The Trump administration is studying harmful classes from El Salvador’s president, however there’s additionally a lot that the US left can be taught from Salvadoran antifascists.
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US President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador within the Oval Workplace of the White Home on April 14, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Win McNamee / Getty Pictures)
Essentially the most revealing a part of the historic assembly between President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele got here within the type of a joke:
Bukele: Generally they are saying that we imprisoned hundreds, I wish to say that we really liberated tens of millions.…
President Trump: Who gave him that line? Do you assume I can use that?
(Laughter)
Bukele: To liberate 350 million you need to imprison some.
Beneath Trump and Bukele’s levity, there’s a lethal seriousness. As a San Francisco–born Salvadoran journalist, creator, and pupil of technofascism, I’ve written about digital surveillance, warfare, MS-13, immigration, nationwide safety, and the conflation of those points, and I see nice hazard forward.
Trump and Bukele’s joke and the objective for the White Home assembly—“working carefully collectively to eradicate terrorist organizations, and construct a way forward for Prosperity”—include acquainted codes harkening again to the repressive statecraft of the Chilly Conflict.
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Bukele’s quip reveals not what El Salvador has realized from the US however what the US has realized and can proceed to be taught from El Salvador. Looming above the assembly is risk that Trump will develop El Salvador’s conventional function as a laboratory for US and world repression. Even probably the most considerate critics of US empire generally fall into the age-old error of framing statements like Bukele’s carceral deal-making tweets (i.e., “We now have supplied the US of America the chance to outsource a part of its jail system”) as being primarily about gangs and immigrants when it’s really a few far bigger group: all of us.
On the identical time, the activist in me who survived persecution by and helped defeat US-backed demise squads additionally senses a chance. Simply as El Salvador’s fascist historical past supplies a mannequin for neofascist domination in Argentina, Ecuador, the US, and different international locations, so does El Salvador’s historical past in preventing—and defeating—fascists present us with useful classes. What can Salvadoran leftists train us concerning the tech-media-enabled fascist creep and the resistance we have to defeat the far proper in El Salvador and the US?
Trump’s Reality Social publish said, “President Bukele has graciously accepted into his Nation’s custody a number of the most violent alien enemies of the World and, particularly, the US.” The implications of those misleading statements have rapid penalties for immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a authorized resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador and presently imprisoned in Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), one of many many prisons in a rustic the place nearly 2 p.c of the inhabitants is incarcerated. (Bukele mentioned throughout his assembly with Turmp that he had no intention of returning Abrego Garcia to the US.)
Trump’s statements present a textbook instance of the lethal amnesia that fascism calls for for its survival, which I described in my e book Unforgetting. Till lately, Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” was a world pariah. He was condemned by governments around the globe, together with by the Biden and Trump State Departments for violations detailed within the 2022 State Division report on El Salvador’s human rights file, which listed such abuses as:
illegal or arbitrary killings, compelled disappearances; torture and merciless, inhuman, or degrading therapy or punishment by safety forces; harsh and life-threatening jail situations; arbitrary arrest and detention; critical issues with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or illegal interference with privateness; critical restrictions on free expression and media, together with censorship and threats to implement felony legal guidelines to restrict expression; critical authorities corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; vital limitations to accessing sexual and reproductive well being providers; and crimes involving violence in opposition to lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people.
Understanding how Bukele’s human rights violations are being erased with a view to remodel him from persona non grata criticized by Trump to a hemispheric hero hailed by Trump and neofascists the world over holds vital classes in what Salvadoran and Latin American leftists name memoria historica, or the deploying of historic reminiscence within the current to outline the long run.
For many years, El Salvador has served as a laboratory for college students of warfare, state violence, and different repression, together with these within the Pentagon, city police forces, and the prison-industrial complexes all through the US. The mediafied mass incarceration of the CECOT and different insurance policies had been concocted on the mental basis laid by nationwide safety operatives just like the late Max Manwaring, a former US Military colonel and professor of navy technique on the US Military Conflict School. Through the Salvadoran civil warfare of the Eighties and early ’90s that killed nearly 80,000 individuals, the Pentagon despatched Manwaring to check rebel and counterinsurgent warfare methods, which he documented in books like his A Strategic View of Insurgencies: Insights from El Salvador.
When the warfare led to 1992, El Salvador was in ruins. That very same yr, I used to be dwelling in Los Angeles when former Bush I lawyer basic Invoice Barr noticed a chance within the ethical panic introduced on by the LA riots. Barr initiated what was on the time the most important reallocation of FBI assets in historical past, shifting 300 brokers from counterintelligence in opposition to international enemies to deal with a brand new home risk: gangs, together with MS-13 and different Salvadoran gangs born within the Pico Union neighborhood I lived and labored in. Barr additionally started the accelerated deportation of precise and alleged gang members from Los Angeles to El Salvador, a rustic with no precedent for US-style gang constructions. The deportees introduced US gang constructions to El Salvador. Mixed with the violence of the Salvadoran navy and police, the murder charges quickly surpassed these seen through the warfare of the Eighties.
Barr’s efforts drew the eye of Pentagon operatives like Manwaring, who began writing articles and books with titles like Gangs, “Coups D’Streets,” and the New Conflict in Central America and Road Gangs: The New City Insurgency. Manwaring and different strategists supplied the counterinsurgency theories that will inform and legitimize the militarization of US police forces, starting with Invoice Clinton and continued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who opened Pentagon warehouses to native police forces, offering them with new, puffy robocop outfits. Trump, Bukele, and Pentagon operatives and police chiefs just like the notorious Darryl Gates and Invoice Bratton—adopted swimsuit, retooling the Salvadoran navy choice for a brand new theater of battle: the streets of the US. Media personalities like Lisa Ling additionally adopted, creating the picture of MS-13 as “probably the most violent gang on the planet.” (There isn’t any knowledge proving who’s “most violent.”)
In 2019, Trump began to extra aggressively deploy the phrase “terrorist” to explain MS-13. After being elected president that very same yr, Bukele did, too. On the identical time, members of San Francisco’s police gang job power informed me MS-13 had killed two individuals within the metropolis. Equally, in Lengthy Island, MS-13 had killed a mean of 5.5 individuals per yr for the previous 10 years. That very same yr, three mass murdering white males in El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Odessa, Texas killed extra individuals than all of the estimated 10,000 MS-13 gang members in the US—a quantity that has remained static for years, in line with the pre-Trump FBI—did in the complete yr.
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We Salvadorans perceive the usage of excessive distortion to justify repression with appeals to “shield and serve” the populace from the darkish, faceless inside enemies of the state, together with these not conscious that they’re—or quickly will likely be—the targets of state repression. We perceive what Trump’s mentioning of the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua as “absolute killer gangs” in his “Liberation Day” speech launching his tariff warfare means: the required fusion of financial warfare and the brand new warfare on the internal metropolis and different populations affected by failed financial insurance policies. We additionally perceive what’s to be accomplished.
Widespread
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By organizing our communities and mobilizing to defend the rights of Kilmar Abrego; Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts PhD pupil kidnapped by plainclothes safety forces in unmarked automobiles; Palestinian US resident Mahmoud Khalil; and others being denied their primary rights, we aren’t simply defending immigrants. We’re defending ourselves from the approaching enlargement of the “terrorist” label and the even higher repression that’s positive to accompany it.
Greater than something, Salvadorans and their historical past of wrestle assist me see the outlines of the broad antifascist entrance that has all the time been the antidote to the reactionary proper. These of us making ready for the opportunity of a greater world should manage basic strikes and different actions in response to the Salvadorization of the US.
However overcoming fascism can be non secular. I’ve interviewed psychologists who’ve handled Salvadoran youngsters whose brains shrink from being caged and separated by Obama, Biden, and Trump. The psychologists have informed me about one of many major methods to deal with them: Create the situations for them to reconstitute the fragments of themselves into tales they will share to stir the reminiscence and creativeness of that a part of themselves that’s resilient and highly effective.
Equally, social actions can even have to train our memoria historica as we reconstitute our political imaginations. Given developments within the US—coup makes an attempt, radical divisions between wealthy and poor, the dismantling of the welfare state, elevated militarism and militarized policing—it ought to be apparent that liberal progressivism is insufficient to defeating fascism. What’s required is what we in El Salvador referred to as a frente amplio, an unprecedented hemispheric and world entrance to defeat the reactionary world forces embodied by the digitally enabled alliance between Trump, Bukele, Elon Musk, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and others.
If we should be taught something from Salvadorans, it’s the strategic and psychic worth of the elegant and the attractive in sustaining particular person and collective wrestle amid a long time of warfare, mass graves, mass homicide, gang violence, and record-breaking murder charges. Within the face of violence that students have referred to as “apocalyptic,” these of us preventing Salvadoran fascism grew to become poet warriors, studying and writing poetry in guerrilla camps and clandestine homes. Within the course of, we realized that the determinant consider warfare and in politics is the spirit that sustains wrestle and retains you regular within the face of hazard. And we’re greater than prepared to assist the combat in opposition to US fascism by sharing what we realized.
Roberto Lovato
Journalist Roberto Lovato is the creator of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Household, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution within the Americas. Lovato can be an assistant professor of English on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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