The unanswered questions surrounding death of Bukele's national security adviser

Alejandro Muyshondt

Days after publicly denouncing a Nuevas Ideas legislator for corruption, Nayib Bukele's national security advisor, Alejandro Muyshondt, was arrested in August 2023 and accused of being a spy for former president in exile Mauricio Funes. Muyshondt disappeared into the incarceration system of the State of Exception, and six months later he was dead. His case is one that leaves more questions than answers, and the government of Bukele is remaining silent on the matter.

Alejandro Muyshondt served as a national security advisor to Bukele starting at the beginning of Bukele's presidency in June 2019. Muyshondt had previously served as an advisor to Bukele from 2017 to 2019 while Bukele was mayor of San Salvador, and they were reportedly childhood friends.

According to Muyshondt's curriculum vitae on the Transparency Portal of the Salvadoran government, he graduated from the University of Angers in France with a degree in criminology in 2003, and in 2008 founded his own firm to do "intelligence and counter-intellilgence" in El Salvador.  As national security adviser his role was to "advise the President on matters of public security" and make proposals to "allow the construction of a national pact and national agreements in areas such as security."
Muyshondt with Bukele on a paintball field
 in 2017

Prior to working for Bukele when Bukele was mayor of San Salvador, Muyshondt had run unsuccessfully for election to the Legislative Assembly with two different political parties. His profile on Wikipedia also notes a number of incidents  between 2013 and 2019 ranging from road rage type incidents to going vigilante with an AK-47 and flak jacket while tracking down a stolen cellphone.

He was the cousin of Ernesto Muyshondt, former mayor of San Salvador, currently in custody on charges of negotiating with El Salvador's gangs on behalf of the ARENA party and other charges. (There are also allegations that the former mayor has suffered mistreatment and prolonged pretrial imprisonment).

Personal letters of Alejandro Muyshondt obtained by the periodical RevistaFactum after his death, show the national security adviser being concerned about ongoing  corruption and frustrated that his warnings were going unheard within Bukele's administration.  

On March 12, 2021,  Muyshondt wrote a letter to United States Senator Angus King warning that El Salvador was doing little or nothing to eliminate corruption and the biggest problem was Guillermo Gallegos, a deputy from the GANA party and ally of Bukele:  
The biggest problem we have in El Salvador is Congressman Guillermo Gallegos and his closeness to President Bukele. He is a member of the "El Golfo" Cartel, he has been a congressman for more than 21 years and, is being elected for one more term as congressman. 
Congressman Gallegos has a lot of power and large tentacles, the year 2018 I was threatened by him.  When we won the elections, he lobbied President Bukele so that I had no place in the government. Congressman Gallegos maneuvered in a very smart way and, now he is the one that controls the whole security apparatus by having control over Minister of Security Rogelio Rivas, Vice Minister of Security, and Director of the prison system Osiris Luna Meza and the whole Police Force.
President Bukele started the "Plan Control Territorial" in the middle of the year 2019, it was our nation's plan to control crime. In our country, everything is handled through social media and therefore appearances. Nothing much has changed since we took office.
The reason Muyshondt wrote to Sen. King may have been a letter authored by Sen. King, published in a Salvadoran online newspaper in December 2020, expressing support for prosecution of the Texis drug cartel by Salvadoran authorities.  

Gallegos pictured with Bukele on Feb. 9, 2020 when Bukele
entered Legislative Assembly chambers with armed troops. 

On April 30, 2021, Muyshondt posted on his personal Facebook page an open letter to the incoming deputies to the Legislative Assembly who would give control of El Salvador's congress to Nuevas Ideas for the first time. Among other things, he urged them not to "prostitute their votes" and not to use their constitutional immunity as legislators to shield illegal actions.

Factum also published a personal letter to Bukele from Muyshondt with advice on several issues and complaining he was not being listened to. The letter is undated but from context appears to be from late 2021:

If you ask me how I feel, I feel excluded from everything. Only when the Innovation Department comes across technological issues do they turn to us. I have several projects that could be useful for the PCT [Plan Control Territorial], but I have no one to present them to. I have asked for an audience with you, but I have not achieved anything.

According to Factum, much of Muyshondt's work as national security adviser involved supervising digital intelligence operatives tracking and pursuing the enemies (and friends) of the Bukele regime online.  

We don't have much indication of what else he was doing, but at the end of July 2023, Muyshondt published a series of tweets suggesting that a Nuevas Ideas deputy in the Legislative Assembly, Erick Garcia, was involved in gangs and drug-trafficking.

I would like to know what comes in those packets that 
Erick Garcia brings from Mexico.   As he has a 
diplomatic passport they don't review 
the suitcases and packages in customs.

Next President Nayib Bukele posted a bombshell tweet on August 9, 2023, not congratulating Muyshondt for exposing corruption, but instead accusing him of being a spy working for former president and fugitive from justice Mauricio Funes:
The State Intelligence Agency discovered that Mr. Muyshondt had been acting as a double agent since 2019, allegedly working for former President Mauricio Funes, and that within these operations, both leaked classified documents, and in several cases modified ones, to journalists Sergio Arauz, Bryan Avelar and Héctor Silva Ávalos, as well as to a foreign government and several citizens of other countries (the latter, as a “safe” in case they were discovered). There is also direct evidence that the national security adviser would have helped former President Funes evade justice and not be captured.
Bukele suggested that Muyshondt's tweets about Erick Garcia had been intended to distract attention from his own malfeasance.  On the same day as Bukele's tweet, the Salvadoran attorney general's office posted notice of Muyshondt's arrest:

Bukele would also direct that Erick Garcia be kicked out of Nuevas Ideas and the Legislative Assembly and then prosecuted. On May 3, 2024, a Salvadoran court convicted Garcia of "ideological falsehoods" and sentenced him to five years in prison. No word on whatever happened to the drug-trafficking allegations.

RevistaFactum published a copy of an August 30, 2023 sealed court order which authorized the ongoing pretrial detention of Muyshondt, and set a six month period for the investigatory phase of the prosecution, to expire on February 25, 2024. Muyshondt would not live to see the end of that investigatory phase. (The sealed court order had been leaked by cyber-hackers operating under the moniker CiberinteligenciaSV).

The fact that Muyshondt had suddenly been arrested and held incommunicado by Salvadoran security forces, after denouncing corruption in Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party, produced a torrent of rumors and suspicion on social media. Salvadoran authorities were silent on where he was being held, on his physical condition, and did not produce Muyshondt in public for any hearings.  His family was kept in the dark, and rumors abounded about what could happen to a close advisor who had exposed corruption within Nuevas Ideas. 

Partly to rebut those rumors, on November 1, 2023, Attorney General's office posted a video of Muyshondt in custody on X.
Screenshot from  Nov. 1, 2023 video

Three months later Muyshondt died still in state custody in a Salvadoran hospital on February 7, 2024.   The initial cause of death was listed as pulmonary edema, a build-up of fluid in the lungs.  The circumstances surrounding his death were murky:

In addition, the paperwork and necessary certificates were filled with inconsistencies about the cause and even the place of death.

“What we went through as a family, having a body delivered to you in that state, the fear, the agony of not knowing how your loved one is, I don’t think that should happen to us or anyone else,” Muyshondt’s sister added.

In the certificate the family received, the cause of death was listed as pulmonary edema, a commonly listed cause of death among those who die in custody in El Salvador, according to local media and humanitarian organizations. The medical records provided to the family also indicate numerous illnesses that Alejandro had suffered since August that do not match his medical history before his arrest, and that even vary from document to document.

According to Alejandro’s sister, the medical records state that “he died of bone metastasis,” while the forensic authorities had listed pulmonary edema. “It is these discrepancies that we would like to know. We would like to clarify this situation,” she said, adding that Alejandro “died in state custody (…) an investigation should have been opened,” she said.
The family would tell the press when it received his body that they believed it showed signs of torture.

More of the details of Muyshondt's detention and the charges against him would come out in June when the hacker group CiberinteligenciaSV published online leaked copies of judicial records from the sealed proceedings against the national security adviser.

Recently the online publication RevistaFactum released a documentary based on its access to Muyshondt's medical file while in custody, pre-arrest dashcam videos, personal correspondence and the leaked court records.  According to the Factum investigation and documentary:

Muyshondt was arrested on August 9, 2023, a month after accusing a Nuevas Ideas (the president’s political party) deputy of links to drug trafficking. His medical records detail his last six months of life under state custody. According to these records, the security advisor died from gastric cancer, was infected with hospital bacteria, and had undergone four brain surgeries.

The Factum investigation revealed that, although the official cause of death listed publicly was "pulmonary edema," in fact there had been an extraordinary progression of medical negligence, covered up from his family, and beginning within a few weeks of his detention.  Even while sedated and nonresponsive, the medical records reviewed by Factum stated that Muyshondt remained in prison shackles.

The family of Muyshondt is now being accompanied by the human rights organization Cristosal which has expressed that the family has the right to know the truth about what happened to him from the point of his capture through the day of his death.

A national security adviser to the president of El Salvador has died in state custody under suspicious circumstances.  Despite the obvious questions this raises, the government of Nayib Bukele has said absolutely nothing about the death of Muyshondt or the case it was prosecuting against him.  In an editorial after publishing its documentary, RevistaFactum made this point: 
The Salvadoran government has handled the Muyshondt case as it handles everything that its publicists’ script cannot control: with secrets, secrecy, and darkness. 
President Bukele; his Minister of Health, Francisco Alabí; his prosyecutor, Rodolfo Delgado; the director of the National Civil Police, Arriaza Chicas, owe us explanations. The doctors and police officers who intervened in Muyshondt’s care, prior to his death, said they had received “superior orders.” That is stated in the medical file. 
Who were those superiors? The chain of command is clear: the hospital directors answer to the minister and the latter to the president. It is difficult to believe that Bukele or part of his cabinet can claim ignorance of what happened.

You can watch the entire Revista Factum documentary, Muyshondt:182 Days Before His Death with English subtitles, for much more detail about Muyshondt's rapid decline after entering prison as a relatively healthy 46 year old man.  

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