Ronald Johnson, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from 2019 to 2021, told the U.S. Senate that, during his time in San Salvador, “I don’t doubt that it could have” been the case that Pegasus spyware was used against civil society or U.S. officials. Although on March 13 Johnson denied having direct knowledge that “they [the Salvadoran government] had employed Pegasus against anyone in El Salvador,” he revealed that “I was constantly emphasizing to everyone that I spoke with, from President Bukele throughout his government, that there must be no surveillance on anyone that works for the Embassy” who met with members of the opposition, civil society, and businessmen. These meetings, according to the ambassador, do not “imply that we support any one side more than we do the other.”
This suspicion of surveillance against U.S. officials is the most direct public statement by a U.S. diplomat about the possible use of Pegasus by the Bukele government. Since December 2022, Pegasus has been the subject of a lawsuit in California by 18 members of El Faro whose devices were hacked and spied on between July 2020 and November 2021 with this software in El Salvador. The developer of Pegasus, NSO Group, operates in Israel and sells it to governments around the world with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, under the premise of fighting organized crime. There is ample evidence that the software was used in countries around the world to spy on opponents and journalists.
Johnson led the diplomatic mission in El Salvador from September 2019 to January 2021. A year later, in early 2022, The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Access Now revealed 35 cases of people surveilled with Pegasus in El Salvador. The researchers identified an operator of the software on Salvadoran soil, whom they dubbed “Torogoz.” Among the targets are 22 members of El Faro, as well as other Salvadoran journalists and columnists, members of civil society, and human rights activists.
Johnson made this statement about Bukele’s El Salvador at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to evaluate his candidacy for ambassador to Mexico. He also revealed that he had fired a contractor in El Salvador for an unauthorized meeting with a journalist.
Regarding Bukele’s armed incursion into the Legislative Assembly in February 2020, Johnson said that he had insisted to him just before: “Don’t do this.” Flanked by soldiers, Bukele usurped the first organ of the Salvadoran state, claiming that he did so to speed up a security loan that the Assembly, which he did not yet control, was delaying in granting him. Bukele claimed that, inside the usurped building, he spoke to God and that God asked him to be patient and not dissolve the Assembly.
“I do not approve of the presence of the Armed Forces in the Assembly yesterday and felt relieved that that tense situation ended without violence,” Johnson tweeted in the afternoon the next day. “Now I recognize the calls for patience and prudence. I join all the actors calling for a peaceful dialogue to move forward.” This month, Johnson played down the incident, asserting that on other occasions, compared to Feb. 9, 2020, “the Assembly in El Salvador had not been nearly that peaceful.”
Now President Donald Trump has promoted him: He has proposed Ambassador Johnson for Mexico, a key mission that touches on conflictive areas of the new U.S. administration’s agenda and discourse: trade, drug trafficking, and migration. Democratic senators, including Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, took the opportunity to question Johnson not only about the neighboring country, but also about the “massive use” of Pegasus in El Salvador against civil society and U.S. officials, or how his “close friendship” with Bukele as head of the Embassy “led to a downplaying of your criticism of his anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies.”
Before Congress, Johnson skillfully crossed party lines, complimenting senators from both parties and dodging most of the criticism from the Democratic side, such as this last one, to which he simply did not reply. On Pegasus, he denied having knowledge of any specific case: “I was not aware that Pegasus was used against anyone in El Salvador. I don’t doubt that it could have happened, but I was not aware of it,” he replied to a question from Shaheen. He now awaits the Senate to finish evaluating and to vote on his confirmation.
“There are also reports that one of the Embassy employees who was investigating some of these anti-democratic activities of the president was fired summarily for that,” Shaheen said. ”Were you aware of this? Were you involved in any decision to fire anyone who was investigating President Bukele’s authoritarian activities?”
Johnson learned, he replied, that “a contractor who had been in country for a long time” had held “an unauthorized meeting with a member of the press,” so he called department heads and security to investigate what information might have been leaked. “I deferred to his boss, really, as to what the final disposition should be in that case,” he concluded, “but I know one of the first questions I’ve always received on any security clearance interview is, ‘Have you conducted any unauthorized meetings with the media or press?’ And apparently this individual had.”
A “great friend” to Bukele
Johnson is not a career diplomat —like the current ambassador in San Salvador, William Duncan— nor was he a political appointment from the ranks of major Republican financiers: In El Salvador he was the first U.S. ambassador with a military or intelligence background. According tothe John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, he led combat operations in El Salvador in the 1980s as an “authorized military advisor” during the civil war. Starting in 1984, he led a Special Forces battalion in Panama. After retiring with the rank of colonel, a “second career” at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gave way to senior liaison posts at Southern Command (Southcom) and Special Operations Command (Socom).
He presented his credentials in El Salvador in September 2019, three months after Bukele took office, while the new president —who began his political career with the FMLN, the former guerrilla group and traditional left-wing party— was selling himself to Trump and the Heritage Foundation as a conservative leader respectful of democracy. He remained in San Salvador until the inauguration of former President Joe Biden in January 2021. Johnson publicly showed closeness to Bukele, promoting cooperation against gangs and to curb migration with the Police and the Attorney General’s Office, even going so far as to persecute migrants as “coyotes” for having coordinated their departure from El Salvador in WhatsApp groups.
These were days when the slogan #SocioConfiable (“reliable partner”) was ever-present on the Embassy’s social networks, projecting a fluid and close relationship between the Bukele and Trump administrations. Bukele, for his part, decorated Johnson a week before his departure with the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán, a recognition he had created days earlier for the occasion. The relationship also extended beyond protocol: In December 2020, Bukele and Johnson posted a photo of themselves dining on lobster in Miami. The ambassador also attended the baptism of the president’s daughter. “A great friend is leaving,” Bukele said as he bade farewell on Jan. 18, 2021.
During Johnson's period in El Salvador, Bukele took some of the first steps against the separation of powers: At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he accused the Constitutional Chamber of seeking the deaths of “tens of thousands of Salvadorans” by limiting his quarantine decrees, which included a strict curfew and lockdowns in confinement centers supported by a large police and military deployment in the streets.
A marketing crisis
On Feb. 9, 2020, a major scandal made international headlines: Bukele threatened to dissolve the Assembly if the deputies did not approve a security loan for him. Two days earlier, at a press conference alongside Ambassador Johnson, Bukele called an extraordinary session for Sunday afternoon, while refusing to give details to opposition auditors about the use of a loan for his flagship “Territorial Control Plan”. Executive sources told El Faro that the threat was an exercise in marketing spun out of control, designed to divert attention from other problems affecting the president’s image on social media: a crisis over algae-contaminated water in San Salvador and another over a controversial private flight by Vice Minister of Security Osiris Luna, paid for by a Mexican security company.
“The key is to choose the conflict and always win it,” said one of the government sources who spoke to El Faro. “A month before, they had this card: The Legislative Assembly is the most hated. In the polls it comes out as the worst evaluated and people even pay to go and insult the deputies,” he says. ”So what you do is find a cause; you choose who to generate the conflict with and make the other side [the Assembly] give in to pressure.”
Bukele even revoked the security details of the opposition deputies for 12 hours the Friday beforehand, after having convened the session. This measure was to pressure the legislators, involved officers told El Faro. Bukele entered the Assembly surrounded by soldiers with long rifles. “It is very clear who is in control of the situation,” he said in the chair of the president of the legislature. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, vice-presidential candidate with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the highest-ranking Democrat for the Western Hemisphere, questioned Johnson about February 9. “I am publicly on the record as saying that I did not condone what he [Bukele] did,” replied the ambassador. “And something that few people know is that I was in contact with him moments before he made the decision, and I was telling him not to go: ‘Do not do this.’”
Johnson qualified this criticism by describing Bukele’s incursion into the Assembly —in which he appeared to be praying, but announced shortly afterwards, in a speech to thousands of supporters, that God “asked me for patience” not to dissolve the legislature— as “peaceful”. He said he had learned of the plan “hours before” Bukele and the soldiers entered the Salón Azul. “It was on a Sunday, and it was an emergency session of congress, and some members resented that they were being called in and didn’t show up,” he said. “There were people on both sides demonstrating. It was a truly peaceful demonstration, and one thing that I’ve used to highlight the entry into the Assembly: President Bukele has no plainclothes security. That [the soldiers] was the only security he has.”
Johnson told the senators that, on other occasions, “the Assembly in El Salvador had not been nearly that peaceful. But we did address it, and I criticized him publicly for doing that, as well as privately. We had long discussions about it.”
The Constitutional Court had a different interpretation: “Armed forces cannot be employed for political, partisan, or other unconstitutional purposes that are not constitutionally legitimate,” wrote the magistrates. “The wielding of weapons and active-duty military officials’ current positions of authority are apt to cause intimidation and influence people’s decisions for reasons other than their political convictions.” According to the Court, the actions of the Presidency constituted a “continued threat against the government’s political system and separation of powers through public and military force.”
Bukele’s storming of the Assembly was so controversial among the diplomatic missions that, two days later, the government summoned some 60 ambassadors and multilateral representatives to a meeting to try to calm the waters. In an audio obtained by El Faro, Japanese Ambassador Kazuyoshi Higuchi broke his silence: “Losing a good image is one day, but recovering an image takes longer. That’s why the event in the Assembly affected almost all the diplomats and it was a bad image, but it takes a long time to recover the country’s image. I hope you don’t repeat it next time, I don’t know... tomorrow, Saturday or Sunday, don’t repeat it... You'll lose more confidence with the diplomats.”
Conservative allies
Bukele did not carry out his threat to dissolve the Assembly. But the international image of his government worsened on May 1, 2021, almost a year and a half after Johnson's departure and after the legislative elections of February 2021. That night, hours after Bukele's new qualified majority took office in the legislature, the deputies illegally removed the attorney general and the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court by executive order. The president of the Assembly, Ernesto Castro, Bukele’s former private secretary, accused the Chamber of imposing itself as a “superpower” above the Executive.
Key figures within Trump’s current circle, from Elon Musk, White House advisor and campaign financier, to Donald Trump Jr., have expressed admiration for the agenda of Bukele, whose regime of exception turns three years old this week, and his removal of the magistrates four years ago. Following some court injunctions against Trump’s agenda, his operatives have accused judges of violating the executive branch purview. Bukele has also described these injunctions as a “judicial coup” in the United States, drawing applause from the MAGA world.
Bukele does not say this without irony in San Salvador, where his removal of the Constitutional Chamber magistrates was branded a “technical coup d’état”. It led to an alleged suspension of USAID cooperation to Salvadoran institutions complicit with the Bukele administration in the removals. Ambassador Jean Manes, who preceded Johnson in San Salvador, returned as chargé d’affaires at the end of May, while nominations in Washington for new ambassadors languished in the Senate and the Biden administration sought to chart a course in El Salvador after the coup against the Supreme Court.
Months later, in September 2021, came the next step: The Constitutional Chamber imposed by Bukele endorsed his candidacy for re-election in 2024 despite six explicit prohibitions in the Salvadoran Constitution. Manes left the country two months later, in November, after comparing Bukele’s aspirations for re-election to Hugo Chávez. “Why should I stay in El Salvador if we have no counterpart?” lamented Manes at a tense press conference before leaving.
Since leaving San Salvador, Johnson has become an active promoter of Bukele from Miami among Republicans, who largely embraced Bukele at forums such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2024. By that June, at Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration, the Biden administration had spent the better part of the previous two years easing tensions with Bukele ahead of his likely re-election. The White House sent a high-level delegation headed by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas. A broad display of conservative support included Donald Trump, Jr., former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Mexican far-right politician Eduardo Verástegui. Johnson, back in San Salvador, was also in attendance.
