Hotel Bukele

Why MAGA Loves the World's Coolest Dictator

La Prensa Gráfica Noticias de El Salvador

Many years ago, I interviewed two former leftist guerrillas in El Salvador who had recently become detectives in the national police force. It was an improbable transition, which followed the 1993 Chapultepec Peace Accords that brought the Central American civil wars to an end. As a consequence of this process, these dapper besuited ex-guerrilleros had become members of the security forces that they had spent their youth fighting.

The seeming turnaround was part of a reconciliation effort, supported by the United Nations, which aimed to wean El Salvador’s security forces away from a modus operandi that relied heavily on torture and executions.

My interviewees wanted to do things differently. They had received training from British and American law enforcement officers, and were fully-committed to the new civilian-based policing that they saw as essential to El Salvador’s democratic transition.

I was impressed by their idealism and dedication, but sceptical as to how all this would work out. Because even though the 12-year civil war was over, El Salvador was still a country where people were murdered every day in the course of robberies, or porque sí - for no reason at all.

With post-war demobilisation still underway, bank robberies were likely to be carried out by former combatants using rocket launchers and machine guns. And even then, there was the emerging problem of the maras - gangs - the most notorious of which was the Mara Salvatrucha 13 - a gang originally formed amongst Salvadoran migrants in Los Angeles, whose members had been deported back to El Salvador in 1992.

I’ve often wondered what happened to those two brave young detectives in the years that followed, as the gangs subjected El Salvador to levels of violence not seen since the civil war. Did they survive this maelstrom? Did they remain the good cops they wanted to be - protecting the community and conducting law enforcement according to democratic norms? Or did they succumb to the dark undertow of Salvadoran history, and slide into the brutality and violence of their predecessors?

After all, this was a country where a small oligarchical elite had always treated the rest of the population like serfs, and responded to any demand for change with extreme violence. In 1932, as many as 30,000 peasants were slaughtered by the security forces as punishment for rebellion - an event that Salvadorans remember as la matanza - the massacre. The dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who oversaw this bloodbath, was a theosophist and occultist, who held seances in his house, and once declared that it was ‘a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever.’

In the 1960s, one Salvadoran landowner had his workers shot because they had the temerity to complain that their lunches were served with rotten beans. In the early years of the Salvadoran civil war, the army, the National Guard, the Treasury Police, and an assortment of paramilitaries - most of whom were off-duty soldiers and police - killed and tortured tens of thousands of Salvadorans with complete impunity.

None of this seemed conducive to evidence-based detective work. And whatever happened to those two guerrilla-detectives, their country did not become the model of democratic governance that they hoped to build. By 2016, internecine gang violence had transformed El Salvador into the murder capital of the world. The violence reached a peak in March 2023, when 87 people were murdered in a single weekend.

That month, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele - the self-styled ‘world’s coolest dictator’, ushered in a state of exception in which 53,000 gang members and former gang members were arrested and locked up over a six-month period By 2024 the figure may have risen to 100,000, out of a population of just under six and a half million, and the murder capital of the world acquired a new reputation as the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

Most of these prisoners held in the 40,000-capacity prison complex known as the CECOT - Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Terrorism Confinement Centre). As the name suggests, this was not a ‘prison’ in the sense that the term is generally understood. Though the CECOT’s detainees included some seriously violent men, many prisoners were simply arrested for ‘illicit association’, on the basis of their tattoos or their presence in a particular locality.

In theory, state prosecutors were expected to provide evidence justifying their arrest within four years, but in practice there were few formal charges, no determined length of sentence, and little or no possibility of rehabilitation. Prisoners were given identical shaven haircuts, white vests and boxer shorts, and slept on metal bunks, 100 to a room with two toilets, two sinks and no mattresses, under 24-hour surveillance with the lights permanently on. No family visits or contact with family members were permitted and exercise was restricted to half an hour a day in the prison corridors.

These prisoners included men - and some 7,000 women - who had once been gang members and left the gangs, and former gang members-turned-evangelical pastors who had been trying to persuade their former comrades to reject the gangs.

The Dumping Ground

Such distinctions were no longer relevant to a government that depicted criminals as terrorists, and used the prison system as a warehouse for whoever it wanted to put there. During a visit to ‘Latin America’s biggest prison’ in January this year, the CECOT prison director Belarmino García told journalists from the France 24 network that the inmates were ‘psychopaths who will be difficult to rehabilitate. That’s why they are here, in a maximum prison that they will never leave.’

Hundreds of CECOT prisoners will definitely never leave. According to the Anglican Church’s human rights organization Cristosal, 261 adults and four children have died in state custody since the introduction of the state of exception, as a result of ‘torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people held in prisons…in conditions that sometimes caused death.’

In effect, the CECOT became the real life version of the Erewhon Prison in John Woo’s Face/Off, where the warden tells Sean Archer:

You are now the property of Erewhon Prison. A citizen of nowhere. The Geneva Convention is void here. Amnesty International doesn’t know we exist. When I say your ass belongs to me, I mean exactly that.

All this was popular with Salvadorans, as the murder rate fell and schools, streets and neighbourhoods became safe again. According to the International Crisis Group - a far more reliable source than the Salvadoran government - the drop in the murder rate was due not so much to the rate of incarceration, but to secret truce negotiations between Bukele and the leaders of the two major gangs - negotiations which Bukele has since denied ever took place.

Few Salvadorans were bothered about how this outcome came about. In February 2024, the world’s coolest dictator won a landslide electoral victory, and today Bukele’s state of exception is still in place, and looks set to be permanently extendable.

Under Bukele’s ‘No Idleness’ policy, El Salvador’s prisons have become forced labour camps, where inmates work for nothing in textiles, manufacturing and agriculture. And now, in a world where terms like ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘criminal’ have become increasingly synonymous, Bukele has transformed El Salvador’s prison system into a national asset that other countries can take advantage of.

Before his election, Donald Trump often expressed his admiration for Bukele’s system, and earlier this month, the US sent 238 Venezuelans rounded up in Texas to El Salvador to be incarcerated in the CECOT. The Time journalist Philip Holsinger described how these deportees were greeted by ‘an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them.’ Following their arrival at the prison complex, the following horrendous scene ensued:

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.

Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

The world’s coolest dictator celebrated these deportations with a typically gleeful video on X showing the deportees shackled and escorted by soldiers, accompanied a raucous musical soundtrack because, as I say, this is a cool dictator. Bukele boasted in his post:

The United States will pay a very low fee for them [the prisoners] but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable. As of today, it costs $200 million per year…As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable, and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place. All in a single action.

Naturally, Trump and his MAGA lackeys joined in the celebrations. The White House posted a mocking video showing shackled migrants being searched, accompanied by the Semisonic 1998 hit ‘Closing Time.’ Trump’s sinister press secretary Karoline Leavitt aka MAGA Goebbels - laughed in a press conference that this video was intended to encourage ‘illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe save themselves from being in one of those fun videos’.

Trump himself has now promised to give ‘Tesla vandals’ 20-year sentences for ‘what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla’ and jokes: ‘Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.’

Though the Trump administration has called these deportees ‘monsters’ and gangsters, it has not provided any evidence for the crimes they were accused of. It has since emerged that some of the deportees had already signed papers agreeing to return to Venezuela. Families and attorneys have recognized clients and relatives, who they insist were not gang members. The gay man described by the Time journalist may well be the anti-Maduro activist client of the attorney Lindsay Toczylowski, who told NBC News: ‘We have no idea if there is any legal process by which we can challenge this, either in El Salvador or the United States. This is the grossest human rights violation I have seen.’

There is terrible historical irony here, which is likely to be lost on the ghouls who authorized these procedures. The US infamously supported and funded the succession of military and pseudo-democratic regimes that terrorised the Salvadoran population in the late 1970s and 80s.

It was in the US that El Salvador’s most notorious gangs were founded, and then deported back to El Salvador. Now the Trump administration has sent unwanted immigrants from Venezuela to indefinite incarceration in El Salvador, and the world’s coolest dictator has accepted them in return for a few million dollars.

Guantanamo Bay was bad enough - and it should not be forgotten that many of those who now criticize Trump, supported detention without charge for the real or suspected terrorists who George W. Bush called the ‘worst of the worst.’ But at least Guantanamo was under US jurisdiction. As difficult as it was, lawyers could take up cases and fight for their clients.

There is no such possibility in the CECOT. The US are now removing foreign citizens from its national territory and delivering them to a country where there are no legal rights and no legal parameters, and no possibility of escape and where - according to the world’s coolest dictator - they will have to perform forced labour.

Bukele has also offered to incarcerate US citizens in El Salvador’s prison complex - an offer for which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described himself ‘profoundly grateful…no country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this.’

Indeed they haven’t, and the fact that the US is considering El Salvador as a destination for its own criminals is further evidence of the stunning descent of the world’s flagship democracy into the moral sewer.

The essential hallmark of fascism is institutionalised cruelty, but it takes time to make such cruelty acceptable to the populace. The abandonment of moral and legal standards may be slow and gradual - for a while - as the government or regime tests the waters and sees how much it can get away with. But there comes a point when the descent gathers speed, and previously unfathomable levels of cruelty can seem routine, normalised, and therefore limitless.

The El Salvador deportations show that the Trump regime has already reached this point. They are evidence of a collective moral collapse, from the top down, in which counter-terrorism, border enforcement, and militarized law enforcement have all converged.

Cristosal entitled its report on El Salvador’s prisons, ‘silence is not an option’. And silence cannot be an option in response to the thugs, bullies and cowards who are now running the US government, and who are leading their country into a new age of cruelty that echoes some of the darkest pages of twentieth century history.