The Naïve Betrayal of Osiris Luna

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In August 2020, Osiris Luna Meza, vice minister of Public Security and director of prisons in El Salvador, secured a meeting with several U.S. officials. A small delegation representing the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security awaited him.

The meeting did not take place inside the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, but at the headquarters of the Joint Border Intelligence Group (GCIF), a discreet location in Colonia San Benito, where intelligence from different countries is shared, financed by the United States, and where representatives of that country have a permanent presence.

One of the U.S. officials —an expert on security issues linked to gang investigations and their political ties— who was at that meeting described it to El Faro: “We proposed that location because Osiris didn’t want to go to the embassy, because there are always a lot of security checks and it’s obvious when someone arrives. He didn’t want to be seen arriving at the embassy. On the other hand, his presence in that office was more or less normal, because he was the vice minister of security.”

At that time, the Salvadoran government boasted of a solid and sustained decline in homicides that had taken place since Bukele came to power and attributed it to the “Territorial Control Plan”, which had been declared secret. The ruling party was promoting a tough stance against gangs, and no indication of the agreements between the authorities and the gangs had been made public. Over time, the depth of these agreements would be revealed in articles published by this news outlet and also in numerous court documents from U.S. prosecutors.

In addition to the source, the meeting was attended by FBI agent Luis Rosas, Charles Walsh of the Department of Justice, and Carlos Ortiz, an attaché from the Department of Homeland Security, who listened to what the Salvadoran official had to say: In summary, Luna reported that he had been forced by the director of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit, Carlos Marroquín, and by Mario Durán, who was then Minister of Governance and is currently mayor of San Salvador Centro, to be an accomplice in the logistical scaffolding of the Nayib Bukele government’s pact with the gangs.

“I think he was scared and went so far as to say, ‘I'm not the one negotiating, it’s Carlos Marroquín and Mario Durán,’” the source said. “He was upset because they were stepping over him, and when he objected, they told him they were acting on behalf of the boss.”

Bukele’s overtures to the gangs date back to 2014, when he was a candidate for mayor of San Salvador. Bukele won those elections and in 2015 took office as mayor of the capital. That same year, the police and the Attorney General’s Office were conducting an extensive investigation against the Mara Salvatrucha-13, known as Operación Jaque, or “Operation Checkmate.” While tailing one of the gang's leaders, they secretly pursued him to a Pizza Hut, where he met with two municipal employees: Mario Durán, who was the síndico, or legal representative, of the Mayor’s Office, and Carlos Marroquín, who headed the municipality’s social reconstruction office. The police photographed them and then arrested both officials so they could be identified.

Bukele maintained the agreement with the gangs throughout his term as mayor and renewed it once he became president. For such large structures —some 70,000 members among the three main gangs, according to Salvadoran authorities— and so widely distributed throughout the country to align themselves with the agreement, it was essential that the top leaders held in maximum-security prisons give their approval.

To this end, the operators of the pact needed Luna to authorize the entry of gang leaders who had been released from prison so that they could hold meetings with their imprisoned leaders. Luna had to guarantee that these gang members could enter without passing through security checks and without identifying themselves.

All the versions gathered by this newspaper, both from documentary sources, prison officials, and testimonies from gang members who entered the prisons, assure that Luna did not enter the rooms where these meetings took place, but remained outside to ensure that the gang members were not interrupted by prison guards.

“He assured us that he did want to register [gang members entering the prisons], but that the others wouldn’t let him... That tells you what an idiot he is, because Osiris didn’t want to screw Bukele — he wanted to screw Marroquín and Mario Durán, but of course he ended up screwing Bukele,” said the source.

Luna asked U.S. officials for asylum in the United States along with his mother, girlfriend, and daughter, but his enthusiasm waned when he learned the conditions attached to these benefits: “We told him we couldn’t help him if he was involved in illegal activities, because he already had a reputation for corruption, and we told him, ‘We can get you out tomorrow, but this is what will happen: You’re going to have to testify before a judge,’” recalls the former U.S. diplomat. “And that scared him, because he didn’t want to stab Bukele in the back.”

Not only did U.S. officials profile the vice minister as corrupt, but so did the Bukele government’s Police Intelligence Subdirectorate, a unit that in April 2020 (four months before the meeting with the U.S. officials) described him in official documents as “an operative in the drug trade” for another politician: Guillermo Gallegos, leader of the GANA party, in which Luna began his political career and which served as a party platform for Bukele to run for president in 2019.

In June 2021, the Biden administration formalized its suspicions that the vice minister was tainted when the State Department included him on the dreaded Engel List, which revokes the travel visas of actors singled-out as corrupt or anti-democratic. Months later, the U.S. Treasury reinforced this view of Luna by issuing Magnitsky sanctions, accusing him of facilitating the pact between the Salvadoran government and Mara Salvatrucha-13, now considered by the U.S. to be a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The sanctions against Luna remain in place at the time of publication, despite Bukele’s good relations with U.S. President Donald Trump.

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After his overtures to foreign agents, the vice minister’s record of corruption only continued to grow: Two months later, in the midst of the pandemic, Luna and his mother, Alma Yanira Meza, appropriated and sold for their personal gain almost 43,000 sacks of food and basic grains that were supposed to be used to alleviate the hunger of the poorest Salvadorans most affected by COVID-19 —embezzlement totalling $1.6 million dollars. To do this, they had prisoners transfer the food from sacks bearing the official government logo to others without logos. That same year, the Attorney General’s Office —which was not yet controlled by Bukele— had detected that Luna spent $278,000 on payments to fake positions, meaning that he invented jobs in order to appropriate their salaries.

2023 was another intense year for Luna: In April of that year, El Faro discovered that inmates under his control had been assigned to build —without any financial compensation, food, or water— a beach ranch owned by a business partner of his mother. In July, it was revealed that Luna’s right-hand man, Wilfredo Ostorga, had been arrested by Bukele's police for charging drug traffickers money in exchange for allowing them to receive visits or food in prison, or to leave for extended stays in hospitals without being ill.

Returning to Luna’s decision to approach U.S. officials in August 2020: that meeting was a first approach, and his interlocutors lost interest after Luna proved reluctant to serve as a witness in court and failed to back up his version with solid evidence.

There was a second meeting, according to the source, this time at the home of one of the officials, which was also attended by political affairs attaché Matt Doore. On that occasion, Luna tried to explore other ways to achieve his goal —exposing Marroquín and Durán— and one of the officials recommended that he contact the media. Luna rejected that possibility.

At that second meeting, the vice minister had another request: that the United States intervene on his behalf so that Bukele would appoint him ambassador to Washington, or grant him some other diplomatic position in that country. “He asked us to recommend him for the Embassy in the United States. We told him, ‘That’s not how it works,’ and I said, ‘Your other option is to discreetly give that information to the media,’” the source recalls.

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After that meeting, Luna decided to prove his worth. Sources within the prison system recall that the director-general requested all the logbooks from the maximum-security prisons. He photocopied several pages of the logbooks from the maximum-security prisons in Zacatecoluca and Phase 3 of Izalco, holding the top leaders of the three main gangs in El Salvador.

These books are used to keep a detailed record of everything that happens in the prison: from the arrival of food, the time of entry and exit of prison officials, to the strange visit of hooded men who refused to identify themselves or undergo mandatory searches, and who arrived accompanied by Luna himself, the director of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit, Carlos Marroquín, and the then deputy director of that unit, Dennis Salinas, who is currently a legislator for the ruling Nuevas Ideas party and a member of the Security and Justice Commission.

Luna copied the pages of the logbooks where these unusual visits were recorded, including those that documented their presence and his orders to facilitate the hooded men’s entry. He also copied some prison intelligence reports in which his subordinates noted the existence of a pact between the gangs and the Bukele administration. In one of these reports, one of Luna’s subordinates wrote: “Next year there are elections and as a Barrio [i.e., collectively, as the MS-13 gang] they are coming to support this new party,” referring to the Nuevas Ideas party and the 2021 legislative elections.

On the same subject, another intelligence report prepared by Inspector Jairo Solís in Phase 3 of Izalco Prison claims that a gang leader known as “White de Iberias”, who entered the prison hooded and accompanied by Osiris Luna, delivered a message to the leaders imprisoned there: “It’s done, he’s spoken. (...) Next year the elections are coming and as a barrio [gang] they are coming to support this new party, because they are going to help us overturn the article [of the law] to obtain the privilege, and with El Diablo and Snyder they are going to come to an understanding with the sum of money…” (sic).

Diablo is Borromeo Enrique Enríquez and Snyder is Tiberio Ramírez Valladares; they were two of the top leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha-13, imprisoned in the Zacatecoluca Prison. According to this document —photocopied by Osiris Luna— White de Iberias was carrying out an order from the Ranfla Nacional: to support the party founded by Bukele. Luna also photocopied some “wilas,” or messages written in code, in which gang leaders gave instructions to their soldiers, evidencing the pact with the government.

Armed with these documents, Luna returned to the U.S. officials. But they did not attach much importance to them, largely because many were photocopies of handwritten documents. “If I remember correctly, it was Charles Walsh [of the Department of Justice] who said, ‘This is of no use to us,’ because they did not understand the future of the case and because they were handwritten documents that could not possibly be considered in a U.S. trial. They were not even presented to the ambassador, because everyone thought they were worthless,” said the source.

However, this former official at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador considered it “impossible” that the meetings with Luna were not recorded in an official report addressed to then-Ambassador Ronald D. Johnson, who is now his country’s representative to Mexico, following Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025. “That kind of thing [like the meetings with Luna] cannot happen without the ambassador receiving at least a brief summary of what took place,” he said.

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For this report, El Faro requested interviews with Ambassador Johnson —through the Embassy in Mexico— and the head of the diplomatic mission in San Salvador, William Duncan, to hear the official U.S. version of the meetings. On Thursday, July 30, the Embassy announced that Duncan was retiring from the Foreign Service. A response was also requested, through the mission in El Salvador, from the U.S. representatives who met with Vice Minister Luna. El Faro verified that all the U.S. officials mentioned by the source were on duty in El Salvador when the meeting took place. A spokeswoman in Mexico responded that Johnson, for his part, “is fully focused on the many pressing issues in the Mexico-United States bilateral relationship and is therefore unavailable for interviews.” The Embassy in San Salvador did not respond to the request to interview then-Ambassador Duncan and contact the other officials, and the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs did not return a similar request for comment.

However, five years after Luna’s offers, and despite the Trump administration’s official silence, everything indicates that Johnson was indeed informed about these exchanges; the New York Times had access to a declassified cable sent from the Embassy in El Salvador on September 10, 2020, notifying the first Trump administration that Luna had informed federal agents of a pact between the Bukele government and the gangs.

Given the lack of interest from the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security, the documents compiled by Luna and handed over to U.S. officials ended up in the hands of El Faro and formed the basis of the investigation that exposed the agreements between MS-13 and the Bukele government.

In other words, the official documents reported by El Faro in September 2020, that served to reveal for the first time the agreements between the Bukele government and Mara Salvatrucha-13 were collected, photocopied, and compiled by Vice Minister Osiris Luna.

In the weeks since the New York Times reported in June that the vice minister had approached foreign officials to denounce the government’s pacts with the gangs, Bukele has decided, for the time being, to keep him in his post.