The Salvadoran vice-president met with the Italy-El Salvador inter-parliamentary friendship group. No press conference and no headlines. Yet, in the handshake with Ettore Rosato and in the other Roman appointments of these days one can read something that deserves attention.

An undercover, non-marginal visit

There are institutional visits that occupy the news, that make noise and are definitely more followed, while others slip almost invisibly under the surface of the political agenda. That of the vice-president of El Salvador, Félix Ulloa, definitely belongs to the second category. Looking at it, however, with a modicum of geopolitical curiosity, it tells a lot about how the relationship between Italy and a part of Central America that for years we have observed perhaps with significant distraction is being recalibrated.

The meeting at Palazzo Montecitorio with the Italy-El Salvador parliamentary friendship group took place a few days ago, as part of a rather full agenda in Rome. Also there to welcome Ulloa was Ettore Rosato, secretary of COPASIR and a long-standing face of parliamentary foreign policy, who had already taken part in a mission to San Salvador at the beginning of 2025 together with his colleagues Fabio Pietrella and Gianluca Caramanna. A detail that is definitely not secondary: the bilateral friendship group is not a front club, it is one of those structures that keep channels alive when the chancelleries’ spotlights are looking elsewhere.

The business card: numbers, security, Bukele

Ulloa arrived in Rome with a clear political message and some figures in his pocket. He reminded the Italian parliamentarians of the 4.1 million visitors registered by El Salvador in 2025, a number that until five or six years ago would have seemed like science fiction, impossible for a nation that has made world headlines almost exclusively for gangs and murders. He then spoke of security as a precondition for development, a formula that has now become the narrative backbone of the Bukele government, and invited Italy to send observers to the presidential elections on 27 February 2027.

The story here gets very interesting. Those elections will be the first after the reform approved by the congress, which allows unlimited re-election of the head of state, a constitutional breakthrough that has divided Latin American constitutionalists and continues to cause debate even in Brussels. Inviting European observers, and Italian parliamentarians in particular, is a shrewd move: international legitimacy is needed, the reassurance that an outside eye certifies. Italy, which is historically sensitive to the democratic question on the Latin American continent, finds itself having to decide which posture to respond with.

In Montecitorio, however, the stop was not isolated. Ulloa also met Giorgio Mulé, vice-president of the Chamber, focusing on criminal and procedural reforms. He signed with Paola Severino, at the National School of Administration, a memorandum on the training of civil servants. He then met Giorgio Silli, for the past few months secretary general of IILA, the Italo-Latin American Institute. And on 27 April he will be in Prato, at the conference on ‘Italy, Europe and Latin America: the shift towards a new strategic centrality’. A title that says practically everything about the meaning of the operation.

In between, the clash between the UN and Bukele

There is a shadow running across Ulloa’s mission in Rome, and that shadow takes the form of a now open tug-of-war between San Salvador and multilateral institutions. Just as the vice-president is meeting deputies and ambassadors in Italy, at home a reform is about to come into force – on 26 April – that introduces the possibility of life imprisonment for minors from the age of twelve for serious crimes such as murder, feminicide, rape or terrorism. A measure that has raised the voices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch and finally, Amnesty International

Bukele, true to his style, is not responding with diplomatic notes, but with targeted posts. On his social channels, where he maintains a huge audience, the Salvadoran president has again started to use the register that is dear to him: direct challenge, sarcasm, delegitimising those who criticise from afar. He has already written in the past that it will be seen who will have the courage to defend the right of murderers and rapists to go free. The message, relaunched in these hours between one post and another, is always the same: international rules are written by those who have never had to bury their own citizens by the dozens every week.

Ulloa, in Rome, offered the suit-and-tie version of the same argument. In an interview with ANSA, given on the sidelines of the visit, he unhesitatingly rejected the criticism of NGOs and the UN, arguing that those speaking from New York, Washington, London or Madrid do not know the reality of a country that had counted 41,000 murders in ten years. He claimed the ‘1,000-plus days with zero homicides’ as overwhelming proof of the model’s effectiveness. And on 12-year-olds, he explained that it is not a matter of punishing innocent children, but of removing the possibility of gangs using them as perpetrators untouchable by justice.

An approach to follow

An impromptu visit, certainly, and one that largely passed under the radar. But Ulloa’s Italian mission touched too many themes – parliamentary, academic, diplomatic, economic – to be dismissed as mere institutional courtesy.

San Salvador is knocking on Rome’s door with a precise agenda, and Rome, for now, has chosen to listen. What will happen in the coming months, from the stage in Prato on 27 April to the eventual Italian response on the invitation for the 2027 presidential elections, will tell whether this rapprochement is destined to remain an isolated episode or to become something more structural.