Trump, Harris and Bukele

With the US presidential election a little more than nine weeks away, El Salvador is watching closely. President Nayib Bukele has his closest ties to members of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, but Trump is a fickle friend. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is likely to continue current US policy which now presents a friendly face to El Salvador and no longer denounces Bukele's trampling over principles of rule of law and judicial independence. 

Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, and several high level officials came to El Salvador to meet with Bukele’s government. Trump was happy because of Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration. Bukele cooperated despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status and calling El Salvador a “shithole country.”

Members of Trump’s political coalition from the “MAGA” wing of the Republican party view Bukele very favorably. Their admiration for El Salvador's strongman leader was highlighted when Bukele was a featured speaker at CPAC earlier this year.  Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Junior and Congressman Matt Gaetz all arrived in San Salvador for Bukele’s inauguration to an unconstitutional second term on June 1.    

But it is important to understand Trump’s view of the world and migrants.  In that worldview, El Salvador is the country which sends MS-13 members over the US border to terrorize US citizens.  Despite the admiration for Bukele espoused by the MAGA crowd, in his current election campaign Trump has once again returned to his singular view of El Salvador – it produces dangerous migrants.

From Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention in July:

In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. Why are they down? Now, he would have you convinced that because he’s trained murderers to be wonderful people, no. They’re down because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America. This is going to be very bad. And bad things are going to happen.

Under a second Trump administration, Bukele need not worry that there will be any criticism of his human rights record. But large numbers of Salvadorans in the US may well face deportation in Trump's plans to expel undocumented migrants, and Bukele cannot expect that he could persuade Trump not to cancel the TPS program which protects almost 200,000 Salvadorans from deportation.

So a Trump administration might be good for Bukele, but it would not be so good for the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans living without full legal status in the US and the families in El Salvador who rely on their remittances. 

The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, can be expected to continue the policies of the current Biden administration towards El Salvador.  Although the Biden administration initially publicly critiqued Bukele’s overthrow of the Constitutional Chamber of the country's supreme court and his unconstitutional candidacy for a second term, that US policy has evolved to a much friendlier face and leaves any criticism of Bukele to private communications.  The Biden-Harris administration has pragmatically decided that it makes little sense to pick fights with a leader who has the support of more than 80% of the population, and so it sent a high-level delegation to attend Bukele's inauguration on June 1 to a second term.

Under the Biden administration, Harris ostensibly led efforts to address the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America.  That initiative consisted of attempting to persuade US corporations to invest and create jobs in the region in an effort to improve the economic outlook so Central Americans would not feel pushed to leave their homes in search of money to feed their families.      

Kamala Harris in Guatemala in 2021

Salvadorans who have lived in the US for an extended period of time will have little fear of removal during a Harris administration, but Salvadorans who recently crossed the border or will cross in the future, should still expect that they will face an ever tougher chance at receiving asylum and face swift removal from the US.    

One wild card in US-El Salvador relations will be the progress of the US prosecution of the top leaders of MS-13 in federal court in New York.  The indictment in that case includes charges that the government of Nayib Bukele negotiated with MS-13 for a reduction in homicides and electoral support in return for various concessions to the top gang leadership including refusals to extradite them to the US to face prosecution.  If this case turns into a very public trial with testimony about those negotiations, it could both embarrass Bukele and lead either administration to insist that Bukele clean house.  

For more on this history of US relations with El Salvador under Trump and Biden, see my post from January 2023.