In March, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador announced the country had accepted more than 250 deportees from the United States. The group was made up mostly of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, as well as some Salvadoran citizens. The men were sent to what is considered the largest prison in the Americas: the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT.
Bukele had commissioned the megaprison in 2022 to facilitate his government’s crackdown on gangs. And using emergency powers granted by the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, U.S. President Donald Trump had apparently made a deal with Bukele to imprison the deportees. At the last minute, a federal judge ordered the deportation flights to turn back to the United States. Bukele wrote on X in response: “Oopsie . . . Too late.”
Those deportations intensified national attention on Trump’s draconian immigration policies. But the incident also dragged El Salvador into the headlines, turning international attention to Bukele and his government’s record of rights violations. Solidifying a long-standing relationship, the leaders of the United States and El Salvador now seem to be sharing authoritarian tactics that have been gaining popularity globally, inciting a litany of abuses of power in both nations.
Since March 2022, Bukele’s government has been in a “state of exception,” a state of emergency that suspends some constitutional protections. As of October, the legislature has extended the measure more than forty times. Bukele, who ran as an antiestablishment candidate, has since anointed himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“That state of exception has militarized the country,” says Samuel Ramírez, an organizer with MOVIR, a movement that aids victims of the state of exception. “It’s criminalized a lot of people who live in poor communities where gangs have control,” Ramírez explains. “The regime sees all the young people who live in communities where gangs have a presence as suspects, and they can be captured at any time.”
It’s impossible to know how many of the nearly 90,000 estimated to have been imprisoned under the state of exception actually belong to a gang, the result of a lack of due process. Though CECOT was only opened in 2023, Human Rights Watch has already documented instances of “torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention . . . and inhumane conditions” at the facility and other Salvadoran prisons. Survivors of Bukele’s prisons affirm those details. In October, digital news outlet El Faro published quotes from former prisoners, outlining hellish conditions. Among the most chilling: “People were committing suicide out of desperation.” And: “This is how the Nazis were, right?”
“Bukele knows people are dying in the prisons. Some people have been captured after going to try to petition for a detained family member, and they’re still in prison,” Ramírez says. “We feel that there’s a minimal chance that people who are captured will make it out of risk alive.”
The Bukele government’s list of suspected crimes doesn’t stop at the prison gates, though. Illegal searches, media restrictions, arrest quotas, lengthy pretrial detentions, and the use of anti-gang laws to target rights defenders, organizers, and opposition members have become common. Violent gang crime has decreased. But extrajudicial killings have climbed, conjuring the horrifying specter of the death squads that plagued El Salvador during its long civil war from 1979 to 1992. Those crimes are seldom investigated, and impunity is the norm.
The current climate is not unlike the one that spawned years of conflict. Political violence in the 1970s exploded into a civil war by the end of that decade, with the leftist revolutionary group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) on one side and U.S.-backed paramilitary death squads and government forces on the other. The FMLN eventually became a mainstream political party. But even its major figures have been targeted.
“A lot of people [in the FMLN] who were really confronting [Bukele] from the historic left were imprisoned,” says Alexis Stoumbelis, the organizational director of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. “Now, the party has even taken a bit of a back seat, thinking about elections.”
Elections themselves are also threatened. Bukele has abolished presidential term limits, a move the Trump Administration backed. Bukele purged his critics from the constitutional chamber of the supreme court and has recently called on the Trump Administration to do the same by removing “corrupt judges,” a rallying cry that riled up the MAGA-sphere. Meanwhile, Trump has fired at least seventy federal immigration judges since February.
The cozy relationship between the Bukele and Trump Administrations makes historical sense. The United States helped lay the groundwork on which Bukele has built his rule.
In 1984, The Progressive published a four-month investigation into the role of the United States government in the violence in El Salvador. In a CIA statement released about the report after it was published, the agency said the story documented that “U.S. involvement with the Salvadoran security services started” during the Kennedy Administration, efforts that “included training in torture methods.” The Progressive also credited the United States with establishing El Salvador’s ORDEN and ANSESAL, “two official security organizations that killed thousands of peasants and suspected leftists over the next fifteen years.” The groups would later evolve into death squads, according to the article.
Between 1980 and 1990, during the height of El Salvador’s civil war, the United States spent $1 billion in military aid to “assist the government in its fight against an insurgency,” according to a 1991 Government Accountability Office report. In practice, that often meant violence and the repression of civilians, especially organizers, opposition figures, people in poor communities, and clergy or any others perceived as supporting the FMLN. It only came to an end with the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992 (a deal that Bukele has called a “farce”).
In 2001, The Guardian reported that a United Nations truth commission found that, of the officers who had committed “the worst atrocities” of the civil war, “two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas,” today known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, located in Georgia. The institution changed its name that year, shortly after the Pentagon made public its training materials that “advocated torture, extortion, and execution.”
The lessons shared between the United States and El Salvador during the civil war have not been lost on Bukele, either. He appears to want to rewrite Salvadoran history, demolishing the Monument to Reconciliation, which he said “glorified the pact between the murderers of our people, to divide the loot.” Some of that loot, though, is still up for grabs.
In May, the Bukele government used the state of exception to try to seize land from the El Bosque farming cooperative that had been granted to campesinos during the war. Leaders of a small protest against the eviction near Bukele’s private residence were detained. On October 29, a court denied conditional release to two of those activists, Alejandro Henríquez and José Ángel Pérez.
When Salvadoran attorney Ivania Cruz arrived in Spain to do advocacy work in early 2025, she didn’t know she’d be staying long-term.
“I didn’t choose exile,” Cruz says now. “I couldn’t even prepare myself.”
Cruz was traveling with her husband, attorney Rudy Joya. In El Salvador, they were members of the Unit for the Defense of Human and Community Rights, or UNIDEHC, where Cruz also served as spokesperson. The organization works to protect communities from eviction, advocates for victims of political persecution and arbitrary detention, and battles corruption. While in Spain, Cruz learned her home and the UNIDEHC headquarters had been raided. Then the pair heard their colleague Fidel Zavala, who had previously spoken out against inhumane prison conditions, had been detained along with twenty leaders from a community, La Floresta, UNIDEHC supported.
After that, exile seemed the only reasonable option for Cruz and Joya. But Cruz said she won’t be silenced. Since taking up residence in Basque Country in northern Spain, she’s earned support from local lawmakers and talked about her country with U.N. staff.
But Cruz’s refusal to stop her advocacy has not been without consequences. In July, El Salvador’s attorney general issued arrest warrants for the pair. In September, they learned El Salvador had also requested that INTERPOL issue a red notice against them. A Spanish court eventually dismissed the notice.
The repression of UNIDEHC and its members is just one of El Salvador’s many overt attacks on prominent rights defenders since Trump took office. This includes the detention in May of Ruth López, a Bukele critic and human rights attorney. In 2022, she had compared El Salvador’s prisons under the state of exception to concentration camps. In February, former FMLN official Eugenio Chicas was detained. Constitutional attorney Enrique Anaya was nabbed in June, after criticizing López’s arrest.
Cruz says the Salvadoran state wants to replace the control of gangs with its own repression. There is even evidence that the gangs Bukele has used as a pretext for his crackdown helped him come to power. One gang leader told El Faro in May that he’d been released from detention in April 2022 because of a pact made between his Barrio 18 Revolutionaries, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), and the government. He said his gang received favors from the state—and helped Bukele ascend to the presidency.
With their collaboration cemented, Trump has asked Bukele to build more megaprisons to house “homegrown criminals” from the United States. Bukele, for his part, has entered the MAGA-sphere. He delivered his first public speech after his 2019 election at The Heritage Foundation and appeared on Fox News for an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2022. Both leaders have accelerated attacks on the press.
Cruz believes Trump’s election has emboldened Bukele. “They’re trying to implement a political agenda,” she says. “That’s given Bukele the green light to do everything he wants.”
Asylum seekers from Central America started to arrive in the United States in the 1980s, fleeing civil war and violence and were given sanctuary by local churches and activists. Today, that history has helped to shape the modern sanctuary movement.
“Those asylum seekers were the chief spokespeople for the movement,” Sergio González, associate professor of history at Marquette University, tells The Progressive. “Every time they talked about the complicity of American taxpayer dollars going to destabilize their countries in Guatemala, El Salvador, people in the pews had an obligation to then make a choice.”
González says that behind the scenes of the sanctuary movement, “there was also a robust network of private sanctuary that received no publicity out of necessity. And that private sanctuary was often being offered by Latin American immigrants, Latino Americans, by evangelical churches that were not part of that mainstream sanctuary movement”—including an underground railroad-like system that shuttled people from the U.S.-Mexico border to Canada.
El Salvador today, Cruz says, “is a volcano that’s on the point of exploding over a social upheaval that could take root due to so much repression.” The only path forward is through an organized resistance, she says, adding that exiled Salvadorans like herself and others in the diaspora could play a critical role in exposing their government to the rest of the world.
“We feel alone here,” says Ramírez of MOVIR, members of which he says have been threatened, persecuted, and even captured. “You never know when you can become a victim.”
He hopes to enlist the global community for more international support.
“We want organizations to demand their governments make any financing to El Salvador conditional in respect to human rights and the lifting of the state of exception,” Ramírez says.
It’s happened before. As González says, international solidarity with Central American migrants and liberation movements grew out of people sharing their stories across borders.
“These aren’t dogs that are dying, or animals. They’re human beings. People die and no one pays for it,” Ramírez says. “But we’re here, putting up a fight.”