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AMY GOODMAN: We want to bring Roman Gressier into this conversation. He’s in Guatemala City, where Secretary of State Rubio will be. Roman, first we want to talk about what happened in Salvador. President Trump made his first call to a foreign leader, Saudi Arabia. His second was to Bukele in El Salvador. And now Bukele, as Rubio was just leaving there, has promised to imprison American prisoners for a fee at the much admired, by Trump, but horrified by human rights groups, prison system in El Salvador and also to take deportees from any country. The significance of this?
ROMAN GRESSIER: Hi. It’s great to be back with you.
Look, I think, in terms of the legal U.S. courts question and international law, I’m not sure how that latter promise will play out. But what we can observe is that a — look, Bukele was close to Trump in his first term, and this is a way of cementing that closeness into a migration-driven alliance in his second term.
From the rhetorical, where we saw a couple months ago, last June to be exact, we saw Trump Jr., we saw Tucker Carlson and other figures in the MAGA sphere at Bukele’s unconstitutional inauguration of his second term, and that was already on the rhetorical end. And then there’s the anti-woke discourse that they share and a certain affinity rhetorically again. And then, now they’re moving more formally into the realm of migration cooperation.
Now, in 2019, the Trump administration had negotiated with El Salvador a safe third country agreement. And this would clearly, at least on the rhetorical end, go much further than that. We’ll have to see what actually — parsing the language a little bit, Rubio said that Bukele had “offered” to receive U.S. citizens convicted of crimes and incarcerated in the United States. But the other things were “Bukele agreed to.” So I think that the Tren de Aragua and MS-13 deportees are perhaps more immediately likely or possible than the latter.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Roman, I wanted to ask you — of the five countries that Rubio is visiting, all of them have relatively conservative governments, and with the exception of Guatemala. What do you expect — what’s your sense of what Rubio hopes to get out of Guatemala and how that government may respond?
ROMAN GRESSIER: I think migration is the item of the day. Rubio will be arriving this afternoon, and he’ll be here tomorrow — excuse me. And tomorrow afternoon, he’ll be giving a press conference summing up his Guatemala trip.
The Arévalo administration, since the transition, has been meeting with Trump officials and the Heritage Foundation to promote the idea that they can get along and that, as they told the U.S. press on background — I don’t think they wanted to put a name to it, perhaps for optics, but they told the U.S. press on background that the Arévalo administration would be open to discussing the possibility of receiving regional return deportees. So, I think, on that plane, that will be a topic of discussion, and it’s certainly of interest to Marco Rubio.
But there’s a broader political issue where the Arévalo administration has been trying to send the signal that they can get along, in part because the public prosecutor’s office, which has been working to — which first worked to prevent Arévalo from taking office in January 2024, has now been working to put him on trial, remove him from office, etc. And just last week, the Supreme Court decided to move forward with a probe of Arévalo that could possibly lead to the revocation of his immunity from prosecution. Anyhow, it’s a very draw-out process, but the Supreme Court kicked the ball forward on that last week. So I think that domestic context is very important, given that the attorney general and her office have been eagerly courting Trump’s support and trying to promote the idea that they defend a conservative agenda.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering if you could — if we could look back at the broader picture of this indication of the Trump administration focusing on Latin America in its first days in office, ostensibly over the migration crisis and fentanyl, but also over China’s growing influence. Isn’t the reality already that China has become the main economic partner of South America? It’s the largest trading partner with South America and the second largest with Latin America as a whole. So, really, the United States has been for now decades losing control of the markets of Latin America for its goods. Your sense of whether this has any impact on how the Trump administration is approaching the region?
ROMAN GRESSIER: Yeah, I think you’re right about that. It does have Marco Rubio’s fingerprint on it. And even in his recent Senate hearings during the Biden administration, he would frequently talk about Chinese influence in the region. Honduras broke relations with Taiwan two years ago. And Guatemala and Belize, which is part of the Commonwealth, the British Commonwealth, are the only two remaining countries now. Guatemala has kind of a balancing act, where they maintain historic relations with Taiwan while also having informal commercial ties to China. And I think that that could possibly be a topic of discussion for the visit, too, especially given that Marco Rubio is very interested in China policy as it pertains to Central America and the broader region, as you pointed out.
AMY GOODMAN: And very quickly, Roman, Latin America and particularly Central America, a place for the Trump administration to actually make money. You have President Trump’s nominee to be secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, also has ties to El Salvador. He’s the billionaire CEO of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which is a major backer of Tether, a cryptocurrency firm that recently announced it’s relocating to El Salvador. Bloomberg recently ran an article headlined “Commerce Nominee Lutnick Is Backer of Outlaws’ Favorite Cryptocurrency.” The article states that Tether is used by, quote, “drug traffickers, terrorists and scammers to move money around the world.” Your response, Roman?
ROMAN GRESSIER: I don’t want to get in over my head on that. I wasn’t aware of Lutnick’s relationship, but it is true that Tether does have a presence in El Salvador. And an array of cryptocurrency companies, major players on the global scale, have had some type of presence in El Salvador since 2021, when the bitcoin law was passed, though I would note that the bitcoin law was basically gutted in recent days. And, for example, any language referencing bitcoin as moneda, or currency, was struck from the law, among others, as part of an IMF financing deal. So, I’m not sure what exactly the political implications would be of Lutnick’s appointment, but we’ll have to watch and see.
