(AFP) – US Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed Monday in El Salvador to coordinate on migration with its iron-fisted leader, who has cast himself as an ally of President Donald Trump. President Nayib Bukele has won popularity at home — and criticism from rights groups — with a sweeping crackdown on crime, which has also earned him hero status with some of Trump’s allies.
Rubio, on the second stop of his first trip as the top US diplomat, will discuss with Bukele whether El Salvador can take in gang members from American nemesis Venezuela. “It was just a decade ago San Salvador was the murder capital of the world, and today it’s one of the safest cities in the world,” Mauricio Claver-Carone, the US special envoy on Latin America, said in a briefing on the trip. Bukele’s efforts “are frankly the envy of a lot of countries throughout the Western Hemisphere,” he said, adding the measures have “really made him one of the most consequential leaders not only on security but a great ally on migration.”
Trump, since taking office last month, has stripped the roughly 600,000 Venezuelans of protection from deportation ordered by former president Joe Biden because of the economic and security crisis in the South American country. A US envoy last week met Venezuela’s leftist president, Nicolas Maduro, and demanded that he take back citizens including members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan-born gang that Trump has designated as a terrorist group. Panama, which Rubio visited on Sunday, also pledged further cooperation in deporting migrants from other nations — part of its own effort to woo Trump as he threatens to seize the Panama Canal.
Before leaving for El Salvador, Rubio observed a deportation flight of Colombians detained as they crossed the Darien Gap, a dense jungle that many migrants pass through towards the United States. “If they reach the southern border of the United States, they create serious problems for us,” he told reporters as Panamanian authorities loaded 32 men and 11 women onto a plane bound for Colombia.
– Allying with Trump agenda –
The Trump administration, with its friendship with Bukele, has so far not touched protected status from deportation for some 232,000 Salvadorans in the United States which was also extended by Biden. On the eve of Rubio’s visit, Bukele unabashedly associated himself with Trump by backing his effort to dismantle US foreign assistance. Posting — in English — on X, Bukele repeated talking points of Trump’s billionaire friend Elon Musk and right-wing populists by alleging that US assistance mostly goes to fund opposition groups including non-governmental organizations.
“Cutting this so-called aid isn’t just beneficial for the United States; it’s also a big win for the rest of the world,” Bukele wrote as he posted a celebrated Norman Rockwell painting. El Salvador received some $138 million in US assistance in the 2023 fiscal year, led by support for the government and civil society and for basic education, according to official US figures. Non-governmental groups have denounced Bukele for ignoring civil liberties, including by suspending the need for warrants to arrest people.
Bukele acknowledges that innocent people have been rounded up, but he enjoys wide public approval and swept to another term last year with more than 80 percent of the vote. Guests at his inauguration included the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson, the right-wing journalist close to Trump. However, Bukele may still need to reassure one dissonant voice — Trump himself. In his speech to the Republican nominating convention last year, Trump unexpectedly criticized Bukele, questioning how he reduced crime and alleging that instead El Salvador was “sending their murderers to the United States of America.” “This is going to be very bad. And bad things are going to happen,” Trump said in the speech.
– Shaun TANDON
© 2024 AFP
