[[link removed]]

THE ROOTS OF BUKELE’S GULAG  
[[link removed]]


 

John Washington
June 1, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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*
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*
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*
*
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_ Understanding why Trump is using El Salvador to test the limits of
illegal deportation requires returning to the US’s long history of
outsourcing violence. _

A guard watching prisoners at Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement
Center (CECOT), Tecoluca, El Salvador, April 4, 2025, Alex Peña/Getty
Images

 

The Terrorism Confinement Center was designed to be a black hole. When
Nayib Bukele’s flagship “megaprison”—known as CECOT, after its
Spanish acronym—opened in January 2023 in a desolate stretch of
Tecoluca, about forty-five miles from San Salvador, his
administration boasted
[[link removed]] that people
held there “would not have contact with the outside world again.”

Bukele has made global headlines for cultivating an air of millennial
cheekiness
[[link removed]],
making Bitcoin a national currency, and storming the halls of Congress
with soldiers, but it’s his gulag that most defines his rule. Having
reportedly spent years secretly negotiating
[[link removed]] with
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, the two gangs at the heart of
the country’s surging violence, in 2022 he responded to an
especially homicidal weekend of killings by declaring a state of
emergency, detaining anyone even allegedly affiliated with either
group, and jailing them in ostentatiously brutal conditions. Within
years El Salvador had traded the highest homicide rate in the world
for the highest per capita incarceration rate
[[link removed]] in
the world. In a country of six million, about one in every fifty
people is imprisoned; less than a quarter have received a sentence.

Being young, poor, male, and tattooed in Bukele’s El Salvador can
practically be a life sentence. “Once an inmate enters CECOT,” the
prison’s director told Agence France-Presse this past January, “he
never leaves.” So far he seems to have kept his word. A recent
court filing
[[link removed]] by
Human Rights Watch stressed that people detained in CECOT are held
almost entirely incommunicado, cut off from family or lawyers, and
“only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of
several hundred detainees at the same time.” The group was, it said,
“not aware of any detainees who have been released.”

Bukele’s government claims that the prison can hold 40,000
people—over six times more than Angola, the largest maximum-security
prison in the US. At that capacity, as the _Financial
Times_ reported in 2023
[[link removed]], the
facility would “set records for deliberately designed
overcrowding,” giving each inmate “less than half the minimum
required under EU law to transport midsized cattle by road.” The
Salvadoran government is not disclosing how many people are currently
confined in the prison, citing “security reasons,” but when a CNN
correspondent visited
[[link removed]] in
April, officials said that they were approaching capacity. The
journalist asked what will happen once they reach it. “Well, we’ve
got plans for that,” an official replied. He said those plans
include a second CECOT.

For years CECOT was known in the US primarily as evidence of a young
autocrat clamping down on his population. Then, in March, the Trump
administration paid Bukele a reported $6 million to take 288
Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants
[[link removed]],
the vast majority of whom have no criminal records, into custody.

 Bukele announced their arrival with what has become the prison’s
visual signature: a slick, medium-production video, with dramatic
music, of people being frog-marched off a plane, shackled, forced onto
their knees to have their heads shaved, and pushed into a brightly lit
dungeon full of four-tier bunks
[[link removed]] overcrammed
with dozens of rail-thin men in white boxer shorts. The migrants would
be held for a year, Bukele said—but the term is “renewable.”

What laid the groundwork for this level of exhibitionistic state
violence? To understand why the US is leaning so heavily on this tiny
Central American country—and its millennial autocratic leader—as
Trump tests the limits on illegal deportations, one must grasp both
the profound political changes El Salvador itself has undergone since
2019 and the longer history of US–Salvadoran relations. The US has a
long record of relying on other countries to deter and detain
migrants, and its anti-immigrant right has long found Salvadorans
particularly inconvenient.

 During the civil war that decimated the country in the 1980s, the US
denied legal entry to the vast majority of people fleeing the violence
even as it funded, trained, and provided material support for the
military dictatorship. (The asylum grant rate for people fleeing El
Salvador during the war hovered around
[[link removed]] or below two percent.
[[link removed].])
But hundreds of thousands
[[link removed]] of
Salvadorans still managed to relocate to the US. Many ended up in
Southern California, where some joined small gangs and picked up
strategies for defense and extortion in American prisons.

After the war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992, the
US, having just helped rip their country to pieces, expedited the
process of deporting these young men back. Weakened by years of
clientelism, corruption, and violence, El Salvador was hardly ready to
receive them or reroute them into the formal economy. Extraordinary
levels of gang violence soon gripped the country. Unlike the US,
however, El Salvador doesn’t have an El Salvador to dump the people
it deems disposable. So it built a CECOT. By selling space in CECOT to
the US, Bukele has in effect brought this long history of violence
full circle.

“For decades,” as Roberto Lovato wrote recently in _The Nation_
[[link removed]], “El
Salvador has served as a laboratory for students of war, state
violence, and other repression, including those in the Pentagon, urban
police forces, and the prison-industrial complexes throughout the
United States.” US government advisers started training the
Salvadoran security forces as early as 1957, when, as Raymond Bonner
wrote in his book _Weakness and Deceit_ (1984), officials associated
with the Agency for International Development “reorganized the
police academy, wrote a textbook for the Treasury Police, and trained
special riot control units” under the guise of rooting out
corruption. In reality, Bonner stressed, their focus was always on
stamping out any hits of communism. When Murat Williams, the US
ambassador to El Salvador during the Kennedy administration, arrived
in the country in 1961, according to Bonner, “he was horrified to
discover that the United States had more air force personnel in the
country than the Salvadorans had planes and pilots.”

El Salvador was ripe for uprisings. In the 1960s and 1970s rampant
inequality, corrupt governance, and military rule laid the conditions
for multiple coup d’etats and counter-coups, mostly orchestrated by
factions of the armed forces jockeying for power against one another
or against civilian governance; in 1963 an article in the _New York
Herald Tribune_ estimated that seventy-five people in the country
controlled 90 percent of its wealth. It was in this setting, that same
year, that the Kennedy administration launched SOUTHCOM, the US
military command center that coordinated counterinsurgency operations
against the specter of communism—the threat of another Cuba—in
much of the hemisphere, and that had a particular stake in El
Salvador. What increasingly defined those operations, as the historian
and human rights activist Michael McClintock wrote in his study _The
American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El
Salvador _(1985), was “the routine practice of terrorism—or
counter-terrorism.” The US counterinsurgency doctrine “adopted
uncritically throughout most of Latin America” in the ensuing
decades, McClintock wrote, “rationalized, sanitized, mechanized and
institutionalized what had been traditionally deplored as barbaric and
shameful: torture and murder by the state.”

In the mid-1970s Salvadoran security officials attacked the villages
and families of peasant union members, massacred and disappeared
student protesters, bombed church buildings and political
organizations’ offices, and assassinated left-wing resistance
leadership. The US kept pouring on support, money, and arms. Then, in
1979, a coalition of military officers overthrew the president of the
military dictatorship, Carlos Humberto Romero, in a coup that was,
McClintock writes, “carried out with the full approval of the United
States.” Both the US and the Salvadoran military feared that Romero
wasn’t strong enough to hold onto power; they sought to replace him
with a more stable regime.

Theoretically, stability would follow such reforms. That’s not what
happened. “Under Romero’s rule,” as Robert Armstrong and Janet
Shenk write in _El Salvador: The Face of Revolution_ (1982),
dissenting mass mobilizations “typically resulted in beatings,
arrests, and later, the disappearance of those presumed to be the
ringleaders. But the October coup was supposed to change all that. It
didn’t.” The new regime offered civilians a place in the junta and
threw workers crumbs, such as agrarian reform
[[link removed]], but those
were merely surface-level changes: not only did the new leadership
fail to account for the disappeared, it kept massacring dissidents and
started using agrarian reform as cover for mass murder and repression.

The tide shifted in March of 1980, when the widely popular Archbishop
Oscar Romero was shot dead while giving mass in San Salvador the day
after delivering a sermon denouncing the repression. Until then
popular organizations largely still believed in protest and civil
disobedience; soon after, they took up arms. By the end of the year
what had been an aboveground mass movement had come to center on armed
insurgency, and various armed groups had coalesced to form a united
front called the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional
(FMLN).

The US was quick to pick a side. In early 1981 the outgoing Carter
administration rushed $5 million dollars of lethal military aid to the
Salvadoran regime on the pretext that the US had discovered a few
Nicaraguan boats carrying Soviet arms via Cuba for the
guerillas—what the US called
[[link removed]] a
“textbook case of indirect armed aggression by Communist powers.”
El Salvador was coming to seem like a chance to rehabilitate the US
war machine after the extended disaster of the war in Vietnam—to
prove that US forces could train and fund an anticommunist fight
without the disastrous entanglements and mass death that took place in
Southeast Asia. Just a month after Carter’s military largesse,
Secretary of State Alexander Haig, in reference to perceived communist
creep, said
[[link removed]] that
he would “draw a line in El Salvador.”

The State Department called it “clean counterinsurgency,”
Armstrong and Shenk write: the US presumed it was easy “to
distinguish between a mere peasant and a militant, and shoot only the
latter.” But to “the Salvadoran army, any peasant was suspect,
even children were subversive.” And by that point the army had
learned that “Washington would back them no matter what.” The same
year Haig drew his line, El Salvador’s Atlacatl Battalion,
generously funded and trained by the US Army, murdered more than eight
hundred people in the small town of El Mozote. As the US journalist
Felipe de La Hoz has related
[[link removed]] in
the independent investigative Salvadoran media outlet _El
Faro_ (where I once worked as an English-language editor), 245 shell
casings were recovered at a convent where “about 140 children were
slaughtered and set on fire.” Of those, “184 bore recognizable
markings identifying the bullets as having been manufactured for the
US government in Lake City, Missouri.”

American soldiers training members of the Salvadoran armed forces
during the civil war, El Salvador, 1983. Michel Philippot/Sygma/Getty
Images

Incidents such as the El Mozote massacre were anomalous only in their
magnitude: bodies frequently turned up in those years, often bearing
signs of torture. A weekly memo dispatched from the US embassy back to
Washington in 1982 noted, as Joan Didion pointed out in these pages
[[link removed]], “that
it is generally believed in El Salvador that a large number of the
unexplained killings are carried out by the security forces.” And
yet it insisted that the country’s “tangled web of attack and
vengeance, traditional criminal violence and political mayhem” made
such claims impossible to verify—despite much evidence to the
contrary. And so US military aid continued, eventually amounting
to billions of dollars
[[link removed]] in total. At one point
as much as $1 million arrived per day.

*

In _The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13
Hitman _(2019), which I cotranslated with Daniela Maria Ugaz, the
journalist Óscar Martínez and his brother, the anthropologist Juan
José Martínez, write that by supporting the Salvadoran military the
US was “flicking a cigarette into a field of dry grass.” The
result, despite US efforts to deny migrants entry, was the mass
northward exodus of the 1980s. Many Salvadorans settled in Los
Angeles, “hundreds of them every day, carrying the dust of a civil
war on their thin-soled shoes.”

Of those new arrivals, many “were young kids who’d already known
war,” having been forcibly conscripted by the military and sent
“to kill and die in the mountains.” The guerillas, too, the
Martinezes write, were “in the business of training kids and
teenagers.” When youth shaped by this brutal landscape found
themselves confronted by Los Angeles’s complex network of organized
crime, in the brothers’ account, they tried to take on the
established gang members at their own game.

Partially in response to the uprisings after the Rodney King verdict
in 1992, which also destabilized parts of Southern California’s gang
ecosystem, in 1994 Bill Clinton pushed for a crime bill
[[link removed]] that
imposed harsher sentences, significantly increased the size of police
forces, and had the effect of funneling a number of these Salvadoran
gang members into new and bigger prisons—many of which were, as it
happened, partially controlled by prison gangs. At the same time,
Clinton was cracking down on immigration. Two years later he signed
another bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which made it more difficult to seek and
be granted asylum, allowed for migrants to be sent back to their home
countries much more quickly and without a trial, and created more
categories to subject immigrants to criminal charges—all of which
made it easier to expel Salvadoran migrants back to “the birth
country that they hardly knew.”

“Academics who claim that gang structures arrived in Central America
with the deportees are correct,” the Martínez brothers write,
“but within that truth lies a whole spectrum of subtlety.” For
decades the gangs grew, took control over swathes of territory, and
held residents hostage. And yet they were also part of local
communities, weaving themselves into the social fabric and assuming de
facto political governance over many jurisdictions. Successive
administrations, including those of Francisco Flores and Antonio Saca,
implemented zero tolerance policies—from _mano dura_ (iron fist)
to _súper mano dura_—to crack down on the gangs even as
they continued to negotiate
[[link removed]] with
their members behind closed doors.

*

These decades of discontent and insecurity were Bukele’s to harness.
The son of a well-off businessman of Palestinian Christian descent who
converted to Islam, Bukele spent his twenties in marketing and
political advertising. He got his start in politics in 2012, when at
thirty-one he narrowly won the mayoral race in the tiny city of Nuevo
Cuscatlán. He ran on the ticket of the FMLN, which had transformed
after the war into a political party.

The country’s capital, San Salvador, was less than ten miles away.
Three years later, having acquired a reputation for progressive
politics and a focus on youth, Bukele won the city’s mayoral
elections. In the process he reportedly benefitted from his party’s
connections with the gangs he would later denounce. In a major
interview with _El Faro_ last month, two former Barrio 18 leaders
with inside knowledge of the negotiations alleged that the FMLN, in
the outlet’s summary
[[link removed]],
“paid a quarter of a million dollars to the gangs during the 2014
campaign in exchange for vote coercion in gang-controlled
communities,” including “on behalf of Bukele for San Salvador
mayor.”

Bukele’s relationship with the FMLN had long been one of
convenience: initially he embraced leftist policies but largely
dismissed their revolutionary rhetoric. In 2017 the party expelled him
after he got into a standoff with another member and allegedly threw
an apple at her head. But by that point he was already building his
own brand, which would become the party Nuevas Ideas. When he ran for
president in 2019, at just thirty-seven, he won in a landslide.

Since taking office Bukele has pursued a range of means of
consolidating power. He has long targeted dissenting critics and
journalists, dozens of whom had their phones hacked using
Israeli-developed Pegasus spyware between 2020 and 2021. In 2020 he
ordered the military to break into the halls of the legislature and
take over the main chamber of Congress in a hypermilitarized show of
force. “It’s very clear now who’s in control of this
situation,” he said
[[link removed]].
Then he bowed his head in prayer; later he insisted that God had been
speaking to him. He gave the legislature a week to approve a $109
million loan for the third phase of his “Territorial Control
Plan,” which focuses on eradicating the gangs and includes major
spending on the country’s police forces, threatening another
military takeover if they didn’t.

A year later he used his party’s supermajority to ignore the
constitution and purge the judiciary, sack the attorney general, and
replace his critics with favorable judges; Bukele-installed
magistrates ruled later that year, in direct violation of the
constitution, that he could run for another term. At the time the US
secretary of state warned Bukele
[[link removed]] about
his administration’s lack of judicial oversight and its threats to
“democratic governance.”

The Territorial Control Plan itself has by now gone through six
“phases.” The early ones, including “Opportunity” and
“Modernization,” sounded like steps in a business expansion model.
Then they turned more martial: “Incursion,” “Extraction.”
These phases saw massive shows of force and sweeping arrests, often of
young men with merely presumed gang affiliation. For years this
strategy reportedly ran in secret parallel with one of directly
negotiating with the gangs. In a 2022 indictment filed against more
than a dozen gang members and MS-13 leaders, including one with the
nom de guerre Vampiro de Montserrat Criminales, the US attorney for
New York’s Eastern District alleged
[[link removed]] that
Bukele’s administration traded reduced prison time, improved
conditions, and non-extradition in return for fewer—or less
visible—murders in the country. (Bukele has always denied making any
such deal.) According to the interviews recently conducted by _El
Faro_, one top Bukele negotiator reportedly encouraged gang members to
disappear their victims: “No body, no crime.”

The pact supposedly broke down in March 2022, when the gangs unleashed
a wave of violence on the country—at least eighty-seven people were
killed in one weekend—and Bukele responded with his own show of
force, declaring a state of emergency and ordering the military into
the streets. The state of emergency, which practically eliminated due
process, was set to last for a month, the maximum length allowed by
the country’s constitution. But it’s renewable by the legislature,
where Bukele’s party has fifty-four of sixty
[[link removed]] seats.
So far Bukele-aligned lawmakers have extended it nearly forty times.

Nayib Bukele speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action
Conference, Maryland, February 22, 2024. Kent
Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In December 2022, before CECOT opened, Human Rights Watch and
Cristosal issued a joint report
[[link removed]] alleging
that the crackdown had “aggravated historically poor conditions in
detention, including extreme overcrowding, violence, and poor access
to goods and services essential to rights, such as food, drinking
water, and health care…and, in some cases, torture and other forms
of ill-treatment.” Children were not spared: in a follow-up report
HRW found that “over 3,300 children have been detained, many without
any ties to gang activity or criminal organizations.” More than
sixty of them had been “subjected to torture, ill-treatment and
appalling conditions.” Deaths as a direct result of medical neglect
and physical abuse
[[link removed]] by
prison authorities—including beatings and electric shocks—have
been recorded in high numbers
[[link removed]]. 

The fear incited by CECOT has provided new opportunities for
exploitation. _El Faro_ recently uncovered
[[link removed]] that
prison officials have reportedly been charging extortionary fees to
allow family members to visit or communicate with people detained in
the facility. People who have spoken out about abusive conditions
have been locked up
[[link removed]].
Human rights groups have been denied access to CECOT and other
prisons; so have journalists. “Since the opening, media access has
been carefully selected and staged at CECOT,” _El Faro_ reports
[[link removed]].
While Bukele has let in a few big US outlets and state-friendly
YouTubers, he has barred the Salvadoran independent press. Last month
at least three journalists with _El Faro_ decided to leave the
country
[[link removed]] after
they were alerted that they might be arrested, joining four who had
already left. That tip-off came amid a wave of repression, including
the arrest of the prominent human rights lawyer Ruth López, head of
Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice Unit.

Many Salvadorans have so far been willing to countenance the loss of
these freedoms as the price of their newly enjoyed security and the
end of the gangs’ reign. Bukele’s approval ratings have climbed to
over 90 percent
[[link removed]],
if the polling is to be believed. One woman who spoke with CNN
[[link removed]] praised
his tactics for returning safety to the streets even as she lamented
the fact that her own son was, she claims, wrongly detained during the
state of emergency. These are what _El Faro’s _Roman Gressier has
called
[[link removed]] Bukele’s
“twin swords of popularity and fear.”

*

Popularity and fear are also tools wielded by Bukele’s counterpart
in the US, with whom he has some striking commonalities. Both
presidents have waded into cryptocurrency trading, though Bukele got a
head start, announcing three years ago to the cheers of the tech bros
that El Salvador would be the first country to use Bitcoin as a
national currency. (Like many crypto endeavors, the experiment has had
mixed and mostly bad results. As of May 1 Bitcoin is no longer
official currency in the country; people can still use it, but not to
pay taxes or state bills.) Both men have delusions of monarchial
grandeur: recently Bukele changed his bio on X to “Philosopher
King”; Trump, before the new pope was named, posted an AI-generated
image of himself in full papal pomp. They both flirt with the idea of
a third term, and both have courted constitutional crises
[[link removed]].
As Bukele sat in the White House during a press conference and
insisted that he wouldn’t return a wrongly deported man, Trump
smirked with what looked like paternal pride.

Both, too, have learned that if you no longer have real conditions of
crisis to exploit, you can always manufacture them. Trump has long
taken advantage of the high number of crossings at the US southern
border to stoke fear and attempt power grabs. Those crossings, even at
their height, were neither violent nor a threat
[[link removed]]—in
fact they were often a response to threats of violence. They have
also, for that matter, plummeted
[[link removed]] in
recent months. Gang violence in El Salvador, unlike migration at the
southern border, was indisputably a real crisis, but it, too, has
fallen sharply. That hasn’t stopped either Trump or Bukele from
treating them both as ongoing threats for the sake of invoking or
renewing states of emergency. Militarized policing machines inflict
real material violence, but for Trump and Bukele they are, at root, a
matter of spectacle. (In Trumpian terms you might call it
showmanship.) Organizing an extreme response to the mere presence of
noncitizens walking down the street incites the very fear it
purportedly protects against.

One of the primary features of that spectacle is forced
disappearance—a form of violence that depends at once on making
arrests and detentions hypervisible and on consigning the victims to
invisibility. During the civil war approximately nine thousand people
[[link removed]] went
missing, many of them disappeared by the dictatorship. Since Bukele
assumed the presidency, a Salvadoran organization called the
Foundation of Law Enforcement Studies has tallied almost 6,500
reports
[[link removed]] of
disappeared persons.

Trump is turning to the same tactic. In a recent piece for _El Faro_,
the Venezuelan human rights researcher Carolina Jiménez Sandoval
reflected on the historical echoes of seeing migrants shipped off to
CECOT from the US. “The constant pain of not knowing a loved one’s
whereabouts, amid an endless search for any clue that might lead to
finding them, is a feeling many in Latin America know too well,”
she writes
[[link removed]].
Today too, she noted, the migrants deported to El Salvador under the
Trump administration had “their names removed from official
databases,” and neither government revealed “their identities and
whereabouts…to their relatives or legal representatives.” Of the
288 people rendered to El Salvador from the United States, researchers
and journalists have identified only 258.

_Shay Cohen Jones contributed research._

_JOHN WASHINGTON is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria
[[link removed]], where he writes about immigration and
border politics, as well as criminal-justice issues and the arts. He
is also an award-winning translator, having translated Óscar
Martinez, Anabel Hernández, and Sandra Rodriguez Nieto, among others.
His most recent book, The Case for Open Borders
[[link removed]], was published by
Haymarket Books in 2024. Find more of his work at:
[link removed]

_For more than sixty years The New York Review has been guided by
its founding philosophy that criticism is urgent and indispensable. It
is the journal where Mary McCarthy reported on the Vietnam War from
Saigon
[[link removed]] and Hanoi
[[link removed]];
Hannah Arendt wrote her “Reflections on Violence”
[[link removed]];
Noam Chomsky wrote about the responsibility of intellectuals
[[link removed]];
Susan Sontag challenged the claims of modern photography
[[link removed]]; James
Baldwin penned a letter to Angela Davis
[[link removed]];
Jean-Paul Sartre talked about the loss of his sight
[[link removed]];
and Elizabeth Hardwick eulogized Martin Luther King
[[link removed]]. _

_In the pages of the Review, Joan Didion wrote a rigorous defense of
the Central Park Five
[[link removed]]; Nadine
Gordimer
[[link removed]] and Bishop
Desmond Tutu
[[link removed]] described
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from the Czech underground
[[link removed]]; Helen
Vendler read poetry by everyone from William Wordsworth
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Stevens
[[link removed]];
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fell
[[link removed]];
Mark Danner reported on torture at CIA black sites
[[link removed]];
Janet Malcolm wrote about psychoanalysis
[[link removed]], Diane
Arbus [[link removed]],
and translation
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and Garry Wills wrote about American politics and the Catholic Church
[[link removed]]. Joan
Acocella watched the work of Bob Fosse
[[link removed]];
Yasmine El Rashidi reported from Tahrir Square during Egypt’s Arab
Spring
[[link removed]];
Darryl Pinckney wrote about Ferguson, Missouri
[[link removed]]; Namwali
Serpell teased out the figure of the whore in literature and film
[[link removed]];
Zadie Smith charted two paths for the contemporary novel
[[link removed]];
Tim Judah reported from the outbreak of war in Ukraine
[[link removed]];
Sherrilyn Ifill wrote about the Supreme Court’s repeal of
both affirmative action
[[link removed]]and Roe v. Wade
[[link removed]];
Fintan O’Toole analyzed Trumpism
[[link removed]];
Aryeh Neier deplored the genocide in Gaza
[[link removed]];
and Martha Nussbaum defended the rights of animals
[[link removed]]._

_As Bob Silvers and Barbara Epstein wrote in the Review’s first
issue, “The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly,
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