El Salvador is a human rights nightmare comparable to the 1980s death squad era
In late March, the Trump administration made headlines for dusting off an 18th century war-time act to justify deporting 200 Venezuelan immigrants who were sent to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT).
The Venezuelan deportees were accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang, which was on the U.S. terrorist list. None of the deportees, however, have faced trial and at least some of them, according to relatives, were not gang members but simply had tattoos.
On March 19, Yahoo News ran an article about the horrific conditions in CECOT, where more than 60 inmates are caged in single cells and confined 23.5 hours per day without having an opportunity to go outside.
The only furniture in the cells are “tiered metal bunks, with no sheets, pillows or mattresses, an open toilet, a cement basin and plastic bucket for washing and a large jug for drinking water,” CNN senior correspondent David Culver said of what he saw at the prison, adding that the inmates “do not work. They are not allowed books or a deck of cards or letters from home. Plates of food are stacked outside the cells at meal times and pulled through the bars. No meat is ever served. The 30-minute daily respite is merely to leave the cell for the central hallway for group exercise or Bible readings.”
Other reports highlight beatings of inmates and electroshock torture.[1]
Receiving $112 million in U.S. foreign assistance in 2024, El Salvador is ruled by Nayib Bukele, 43, a bitcoin enthusiast known for his leather jackets and backward baseball caps who jokingly refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator.”
Human Rights Watch wrote that “widespread human rights violations were enabled by President Bukele’s swift dismantling of democratic institutions since taking office in 2019, which has left virtually no independent government bodies that can serve as a check on the executive branch or ensure redress for victims of abuse.”
In 2020, Bukele ordered the country’s military to occupy its parliament and intimidate the legislature to pass new funding for the country’s repressive security forces so that they could carry out a draconian war on crime.[2]
These security forces have been bolstered by U.S. police training programs and U.S. funding of the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA), a creation of the Clinton administration that has come to “function like another School of the Americas (SOA), under a new name and in a new location,” according to one critic.[3]
Since declaring emergency rule in 2022, Bukele has locked up at least 85,000 people, giving El Salvador one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Most of those accused of gang ties have not been tried in court and have no right to an attorney.
More than 370 people have died in prison according to investigations by Cristosal, a human rights group, which determined that torture has “become state policy” under Bukele.[4]
Bukele is in many ways a Central American version of Rodrigo Duterte, the former Philippines president who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for presiding over massacres in waging an overzealous war on drugs and crime.
Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern (D) said that there was no equivalent in Latin America to the levels of abuse taking place under Bukele’s war on crime, “not even during the worst years of military dictatorship.”
The latter is a reference to the 1980s when the Reagan administration and CIA supported death squad operations that set the groundwork for the continued violence gripping El Salvador today.
The Committee in Solidarity with the People (CISPES), an activist group formed to protest the Reagan administration’s support for Salvadoran death squads, is spotlighting the case of human rights lawyer Fidel Zavala, spokesperson for 24 residents of the La Floresta community who were unjustly arrested while trying to protect their land. Zavala was sentenced to 6 months of pre-trial detention in February. He has pending lawsuits against prison authorities for abuses he witnessed during 13 months of a previous unjust detention.
Another article on CISPES website highlights that last year, 390 complaints were filed by feminist and women’s organizations against state agencies operating under Bukele, and that 25 women have lost their lives in state custody.
El Salvador’s Feminist Network to Combat Violence against Women (RedFem) issued a statement proclaiming that “militarization and the increase in arbitrary detentions have exposed many women to human rights violations, including forced separation from their families, institutional violence, a lack of access to justice, additional burdens of care and precariousness due to a decrease in income.”[5]
The horrific situation in El Salvador today is rooted in the failure of neo-liberal economic policies that have produced a tier tiered society in the wake of the 1980s civil war combined with brutal state repression.
Signed in 2005, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) decimated local industry by favoring foreign multinational corporations and took away job prospects for Salvadoran youth who became easy prey for gangs.
Bukele started his career as a member of the left-wing Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN), which had waged guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in the 1980s after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and then became a leading political party.
However, after becoming mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan in 2015, Bukele was ousted from the FMLN and formed his own political party (Nuevas Ideas) that adopted a right-wing and fascistic platform.
The latter did not bother the Biden administration, which expanded foreign assistance and provided police aid and military equipment to Bukele’s government. Reflecting its own authoritarian bent, the Trump administration has grown even closer to Bukele.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Bukele for (supposedly) bringing “freedom to El Salvador” and security that could allow, in his view, for greater foreign investment.
Bukele invited Trump’s children and key allies, including disgraced former Florida representative Matt Gaetz and former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, to attend his inauguration for a constitutionally dubious second term, and made a prime-time address to the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference.[6]
Gaetz posted on X: “Nayib Bukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results. He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.”
If this is an inspiration, we certainly are in trouble.
“Left” Media Disappoints in Coverage of Central America
The coverage of Central America has been largely disappointing, not only in the mainstream, but also alternative media.
While focusing relatively little on El Salvador, the flagship “lefty” program Democracy Now, for example, ran a heavily biased segment on Nicaragua in early February that warned of a new dictatorship there.
The segment featured Reed Brody, who during the 1980s published a report on Contra [counter-revolutionary] violence backed by the CIA. Now Brody is on the side of the CIA, claiming that Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega heads a bloody dictatorship reminiscent of the Somozas the Sandinistas had overthrown.
But Brody is out of touch with political realities in Nicaragua and repeats State Department/CIA disinformation that is part of regime-change propaganda.
Brody, for example, impugns Ortega—who has genuine popular support—for violently cracking down in 2018 on protesters who actually mounted a violent coup against his legally elected government.
Many of the protesters received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which finances civil society groups and media in foreign countries the U.S. targets for regime change.
Further, Brody neglects to consider, apparently, that many of those labeled as political prisoners by human rights organizations—functioning as adjuncts of the U.S. State Department—are extreme right-wingers with violent proclivities. Many also have ties to U.S. political leaders and are considered traitors in Nicaragua.
Brody additionally neglects to mention the significant social gains in Nicaragua under Sandinista rule, resulting from its socialistic philosophy.[7]
The contrast between the political situation in Nicaragua and El Salvador is generally night and day. So why is a supposedly progressive media outlet warning us about a dictatorship especially in Nicaragua, while failing to educate people as to the reason the U.S. supports fascistic governments like that of Bukele and tries to overthrow left-leaning ones like that led by Ortega?
The 2023 U.S. State Department country report on El Salvador noted “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” in Salvadoran prisons. Amnesty International found a pattern of “systemic torture” there. ↑
For more on Bukele’s authoritarian methods, see Hillary Goodfriend, “El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele Committed Blatant Election Fraud,” Jacobin, February 20, 2024; Hilary Goodfriend, “El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is Yet Again Ramping Up His Authoritarian Violence,” Jacobin, April 8, 2022. ↑
Salvadoran officers receive training in police work at the ILEA from U.S. police professionals. Prison officials have also received training on topics like riot control and baton use. The horrible past impact of U.S. police training programs in El Salvador and around the world is chronicled in Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Since renamed the the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the School of the America was infamous for training many of Latin America’s worst torturers and dictators in counterinsurgency operations during the Cold War. See Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, C: Duke University Press, 2004). “The legacy of U.S. training of security forces at the School of the Americas and throughout Latin America is one of bloodshed, of torture, of the targeting of civilian populations, of desaparecidos,” wrote SOA Watch founder Roy Bourgeois after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced plans for the ILEA San Salvador at a June 2005 Organization of American States meeting in Miami. “Rice’s recent announcement about plans for the creation of an international law enforcement academy in El Salvador should raise serious concerns for anyone who cares about human rights,” he said. ↑
Often the dead were dumped in mass graves and their families were never notified of their deaths. A more recent study suggests that over 1,000 have died, including four babies. Massive corruption in El Salvador’s prison system was evident in large-scale bribery and extortion schemes targeting family members of inmates who have to pay thousands of dollars to visit with their loved ones. Incarcerated females are subjected to the threat of sexual violence and “spontaneous abortions.” One 24-year-old man, whose family spoke to Cristosal, died of a burst intestine theorized to have been caused by a severe beating. After an initial hospitalization due to malnutrition after seven months in prison, he was granted special release by a judge who told him that the “good news” was that a polygraph determined he was innocent—but the bad news was that he had “terminal renal insufficiency.” He told a relative shortly before he died that at Mariona Prison the “water is hot and tastes like chlorine and they hardly give us food, we get fed once a day, they don’t give us breakfast or lunch only dinner … we wait in line in a large court and everyone who gets food receives two hard blows on the back … so I stopped going out to eat so they wouldn’t hit me, because those blows hurt.” ↑
Representatives of feminist and women’s organizations complained that the repressive policies of the government have not only served to criminalize dissent, but also to weaken women’s ability to organize. The Women’s Commission of the Movement for the Defense of Working Class Rights (MDCT) denounced the repression against union leaders, workplace harassment, and arbitrary terminations. They also pointed out that the criminalization of protest and the increase in workplace harassment in the public sector directly affect women workers and union leaders, who face an increasingly hostile environment for defending their rights. ↑
Not to be outdone, the Biden administration also sent a delegation to Bukele’s inauguration to indicate its support for Bukele. ↑
For an antidote to Democracy Now’s biased coverage of Nicaragua, see John Perry, “The ‘Human Rights Industry’ and Nicaragua,” CovertAction Magazine, February 6, 2024; and John Perry, “Is USAID a ‘Criminal Organization?’—In Nicaragua, the Evidence Suggests It Is,” CovertAction Magazine, February 25, 2025. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Excellent article. I am happy to see that Human Rights Watch is considered to be a reliable source of information in this article. I have noticed past articles in Covert Action Magazine where Human Rights Watch has been given a very low credibility rating, especially when they point out atrocities in countries that Covert Action Magazine consistently supports. Anyways keep the good work. Excellent article.