Federal prosecutors are abandoning terrorism charges against a top MS-13 leader in a shocking move that has legal experts questioning the Trump administration’s priorities. Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, who sits on the gang’s highest leadership council, was set to face serious federal charges including racketeering and narco-terrorism conspiracy.
Instead, newly unsealed court documents show the Justice Department wants him deported to El Salvador immediately. The reason? What officials cryptically call “sensitive foreign policy considerations” and “geopolitical concerns.”
But critics smell something far more troubling. They believe the Trump administration is deliberately silencing a key witness who could expose explosive details about a secret 2019 deal between MS-13 and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.
According to the allegations, Bukele’s government actually paid the gang and gave them territory in exchange for reducing violence and helping his political party win elections. Arevalo-Chavez knows the intimate details of these negotiations as a member of MS-13’s “Ranfla Nacional” – their equivalent of a corporate board of directors.
The deportation is part of a larger agreement letting the US send immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot maximum-security prison. Political scientist Michael Ahn Paarlberg called it exactly what it appears to be: “collusion between two governments to cover up a gang pact.”
This follows a pattern. Just two months ago, another high-ranking MS-13 leader, Cesar Humberto López-Larios, had his charges mysteriously dropped and was quietly shipped to the same Salvadoran prison. Both men possessed dangerous knowledge about Bukele’s secret gang negotiations.