They act discreetly and are not inclined to publicize themselves.
A group of Venezuelans with roots in anti-Chavismo are stealthily surrounding Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who swept elections last Sunday that will keep him in power for another five years.
The Venezuelans, who have managed to irritate Salvadoran ministers and senior officials who have felt that their functions were usurped, have been in charge of organizing their successful electoral campaigns and after structuring their Government and serving as liaison with advisors, friends, contractors and salesmen of smoke.
Paradoxically, this type of shadow cabinet has replicated some tactics with which Chavismo took an authoritarian turn and has managed to perpetuate itself in power.
Around Bukele, a 42-year-old president who is very popular for having reduced crime to a minimum in a country with a very violent past, orbit American, Spanish and Argentine advisors who blame each other for successes in propaganda and strategic decision-making, without That is necessarily true.
Bukele is enormously popular on social networks, where he releases very shocking videos of gang members held in a maximum security prison and has a group of
YouTubers
with millions of followers who travel to El Salvador to glorify his policies.
This network of foreign hustlers has very little weight and limited access to the leadership.
It is really the Venezuelan advisors who make important decisions and those who have direct access to Bukele and his brothers.
“Everything passes through his hands,” says a high-level source who worked with Bukele during the first two years of his Government.
“When the pandemic began, they formed the emergency team.
Anything had to be consulted.
The ministers had no real decision-making power.
It is true that some rebelled and did not let the Venezuelans get over them, but others simply had no other option.”
The foreign team settled in a wing of the hospital that Bukele built, near the National Palace, where they stayed at least until the end of 2023.
This same source details that they are part of “a shadow cabinet.”
There is a presidential one, the main one;
another strategic, made up of private secretaries, Bukele's brothers, the press secretary, and a cabinet of Venezuelans.
They remember the mysterious Cubans, experts in security and intelligence, who surrounded Hugo Chávez.
El Faro
, a media outlet in El Salvador, has identified a dozen of them and it is believed that there have been at least 20. It is not easy to detect them because their contracts are not public and do not appear in state accounts.
Among all of them, Sarah Abdel Karim Hanna Georges, better known as Sarah Hanna, the leader of the group, stands out.
Bukele and his brothers have blind faith in him, according to different sources.
Years ago he worked with Leopoldo López, who represents the most radical wing of the Venezuelan opposition, and later with her wife, Lilian Tintori, who launched a global campaign to obtain the release of her husband from a Chavista prison.
Sarah Hanna is a dentist and is not yet forty years old.
Armando Info, a Venezuelan investigative newspaper, maintains that he demonstrated as a student against the constitutional reform proposal presented by Hugo Chávez in August 2007. He arrived in El Salvador in 2018, it is believed that through one of the brothers of the now president. , and dedicated himself to writing his speeches, shaping his image and carrying out the network and communication strategy.
In view of the results, Sarah Hanna's work has been impeccable; she has managed to create a cult around Bukele in the same way she created with Chávez, but from a more modern perspective.
Several sources consulted by this newspaper do not detract from the Venezuelan woman, but maintain that there is a Salvadoran woman who has even more power, Sofía Medina, Secretary of Communications.
Medina has a more modest presence on social media than Ernesto Sanabria, the secretary of the Presidency — he uploads portraits of his expensive shoes on Instagram.
However, she is even closer to Bukele.
Ernesto Sanabria, Secretary of the Presidency of Nayib Bukele. COURTESY
The Salvadoran president has been re-elected despite the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibited it in up to six articles.
The control that he exercises over the Constitutional Chamber made it possible for the magistrates to reinterpret the norms at their convenience.
Bukele has used the figure of the emergency regime, imposed two years ago through extensions in the Assembly dominated by his party, to deprive civil liberties and fill prisons with gang members, yes, but also with innocents who are not having the right to a fair criminal process.
This has been widely documented by humanitarian organizations and journalistic investigations.
Some analysts believe that Bukele's authoritarian drift has its roots in Venezuela.
“These Venezuelan advisors are supporting an authoritarian leader [Bukele] who uses Chávez's manual, who exploited his popularity to dismantle democracy, change the rules of the game to never let go of power, and apply dirty strategies to silence the press and dismantle all opposition or dissent,” explains Jimmy Alvarado, a Salvadoran journalist who has been behind all these connections.
You don't have to dig very hard to find them.
The Government of El Salvador has replicated the tactic of the Clap, the food distribution that Chavismo devised to create a support network in the neighborhoods and isolate critics, who did not receive their food box.
These, as this journalist was able to verify, were distributed in the surroundings of San Salvador just one or two days before the elections.
Bukele and his team take advantage of their immense popularity, something unquestionable today, to ensure that Nuevas Ideas, the president's personalist party, is founded with the population in the way that the PRI did in Mexico or Chavismo in Venezuela. .
Also the Chivo Wallet project, the wallet created by Bukele to make payments in dollars or bitcoins, is a carbon copy of the Pretro, the Venezuelan cryptocurrency that has its origins in an idea by Chávez.
Special mention deserves Lester Toledo, a Venezuelan electoral strategist who works directly for the party and has a direct relationship with his compatriots in the Government.
He was once a vocal opponent of Chavismo for denouncing Chavista corruption, pointing directly to men as powerful as Nicolás Maduro or Diosdado Cabello.
“The truth is that the corduroy took a gamble.
Chavismo targeted him,” says an anti-Chavista advisor.
Toledo does not hide in networks and recently uploaded a photo hugging Bukele on his Instagram.
He is the chief advisor of the campaign and has been in charge this time, among many other things, of deploying 100,000 party supporters to the polling stations.
A huge logistics job.
Whether in the Government or in the party, the Venezuelan seal is more than evident.
The experience of facing a social phenomenon that suffered an authoritarian drift has given them the tools to elevate Bukele to absolute power.
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