A Texas Democrat, Vicente Gonzalez, serves as co-chair of a congressional caucus that has consistently promoted El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele. This support has been evident on the caucus’s X account, where they have reposted calls from Bukele, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk to “impeach the corrupt judges.” Bukele is also at the center of a scandal involving the transport of Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they are placed in prisons for gang members despite lacking any gang affiliations.
Gonzalez, who has been in Congress since 2016, co-founded the El Salvador caucus in August 2022 alongside the far-right Republican former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz. The centrist Democrat’s endorsement of Bukele has sparked criticism and concerns about the flexibility of human rights and democracy for centrist Democrats during the Trump era, especially when the US president displays increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
Ana María Méndez-Dardón of the Washington Office on Latin America, criticizes the El Salvador caucus as symbolizing political support for Bukele’s regime amidst documented torture in El Salvador’s prison system. Sonja Wolf, a political scientist at the Panamerican University in Mexico City, notes that the caucus’s social media posts indicate admiration for and support of Bukele’s security strategy.
Gonzalez’s co-chair on the committee is the far-right Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna. In January, Luna introduced a bill to add Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore. The caucus promotes its activities through Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, where they have endorsed unconstitutional and anti-democratic propositions from Bukele, Musk, and other far-right figures.
Bukele, who has been praised by the US far-right for his authoritarian law and order approach, has cracked down on opposition, dismissed the attorney general and supreme court judges, and pushed for measures that undermine press freedom and displace communities. Despite violating the constitution in his second election win, Bukele’s regime is opaque and corrupt, pursuing personal enrichment and eroding institutional checks and balances.
Gonzalez has a history of conservative positions, including support for a Trump-backed act to withhold federal funding from schools that allow transgender athletes to compete alongside girls and opposition to the Biden administration’s environmental legislation. During his campaign, a blogger who received campaign funds from Gonzalez’s committee made racist comments about his opponent, Mayra Flores.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/vicente-gonzalez-el-salvador-nayib-bukele
