The Long History of Lawlessness in U.S. Policy Toward Latin America

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By shipping immigrants to Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador, Trump is using a far-right ally for his own ends.
Greg Grandin
April 22 2025, 12:03 p.m



It seems as if the entire, dishonorable history of U.S. lawlessness in Latin America is distilled in the saga of Kilmar Ábrego García: the man whose illegal deportation to El Salvador and imprisonment in the country’s Terrorism Confinement Center has sparked outrage in the U.S. among human rights advocates and the Trump administration’s opponents. Some see Ábrego García’s arrival in El Salvador as marking a new, dark chapter in U.S. history, but Washington has long supported and harnessed lawlessness in Latin America to pursue its own aims.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes “disappeared” hundreds of thousand Latin American citizens, engaging in a form of state terror traced back to Nazi Germany. El Salvador became infamous for such political “disappearances.” About 71,000 people, or between 1 and 2 percent of El Salvador’s population, were killed or disappeared. A key aspect of the terror, back then, was the not-knowing. Friends and families of “los desaparecidos” exhausted themselves dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies. Government officials shrugged off their questions, telling them their missing relatives probably went to Cuba or ran away with a lover.

Today, though, Trump, aided by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, feels no need for such evasions. The fuck-you impunity on display during Bukele’s recent visit to the Oval Office — “Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said, when asked if he would return Ábrego García — is a higher order of terror, one meant not to generate doubt but to instill helplessness. About 2 percent of El Salvador’s population languish in Bukele’s gulags, with the country clocking the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world — a number comparable to about 7 million people in the United States. It is as if suddenly no one were able to account for all the inhabitants of Arizona — only to learn they had been shipped off to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT in Spanish.

The movement to have Ábrego García returned, as is any effort to rein in the predator Trump administration, is inspiring. Yet all those deported to CECOT deserve our attention. The state crime isn’t that an innocent person was sent to CECOT in “error” but that anyone was sent there at all. CECOT, however, needs to be recognized as not an aberration in the history of the U.S. in Latin America, but an extension of it. Don’t, said Bertolt Brecht, romanticize the “good old days” when fighting the “bad new days” of fascism. That advice holds for the Trump administration’s efforts to use El Salvador as a receptacle for its cast-offs.

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/22/trump-latin-america-bukele-el-salvador-prison/