by T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, Kirsten Berg and Brett Murphy
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In August 2020, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, went to the U.S. ambassador with an extraordinary request. Salvadoran authorities had intercepted a conversation between a journalist and a U.S. embassy contractor about corruption among high-level aides to the president.
The contractor, a U.S. citizen, was no ordinary source. He collaborated with U.S. and Salvadoran investigators who were targeting the president’s inner circle. Over the previous year, he had helped an FBI-led task force uncover a suspected alliance between the Bukele government and the MS-13 street gang, which was responsible for murders, rapes and kidnappings in the United States. He had worked to gather evidence that the president’s aides had secretly met with gang bosses in prison and agreed to give them money and protection in exchange for a reduction in violence. The information posed a threat to the Bukele government.
Bukele wanted the contractor out of the country — and in Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, he had a powerful American friend. Johnson was a former CIA officer and appointee of President Donald Trump serving in his first diplomatic post. He had cultivated a strikingly close relationship with the Salvadoran president. After Bukele provided Johnson with the recordings, the ambassador immediately ordered an investigation that resulted in the contractor’s dismissal.
It was not the only favor Johnson did for Bukele, according to a ProPublica investigation based on a previously undisclosed report by the State Department’s inspector general and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran officials. The dismissal of the contractor was part of a pattern in which Johnson has been accused of shielding Bukele from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement, ProPublica found. Johnson did little to pursue the extradition to the United States of an MS-13 boss who was a potential witness to the secret gang pact and a top target of the FBI-led task force, officials said.
After he stepped down as ambassador, Johnson continued his support for the Salvadoran president despite the Biden administration’s efforts to curb Bukele’s increasing authoritarianism. He also played a prominent role in making Bukele Trump’s favorite Latin American leader, according to interviews and public records.
Johnson’s tight friendship with Bukele troubled top State Department officials in the Biden administration, who asked his successor, Jean Manes, to look into the firing of the contractor. She reached a blunt conclusion, according to the inspector general’s report: “Bukele requested Johnson remove [the contractor] and that was what happened.”
“Manes explained that [the contractor] was working on anti-corruption cases against individuals close to El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Manes believed removing [him] was a way to ensure the investigations stopped,” the report said.
ProPublica has also learned that Manes’ review led to an extreme measure: She forced the ouster of the CIA station chief, a longtime friend of Johnson, because she felt he was “too close” to Bukele, according to the inspector general report. Senior State Department and White House officials said they suspected that Johnson’s continuing relationships with the station chief and Bukele fomented resistance within the embassy to the new U.S. policy confronting the Salvadoran president over corruption and democracy issues, according to interviews.
“Manes would go see Bukele to convey U.S. concerns about some of his policies. Then the station chief would go see him and say the opposite,” said Juan Sebastian Gonzalez, who received regular briefings about the embassy as the former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.
ProPublica is not identifying the former station chief or the contractor to protect their safety.
After battling Bukele in public and her own embassy in private, Manes announced a pause in diplomatic relations and left El Salvador in late 2021. Days later, Johnson posted a photo on LinkedIn that sent a defiant message to the Biden administration: It showed him and Bukele smiling with their families in front of a Christmas tree at the Johnson home in Miami.
“It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, left, wrote in a Nov. 30, 2021, post on LinkedIn.
(Ronald Johnson via LinkedIn)
The bond between the two men was at the center of a fierce political conflict that spread in Washington, San Salvador and Miami. Today, Johnson and Bukele — once minor players in U.S. foreign affairs — have emerged from the fray triumphant. On April 9, the Senate confirmed Johnson as ambassador to Mexico, arguably the most important U.S. embassy in Latin America. On April 14, Trump met with Bukele in the White House to celebrate an agreement that would allow the U.S. to deport hundreds of immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison, elevating the global stature of the leader of one of the hemisphere’s smallest and poorest countries.
Johnson’s detractors accuse him of championing Bukele despite his increasing abuses of power.
“We didn’t have a credible or effective U.S. representative in that country. We had a mouthpiece for the government of El Salvador,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime foreign policy aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
Johnson’s defenders argue that his strong ties to the Salvadoran president benefited U.S. policy objectives. Upon arriving in El Salvador, Johnson told his staff that he wanted Bukele’s support in reducing U.S.-bound immigration, the Trump administration’s top priority with the country.
“During Trump and Johnson’s time, the thinking was let El Salvador be El Salvador,” said Carlos Ortiz, the former attache for the Department of Homeland Security at the embassy, who describes himself as a friend and admirer of Johnson. “Let them deal with their own corruption. The U.S. focus was migration.”
A State Department spokesperson said it was “false” that Johnson had blocked or impeded any law enforcement efforts in order to protect Bukele or his allies and that the allegations made by Manes in the inspector general report were untrue.
In addition, Tommy Pigott, the department’s principal deputy spokesperson, praised Johnson for having “always prioritized our national interests and the safety of the American people above all else.”
“Thanks to President Trump’s and President Bukele’s strong leadership, we are ensuring our region is safer from the menace of vicious criminal gangs,” Pigott said. “Secretary Rubio looks forward to continuing to work with regional allies, including the Salvadoran government, in our joint efforts to counter illegal immigration and to advance mutual interests.”
The department provided a written statement from Johnson highlighting the Salvadoran president’s achievements.
“Our cordial relationship was based on honest and frank dialogue to advance issues of mutual benefit for both of our nations,” Johnson said. “President Bukele has continued to maintain widespread popularity and high approval ratings in his homeland. He transformed El Salvador from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest countries worldwide.”
Spokespeople for the CIA and Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to the State Department. The Salvadoran government did not respond to requests for comment.
Johnson arrives as the new U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in September 2019 and presents Bukele with his credentials during a visit to the Casa Presidencial.
(Camilo Freedman/APHOTOGRAFIA/Getty Images)
The Gang Pact
Manes had the unusual distinction of serving as the top U.S. diplomat in El Salvador twice — once before Johnson and once after.
She first arrived in El Salvador in 2016, as an appointee of President Barack Obama. It was her first ambassadorship. Manes earned a degree in foreign policy from Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell, the television preacher and activist, and a master’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C. She joined the State Department in 1992 and served in cultural, educational and public affairs posts in several Latin American countries as well as in Afghanistan and Syria. Although more politically conservative than many of her diplomatic colleagues, she developed a reputation as a nonpartisan, hard-edged professional. Manes declined to comment for this article.
When Manes arrived, Bukele, the son of a wealthy executive of Palestinian descent, was mayor of San Salvador. Manes and Bukele got along well. In 2019, the 37-year-old Bukele ran for president as a populist outsider promising to defeat crime and corruption in a nation with one of the world’s worst homicide rates and a history of former presidents being charged with crimes. His political coalition defeated the traditional power blocs of left and right. The most dangerous national security threat that the new president faced was the MS-13 street gang, which the U.S. government had designated as a transnational criminal organization and the Salvadoran government as a terrorist group.
Manes admired Bukele’s reformist zeal, former colleagues said. During conversations after his election victory, Bukele assured her that he was devoted to rooting out lawlessness, even in his own party, and asked for the embassy’s support.
“Go after my people first, crack down on anyone who is corrupt, and on MS-13,” he said, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the conversations.
Bukele, though, had already been publicly accused of cutting deals with MS-13 and another gang while he was mayor. U.S. and Salvadoran investigators soon learned that the new president’s senior aides had entered into secret negotiations with the leaders of MS-13 who were imprisoned in El Salvador, according to U.S. court records, Treasury Department sanctions, interviews and news accounts.
Osiris Luna, Bukele’s prison director, and Carlos Marroquin, a presidential ally in charge of social welfare programs, reached an agreement with the gang’s ruling council, known as the Ranfla, according to U.S. court documents and interviews with U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement officials. It was a more expansive deal than those struck by previous Salvadoran governments, which had offered the gang jailhouse perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions. Marroquin and Luna have not responded to requests for comment.
The council, which controlled tens of thousands of MS-13 members across the U.S., Mexico and Central America from prison, agreed to decrease killings and provide votes for Bukele’s party in exchange for financial incentives and political influence. According to court documents, the gang chiefs also asked the president’s men for an important guarantee: protection from extradition to the United States.
Homicide rates soon plummeted. Today, El Salvador is one of the safest countries in the Americas, and Bukele is one of the region’s most popular politicians. But the secret truce with the gangs made his government a target of the FBI-led multi-agency team, which was known as Joint Task Force Vulcan.
Trump had vowed to defeat MS-13 during his campaign and, in August 2019, created Vulcan to dismantle the gang. Its strategy was similar to the fight against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerillas. Led by a Justice Department prosecutor in New York, the team combined agents from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and other agencies based around the United States and operating in El Salvador and neighboring countries.
The initial focus was to build cases against gang bosses on racketeering, terrorism and drug charges and extradite them to the United States. Soon, though, leads from informants and wiretaps spurred federal agents to expand their investigation to examine the deals between the gang and top Bukele officials, according to interviews and U.S. court records. As ProPublica has previously reported, Vulcan agents even filed a request with the Treasury Department to canvass U.S. banks for any signs that Bukele and other Salvadoran political figures close to him had laundered U.S. Agency for International Development funds as part of the deal with MS-13. The result of that request is unclear.
Vulcan also cooperated with a team of Salvadoran prosecutors who were accumulating their own evidence about the gang pact and a network of suspected graft that allegedly included the president’s inner circle.
The potential revelation of a secret deal posed a threat to Bukele because it could undermine his reputation as a crimefighter and expose him to possible criminal charges in the U.S. and El Salvador.
The Friendship
A month after the launch of the task force, Johnson succeeded Manes as ambassador.
He knew El Salvador, having led combat operations there as an Army Green Beret — one of 55 U.S. military advisers to the Salvadoran armed forces in the bloody civil war against leftist rebels in the 1980s, according to former U.S. officials and an online biography of Johnson.
“One of my specific tasks was to teach the soldiers respect for human rights,” Johnson said in his written response to ProPublica.
After rising to the rank of colonel, Johnson left the Army in 1998 and joined the CIA for a second career that included assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and at U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Special Operations Command in Florida.
Johnson and Bukele came from different worlds. Johnson, now 73, grew up in Alabama. He was a devout Christian, favored suits and ties, and spoke with a Southern drawl. “I was raised in a small town and I was honored to work in the military as well as the CIA,” Johnson said in his statement to ProPublica.
Photos from early in his career show Johnson posing with weapons and fellow commandos in Latin America and other locales. As ambassador, he once parachuted out of a plane at a Salvadoran airshow.
Bukele was more than 20 years younger. He cultivated a hip image, wearing jeans, colorful socks and an assortment of sunglasses. He was adept at communicating on social media and posted frequently on X. He talked about reinventing his strife-torn nation as a mecca for bitcoin, surfing and tourism.
Almost immediately, though, it became clear the two had buena onda — a good vibe. Soon after his arrival, Johnson posted an X message quoting Bukele.
“I believe that with the United States, we have an alliance,” it read. “But I believe that with Ambassador Johnson and his wife, Alina, we will have a personal friendship.” Johnson shared the sentiment. In a recent interview, he recalled that he had “developed a very close personal relationship” with the president.
About three weeks after Johnson became ambassador, Bukele visited Trump in New York — the first Latin American leader to hold an official one-on-one meeting with the president in his first term. Trump lauded Bukele for being an enthusiastic ally in fighting MS-13 and in containing illegal immigration flows in Central America. In a post on X, Johnson declared, “If this isn’t a demonstration of the strength of our bilateral relationship, I don’t know what is.”
“Johnson was very successful in El Salvador, in developing a relationship with Bukele, in convincing Trump that El Salvador mattered,” said Thomas Shannon Jr., a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat who has worked in Washington as a lobbyist for the Bukele government.
Johnson and Bukele documented their growing friendship on social media. One post showed Johnson and his wife boating with Bukele and his family on an estuary in El Salvador. Another showed the ambassador and president eating cracked stone crab claws at a restaurant. They held joint press conferences and often dined together, according to interviews. Johnson’s embrace of the president struck some of his critics in El Salvador and Washington as excessive for a diplomat.
“Johnson insinuated himself into Bukele’s family and circle in a way that made some people in the U.S. government at the time uncomfortable,” Shannon said.
Others, however, believed that Johnson used his access as leverage in dealing with Bukele.
“He was trying to use his relationship in order to advance U.S. policy and U.S. objectives,” said a former embassy employee who served during Johnson’s ambassadorship. “He did so in a much more personal way.”
Johnson’s approach reflected his experience cultivating sources as a former intelligence officer, but that did not mean he was always in control, said a former Trump administration official familiar with the matter.
“Johnson wasn’t just recruiting Bukele. What’s remarkable is that Bukele was recruiting him,” the official said. “They were recruiting each other. It was a relationship in which Bukele had power.”
Bukele speaks during the opening ceremony in El Salvador for the 2021 International Surfing Association World Surfing Games.
(Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dismissal
As the friendship blossomed, U.S. embassy officers kept Johnson informed about the increasing evidence of the gang pact and high-level corruption, according to former U.S. officials. Officers in law enforcement and intelligence briefed the ambassador regularly, the officials said.
In mid-2020, investigators had a major breakthrough.
Luna, the president’s national director of prisons, made contact with U.S. embassy law enforcement officials, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the case. During a meeting at a discreet site, he admitted that he was part of talks with the gang but said that he was following Bukele’s orders, the officials said. He discussed the possibility of giving testimony as a protected witness in exchange for him and his family being brought to the United States.
Luna’s reluctance to testify against Bukele in a U.S. court caused the deal to fall through, but Vulcan investigators now had an insider account implicating the president, officials said.
“It was huge,” said a former official familiar with the case. “One of the strongest keys was when Osiris tells us, ‘I want you to know this isn’t me negotiating with gangs. This is Bukele’ — and other top aides — ‘and I don’t want to be the fall guy for them.’”
Bukele has publicly denied such allegations and has not been charged.
That August, a reporter for El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, was chasing an exclusive story to expose the gang pact. The story would feature voluminous evidence, including Salvadoran intelligence reports, government documents and even prison logs recording the visits of Luna and other Bukele aides to MS-13 leaders.
Bukele had been waging a harassment campaign against El Faro, which had aggressively covered corruption in his government. His security forces had installed Pegasus, the Israeli spyware, on the phones of some reporters, according to interviews and an investigation by researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
One of the intercepted conversations was between the journalist and the U.S. embassy contractor. Well respected at the embassy and among Salvadoran officials, the contractor oversaw U.S.-funded cooperation programs for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The American was working closely with the Vulcan investigators in the U.S. and El Salvador as well as the Salvadoran prosecutors collaborating with the task force. The intercepts indicated that he was providing information to the reporter, according to the inspector general report and interviews. ProPublica has learned that the contractor relayed information including handwritten Salvadoran documents about the gang negotiations.
After Bukele asked for the contractor’s removal, Johnson ordered an investigation by embassy security officials. They determined that the contractor had unauthorized contact with the El Faro reporter and that he had misled them about the contact, according to the inspector general’s report.
But there was something else: The U.S. security officials also worried about possible retaliation against the contractor. It was a remarkable acknowledgement that the Bukele government might resort to harming an American working for the embassy, especially given the president’s friendship with Johnson, according to the report and interviews.
The embassy security office’s “biggest concern, though, was [the contractor’s] safety because” his “statements to the press upset the El Salvadoran government and there was concern that [he] became a target of the El Salvadoran government,” the report said.
As a result of the investigation, embassy officials decided not to renew the employee’s contract, effectively dismissing him. He left the country at the direction of his supervisors in Washington within weeks of Bukele’s conversation with Johnson. The contractor retained a good reputation in Washington and has continued to work for the State Department on overseas assignments.
News of the case ricocheted among Latin America experts working in the White House, Capitol Hill and think tanks.
“It is highly, highly abnormal for an ambassador to dismiss an embassy staffer at the request of a foreign president,” said a former Hill staffer.
Senior U.S. officials questioned Johnson’s handling of the incident.
“Johnson’s reaction should have been, why are you spying on my staff? That’s the right answer for any U.S. ambassador,” said a former State Department official familiar with embassy operations in El Salvador.
In response to questions about the incident, the State Department said the “surveillance of U.S. personnel is not tolerated.”
In her review of the case, Manes would later express concern about “the issue of a foreign president requesting the removal of an embassy employee,” according to the inspector general report. She said the employee spoke regularly with the press as part of his job, “so that was not a deal-breaker,” according to the report. She was “not convinced [he] provided false statements” during the inquiry ordered by Johnson.
Manes wondered whether the contractor “had been let go appropriately, or had been unjustifiably removed at the request of Bukele.” She said she was unable to answer that question “with the information provided to her,” according to the report.
Johnson commented about the matter this year during his Senate confirmation hearing. Questioned by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he defended himself but made no mention of Bukele’s role in the contractor’s departure.
“I was a little surprised when I heard that he had had an unauthorized meeting with a member of the press,” Johnson testified, “and I did what I think any manager would do at that point. I called in his department heads and I called in security and I said, ‘We need to investigate this and determine whether or not these accusations are true. And if they are true, I think we need to determine what kind of information might have been passed.’ And I deferred to his boss, really, as to what the final disposition should be in that case.”
The contractor’s removal led to a decline in U.S. embassy cooperation with Salvadoran anti-corruption prosecutors who were funded, trained and assisted by the State Department and other agencies, a former Salvadoran official told ProPublica.
“Nobody really replaced him,” the former law enforcement official said. “He was the most active of the Americans working with us.”
“El Salvador’s Battles”
Other events deepened concerns about whether Johnson was shielding Bukele and his allies from U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement.
Johnson made clear to embassy staff that the Trump administration’s top issue in El Salvador was cooperation on immigration. In 2018, Trump had accused the Salvadoran government of letting MS-13 “killers” return to the United States after their deportation.
“El Salvador just takes our money,” Trump had declared in a post on X.
After Bukele became president, the governments signed an agreement allowing the U.S. to send refugees seeking asylum to El Salvador to await the outcome of their cases there. The Bukele government also deployed more than 1,000 officers to the border with Guatemala to prevent the smuggling of U.S.-bound migrants. And Salvadoran authorities permitted the continued arrival of U.S. deportation flights during the pandemic.
As a result, Bukele’s standing at the White House increased. During the early days of COVID-19, Trump told Bukele in a phone call that the U.S. would donate hundreds of ventilators to El Salvador. Trump said on X, “They have worked well with us on immigration at the Southern Border!”
Bukele posted this photo with Johnson speaking to President Donald Trump in April 2020 about El Salvador’s request for help with ventilators during the pandemic.
(Nayib Bukele via X)
Johnson seemed to show less interest in the Vulcan investigation, former U.S. officials said. “We are not here to fight El Salvador’s battles,” Johnson would tell embassy employees.
“His general demeanor was do not push things that upset Bukele — he is our No. 1 ally on migration,” a former U.S. official said.
One of Vulcan’s early accomplishments was the first use of terrorism charges against an MS-13 leader. The allegations against Armando Melgar Díaz, alias Blue, included kidnapping, drug trafficking and approving the murder of U.S. citizens. Trump even had a press conference to announce the indictment. Prosecutors sent the Bukele government an extradition request for Melgar, who was jailed in El Salvador at the time, according to Salvadoran court records.
In a post on X from his official embassy account, Johnson promised that Melgar was going to “face justice thanks to cooperation between authorities.”
Despite that pledge, months passed without progress. U.S. and Salvadoran officials worried that Johnson was not applying pressure on Bukele about a request that Vulcan investigators expected to be an “easy win.”
“Ron Johnson didn’t do much to extradite Blue,” said a former State Department official with knowledge of the embassy. The Bukele government eventually denied the request. U.S. law enforcement officials suspected that Melgar knew inside details about the secret gang pact. He is believed to remain in a Salvadoran prison.
Johnson was also not entirely forthcoming in communications back to Washington, D.C., according to the former official, who said embassy staff told him that the ambassador blocked information in diplomatic cables about the pact between Bukele and MS-13.
“It was pretty clear that Ronald Johnson was so close that he absolutely did protect Bukele from allegations that Bukele was negotiating with the gangs,” the former official said.
Ortiz, the former DHS attache, defended Johnson. “Ambassador Johnson wouldn’t shelter Bukele,” he said. As “a former CIA officer, he knew how to navigate where he was close to someone but not cover for them. His interest was the interest of the United States, and the U.S. had a great relationship with El Salvador.”
Critics said Johnson’s hands-off approach was evident in his response to the biggest political crisis of his tenure. In February 2020, the Salvadoran legislature resisted Bukele’s proposal to seek a $109 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration for new vehicles and equipment for the police and military. The president responded by calling a special session and flooding the assembly with armed troops.
Following orders from Bukele, Salvadoran army soldiers occupy the Legislative Assembly in February 2020.
(Salvador Melendez/AP Images)
Many Salvadorans and human rights advocates were aghast at the sight of soldiers trying to pressure the lawmakers. It evoked Latin America’s bleak history of dictatorial rule. At the time, the U.S. Embassy denied any role.
“Neither Ambassador Johnson nor any Embassy official had prior knowledge of what was to happen,” the embassy said in a statement to El Faro after the incident.
During his Senate hearing this year, though, Johnson admitted that he had talked with Bukele just before he sent in the troops. Johnson testified that he privately urged the president to refrain from the military show of force.
“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,’” he told lawmakers. He also testified that he had criticized Bukele in public.
For human rights advocates, Johnson’s reluctance to forcefully criticize Bukele at the time was a sign of his undue deference to the Salvadoran leader.
“Johnson was an ally of the president and not civil society, not the democratic forces in the country,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of Cristosal, a leading human rights organization. “There was no distance between him and Bukele.”
Johnson’s term ended after only 17 months, when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Before Johnson left, Bukele created El Salvador’s highest honor and made the ambassador the first recipient of the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán.
“A great friend is leaving,” Bukele declared at the ambassador’s farewell ceremony.
Johnson receives the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán from Bukele before departing El Salvador in 2021.
(Gobierno de El Salvador via YouTube)
Manes Returns
A little more than three months after Johnson’s departure, Bukele unleashed an assault on the judiciary. The Salvadoran legislature, dominated by the president’s ruling coalition, removed five Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. At least eight Salvadoran officials who had been investigating MS-13 and corruption, including some who had worked with Vulcan agents, fled the country after threats, harassment, and searches of their homes and offices.
Critics in El Salvador declared that the president had engineered a “self-coup.” Bukele began calling himself the “world’s coolest dictator.”
Newly installed Biden administration officials watched the crisis with alarm. Concerned that Bukele was turning El Salvador into an autocracy, they broke with Trump’s policy.
Soon after the purge of the judiciary, State Department officials announced they were sending Manes back to El Salvador as the interim chargé d’affaires, the term for a temporary ambassador. They directed her to stand up to Bukele, according to the inspector general’s report and interviews. Her superiors saw her as a natural choice because of her constructive relationship with Bukele during her term as ambassador.
“She was brought back as a message that we won’t have business as had been conducted,” said a former high-ranking State Department official.
Jean Manes, the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, in her office in San Salvador on April 23, 2019.
(Daniele Volpe/The New York Times)
A top State Department official asked her to conduct an “assessment” of the embassy, including the contractor’s dismissal, according to the inspector general report and interviews. The official told her he had concerns “about the dynamics” at the embassy, the report said. Gonzalez, the former National Security Council official, said senior policymakers thought that embassy staff were showing favoritism to Bukele, sending reports that minimized the growing crisis of democracy in El Salvador.
Upon arriving at the embassy, Manes ran up against a group of senior staff, mostly law enforcement and intelligence officials who were not members of the Vulcan task force. She accused them of undercutting her leadership because of their loyalty to Johnson and rapport with Bukele, according to the report and interviews.
Manes laid out her findings about Johnson “loyalists” in a memo and other written communications, former officials said. To regain control, she issued a drastic order: Embassy personnel “were not to have communications with Bukele government officials,” the inspector general report said. In practice, that meant the staff stopped meeting with senior Salvadoran officials and had to get approval from Manes and her top deputies to engage with others, according to former senior embassy officials.
A former senior embassy official criticized Manes’ handling of the feud. “It got pretty ugly,” the official said in an interview. “She wanted to micromanage everything.”
One opponent was especially nettlesome: the CIA station chief. Early in his tenure as ambassador, Johnson had helped secure his appointment to head the CIA station, former officials said. Like Johnson, he had served as a military adviser in El Salvador years earlier. Also, like Johnson, the station chief had an unusually friendly relationship with Bukele. Manes learned that he was meeting with Bukele on a regular basis, often having breakfast with him. Bukele would also visit the station chief’s home, according to a former U.S. official.
“Former Ambassador Johnson and the section chief were close friends and were close to Bukele and members of Bukele’s government,” an embassy employee later told an investigator, according to the inspector general report.
Rather than support the new mission to confront Bukele over backsliding on human rights and democracy, the CIA officer defended the president, former U.S. officials said.
“He tried very hard to undermine the notion that Bukele was consolidating and centralizing power or acting to dismantle Salvadoran institutions,” said the former State Department official familiar with the embassy.
The interlocking friendships among Johnson, the station chief and Bukele led Biden administration officials to believe the former ambassador was influencing opposition to the new U.S. policy — though they did not have concrete proof, former officials said.
“We knew that Johnson and Bukele continued to talk,” Gonzalez said. “The suspicion was that Johnson played a role in the dissidence at the embassy opposing Manes and favoring Bukele.”
After he stepped down as ambassador to El Salvador, Johnson made numerous posts praising Bukele, including this one from August 2024.
(Ronald Johnson on Linkedin)
Manes decided to demand that the CIA remove the station chief — an unusual move, but it was within her power to withdraw approval for anyone assigned to the embassy. A senior CIA official questioned the decision, but Manes’ superiors held firm. The station chief was transferred to another country and has since retired, former officials said.
The station chief filed a complaint with the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General, charging that Manes had unfairly dismissed him, among other allegations.
The resulting report cleared Manes of wrongdoing. The former station chief did not respond to a list of questions sent by ProPublica.
As the fight escalated within the embassy, Manes engaged in an increasingly open clash with Bukele. She criticized the replacement of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. She warned that the government was weakening democracy and human rights. And she called for the extraditions of Melgar and other MS-13 senior leaders indicted by the Vulcan task force.
“Extradition is something very important for the United States,” she told the press.
As ProPublica has previously reported, the Bukele administration systematically interfered with extradition efforts and has not sent to the U.S. any of the 27 MS-13 gang chiefs charged by Vulcan prosecutors in indictments in 2021 and 2023.
Top State Department officials traveled to El Salvador to urge Bukele to reverse course. USAID cut funding. Luna, Marroquin and other high-level Salvadoran officials were hit with State Department sanctions that blocked their travel to the U.S.
Bukele did not budge. On X, he blasted Manes for interfering with his country’s internal politics. He published a string of personal WhatsApp messages between them, accusing Manes of asking him to free a politician jailed on corruption charges.
In November 2021, Manes declared a “pause” in Washington’s relations with the Bukele administration and announced that she was leaving her post.
El Salvador and the U.S. had reached a diplomatic nadir. More than a year would pass before a new ambassador was named.
“It’s impossible to think that someone has an interest in our relationship when they’re using their paid media machine to attack the United States every day,” Manes told the press.
The Rehabilitation
A week after Manes’ departure, Johnson posted the image of himself posing with Bukele and their families in front of a Christmas tree.
“It was great to spend some time in our Miami home with El Salvadoran President Bukele,” Johnson wrote on a photo he posted to his LinkedIn account.
On Christmas Eve, Johnson posted holiday wishes to Bukele and his family. The Salvadoran president responded with a jab at Manes and the Biden administration: “Those were the times when ambassadors were sent to strengthen relations between nations.”
The exchange was an early salvo in a campaign not just to rehabilitate Bukele’s reputation in the United States but to make him a MAGA icon. Johnson helped lead this effort, which involved legislators and lobbyists working in Washington, Florida and El Salvador.
It occurred as the Biden administration stepped up its confrontation with the Salvadoran president. In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued more sanctions against Luna and Marroquin, alleging that the Bukele aides negotiated the secret agreement with the MS-13 gang. They also accused Luna and the president’s chief of staff of corruption. Neither responded to requests for comment.
In a criminal indictment, Vulcan prosecutors detailed alleged wrongdoing by senior Bukele officials and the gang’s promise to turn out support for the president’s party in exchange for financial benefits and protection.
In March 2022, for reasons that still remain unclear, the truce between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 fell apart. During a three-day rampage of gang violence, some 80 people died — the deadliest days in El Salvador since its civil war. Bukele struck back with a policy of mano dura — an iron fist. He suspended constitutional protections and rounded up accused gang members without due process. The security forces arrested 70,000 people over the next several years, locking up many of them in CECOT, the maximum-security prison.
The crackdown made Bukele enormously popular in El Salvador. But senior Biden administration officials saw it as a further step toward the dismantling of the nation’s constitutional democracy. Even some in the GOP had misgivings. Then-Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who was influential on Latin American issues, expressed ambivalence about Bukele’s actions.
“I’m not a big fan of everything that’s been done out there,” he said during a Senate hearing in 2022. “I’m hoping that we can still have a relationship in El Salvador that’s pragmatic. We don't have to clap or celebrate all the stuff people do that we don’t necessarily think is good. But I also think we have a national interest concern there that needs to be balanced.”
By then, Johnson and others were already deeply engaged in promoting Bukele. Johnson praised the president’s campaign advising Salvadorans on how to stay healthy during COVID-19. At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, he met with El Salvador’s ambassador to the U.S., former beauty queen Milena Mayorga. He continued posting about his visits with Bukele and his family.
Damian Merlo, a lobbyist for Bukele, posted this photo of himself and Johnson at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024.
(Damian Merlo on X)
Bukele enlisted Damian Merlo, a well-known lobbyist for Latin American countries and leaders, eventually paying his firm more than $2 million, according to lobbying records. Merlo set up meetings with Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, contacted State Department officials, and spoke to reporters at The New York Times, Fox News and other outlets, lobbying records show. Bukele appeared on “Tucker Carlson Today.” Time magazine featured him on its cover, calling him “the world’s most popular authoritarian.” He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of the country’s most influential conservative politicians. Johnson attended, posting afterwards that Bukele had delivered “an incredible speech.”
“Johnson’s credibility and Merlo’s instincts helped Bukele connect with MAGA world,” said Shannon, the former diplomat and lobbyist. Merlo did not respond to a detailed set of questions from ProPublica.
First image: Johnson at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024 with his wife and Bukele. Second image: Johnson posted that it was a “wonderful surprise to spend some time with President Nayib Bukele and the 1st family of El Salvador,” in August 2024.
(Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)
A turning point came in March 2023, when Rubio paid an official visit to El Salvador. Whatever uncertainty he may have had about the Salvadoran leader vanished after his return. Rubio lauded Bukele and mocked the Biden administration’s attempts to pressure him.
“All of a sudden, the crime rate has plummeted. All of sudden, the murder rate has plummeted. All of a sudden, for the first time in decades, people can go out at night,” Rubio said in a video posted online. “So how has the Biden administration reacted to this? By badmouthing the guy, by sanctioning people in the government, by going after them because they’re being too tough and too harsh.”
Johnson hailed Rubio’s newfound admiration.
“I want to thank my friend, Senator Marco Rubio, for going there to visit and for recognizing the progress made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
In September 2022, Bukele announced his candidacy for reelection. The Salvadoran constitution had limited presidents to a single five-year term, but the Supreme Court, packed with Bukele allies, had allowed him to run again. The decision set off a new round of protests.
Johnson defended the reelection bid during a fireside chat at a conference at Florida International University, where he applauded El Salvador’s progress on security.
“In some recent discussions that I had with people in Washington, D.C., we talked about a second term for President Bukele,” Johnson said. “I said, ‘I think we’re focused on the wrong things. If he runs for a second term in a free and fair election and the people of El Salvador select him for a second term, then isn’t that we do here?’”
Bukele won with 85% of the vote.
The guest list for Bukele’s inauguration on June 1, 2024, illustrated his growing popularity with Republicans. Conservative luminaries including Donald Trump Jr., Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Carlson showed up. So did Democratic Reps. Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Lou Correa of California. Also in attendance were Johnson and the former CIA station chief.
Johnson posted these photos of him with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle at events related to Bukele’s second inauguration in June 2024.
(Ronald Johnson on LinkedIn)
Afterward, Johnson and Merlo helped arrange a private meeting with Bukele for Sara A. Carter, a former Fox news contributor whom Trump has since nominated to serve as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In a video podcast, Carter recounted a late-night meal of sushi with the Salvadoran president.
“We had the opportunity to meet with Bukele privately, our group, and I want to thank Ambassador Ron Johnson for that and Damian Merlo for that, for making that happen,” she said.
Epilogue
This April, Trump and Bukele met to celebrate a partnership.
“It’s an honor to be here in the Oval Office with the president and leader of the free world,” the Salvadoran president said as they shook hands. “We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we’re a small country, but if we can help, we will do it.”
Bukele meets with Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials at the White House in April.
(American Photo Archive/Alamy)
Rubio, now secretary of state, and Bukele had reached an agreement in which the Trump administration would send more than 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants to be detained in CECOT. (The Venezuelans were returned to their country in July.)
Bukele’s administration asked for the return to El Salvador of some of the MS-13 gang leaders who had been arrested in Mexico and imprisoned in the United States. The federal prosecutors who had worked to bring the bosses to justice asked a judge to release two of them. Former Vulcan investigators said they believe both have information tying Bukele aides to the gang pact.
A few days before Bukele’s Oval Office meeting with Trump, the Senate approved Johnson on a party-line 49-46 vote as the ambassador to Mexico. He stepped into the job at a time when the Trump administration’s hardline policies — notably the prospect of unleashing U.S. military might against drug cartels — have strained the always complex relationship with Mexico.
“I’m eager to meet Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and ready to work with her administration on issues that are mutually beneficial to both our nations,” Johnson wrote on social media.
Manes’ career has not fared as well. In 2023, the Biden administration nominated her as ambassador to Colombia, one of the top diplomatic posts in Latin America. She seemed a strong candidate until Rubio and other Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced their opposition. Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho cited the inspector general investigation of Manes’ conflict with the station chief as a reason.
“Staff on our side has received complaints about Ms. Manes’ leadership ability, interagency management style and judgment while serving as ambassador in charge in El Salvador,” Risch said at a hearing.
Manes’ defenders pointed out she had been cleared by the internal inquiry and was implementing a policy dictated from Washington.
“She was following a policy that was clearly the guidance of the administration,” a former senior State Department official said in an interview. “It has become very difficult for career officers when their loyal service is seen in the political arena as unacceptable. It’s ironic, given her political views.”
Instead, Manes was named the U.S. representative to UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural organization in Paris that promotes science and the arts.
This July, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw its participation in the organization.
Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting, and Doris Burke contributed research.
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