The Invisible Salvadorans
How the North American Narrative Ignores the Victims of the Bukele Regime
The illegal deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador by the Trump administration has fixated the world’s gaze upon the Salvadoran carceral system. And while the mainstream progressive narrative in the United States is hyper-focused on the abject cruelty and despotism on display inside Salvadoran prisons, and immigrant rights organizations vociferously condemn the violation of due process and the human rights of deportees, it is disheartening to see how hardly anyone is acknowledging that over the last three years under the authoritarian regime of Nayib Bukele, more than 80,000 Salvadoran citizens (including children and the elderly) have had their constitutional rights violated and have been subjected to unjust detainment, torture, sexual assault, gross medical neglect, and even death while in prison.
The Salvadoran prison industrial complex that the world gawks at in horrified awe, and which is now being exploited as America’s own outsourced prison colony, was built upon the backs of the Salvadoran people and over the grave of Salvadoran democracy. And despite the sudden fixation of the world’s press upon the “gulag” that is tiny El Salvador, the police state that presently rules over the country did not materialize overnight.
Over the last six years, journalists, academics, labor unions, human rights organizations, on-the-ground activists, and entire communities based in El Salvador have been warning the world about the abuse of power and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Bukele regime. Multiple U.S. presidential administrations, both Democrat and Republican, watched, tolerated, and eventually, fully endorsed the Bukele regime as it dismantled democratic institutions, covered-up negotiations with gangs, unleashed a campaign of terrorism against its own poor people, and rigged an unconstitutional second presidential term.
And yet, when you peruse recent mainstream news reports on the unlawful deportations of migrants to El Salvador, while journalists are generally doing their due diligence in providing a thorough and comprehensive picture of who these migrants are as human beings and the potential ramifications to American democracy these deportations pose, the representation of El Salvador as a nation is nonetheless reduced down to the authoritarian clownery of Nayib Bukele and his pet project, his maximum security mega-prison (CECOT). There is no deep dive into how the abuse of executive power, the dismantling of government, the grifting and poaching of public resources, and the arbitrary arrests of enemies of the state as carried out by Donald Trump during the first 100 days of his second term has already happened in El Salvador under the Bukele regime.
So-called experts on Latin America have confidently reported about El Salvador but never reached out to Central American scholars to provide historical and political context; they didn’t seek out data, statistics, and victim testimonies gathered by Salvadoran human rights organizations; they didn’t interview with Salvadoran grassroot organizations and on-the ground activists to obtain an alternative opinion on the Bukele regime; and they certainly didn’t have access to other Salvadoran prisons beyond CECOT and take notice that the incarcerated populations inside them are regular-looking people who don’t bear any resemblance the tattooed mareros that get paraded around for the world press and Republican politicians. As has always been the case, North American mainstream journalism is ill-equipped to provide a complex and nuanced depiction of El Salvador.
Thankfully, there are numerous large immigrant/human rights organizations in the U.S. who work directly with the Salvadoran diaspora and who can provide news organizations with accurate and contextual information on the Bukele regime… except they don’t. The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran migrant legally residing in Maryland and who was illegally kidnapped by ICE and deported to El Salvador’s CECOT, highlights a glaring contradiction within the politics of North American immigrant/human rights organizations. That is, these organizations have spent considerable time, effort, and resources marching, rallying, and advocating for the release and return of this one singular Salvadoran migrant, and yet, that same level of energy has not necessarily materialized for the tens-of-thousands of Kilmar’s Salvadoran compatriots who were also illegally kidnapped and imprisoned, but by the Bukele regime.
Of course, for immigrant/human rights organizations based in the United States, the Ábrego García case carries with it tremendous urgency and potentially catastrophic ramifications for the immigrant populations they advocate for and provide services to. Unquestionably, the legal rights of Ábrego García must be defended vigorously and his release pursued tirelessly. And yet, given that Ábrego García has been taken to a Salvadoran prison system with literally tens-of-thousands of individuals who are there under carbon copy circumstances as him, it would behoove immigrant/human rights organizations to, at the very least, acknowledge this fact.
I would argue that focusing exclusively on the rights of Kilmar Ábrego García as an individual, or for that matter, the Venezuelan migrants who been deported to El Salvador, while ignoring that 2% of the Salvadoran adult population has been incarcerated without due process in the last three years alone, reinforces the American Exceptionalist (and false) ideology that only human life that has proximity or affiliation with the United States holds any inherent value. To actively refuse or passively neglect to name the Salvadoran citizens suffering in prisons along-side the deportees is to subject them to social death.
Granted, for immigrant/human rights organizations that in particular cater to the Salvadoran diaspora, and given how a large percentage of that population has been supporting and voting for Nayib Bukele, it’s likely that said organizations would rather not take a public principled position against the rise of fascism in El Salvador and risk jeopardizing their relationship with their Salvadoran clientele. However, if these organizations are willing to openly criticize the Trump administration and its policies, why can’t the same courtesy be extended toward the Nayib Bukele regime, especially after Bukele’s visit to the White House this week and his enthusiasm to serve as Trump’s personal penal colony warden? At this point, is there really a difference between a Salvadoran disappeared by the Trump administration versus a Salvadoran disappeared by the Bukele regime?
The fact of the matter is that fascism relies on the dehumanization/demonization of marginalized populations to justify and rationalize its operations of violence. The intensification of repression against migrants by the current Trump administration could not have been possible without the first Trump administration (2016-2020) having weaponized the imagery of brown, tattooed bodies of MS-13 gang members to construct a vocabulary of fear and hate for his right-wing base, which through osmosis filtered out into the larger cultural imaginary of the United States. Likewise, the escalation of violence and mass incarceration of 80,000 Salvadorans under the State of Exception would not have been possible without a vicious campaign of dehumanization and criminalization of El Salvador’s poor and working-class by the Bukele regime. Take heed, fascism is a globalized phenomenon, and demagogues are taking notes from each other.