Nayib Bukele is so popular with the US right that his refusal Monday to free a Maryland man with no criminal record mistakenly sent to a supermax prison in a foreign country was greeted by MAGA types as being, basically, badass.
The Salvadorian president who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator” was already a Trumpworld darling partly because of his gift for authoritarian showmanship— and his apparent success reducing crime by jailing alleged criminals with little due process. But his US popularity is also the product of a years-long courtship of American right-wing influencers, media, and politicians organized by Damian Merlo, a 50-year-old Miami-based lobbyist who has become, as the Central American newspaper El Faro put it last year, “a sort of ambassador to the Trump-aligned Right” for Latin American leaders.
Merlo earned more than $1.5 million for his firm since 2022 by pitching Bukele to right-leaning lawmakers and influencers, as Anna Massoglia reported Monday in her Influence Brief newsletter. Merlo did not respond to inquiries from Mother Jones.
Bukele’s willingness to accept and indefinitely imprison Trump administration deportees who have not been charged with a crime or afforded any meaningful due process is a policy reward that followed three years of partisan outreach overseen by Merlo. This is a new kind of foreign influence campaign that Trump has made possible: Lobbying that relies on far-right to far-right ideological affinity and aggressive embrace of MAGA messaging to win access and sway with the new administration.
Traditionally, many foreign leaders have hedged their bets in the US by hiring lobbyists with ties on both sides of the aisle. But Bukele, who was elected president in 2019, has recently employed only Merlo, a guy who posted a photo of himself wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt just before the 2022 midterms and has dispensed with any pretense of outreach to Democrats. It’s working for now, though the disdain with which Bukele treated critics of Trump’s policies may prove problematic for the Salvadorian president should Democrats return to power in coming years.
Merlo got his start in the business of lobbying on behalf of foreign strongmen when he worked as a vice president at Otto Reich and Associates, according to an online bio. That’s the lobbying firm founded by Reich, the Cuban-American extremist exile who played a prominent role in the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration. From his post as head of the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, Reich worked with Col. Oliver North to manipulate the US media to generate support for the Nicaraguan guerillas against the Sandinista government. In 1987, a report from the Comptroller General found that Reich’s office engaged in “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” that were “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.” Reich in 2006 famously praised Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet claiming that he had “saved Chilean democracy from communist takeover.”
Merlo later worked for the International Republican Institute, a right-leaning nonprofit group that has been accused of working to overthrow Democratic governments it dislikes, including Haiti’s in 2004. Still, after striking out on his own, Merlo also worked as a special assistant to Haiti’s former president Michel Martelly, and as a lobbyist for that country. Last year, the US government officially sanctioned Martelly for his involvement in drug trafficking and ties to the armed criminal gangs that have terrorized the poor country. Merlo, who is Argentinian, has also worked for Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
According to FARA filings, he began working for Bukele in 2020, helping efforts to boost US investment in El Salvador. Merlo has said that he helped arrange that country’s much-hyped adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, a policy which, under IMF pressure, was quietly undone last month. But as a PR stunt, the move was a success, drawing attention to El Salvador as a crypto-friendly outpost, at least according to Merlo. “We call it the Great Rebranding. It was genius,” Merlo told Time. “We could have paid millions to a PR firm to rebrand El Salvador. Instead, we just adopted Bitcoin.” (Merlo has since become a lobbyist for the crypto-currency company Tether.)
Merlo in 2023 and 2024 lobbied MAGA figures including Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Rep. Lauren Boebert, (R-Colo.,) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for Bukele, according to Foreign Agent Registration Act filings and news reports. Last November, Merlo met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). Merlo’s recent filing said, vaguely, that all his lobbying contacts were “about the importance of fostering strong dialogue between the US and El Salvador.”
Merlo has made himself a fixture in Trumpworld, with appearances at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago—“It’s the place to be and the place to be seen,” he told Fortune last year—accompanying Bukele on a trip to visit SpaceX with Elon Musk, and meeting at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference with Matt Schlapp, chairman of the conference, and Schlapp’s wife Mercedes, who is one of Trump’s former communications directors.
Merlo has also had extensive contacts with right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson. In May last year, the former Fox News host interviewed Bukele, characterizing his leadership as a model for the US. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” Tucker gushed in a post promoting the interview. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”
Carlson has been a reliable Bukele booster, even promoting a February interview in which Bukele claimed that “MS-13 participates in Satanic child sacrifice rituals.”
The Salvadoran constitution limits the national presidency to a single five-year term. But after taking office in 2019, Bukele systematically purged the judicial system of independent judges and replaced the members of the Supreme Court with his loyalists, who green-lighted his run for a second term. Merlo sprung into action, arranging for MAGA luminaires to attend Bukele’s swearing-in last June.
The power grab didn’t stop a gaggle of Americans from celebrating Bukele’s reelection. Trump Jr., his then-girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, since nominated as US Ambassador to Greece, Carlson, Lee, and Gaetz were among the attendees. Democratic Reps. Lou Correa of California and Vincente Gonzalez of Texas also attended the inauguration, in a small nod at bipartisanship.
The US visitors were ushered to restaurants and new Google offices, taken on a tour of the newly safe downtown San Salvador, and watched as Bukele—clad in what Time called “a striking suit with a stiff, gold-embroidered collar and cuffs that evoked a cross between Latin American revolutionary war heroes and Star Wars”—was inaugurated for what has been seen as an illegal second term. Merlo celebrated the event as “the hottest ticket in the Americas.”
After returning to the US, Gaetz helped form a new El Salvador Caucus in Congress. The former Florida congressman described it as a sort of Bukele fan club, saying it aimed to “nurture and advance the US-El Salvador relationship to encourage strong borders, strong culture, and the strong reforms that President Bukele has put into effect.”
“Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well,” Gaetz said. “So that we can experience a triumphant return of safety and prosperity that we once inspired in others.”
“Through the inspiration from El Salvador’s astonishing transformation, the great American rejuvenation can become a reality as well.”
Soon after, Gaetz headed south again to visit the notorious CECOT prison, where the Trump administration is now sending Venezuelan immigrants and where the president has discussed sending American citizens. Gaetz touted the prison in a slickly-produced video, touted by Bukele on X, that foreshadowed the video of Venezuelan migrants arriving there, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s infamous Rolex-accessorized appearance at the facility.
Behind the scenes, Merlo was involved. He apparently took photo of a sunglasses-adorned Gaetz standing in a hallway amid cells seen in a CNN story on Gaetz’s visit. “Courtesy Damian Merlo,” the photo’s tagline says.
Shortly after Trump’s election last year, Merlo penned an op-ed in the Miami Herald, bashing Joe Biden’s policies and urging the incoming Trump administration to look to El Salvador as a “model” for addressing the causes of illegal immigration. “President Bukele’s crackdown on crime has made El Salvador the safest country in the region, fueling economic growth and even reversing migration flows,” Merlo wrote. Rubio, whom Trump had just nominated as Secretary of State, “understands this model well, having visited El Salvador and witnessed its success under Bukele’s leadership,” Merlo noted.
The op-ed identified Merlo as “a Republican strategist and Latin America expert” and “president of the Latin America Advisory Group, a PR and government relations firm based in Miami.” It did not say that Merlo worked for Bukele.
Following an inquiry by Mother Jones, the Herald updated the tagline of the piece with a correction stating that the paper had failed to follow its guidelines on the piece. “The Herald did not disclose in this commentary that Merlo’s company had El Salvador as a client,” the note said.
One lobbying priority for El Salvador, promoted by Gaetz and the El Salvador caucus, has been to have the State Department to upgrade the country’s travel advisory to Level One, a designation that ranked the country as a safer tourist spot than many European countries. Last week the State Department complied, upgrading its guidance for El Salvador, long known for its US-trained death squads and MS-13 gangs, suggesting it is now a safer place for Americans to vacation than France. (The advisory presumably is not intended for Venezuelan asylum seekers forcibly sent to El Salvador because they have tattoos.) Announcing the change, Rubio credited Bukele’s leadership as “crucial in improving the security of his country for foreign travelers.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.