Trump State Department Puts El Salvador and Guatemala on Friend List [View all]

With Donald Trump back in the White House, Nayib Bukele offers sweeping deportation cooperation while asking the U.S. to send back MS-13 leaders awaiting trial. Trump says Panama is not going far enough in shunning China’s Belt and Road initiative, while Guatemala has agreed to accept regional deportees in exchange for support for infrastructure projects. Each Central American country is forging its own path.



Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Roman Gressier and Yuliana Ramazzini
El Faro English translates Central America.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, one issue seemed to bring together the leaders of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: their rebuffing of U.S. corruption sanctions with sovereignty rhetoric and calls for multipolar relations. In 2022, Bukele tellingly compared Biden’s influence in Central America to the United Fruit Company.

Those times of narrow unity are over: As El Salvador and Guatemala eye deals with Trump to receive regional deportees, Honduras promotes a regional anti-deportation front, and Nicaragua, comparing Trump to the Ku Klux Klan, bites its tongue on possible CAFTA sanctions. Solitary Panama, which complained to the U.N. of Trump’s threats of military force, retorts that its control of the canal is “non-negotiable”, but also conceded that they will cut ties with China’s “Belt and Road” program.

In El Salvador on Monday afternoon, Bukele said he would receive and imprison Salvadoran deportees from MS-13 and Venezuelans from the Tren de Aragua gang. He also “offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.”

That latter offer would receive swift legal challenges. “The United States cannot legally banish Americans — such authorities died centuries ago,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. “There’s not even a hint of a possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever.”

Moreover, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trip to San Salvador cemented Trump’s alliance with Bukele from the symbolic —such as Donald Trump Jr.’s attendance of Bukele’s 2024 unconstitutional inauguration— to anti-migration cooperation, expanding on Trump’s first term. They also signed a memorandum on “peaceful nuclear cooperation”.

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