Bukele's Agenda: Spy on Journalists, Protect the Corrupt

Bukele’s Agenda: Spy on Journalists, Protect the Corrupt

Wednesday, September 18, 2024
El Faro Editorial Board
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The audio recordings of conversations held between Ernesto Castro and Alejandro Muyshondt at Casa Presidencial —the Salvadoran President’s Office— provide an important piece of the Bukele regime puzzle.

At the time that these conversations took place, in August 2020, Castro was serving as Nayib Bukele’s private presidential secretary, and Muyshondt as his national security advisor. The casual, everyday way that two officials close to the president spoke privately of committing illegal acts, of intercepting the communications of journalists and opposition politicians, and of protecting, for the benefit of their boss, the President of the Republic, various public officials under investigation for corruption or drug trafficking, provides yet another alarming confirmation of the mafioso character of the men responsible for installing a dictatorship in El Salvador.

“Let our bad guys be our bad guys,” Castro told Muyshondt after the security advisor warned him about corruption in the government. “It’s the outsiders who want to fuck with us.” The phrase defines the regime’s agenda to a tee: to protect its own —even if they are drug traffickers, corrupt officials, or criminals— and to persecute its critics, especially journalists.

Castro’s words were not spoken in the abstract; they have a shocking concreteness in the context of the conversations, with regard to protecting their own and persecuting “the outsiders.”

Muyshondt warned the private secretary that agents from the United States and from El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office —which at the time was not yet under Bukele’s control— had questioned the protections provided by the Salvadoran government to then-GANA party legislator Guillermo Gallegos, who was under investigation for drug trafficking, and to the director of El Salvador’s Bureau of Prisons, Osiris Luna Meza, who is accused of serious acts of corruption.

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202409/opinion/27560/bukele-rsquo-s-agenda-spy-on-journalists-protect-the-corrupt



pResident Nayib Bukele with Trump.
Nayib Bukele is wildly popular with the US right-wing.