08.05.2025

Salvadoran justice minister Gustavo Villatoro and US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem gawping at inmates

Cruel and unusual punishment

Trump’s use of prisons in El Salvador as a means of terrorising migrants is a flagrant attack on constitutional rights and the rule of law, writes Ian Spencer

Trump’s administration is on a collision course with the US judiciary over its brutal deportation of people by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department. So far, 158,00 have been arrested and deportations have exceeded 142,000. The Department of Homeland Security is bullish in its description of them as “criminal” and “illegal aliens” - many of whom are said to be associated with “criminal gangs” designated as “Foreign Terrorist Organisations”. The basis for the arbitrary seizures is the “common sense” of law enforcement officers. The DHS is at pains to point to the illegality of those arrested and deported, which is assured by the rigid enforcement of the Alien Registration Act.

In addition, thousands have been encouraged to “self-deport”. The message is clear: if anyone entered the US illegally, the choice is either to leave in the hope of one day being able to apply to enter lawfully (what are the chances of that happening?) or be deported with no hope of ever being allowed to re-enter. A climate of fear has been created and there is no doubt that the process of arrest, detention and deportation has also included many who were residing lawfully in the country. Some of the detentions have been to the notorious Guantanamo Bay, but others are suffering the appalling conditions of the Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT - Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) in El Salvador.¹

CECOT - now the largest prison in Latin America - is located in Tecoluca, a remote area 70km east of San Salvador, the country’s capital. It has been operational since February 2023, when US secretary of state Marco Rubio met with president Nayib Bukele, who offered to accept convicted American criminals and incarcerate them at CECOT for a fee. So far $6 million has been paid by the US.

The prison’s director, Belarmino Garcia, estimated in April that the population is close to its capacity of 40,000 inmates, but has plans to expand to 80,000.² The conditions are horrifying - reminiscent of a concentration camp. Each of the 256 cells can house an average of 156 inmates! They are equipped with four-level metal bunks with no mattresses or sheets, two toilets, two wash basins - and two bibles! The cells are lit 24 hours a day and are calculated to have a tiny 0.6 square metres of space per prisoner. The inmates wear all-white uniforms and are allowed out of their cells for just 30 minutes of exercise a day (CECOT was originally constructed with no outdoor exercise facilities). There is not the slightest pretence of rehabilitation. Visits are not allowed and there are no plans to release any of the inmates.

Most of the prisoners were detained in a crackdown on ‘gangs’ ordered by Bukele. The criteria for detention is unclear and many are detained without due process. Detention can be simply based on having known gang tattoos, it seems. Miguel Sarre, a former member of the UN Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture, described CECOT as a “concrete and steel pit” used to “dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty”.³ Amnesty International has issued a statement which reminds the governments of El Salvador and the US that “the rights to freedom, a fair trial, asylum, legal defence and protection against torture and enforced disappearance are not privileges, but rather obligations that their governments must uphold at all times”.⁴

No evidence

Since March, Trump’s administration has deported 271 Venezuelan and Salvadorian expatriates from the US to CECOT. Washington claims that all the deportees belong to criminal organisations, but has provided no evidence. Many of the deportations have been carried out using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives the president the power to detain and deport natives of ‘enemy’ nations without the usual processes. The act has only been used three times before - all during war. The last time was during World War II, when people of Japanese heritage were interned.

Out of the 261 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador as of April 8, 137 were removed using the Alien Enemies Act. While a lower court had temporarily blocked such deportations in March, the Supreme Court ruled on April 8 that Trump could use the Alien Enemies Act, but those facing deportation must be given a chance to challenge their removal. The American Civil Liberties Union maintains that none were told they had this right.

Among the deportees is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three from El Salvador, who fled from the country at the age of 16, as his father’s company was being threatened by gangs. In the US, he had been granted a work permit and refugee status. He is married to someone with leave to remain and has never been convicted of a criminal offence. He was deported to CECOT and, despite the State Department admitting that his arrest was due to an “administrative error”, it has flatly refused to allow him back despite an order from the Supreme Court. This has been justified by the claim, without evidence, that Abrego Garcia is a member of the notorious MS-13 gang - apparently on the basis that he was wearing the apparel of the Chicago Bulls basketball team (evidence enough, it would seem)!

We have, of course, been here before. The US and UK have both cooperated in outsourcing repression to evade judicial standards in our respective countries. Whether that is for the ‘extraordinary rendition’ to Uzbekistan, or other countries where they could be tortured with impunity, or whether it is US use of Guantanamo Bay in the hope that the abuse of prisoners would evade scrutiny during the so-called ‘war on terror’.⁵

What marks Bukele’s contribution as different is his treatment as the poster child for authoritarian repression by so many in the rightwing media. El Salvador’s youngest president was born in 1981 and had a career in his father’s advertising company before his entry into politics. He joined the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in 2012, after it had abandoned the armed struggle and entered Salvadorean electoral politics as a broad left-nationalist-Catholic front, winning the 2009 presidential elections with former journalist Mauricio Funes as its candidate.

Having been expelled from the FMLN in 2017, Bukele built his political career on the back of campaigning against corruption and crime, especially the ‘war on gangs’ from 2022 to the present. For the bourgeois press, where history started yesterday, Bukele is portrayed as a ‘populist’ and ‘authoritarian’, and he has described himself as the “world’s coolest dictator”.

His approval ratings of 80% are lauded, as is the dramatic decline in the Salvadorean murder rate, formerly one of the highest in the world. He has been the subject of fawning interviews by rightwing TV host Tucker Carlson, who gushingly said that president Nayib Bukele “saved El Salvador” and “may have the blueprint for saving the world”.⁶

Huge problem

For communists, gangs trading in drugs and people are not primitive rebels or part of the proletariat, but the product of class forces, and their extortion is another burden on an impoverished population. However, neither are they merely the result of misgovernment or regimes that have been ‘too soft.’ They have their own history, which needs to be understood.

The bourgeois press chooses to ignore the fact that barbarism in El Salvador is, in part, the product of a 13-year civil war, in which the government, supported by the US, killed at least 75,000 people. Many of those were sympathetic to the FMLN, and many were killed by government-backed death squads. These existed to prevent self-determination for the people of El Salvador, particularly where they threatened profits or US control of the region, during the closing years of the cold war.

Bukele is as much the creation of US imperial domination of Latin America as the gangs themselves - gangs which made life in El Salvador so intolerable that many left to seek a ‘better life’ as superexploited, illegal workers in the US. Brutalising and arbitrary detention of people from an impoverished population that has turned to crime as a response to destitution is not part of the solution: it is a huge part of the problem.

If Bukele faces resistance from an independent press, trade unionists or workers demanding more than poverty, they too can face disappearance into CECOT, with no questions asked. One example is Giovanni Aguirre, a trade unionist who was imprisoned in 2022 and has not been seen since. Civil rights lawyer Ingrid Escobar, who has represented thousands detained without due process, has been fighting for his release. “The threat is real,” she said. “There are activists and unionists in prison. There are others with arrest orders out for them. Yes, we are afraid.”⁷

The parallel between Bukele and Trump is clear - that of a model which extols a hard-line approach to crime, yes, but also entails an assault on civil society and democratic institutions, and the accumulation of near absolute power. Even before Trump began his second term of office, the US had one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the world. That trend is only going to accelerate.

Bukele achieved some success in his war on gangs by doubling the size of the army and paying for it with US loans. He used the army to intimidate the National Assembly into approving a request for a loan of $109 million to pay for the ‘Territorial Control Plan’, which has also led to a massive expansion of El Salvador’s prisons - including CECOT.

The Legislative Assembly has also approved Bukele’s proposals to reduce the number of municipalities from 262 to 44 and the number of seats in the legislature from 84 to 60. He ran for re-election in 2024 and won with 85% of the vote after the Supreme Court of Justice ‘reinterpreted’ the constitution’s ban on consecutive re-election.

As for the US constitution, its eighth amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments”.⁸ The context was, of course, the history of the American revolutionary war of independence from British control. The new republic was supposed to prohibit the kind of arbitrary imposition of force characteristic of a country emerging from the remnants of feudal society. But it is a constitutional prohibition that never stopped judicial execution, whether by electric chair or whatever, and did little to prevent extra-judicial lynchings.

The people today being deported in tens of thousands from the US were there in the first place precisely because of the poverty induced by a system headed by a world hegemon in decline. The cruel and unusual punishments currently inflicted in CECOT are a foretaste of what is to come if the global proletariat fails to organise politically in order to stop it.