A Texas Democrat is co-chair of a congressional caucus that has tirelessly promoted El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, including on the caucus’s X account by reposting calls to “impeach the corrupt judges” who impede the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Bukeke is also currently at the center of a scandal in the US involving the transport of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they have entered the country’s notorious prisons for gang members – despite clear evidence that some of them have no gang links.
Vicente Gonzalez, who has been in Congress since 2016, has co-chaired the El Salvador caucus since it was founded by the far-right Republican former Florida representative Matt Gaetz last August.
The apparent admiration of Bukele by the centrist Democrat has sparked criticism and concerns about the negotiability of human rights and democracy for centrist Democrats in the Trump era when the US president is showing increasingly authoritarian traits domestically and sympathies for autocrats abroad.
Ana María Méndez-Dardón of the Washington Office on Latin America, where she is director for Central America, said the El Salvador caucus “symbolizes political support for Bukele’s regime” at a time when “human rights organizations have documented torture in El Salvador’s prison system”.
Sonja Wolf, a political scientist at the Panamerican University in Mexico City and the author of Mano Dura, a book on the politics of gang control in El Salvador, said: “The social media posts of the caucus indicate admiration for, and support of, Bukele’s security strategy.”
Wolf added: “As things currently stand in the United States, the Democratic party has yet to figure out how to resist the Trump administration and try to halt the authoritarian regression in the United States.”
The El Salvador caucus was created just weeks after Gonzalez attended Bukele’s second inauguration last June alongside Gaetz, four other Congress members and Maga world figures including Donald Trump Jr and Tucker Carlson.
The Guardian contacted Gonzalez’s office for comment but received no response.
Gonzalez’s co-chair on the committee has been the far-right Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna. In January, Luna introduced a bill to add Trump’s face to the side of Mount Rushmore, the mountainside memorial to the nation’s greatest presidents.
The caucus publicizes its activities via an account on Musk’s social media platform, X. In many posts and reposts, that account has appeared to endorse unconstitutional and anti-democratic proposals from Bukele, Musk and other far-right actors.
One of the account’s reposts is of a post from Bukele that embeds a 26 February complaint from Musk saying: “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges. No one is above the law, including judges. That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America.”
The day before, a federal judge blocked Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing the personal details of millions of Americans via data from the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management.
Bukele shared Musk’s post with the remark: “If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country.”
He added: “They will form a cartel (a judicial dictatorship) and block all reforms, protecting the systemic corruption that put them in their seats.”
In May 2021, Bukele removed the country’s attorney general and five supreme court judges. Later that year, the Biden state department put Bukele’s hand-picked replacement judges on a list of “undemocratic and corrupt actors”, with the US chargé d’affaires in El Salvador at that time warning of a “decline in democracy” in the country.
In a 26 February post reposted by the El Salvador caucus account, Matt Gaetz amplified yet another of Bukele post from 2021. Bukele had posted pictures apparently showing a rally of the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party; that party initially formed as an armed insurgent group, but has participated in national elections since 1994 after the insurgency ended in peace accords in 1992.
Bukele himself served as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán and San Salvador, before he was ousted from the party in 2017. He has consistently attacked the party in power, including by refusing to commemorate the peace accords that brought peace to El Salvador after years of brutal civil war.
In 2021, Bukele wrote of the apparently peaceful protest: “US taxpayers should know that their government is using their money to fund communist movements against a democratic elected (and with a 90% approval rating) government in El Salvador.”
In the Gaetz post, reposted by the El Salvador caucus account, he wrote: “Every dollar of this must be cut off @elonmusk.”
On 16 March, the account reposted a post from Luna, who was herself reposting a celebratory Bukele post about the brutal delivery of Venezuelan immigrants, whom the Trump administration alleges are Tren de Aragua gang members, to the Salvadoran prison system.
She commented: “Well done @nayibbukele!”
Those prisoners were sent to El Salvador in apparent defiance of a restraining order issued by the federal court judge James Boasberg. On Monday, the appeals court judge Patricia Millett averred that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act” during the second world war.
The relatives of some people sent to El Salvador as gang members have said that they are innocent. While immigration officials selected deportees on the basis of alleged gang tattoos, family members say the tattoos were of religious imagery and football club logos.
Bukele has long been in favor on the US far right, who admire his authoritarian approach to law and order, his strongman constitutional brinkmanship, and his embrace of cryptocurrencies.
Wolf said: “Having been elected president twice, the second time by violating the constitution, [Bukele] has established an opaque and corrupt regime that pursues personal enrichment… the president has also eroded institutional checks and balances, stifled press freedom, and pushed for gentrification and megaprojects that undermine people’s livelihoods and displace communities.”
Gonzalez has a history of striking conservative positions both in Congress and on the campaign trail. In January, he was one of two Democrats who voted to support a Trump-backed act that would withhold federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes to compete alongside girls. During the Biden administration, he was one of a number of Texas Democrats who pushed back on the administration’s environmental legislation, before eventually supporting it.
During his 2022 campaign, a blogger who had previously received campaign funds from Gonzalez’s committee made comments about his Mexican-born opponent Mayra Flores that were criticized as racist, including references to her as “Miss Frijoles” and “Miss Enchiladas”.
