By now, the images of Donald Trump’s March 15th flights to El Salvador are all too familiar: shackled Venezuelans being off-loaded from U.S. planes at the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, and cowering as their heads are forcibly shaved by other prisoners. But in those same scenes, some Salvadorans recognized a face: César Humberto López Larios, alias Greñas de Stoners, one of three leaders of the street gang MS-13 who was indicted in 2020 on terrorism-related charges and had been brought to the U.S. for trial. Four days earlier, U.S. Attorney John Durham had informed a judge in the Eastern District of New York, where Greñas was being charged, that the prosecution was requesting the case against Greñas be dropped, “due to geopolitical and national security concerns of the United States, and the sovereign authority of the Executive Branch in international affairs.”

Greñas was among fourteen MS-13 leaders indicted on terrorism charges in 2020. American investigators were able to capture only three of them—the two others in custody were Elmer Canales Rivera, alias Crook de Hollywood, and Fredy Iván Jandres Parada, alias Lucky de Park View. For the U.S. Department of Justice., the arrests were a major breakthrough in one of its most high-profile anti-gang initiatives. But for Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, the D.O.J.’s case has always carried a significant risk. Greñas, Crook, and Lucky reportedly knew the details of a secret, illegal agreement that the Bukele administration made with MS-13 that both expanded the Salvadoran President’s power and eventually unleashed a wave of bloodshed across the country. “He has presented himself as a man with an iron fist, a man who is firm and intransigent with criminals,” Luis Enrique Amaya, a Salvadoran security expert, told me. “That image could be compromised by the details of the negotiation that the President allegedly sustained, of which there is a lot of evidence.”

The Trump Administration now appears to be helping Bukele sweep away the case. In early February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio travelled to El Salvador and announced that Bukele had offered to warehouse deportees from the U.S. Rubio called the deal, which specifically included members of MS-13, “an act of extraordinary friendship.” Noah Bullock, the director of Cristosal, a human-rights organization based in Central America, told me that, as a result, there is now “an irreconcilable difference between how the State Department and the Justice Department view the Bukele regime. State says that Bukele is one of their key allies in combating gangs and organized crime, while Justice’s investigation indicates that Bukele benefitted politically through a partnership with those same criminal groups.” He added, “The fear there, and the motive, is to try to manage the optics and cover up the truth.”

The D.O.J.’s terrorism case against the leaders of MS-13 was the result of a years-long bipartisan effort. In 2011, President Barack Obama declared that so-called transnational criminal organizations, or T.C.O.s, posed an emergency national-security threat to the U.S., and that combatting them required an enhanced law-enforcement effort. The Department of the Treasury, which managed a sanction list, added a section for T.C.O.s. The following year, MS-13 was added to it. The designation enabled the U.S. to bar financial transactions with the gang, freeze its assets in the U.S., and sanction some of its individual members.

Five years later, during Trump’s first Presidency, he used the spectre of MS-13 to justify more draconian immigration policies. Both of the Attorneys General during Trump’s first term—Jeff Sessions and William Barr—travelled to El Salvador to observe an ongoing effort to dismantle the gang. In 2018, Sessions called MS-13 a top transnational criminal group threatening the U.S., alongside Hezbollah and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. In August, 2019, Barr established an interagency task force called Vulcan, through which the D.O.J. would collaborate with foreign law enforcement to systematically target the gang’s leadership. “There’s never been any move like this before,” Trump said of the initiative, in July, 2020. “My Administration will not rest until every member of MS-13 is brought to justice.”

Through Vulcan, D.O.J. investigators were able to access evidence that Salvadoran authorities had gathered, assembling a trove of information from confidential sources in the underworld, forensic data extracted from confiscated gang cellphones, and messages gleaned from wiretaps and wilas—jailhouse notes between MS-13 members. Five months after Trump touted Vulcan in the Oval Office, the D.O.J. charged the fourteen leaders of MS-13. The indictment maintained that the Salvadorans should be prosecuted in a U.S. court because they “exercised control over the activities of MS-13 in the United States, including in the Eastern District of New York.” According to the D.O.J., the leaders exerted power through practices like “opening the valves,” to allow for a spate of killings of anyone believed to have done something to deserve that fate, then “closing the valves,” or ordering the killings to end.

At the time, authorities also alleged that the gang gained influence by negotiating with Salvadoran political parties and leaders. In 2022, in an indictment of a second group of MS-13 leaders, the D.O.J. expanded on the allegation. By then, Salvadoran journalists and courts had already revealed that the main political parties in the country had negotiated with the gangs in some form since around 2012. But the D.O.J. now claimed that, in 2019, shortly after Bukele first won the Presidency, his prisons director, Osiris Luna Meza, and his director of social-fabric reconstruction, Carlos Marroquín, orchestrated numerous encounters with a handful of incarcerated gang leaders. (Additional members of the Salvadoran government were also involved, according to the indictment, but the D.O.J. has yet to name them.) U.S. federal prosecutors described how the Salvadoran authorities “secretly attending these meetings at the prisons often wore masks and refused to identify themselves when entering.” At other times, Salvadoran prison officials escorted other gang members into the prisons for meetings, providing them with “identification cards identifying them as intelligence or law enforcement officials.”

As a result of these talks, according to the indictment, the two sides struck a deal. MS-13 demanded “financial benefits,” “control of territory,” “less restrictive prison conditions,” “legislative and judicial changes,” and a promise from the Bukele administration to refuse to extradite the gang leaders to the U.S. for prosecution. (Bukele has repeatedly denied the pact.) In exchange, the gang agreed to kill fewer people, “which politically benefitted the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the D.O.J. alleged. Indeed, between 2018 and 2021, the rate fell from fifty-one homicides per hundred thousand people to eighteen homicides per hundred thousand. And, when the U.S. government began requesting the extradition of the leaders, the Salvadoran courts, subservient to Bukele, repeatedly found excuses to avoid handing them over.

The Vulcan investigation led to another explosive allegation: that MS-13 had promised to use its influence in the neighborhoods that it controlled to force a mass vote for Nuevas Ideas, Bukele’s party, which won a supermajority in El Salvador’s 2021 legislative election. It was not the first time that a U.S. agency had made such a claim: in December, 2021, when the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Luna and Marroquín, the two Bukele officials, a department notice said that investigators had found evidence of an election scheme brokered between MS-13 and the Salvadoran government.

Much about Bukele’s pact with the gang remains unknown, but the timing of its demise is clear enough. On March 25, 2022, MS-13 began a three-day massacre on the streets of El Salvador, indiscriminately killing eighty-seven people. According to an investigation by the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro, most victims were not gang members: they were housewives, cobblers, fruit venders, municipal employees, surfers. In response, Bukele declared a state of exception, which is still in effect, suspending many of the country’s due process rights and commencing a wave of mass arrests. About eighty-five thousand Salvadorans have since been detained on little or no evidence. The CECOT prison was built as part of the crackdown.

Meanwhile, Bukele’s party, with its legislative supermajority, fired the sitting Supreme Court justices, then stacked the bench with judges who reinterpreted the constitution to allow Bukele to seek reëlection to a second consecutive term. The legislature also fired the attorney general and handpicked a replacement who promptly halted a series of investigations that were encircling Bukele, including an inquiry into the administration’s negotiations with the gangs. (The prosecutor in charge of the investigations fled into exile; Luna and Marroquín, the officials sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, remain in their posts.) The U.S. government’s evidence implies that the gangs were Bukele’s “partners in dismantling democracy,” Jeannette Aguilar, a Salvadoran security analyst, told me. “If the D.O.J.’s cases are able to move ahead, it could be the end of the Bukele regime.”

The MS-13 leader whose testimony in New York could most imperil Bukele’s grip on power is Elmer Canales Rivera, a.k.a. Crook de Hollywood. When the D.O.J. announced his arrest, in November, 2023, Crook was supposed to be serving forty years at a Salvadoran maximum-security prison in Zacatecoluca, a facility popularly known as “Zacatraz.” (While much attention is now being paid to the miseries of CECOT, conditions are even worse in the country’s other prisons, where most incarcerated Salvadorans are kept.) But U.S. authorities soon learned a disturbing fact: Crook was no longer behind bars.

According to investigations by both U.S. authorities and Salvadoran journalists, as part of Bukele’s deal with the gang, the government freed Crook from Zacatraz and put him up in a luxury apartment. Marroquín then personally escorted him to the border with Guatemala and gave him a firearm for self-protection. (El Faro published leaked audio that confirmed Marroquin’s role.) Crook eventually made it to Mexico. When the D.O.J. began to search for him, the Bukele administration reportedly grew so concerned about what Crook’s arrest might expose that it sought out a member of one of MS-13’s rival gangs to help recapture him. Later, a Salvadoran official promised to pay a million-dollar bounty to a Mexican cartel if it could take Crook into custody. Crook was ultimately arrested by Mexican authorities, on November 7, 2023. He is now being held in a Pennsylvania prison.

Crook’s testimony could have an outsized impact in El Salvador, where, even after the news reports and U.S. sanctions, many people remain unaware of the evidence against the Bukele administration. “The news didn’t make a splash, because there aren’t independent institutions in the country that could react to it,” Bullock, at Cristosal, said. “There are no powerful political opposition parties that would elevate it, no legislature that would open hearings to discuss it, no attorney general that would look into the case. The news fell into a void.” The White House recently noted in a press release that Greñas was included in the flights of “illegal immigrant criminals” sent to El Salvador. Crook, in contrast, still appears in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons database. It seems probable that he has not yet been deported.

On April 14th, as Bukele sat smirking beside Trump and Rubio in the Oval Office, he dismissed the idea that he has turned his country into a police state. “They say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele said. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” Trump raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Who gave him that line?” he said. “Do you think I can use that?”