Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say.
Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.
His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.
But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.
The surprising reversal came shortly after a deal the Trump administration struck this year with Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, who agreed to accept more than 200 migrants expelled from the United States into a prison he built for terrorists.
In exchange for helping President Trump carry out his deportation agenda, the United States paid El Salvador millions of dollars, adding an important sweetener at Mr. Bukele’s request: the return of key MS-13 leaders in American custody.
Officials from both countries have said the gang leaders are being sent back to face justice.
But the Trump administration has not acknowledged another reason Mr. Bukele would want them back: U.S. prosecutors have amassed substantial evidence of a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who they say agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail, a New York Times investigation found.
The deal with El Salvador heralded by Mr. Trump as a crackdown on crime is actually undermining a longstanding U.S. inquiry into the gang, according to multiple people with knowledge of the initiative. Two major ongoing cases against some of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders could be badly damaged, and other defendants could be less likely to cooperate or testify in court, they said.
The deal has also undercut Mr. Trump’s own repeated pledges to dismantle MS-13, a central plank of his tough-on-crime brand. Earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an internal memo calling for the “total elimination” of the gang, which the White House has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
In his first term, Mr. Trump established a group of prosecutors and investigators known as Task Force Vulcan that brought expansive cases against the gang’s leadership. Some who were part of that effort are now alarmed by the deal with Mr. Bukele, and worry that he wants the gang leaders back to prevent them from revealing damaging information about his government.
The Times investigation found that U.S. officials have had strong indications for years of the troubling relationship between the Bukele administration and MS-13 and its leaders — and had begun scrutinizing Mr. Bukele himself. The findings are based on government documents and interviews with more than 30 people who have knowledge of the Vulcan inquiry or the U.S.-El Salvador relationship, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the ongoing federal investigation.
-
The first Trump administration received a warning about the secret pact as early as August 2020 from a top Salvadoran official who showed up at the United States Embassy in San Salvador to share information.
-
The following year, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on that same official and another top Bukele aide after determining they had offered MS-13 leaders money, mobile phones and prostitutes in jail in exchange for their help bringing down the homicide rate and securing votes.
-
Federal investigators were examining whether some U.S. aid provided to El Salvador was being illicitly funneled to benefit MS-13.
-
At one point, a gang leader ordered the assassination of an F.B.I. agent working on the case in El Salvador, to stymie the investigation. The agent and his family had to leave the country.
-
Federal investigators had begun looking at Mr. Bukele’s activities, taking steps to request a review of his bank records to examine possible misappropriation of U.S. funds, according to Christopher Musto, a task force member at the time. ProPublica previously reported some aspects of the case, including the focus on Mr. Bukele.
“It was groundbreaking,” Mr. Musto said of the Vulcan investigation, noting that some agents risked their lives to help track down and detain MS-13 leaders. “We went through a lot to do it.”
While he broadly supports Mr. Trump’s deportation of gang members, Mr. Musto said it was striking to see him host Mr. Bukele at the White House to celebrate their deal.
“He was dirty,” Mr. Musto said of the Salvadoran president. “He was corrupt. And now he’s sitting next to the president in the Oval Office and he’s got prime access to the leader of the free world.”
Mr. Bukele has repeatedly denied there was a pact between his government and gang leaders. Salvadoran officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “any suggestion that President Trump isn’t successfully eradicating terrorist criminal gangs from the United States is just plain stupid.” She said the administration was “grateful for President Bukele’s partnership” and the use of his maximum-security prison, adding: “There is no better place for these sick, illegal criminals.”
A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement that the agency was “focused on making America safe again, which includes ending the invasion of violent illegal alien criminals.”
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which brought the two MS-13 leadership cases, declined to comment.
It remains unclear how many MS-13 leaders the Trump administration has sent back to El Salvador so far — or how many more it plans to return.
At least one of them, César López Larios, was put on a plane to El Salvador in March with other migrants sent to the maximum-security prison. Mr. López had been in U.S. custody for less than a year and was awaiting trial on Long Island on narco-terrorism conspiracy charges.
Lawyers for Mr. Arévalo, who remains in federal custody after pleading not guilty, have been trying to prevent him from facing a similar fate. In a recent letter to the judge overseeing the case, they argued that the Trump administration had made “a corrupt deal” to send defendants in the case back “to be silenced by the Bukele administration.”
The government’s sudden reversal troubles Richard Loeschner, the former principal of Brentwood Ross High School on Long Island, where nearly a decade ago two of his students were murdered by MS-13 members.
“Those were heinous acts, and I just hope, my God, that the men who were behind them, the masterminds, serve time — wherever it may be,” Mr. Loeschner said. “I would be very unhappy if they dropped all the charges here and flew them back to El Salvador, and they were just set free.”
“That,” he added, “would be devastating.”
‘Dismantle, Decimate and Eradicate’
The spasm of violence committed by MS-13 on Long Island caught Mr. Trump’s attention during his first term. In July 2017, he delivered a speech in Ronkonkoma, calling the gang’s members “animals” and asserting that the policy of his administration was “to dismantle, decimate and eradicate” the group, which was started by Central American immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s before morphing into an international syndicate.
The next year, he invited the mother of one of Mr. Loeschner’s slain students to attend his State of the Union address, telling those watching that the girls had been murdered by “members of the savage MS-13 gang.”
In August 2019, his attorney general, William P. Barr, created a special unit targeting MS-13. Joint Task Force Vulcan was asked to hunt down and prosecute not just the gang’s minions on the streets of American cities, but also its top leaders overseas.
The man selected to oversee Vulcan was a scion of a Justice Department stalwart: John J. Durham, the son of John H. Durham, a longtime federal prosecutor (and ally of Mr. Barr) best known for having investigated the investigators who scrutinized connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Bespectacled like his father, but without the imposing beard, the younger Mr. Durham quickly developed a reputation for probity and relentlessness. Working from his base in the federal prosecutor’s office on Long Island, he was placed in charge of a team that drew on the resources of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations and at least 10 U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country in MS-13 hot spots.
By the following year, the team had received a big tip.
The Pact
Twice in August 2020, an unusual guest with a startling secret visited the United States Embassy in San Salvador.
His name was Osiris Luna Meza, and he was a top Bukele aide who ran the Salvadoran prison system.
Although Mr. Bukele has long denied having corrupt ties with his country’s gangs, Mr. Luna — one of Mr. Bukele’s closest confidants — told U.S. diplomats that just such a pact existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13, according to a State Department cable reviewed by The Times.
Confessing his “discomfort at the government’s interactions” with the gang, the Sept. 10, 2020, cable said, Mr. Luna showed officials at the embassy a security camera screenshot of several masked men entering one of the prisons he oversaw.
One of the men, he said, was a senior MS-13 leader wanted by Salvadoran authorities. Mr. Luna acknowledged that he had personally brought him into the facility to meet with some of his jailed colleagues, though he disavowed knowing anything about their conversations.
Embassy officials were uncertain what to do with the information, according to the cable, because they believed that Mr. Luna, who had a reputation for corruption, was probably downplaying his own involvement. The officials were also skeptical because he had made a big request: asylum in the United States — with luxurious accommodations — in exchange for testifying against the Bukele government.
Still, much of what Mr. Luna revealed at the embassy made its way to Mr. Durham and his Vulcan investigators, according to three people familiar with the matter. Then, shortly after his visit, the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro published a lengthy investigation describing the pact between the Bukele administration and MS-13.
Within months, Vulcan issued its first significant indictment against the highest reaches of MS-13’s leadership. In December 2020, prosecutors charged 14 men, including 10 who were part of the gang’s founding cadre, the 12 Apostles of the Devil. The indictment was unsealed on Jan. 14, 2021, less than a week before Mr. Trump’s successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was inaugurated.
The charging document revealed, among other acts of violence, that MS-13 had sought the murder of an F.B.I. agent. The agent had been assigned to El Salvador as part of an anti-gang task force helping Vulcan gather intelligence when the hit was put out on him, according to three people with knowledge of the case. He and his family had to be rushed out of the country.
The indictment also had a section titled “Political Influence in El Salvador,” which laid out how MS-13 leaders had helped secure votes for the party that governed El Salvador before Mr. Bukele took over, in exchange for cash and other perks.
The indictment said nothing about Mr. Bukele, who had assumed the presidency in June 2019; Mr. Luna; or the illicit prison visits. There was only a tantalizing reference to how MS-13 had “continued to negotiate with political parties in El Salvador and to use its control of the level of violence to influence actions of the government.”
‘Pick Our Battles’
As Vulcan’s work proceeded, the Biden administration went public with what it knew about the relationship between the Bukele government and MS-13.
In December 2021, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mr. Luna and another top Salvadoran official, Carlos Marroquín Chica, after finding that the men had not merely facilitated prison meetings with MS-13 members after Mr. Bukele took office in 2019, but had also taken part in them. Those meetings, the Treasury report said, were part of the Bukele government’s “efforts to negotiate a secret truce with gang leadership.”
During the negotiations, MS-13 leaders agreed to give their political support to Mr. Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party, which ultimately won a two-thirds supermajority in the 2021 legislative elections. Fulfilling its side of the bargain, U.S. officials said, the Bukele government provided the gangsters with money and, for those who were in custody, mobile phones and prostitutes.
Mr. Bukele scoffed at the allegations. “How can they put out such an obvious lie without anybody questioning it?” he wrote in a social media post.
Inside the Biden administration, there was broader worry about the Salvadoran president. Four former officials who focused on Latin American affairs said that U.S. officials had been concerned about the allegations of Mr. Bukele’s ties to Salvadoran gangs going back to his stint as the mayor of San Salvador from 2015 to 2018.
But there was debate about how much to call him out amid a growing migrant crisis, particularly as the president made moves that raised alarm over due process and human rights in El Salvador. As one former official put it, the Biden administration wanted to “pick our battles” with Mr. Bukele.
In 2022, an outburst of violence signaled the breakdown of any pact between Mr. Bukele’s government and top MS-13 leaders. Mr. Bukele imposed a state of emergency, leading police and security forces to carry out mass arrests of tens of thousands of people accused of being gang members or collaborators, many of whom were innocent, human rights groups said. Despite this, his approval ratings soared as crime rates plummeted.
The Bukele government had been dismantling the Salvadoran investigative units that had scrutinized the government’s pact with the gangs and assisted U.S. investigators, and also threatened El Faro reporters for their work uncovering its dealings with the gangs, the journalists have said. Prosecutors and journalists have fled the country for their own safety.
Vulcan 2.0
In early 2023, Mr. Durham led his colleagues at Vulcan into a new phase of their efforts to take down MS-13.
That February, the task force announced the arrest of three gang leaders, including Mr. Arévalo, the man known as Vampiro, who was captured in Mexico, then sent to the United States. The arrests were based on a sprawling second indictment, charging Mr. Arévalo and 12 other high-ranking MS-13 members with an array of narco-terrorism crimes.
“Only by combating MS-13’s command and control structure, and bringing the transnational criminal organization’s highest-ranking leaders to justice in the United States, will we be able to break the persistent cycles of violence that have plagued our communities,” Mr. Durham said in the announcement.
Some of the most explosive revelations concerned Mr. Luna and Mr. Marroquín, identified in the 42-page document only by their government positions.
Mr. Durham’s prosecutors disclosed that the two men had met numerous times inside Salvadoran prisons with top MS-13 leaders, including Elmer Canales Rivera, also known as “Crook.”
The indictment also asserted that the gangsters had asked for assurances from the Bukele government that they would not be extradited to face prosecution in the United States.
Indeed, when the United States originally asked El Salvador to extradite Mr. Canales, “high-level Salvadoran officials” set the gang leader up in a luxury apartment, gave him a firearm and then, prosecutors said, made arrangements to get him out of the country. He remained a fugitive until he was caught by Mexican authorities and placed in American custody in November 2023.
As the Vulcan team pursued its second case, investigators found evidence that it was not just a “few bad apples” in the Bukele administration working with MS-13. There were ties to the gang at “the highest level of government,” one former official with knowledge of the inquiry said.
Mr. Marroquín, a close aide to Mr. Bukele, was suspected of funneling to MS-13 resources from the U.S. Agency for International Development that were coordinated on the ground by a Salvadoran aid program he ran called Tejido Social, according to three people familiar with the case. The aid, which financed community centers outfitted with libraries, computers and other amenities, was believed to have been directed to MS-13 neighborhoods as incentives for gang leaders to cooperate.
The Salvadoran government also appeared to be directly siphoning off U.S. government aid to the gangs. One senior Salvadoran official laid out the scheme in a presentation to Vulcan investigators in a meeting in Washington in spring 2021, according to Mr. Musto, an early member of the task force. While the bulk of U.S. funds went to real projects, “some of that money was going to pay the gang members, too,” he said.
It was around this time that the Vulcan team asked the Treasury Department to review the bank accounts of top Salvadoran officials, including Mr. Bukele’s, as part of the effort to trace the U.S. funds, according to Mr. Musto.
U.S. prosecutors occasionally investigate foreign heads of state, but it is rare to pursue a case against a sitting leader, which can carry significant diplomatic consequences. Mr. Musto, who left the task force in late 2021, said he did not know what came of the request. The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
As soon as Treasury officials imposed sanctions on Mr. Marroquín in late 2021, U.S.A.I.D. ended its relationship with Tejido Social, according to five former U.S. officials.
The Unraveling
The unraveling of some of Vulcan’s work began weeks into Mr. Trump’s second term. By early February, the United States had struck its deal with El Salvador, and Mr. Bukele wanted his gang leaders back.
The day after the agreement was announced, the Salvadoran ambassador to Washington, Milena Mayorga, said in an interview that Mr. Bukele requested that MS-13 leaders be among those deported to El Salvador, “as a matter of honor.”
For some on Mr. Durham’s team who had been building cases for years, the Trump administration’s pivot was deeply frustrating.
Nevertheless, on March 11, Mr. Durham sent a letter to Judge Joan M. Azrack, who was overseeing both of the MS-13 leadership indictments, saying the United States was seeking to dismiss all charges against Mr. López, a defendant in the first case.
The letter, filed under seal, asserted that the Vulcan team believed the evidence in the case was “strong.” But the new administration had “important foreign policy considerations” and “national security concerns” that required dropping the case and returning Mr. López to El Salvador, Mr. Durham wrote.
That same day, before defense lawyers had much time to react, Judge Azrack granted the request. Mr. López was placed on a plane four days later and flown into the custody of Salvadoran jailers.
On April 1, prosecutors went back to Judge Azrack, asking again under seal to dismiss the charges against Mr. Arévalo.
This time, defense lawyers put up a fight.
Louis M. Freeman and Thomas H. Nooter, lawyers for Mr. Arévalo, said in a letter to the judge this month that the U.S. government knew it was likely that their client would be “tortured or ‘disappeared’” if he returned to El Salvador, because Mr. Bukele wanted to silence him. They asked the judge to unseal the government’s request to dismiss the charges, which she granted.
In response, Mr. Durham did not address the substance of those accusations, but reiterated that the charges against Mr. Arévalo “must yield” to the administration’s “geopolitical” imperatives.
One defense lawyer familiar with some of the MS-13 prosecutions described the developments as “kind of mind-boggling.”
The Justice Department, he said, was having its cases “literally pulled out from under them.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting from Central Islip, N.Y. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Annie Correal reports from the U.S. and Latin America for The Times.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
The post Trump Vowed to Dismantle MS-13. His Deal With Bukele Threatens That Effort. appeared first on New York Times.
