those not supported by customs documents.
As for the block of $45 million, the draft sentence ordered reimbursal from employees Luis Miguel Segovia Granillo (deputy director of agricultural economics), Ezequiel Urias Aguilar Tobías (contract administrator), Amilcar Daniel Landaverde Lemus (contract administrator), Teresa Elizabeth Uribe Hernández (institutional treasurer) and the heirs of Carlos Jesús Argueta Orellana (contract administrator).
The Court of Accounts also found that the MAG transferred $2.55 million for food-bundling services by a Nice Moon, a Panamanian shell company owned by brothers Roberto and Thomas Bogarín Rangel, Venezuelan executives who were also investigated for defrauding Panamanian Social Security during the pandemic. The judges found that volunteers from the Salvadoran Armed Forces had in fact done the bundling, but they determined that the personnel who obeyed Anliker’s orders should reimburse the state: “Condemn the heirs of Carlos Jesús Argueta Orellana, contract administrator; Ezequiel Urías Aguilar Tobías, contract administrator, and Amílcar Daniel Landaverde Lemus, contract administrator.”
Prosecutors sit on case against Anliker
By the time the trial began in August 2021, the Attorney General’s Office had already incorporated Anliker and at least eight companies mentioned in the Court of Accounts’ case into its broader investigation, known as “Operation Cathedral,” overseen by the now-defunct Special Anti-Mafia Group.
Prosecutors were preparing criminal charges against Anliker for “breach of duty”, and and an accusation of “arbitrary acts” against Treasury Ministry official Jazmín Arteaga, the author of the Covid-19 emergency guidelines that suspended procurement procedures, leaving public institutions unprotected. “Jazmín Arteaga Chávez acted illegally by issuing the guidelines for emergency purchases in excess of what is regulated in decree 606, specifically to the type of guarantees and advance payments to suppliers,” says a document in the Cathedral file. “The advance payment should have been subject to the existence of a suitable document that guarantees that the supply will be received.”
Prosecutors concluded, too, that the Ministry of Agriculture contracts under scrutiny had indeed been signed by Anliker, and that instructions to personnel were given by Corpeño: “In all purchasing processes this procedure was documented,” wrote prosecutors, as they prepared an indictment against both men for failing to provide justification for each authorized contract and provider. Instead, the Special Anti-Mafia Group wrote, they had chosen contractors “without having the technical and financial capacity to do so.”
The prosecutors’ unit was dismantled after the illegal removal of Attorney General Raúl Melara on May 1, 2021. The Attorney General’s Office, under Bukele loyalist Rodolfo Delgado, has provided no indication of progress in the investigation into Ministry of Agriculture irregularities during the pandemic.
*Additional reporting from Gabriel Labrador
