In August, the Salvadoran National Assembly approved a series of constitutional reforms extending president Nayib Bukele’s term from five to six years and allowing for indefinite reelection. In response, the U.S. State Department issued a statement rejecting “comparisons with illegitimate dictatorial regimes elsewhere in our region”.

The Salvadoran leader has drawn praise from the White House for reducing crime, angering critics who accuse him of authoritarianism. To be sure, Bukele has dramatically improved public safety in El Salvador. But the Trump administration’s embrace of Bukele—who was once a vocal supporter of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez—is especially stark given Washington’s ongoing efforts at regime change against Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

It’s all the more peculiar that a contingent of Venezuelan nationals—many of whom share ties with both the Maduro regime and opposition—have played an integral part in the Salvadoran government.

Multiple Bukele officials have reported seeing their functions usurped by a “shadow cabinet” comprised of private secretaries, the president’s brothers, and a group of mysterious Venezuelans. An anonymous cabinet minister said the following to independent Salvadoran outlet El Faro: “If you don’t have a direct line of communication with the President, you’re screwed, because the Venezuelans are the ones in command”.

Members of this shadow cabinet run Bukele’s campaigns and serve as liaisons with advisors, friends, contractors, and underworld figures—a clientelistic web that in many ways mirrors those forged by Chavez and Maduro. Indeed, Bukele’s Venezuelans have been compared to the reclusive agents of Cuban intelligence that advise Maduro.

The most prominent Venezuelan within the Salvadoran shadow cabinet is Sara Hanna Georges, who reportedly writes Bukele’s speeches and has tailored his public persona. Georges’ right-hand man, Miguel Sabal, recruits Venezuelans in Caracas to work in El Salvador. Another conational, Miguel Arvelo, supervises healthcare policy for Bukele while Tomás Hernández, Ernesto Herrera, and Roddy Rodríguez provide advice on economic policy, security, foreign relations, and education. Finally, María Alejandra García and her aforementioned partner, Hernández, are reportedly in charge of El Salvador’s Emergency Health Program (PES).

El Faro has also reported that Venezuelan consultants like Santiago Rosas and Ernesto Herrera developed much of Bukele’s security strategy without so much as consulting the minister of security. Similarly, a group of health professionals complained publicly about Hanna and Arvelo instructing employees from the Health Ministry via WhatsApp not to return Covid-19 results to patients during the pandemic.

Hanna Georges previously worked for Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López and his wife Lilian Tintori. Following Lopez’s arrest in 2014, Hanna and Tintori opened a public relations office in Miami aimed at launching an international campaign in favor of the opposition leader’s release. At the same time, Georges played a role in former U.S. Congressman David Rivera (R-FL)’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the Maduro regime.

An anti-communist Cold Warrior from Miami, the Cuban-American Rivera was indicted in 2022 on eight counts including money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent for Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA. In 2012, while he was still in Congress, Rivera was observed dining with the son of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega, who allegedly introduced the congressmen to executives of the Venezuelan oil giant. Five years later, following Trump’s first inauguration, Rivera accepted a $50 million consulting contract with PDVSA and returned to Washington to lobby the new administration along with Venezuelan media tycoon Raul Gorrín; the pair billed themselves to the White House as a backchannel to Caracas.

Like Rivera, Gorrín was indicted in 2018 for running a sophisticated money laundering operation for the Maduro regime involving both Hanna Georges and Lilian Tintori; Georges is alleged to have received at least $500,000 from Gorrín. The same year, Georges traveled to El Salvador to join Bukele’s presidential campaign after meeting one of the president’s brothers in Miami. A year later, a group of Republican congressmen wrote a letter to the White House expressing concerns about the Bukele confidant’s ties to Chavismo, the left-populist movement associated with Chávez and Maduro. 

In 2020, the Salvadoran Attorney General Raul Melara opened an anti-corruption investigation dubbed “Operation Cathedral” with the support of U.S. federal agencies. The investigation consisted of three planks scrutinizing Bukele’s alleged pact with Salvadoran gangs, prison corruption, and misuse of funds intended for Covid-19 relief. The case describes Bukele’s shadow cabinet as a kind of corporation in which the president’s siblings serve as board directors and their closest advisors—such as Georges—act as executive vice presidents. Beneath this executive level, a second tier consisted of figures like Bukele’s Chief of Staff Carolina Recinos; Recinos is currently sanctioned under the Office of OFAC for corruption. 

Since 2013, moreover, the Salvadoran subsidiary of PDVSA, Alba Petroleos, funneled millions into Bukele’s mayoral and presidential campaigns. The firm is accused by U.S. authorities of laundering at least USD$1 billion via shell companies in Venezuela, El Salvador, Panama, and the United States. Just two days before Bukele assumed the presidency in 2019, the Salvadoran Ministry of Finance issued the sale of USD$120 million in debt to Venezuela’s central bank which has since generated around USD$19 million in interest. Thereafter, Caracas authorized a partial interest payment to Drefaza, a firm operated by members of Alba Petróleos as well as the president’s shadow cabinet.

The Salvadoran government’s innumerable connections to Venezuelan leftists no longer seem to trouble the Trump administration or congressional Republicans. Until 2017, Bukele was a lifelong member of the FMLN political party, itself a successor to the Marxist guerrilla movement of the same name that demobilized in 1992; many of the members of the president’s New Ideas party were previously part of the FMLN. Various statements from the millennial president can be found praising Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro throughout the 2010s.

It’s uncanny how Bukele and his Venezuelan advisors have thoroughly imitated their Bolivarian counterparts. A year after taking office, Hugo Chávez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution to extend his term from five to six years. Then in 2009, he did away with term limits altogether, allowing him—and now his successor—to govern for life. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega likewise suspended term limits in 2014; in 2025 he went a step further and extended his term to six years while also codifying himself and his wife as ‘co-presidents’ with legal authority over all branches of government. Bukele too has engineered the scrapping of term limits.

Even seemingly benign initiatives from the Salvadoran government have parallels in left-wing Bolivarianism, including the adoption of cryptocurrencies as legal tender. Under Bukele, El Salvador adopted its own version of Chavismo’s CLAP committees—a state food distribution network in poor neighborhoods that can be weaponized against critics by withholding nutrition assistance. Similarly, the president’s so-called Chivo Wallet project—which is used to make payments in dollars or bitcoin—is a carbon copy of an equivalent used for the Petro, Venezuela’s failed state cryptocurrency launched in 2018, a year before Bukele assumed office.

The whole point of a double agent is that it’s impossible to ascertain their true allegiance. In this sense, the Venezuelans active in the Salvadoran government have performed their duties remarkably well, bringing benefits to both the Bukele and Maduro regimes. At the same time, there’s another, more mundane explanation for the conduct of seemingly paradoxical figures such as Hanna Georges: They are interested in power and wealth as opposed to grandiose ideological commitments. 

In turn, Bukele’s courting of Washington and especially Trump’s second administration has done wonders for his regime. A third tier detailed in the Cathedral case includes government officials such as prison director Osiris Luna Meza–a key operator in an alleged pact with Salvadoran gangs. Like his FMLN predecessors, Bukele is alleged to have negotiated special privileges with incarcerated gang leaders in exchange for reducing violence. Indeed, most of El Salvador’s decline in homicides preceded Bukele’s presidency as well as the post-2022 state of exception suspending due process. In the four years before the millennial president assumed office in 2019, El Salvador’s homicide rate fell from 103 to 36 per 100,000 before falling to 17 per 100,000 by 2022. 

The Salvadoran leader has consequently taken pains to ensure that his covert dealings fail to come to light. In 2021, the Cathedral investigation was shelved after Attorney General Melara was removed from his post and forced into exile by Bukele. Details from the case, however, were used by the U.S. Justice Department to strengthen criminal charges against MS13 leaders. The case also fueled an investigation into prison director Luna Meza. According to an unnamed official from the Biden administration, opposition from the State Department led Justice to decide against an indictment.

The same year, Salvadoran authorities illegally and covertly released Elmer Canales, an MS13 member with intimate knowledge of the regime’s alleged pact with the gangs who was due for extradition to the U.S. Canales was later apprehended by Mexican authorities and extradited north of the border in 2023. But just three months into Trump's second term, the aforementioned investigations were abruptly dropped and Canales and two other gang leaders were deported back to El Salvador as part of the March deportations to the regime’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

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Here it’s worth noting that even Bukele’s approach towards security shares similarities with its Venezuelan and other Bolivarian peers. As Trump himself has observed, Venezuela has made significant inroads in reducing lethal crime in recent years. Between 2016 and 2024, the country’s homicide rate fell from around 90 to 26 per 100,000. As with Bukele’s crackdown on crime, this success is due in equal parts to regime negotiations with armed groups as well as a draconian policy of extrajudicial killings in poor neighborhoods; in 2018, security forces executed over 5,000 suspected criminals.

Washington can sometimes divide the world between autocratic enemies and democratic allies based not so much on strength of democratic institutions in foreign countries, but on the extent to which those countries bend the knee to the U.S. For Miami neocons like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, pro-American leaders like Bukele are endowed with democratic legitimacy while “narcoterrorists” like Maduro are fair game for regime change. In the same vein, Bolivarian apologists see little comparison between Maduro and Bukele on account of the former’s struggle against the American empire. In reality, the praxis of both regimes follows an eerily comparable, self-serving logic.

In the event that Washington pursues the disastrous course of military intervention in Venezuela to oust Maduro, it’s quite likely that many of Bukele’s Venezuelans would be part of the new government in Caracas. It will remain to be seen whether they simply recreate another right-wing variant of Venezuela’s tyrannical Bolivarian regime.