El Salvador is intent on displacing the US to make China its patron. But it needs our cash to do it.

The country that we rescued from a Communist takeover a generation ago is selling itself to Communist China.

But it needs our money to bridge the gap.

El Salvador is on somewhat of a charm offensive in Washington this week, desperately trying to convince anybody who will listen that its dynamic young president, Nayib Bukele, is a solid asset for the United States who is fending off aggressive advances from Beijing.

The opposite is true.

Bukele is a Communist Chinese asset who needs infusions of American aid and Washington-approved cash to keep his bankrupt economy going while he works out a better deal with Xi Jinping.

Two years ago I agreed with a Latin American commentator that Bukele, who has Venezuelan handlers, could be “more dangerous than the Communist FMLN” guerrillas of the 1980s. With Soviet backing and Cuban training, the FMLN launched a murderous civil war in El Salvador to turn the country into a Soviet ally. Bukele, I said, is “an FMLN byproduct who is friendly with jihadists.”

Bukele has been drawing El Salvador more tightly with Qatar and China.

I have known El Salvador since being a participant in the war against the Soviet-backed FMLN guerrillas in 1984. The Bukele family supported the Communist side (his father later became an Islamist imam with cash from Qatar). Nayib himself joined the FMLN when it became a Marxist political party, got kicked out, and won the presidency on his own with a large majority – as well as control of two-thirds of the legislative branch.

Bukele and his handlers have been running political influence ops to against the Trump administration and its supporters in 2019 and 2020, and are waging a diplomatic offensive against the present administration today. Bukele appealed to elements of the Trump team and its constituency by saying he wanted to end the illegal immigration of Salvadorans to the United States. One of the biggest conservative think-tanks in the capital even provided Bukele a forum in 2019, and a prominent and popular conservative TV figure went to El Salvador this year to interview him.

Bukele can’t build his alliance with China without the Americans giving him the bridge funding. He needs continued USAID development and training programs, occasional cash from Congress for his “cooperation,” and huge infusions of US-approved cash from multilateral money houses like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

And he couldn’t proceed while his own prosecutor-general was investigating him and his cronies for massive corruption.

So Bukele fired him and shut down the criminal probes. Then, a month ago, he took control of the third branch of government by sacking the entire supreme court and taking away their personal security guards. El Salvador remains the hemisphere’s most violent country, so Bukele’s judicial coup d’etat not only gives him dictatorial control, but sends a message that any judge opposing him could be sentencing himself to death.

A Salvadoran lawmaker said that Bukele is pushing through ex post facto laws as a basis to give himself dictatorial powers.

Most of the countries of the Western hemisphere oppose what Bukele is doing. Even the Biden administration withdrew US aid programs for El Salvador’s law enforcement and other government purposes.

Now Bukele has a diplomat in Washington speaking to ambassadors from across the hemisphere, and seeking support for the Biden administration to restore the aid.

Meanwhile, another Bukele team is negotiating quietly with the Chinese.

The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t “give” aid to any country without seeing what it can take of greater value. Bukele knows that. Which is why he needs continued US aid to appear strong, to make it look like he has robust American backing, and to make his country a more valuable sale to Beijing.

“Nayib is fully committed to turning El Salvador into part of Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road, to make our country a Chinese ally,” a well-connected Salvadoran businessman told me. “His diplomatic outreach to Washington is a hoax. His is doing it to help him squeeze more from China.”

Policy recommendations:

The Biden Administration should freeze all US aid and assistance programs to the Salvadoran government and to any entity tied to Bukele and his organizations.
The State Department should cancel all visas of Salvadoran officials involved in double-dealing against the United States and building relations with China, involved in the judicial coup d’etat, and involved in official corruption, and cancel the visas of those individuals’ family members.
The World Bank should suspend all program financing in El Salvador.
Inter-American Development Bank President Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former Trump National Security Council staffer responsible for the Western Hemisphere, should stop all loans to El Salvador.
The US should veto all further disbursements of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans to the Salvadoran government.
Leaders in Congress and elsewhere should develop a long-overdue strategy to push back Chinese influence from the hemisphere and make Chinese adventurism too costly for the CCP to bear.

Reunión Presidente Sánchez Cerén con alcalde de San Salvador. by Presidencia El Salvador is licensed under CC0 1.0