El Salvador, a country with the highest prison population rate in the world and an overcrowding of at least 130 percent, has offered to receive inmates of any nationality who are being held in the United States, as announced Monday night by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his tour of Central America and the Caribbean. The announcement was complemented Tuesday morning by the Salvadoran ambassador in Washington, Milena Mayorga, who revealed that, during the diplomat's visit, President Bukele asked him “as a point of honor” that among those deported to El Salvador are gang leaders, some of whom secretly negotiated with his administration a decrease in homicides and electoral support.
“The President, in an act of extraordinary friendship toward our country, has agreed to the most extraordinary and unprecedented immigration agreement in the world,” Rubio said. According to the diplomat, in addition to receiving undocumented Salvadorans in the United States, Bukele agreed to receive “any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal of any nationality, whether from MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua, and house them in his jails.”
In addition, the Salvadoran president also offered to “house in their jails dangerous U.S. criminals detained in our country, including U.S. nationals and legal residents. No country has ever made such an offer of friendship.” But the latter has not yet been agreed to. “It is an offer made by President Bukele. Obviously there are legal aspects to consider. We have a Constitution,” Rubio clarified Tuesday upon his arrival in San José, Costa Rica, his second-to-last stop in Central America. “But it is a very generous offer to outsource for a fraction of the cost some of the most dangerous and violent criminals we have in the United States.”
According to Bukele, the United States will pay a fee that will allow El Salvador to make its prison system sustainable, but no authority has detailed the amount.
The prisons that the Salvadoran government has offered to incarcerate people sent by the United States are collapsed and are, since the installment of the state of exception in March 2022, places without independent supervision in which systemic torture, murders, and deaths due to medical negligence have been widely registered. They are, moreover, directed by Osiris Luna, an official sanctioned both by the Magnitsky Act of the U.S. Treasury Department and by the Engel List, published by the State Department now headed by Marco Rubio.
The more than 80,000 detentions accumulated since March 27, 2022, when the exception regime began, have saturated an already overcrowded system. “There are no institutions prepared to receive migrants according to rights or the minimum of assistance, whether or not these migrants have committed crimes,” says economist Tatiana Marroquín, a former legislative advisor in the Treasury Commission. “Without institutionality it doesn't matter how much money the United States gives Nayib Bukele's government; we would be guaranteed institutional chaos and rights violations,” says Marroquín.
Receiving these incarcerated persons is a time bomb for a prison system with an overcrowding of at least 130 percent, as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) reported last year in reiterating calls for the state of exception to end. The figure increases if one excludes the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT), whose real capacity has not been determined, but which according to Bukele has capacity for 40,000 inmates.
As of March 2024, El Salvador had a prison population of 109,000 people, according to the World Prisons Brief (WPB). According to a report by La Prensa Grafica, this placed the country as the one with the highest incarcerated population per capita: El Salvador has 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, more than double second-place Cuba, with 794.
The press and human rights monitors have documented cases of torture and hundreds of deaths in prison. Some of these deaths are due to negligence in the medical care of prisoners, but also to attacks, asphyxiation, and beatings. As of December 2024, the number of deaths in prisons had risen to 349, according to the organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, which has been keeping a tally since the beginning of the regime. The IACHR also documented the testimony of inmates who witnessed abortions in Bukele's prisons.
Before the state of exception, the 22 existing prisons had capacity for 27,000 people and the state reported 37,000 inmates. Overcrowding was the norm. If official figures indicating that 83,000 people have been detained since the regime began are taken as true, and the at least 7,000 that the government said it “released” because they had proven their innocence are subtracted, the prison population now stands at around 113,000.
In August 2022, the United Nations also became aware of reports of torture and ill treatment in prisons. Two working groups and four special rapporteurs under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights asked the Salvadoran State to investigate in-custody deaths. Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado said in December that they are still investigating the in-prison deaths, although in June 2023 he had said that 142 deaths had been shelved because, he said, there was no crime to prosecute.
The announced agreement exceeds in scope the one El Salvador signed in September 2019 with the United States during Donald Trump’s first administration. That year, after the emergence of migrant “caravans”, Trump managed to get El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to sign “safe-third-country” deals. The plan was fully implemented only in Guatemala, and in El Salvador there were other expressions of alignment with Washington, such as the creation of border patrols.
MS-13 negotiators
On Tuesday morning, Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States Milena Mayorga confirmed in a television interview that Bukele wants Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang leaders awaiting trial in New York to be sent back to El Salvador. “The president was blunt and told Rubio: I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States. He told him exactly, we want the gang leaders deported to us, I think it was a matter of honor,” Mayorga said.
Seven of the 24 MS-13 leaders are in U.S. custody stemming from two federal indictments for alleged crimes such as conspiracy to provide and conceal material support for terrorists, conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism that transcend national borders, conspiracy to finance terrorism, and narco-terrorism. The Justice Department mentions officials of the Bukele administration by name and surname as part of the Salvadoran government’s secret and illegal negotiation to manipulate the homicide figures.
U.S. prosecutors also asserted that, as part of the accords with the Mara Salvatrucha, the Salvadoran government protected gang members wanted for crimes in the United States by skirting their extradition.
Osiris Luna Meza, director of Penal Centers, was included among ‘Engel List’ visa sanctions in July 2021 for his involvement in diverting food purchased to deliver to the population during the Covid-19 emergency. Later that year, the United States again sanctioned Luna with the Magnitsky Act, this time for his role in the MS-13 leadership’s negotiations with the Bukele administration.
The U.S. Department of Justice formally began its pursuit against the top MS-13 leadership, known as the Ranfla Nacional, in 2020. Since then, it has captured six of the gang members it intends to try in New York outside of El Salvador’s borders.
Élmer Canales Rivera, known as Crook, is one of the leaders. He was arrested in Mexico in November 2023, two years after being secretly released by Nayib Bukele’s administration even though he was serving a 40-year prison sentence. Mexico sent him to the United States, where he had an extradition warrant.
Audio published by El Faro revealed that a Bukele official took him out of jail and transferred him to Guatemala, as part of the agreement between the government and the gangs. The Salvadoran government attempted unusual operations to recover Crook, such as conspiring with a fugitive gang leader to negotiate with a Mexican cartel to kidnap the MS-13 leader and transfer him to El Salvador. The gang member conned the Bukele government, recorded conversations with the police chief of the Elite Division against Organized Crime, and is now under U.S. protection.
Of the 27 defendants charged in the New York court, prosecutors named, in addition to Crook, six gang members for their direct participation in the negotiations with Bukele's government, known by the aliases Vampiro, Renuente, Cisco, Big Boy, Cruger, and Snayder. They are among those who Bukele has requested from the United States, in the words of Ambassador Mayorga, as a “point of honor.”
