A dead man spoke in El Salvador

The last time we heard anything about Alejandro Muyshondt was in February of this year, when two photos circulated of his corpse with crude serpentine needle stitches clumsily joining folds of his scalp; and others running along his neck and chest.

We hesitate. We wonder if that evidence of fatal damage, that clumsy forensic intervention, that Frankenstein failure was actually the body of Muyshondt, a burly man in his early 40s who five years ago was officially appointed national security adviser by his friend, President Nayib Bukele.

His family confirmed the images. The Institute of Legal Medicine handed over the poorly sewn body with a paper stating the cause of death: “pulmonary edema,” the same disease that, according to Salvadoran authorities, also ended the lives of dozens of prisoners captured during the state of emergency, whose bodies show evidence of torture. There is an epidemic of pulmonary edema in Bukele’s prisons.

Muyshondt fell into disgrace a couple of years ago. No one took his calls or responded to his warnings about corruption by some officials. He was arrested in August 2023, accused of leaking classified information to journalists. Bukele himself announced his capture. He was isolated and tortured, with no family or lawyers allowed to see him. Until we all saw him dead.

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It is not that his capture was surprising. That man had tempted his fate by publicly denouncing the corruption of some government officials. The state apparatus, totally controlled by Bukele and his group, does not forgive disloyalty.

Muyshondt died in February, but he spoke last weekend with the forcefulness of a living soul and confirmed to us that, for reasons that will soon become clear, the Nayib Bukele regime fears journalists more than drug traffickers.

It was a journalist, Héctor Silva, who gave the dead man his voice. He published audio recordings of conversations between Muyshondt and Bukele’s private secretary, Ernesto Castro (now president of the Legislative Assembly), in the Presidential House, which Muyshondt himself secretly recorded.

In the meetings, held between August and September 2020, Castro asked him to set up a secret “political intelligence” service, at the service of the president, to spy on journalists and opposition politicians. The advisor, who at the time was managing a government team of 15 disseminators of fake news on social networks, presented him with a plan that included tapping phones and emails and conducting physical surveillance.

Muyshondt takes advantage of the meetings to warn that some people in the United States are asking about the relationship between President Bukele and Congressman Guillermo Gallegos, who is being investigated in New York for drug trafficking. “The CIA is questioning why N (Bukele) is friends with Gallegos, whether he has made him a partner or is covering for him.” Castro admits having received reports of large amounts of money moving through the Congressman’s accounts, but, he warns, he is someone who is a close friend of Bukele. “He is a close friend of Nayib, just as Herbert Saca is a friend of Nayib,” says the private secretary.

Herbert Saca, the president’s other friend, was an advisor to the presidency of Antonio Saca (now imprisoned for corruption) and a man profiled by police intelligence as a suspected drug trafficker. That same police report identifies Gallegos as a drug trafficker and the director of the Penitentiary Centers, Osiris Luna, as Gallegos’ operator in the distribution of drugs.

Regarding Osiris Luna, Muyshondt reveals that he has set up a corruption network in prisons, where he and his mother keep the funds from the social reintegration program. Three years later he will be tortured in one of these prisons. The private secretary of the presidency reacts: “Those bad guys are our bad guys. Those who want to screw us are those outside.” And he orders to spy on those outside: journalists and opposition politicians.

Muyshondt kept these recordings, which survived multiple raids on his home and those of his relatives, which outlived him and ended up in the hands of Héctor Silva and finally available to everyone. His voice rang out last weekend and shook Bukele’s house. The dead sometimes speak more than the living, because they are no longer afraid.

Castro appeared briefly before reporters in a hallway of Congress and said that the audios are a fabrication of artificial intelligence and do not deserve more credibility than the images of Pope Francis in a gladiator suit. It was not necessary to know the chain of custody of the audios to know that the nervous man who was giving statements had tripped over his own mouth again. Not even his armies of bots have reproduced the story of artificial intelligence. It is he who speaks in those recordings and who deserves credit for the fabulous ending of the second conversation: he asks the advisor to get him a device to prevent anyone from secretly recording conversations in his office.

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