\n Photo: Ken Cedeno\/UPI\/Bloomberg via Getty<\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
It seems as if<\/span> the entire, dishonorable history of U.S. lawlessness in Latin America is distilled in the saga of Kilmar \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda: the man whose illegal deportation to El Salvador and imprisonment in the country\u2019s Terrorism Confinement Center has sparked outrage in the U.S. among human rights advocates and the Trump administration\u2019s opponents.<\/p>\n Some see \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Through the 1970s and 1980s, U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes \u201cdisappeared\u201d hundreds of thousand Latin American citizens, engaging in a form of state terror traced back<\/a> to Nazi Germany. El Salvador became infamous<\/a> for such political \u201cdisappearances.\u201d About 71,000 people, or between 1 and 2<\/a> percent of El Salvador\u2019s population, were killed or disappeared.<\/p>\n A key aspect of the terror, back then, was the not-knowing. Friends and families of \u201clos desaparecidos\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The fuck-you impunity on display during Bukele\u2019s recent visit to the Oval Office is a higher order of terror.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Today, though, Trump, aided by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, feels no need for such evasions. The fuck-you impunity on display during Bukele\u2019s recent visit to the Oval Office \u2014 \u201cOf course I\u2019m not going to do it,\u201d Bukele said, when asked if he would return \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda \u2014 is a higher order of terror, one meant not to generate doubt but to instill helplessness.<\/p>\n About 2 percent of El Salvador\u2019s population languish in Bukele\u2019s gulags, with the country clocking the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world<\/a> \u2014 a number comparable to about 7 million people in the United States.<\/p>\n It is as if suddenly no one were able to account for all the inhabitants of Arizona \u2014 only to learn they had been shipped off to El Salvador\u2019s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT in Spanish.<\/p>\n The movement to have \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda 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\u2019t that an innocent person was sent to CECOT in \u201cerror\u201d but that anyone was sent there at all.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t, said Bertolt Brecht, romanticize the \u201cgood old days\u201d when fighting the \u201cbad new days\u201d of fascism. That advice holds for the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to use El Salvador as a receptacle for its cast-offs.<\/p>\n Washington was deeply implicated in Latin America\u2019s deep history repression, helping create a formidable system <\/a>of death squads, death camps, and death flights \u2014 helicopters or planes that dumped political prisoners into the ocean to drown.<\/p>\n Condemn Trump in voices loud and certain. Demand \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda\u2019s return. Don\u2019t forget, though, that the U.S. has long been lawless in Latin America.<\/p>\n In Latin America, the line between fighting and facilitating fascism has been fungible. During World War II, Washington invested enormous repressive capacity in hemispheric neighbors as part of the Allied war effort against Nazism. Once the war was won, the region\u2019s security forces, encouraged by the Truman administration, turned their guns on the Latin America\u2019s antifascists.<\/p>\n In 1948, for example, Chile cracked down on a miners\u2019 strike with its U.S.-fortified army. The military, wrote<\/a> historian Jody Pavilack, took \u201ctotal control of the mines, towns, and surrounding countryside\u201d and \u201csent hundreds of people to mili\u00adtary prison camps and banished thousands more from the region.\u201d<\/p>\n Just four years earlier, many of these strikers had heard Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s Vice President Henry Wallace tell them they were democracy\u2019s front line. Now, they found themselves on the killing line, being hunted down by a young army captain, Augusto Pinochet, who rounded up coal and nitrate miners. Many were detained in the Pisagua penal colony in the Atacama Desert. (During his post-1973 dictatorship, Pinochet would use the colony again as a detention and torture center and site of mass graves for victims of his regime.)<\/p>\n Ecuador likewise used tanks and planes it received from the U.S. wartime Lend-Lease<\/a> program to lay siege to a student protest. Bolivia and Paraguay also deployed U.S.-supplied tanks to break up strikes.<\/p>\n As the Cold War advanced, Washington backed a series of coups, starting in Venezuela and Peru in 1948, that by the mid-1970s turned Latin America into garrisoned continent.<\/p>\n The CIA interpenetrated itself into nearly all aspects of civil society. Among the documents recently declassified related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a report revealing<\/a> that the CIA staged Bolivia\u2019s 1966 election as if it were an off-Broadway production, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on both the winning candidate and his opponent, to make the election look \u201ccredible.\u201d The agency judged its production a \u201cgenuine tour de force.\u201d Five years later, Washington dispensed with the pretense and just backed a straight-up military coup in Bolivia.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Washington loaded the region\u2019s security and intelligence agencies with enormous repressive power. Latin America\u2019s death squads weren\u2019t independent vigilantes but the front lines of an increasingly integrated, continentwide crusade. U.S. officials helped<\/a> synchronize Latin American national intelligence units into a single operation<\/a>, which functioned under the name Condor<\/a>. Its agents were supplied with intelligence by the CIA and communicated<\/a> through a continentwide CIA system based in the Panama Canal Zone. European intelligence agencies looked<\/a> to Condor for lessons on how to build their own machines of repression.<\/p>\n The United States sent many men to Latin America, often under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to train Latin Americans in the art of torture. None were more notorious than Daniel Mitrione. <\/p>\n In Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, the U.S. designs on dominance necessitated such brutality \u2014 just as in El Salvador today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Mitrione arrived in Brazil before the country\u2019s 1964 CIA-orchestrated coup, as part of a team whose job it was to apply a \u201cscientific method\u201d to torture. He did the same in Uruguay, where he invented unique torture instruments. One was the \u201cdragon\u2019s chair,\u201d made from conductive metal, with articulating bars that pressed on limbs of the naked prisoner every time shock was applied, creating deep gashes in the skin.<\/p>\n Then, as now, the complete absence of accountability wasn\u2019t merely a common thread among U.S. partners; it was a basic condition for the partnerships. In Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, the U.S. designs on dominance necessitated such brutality \u2014 just as in El Salvador today, where Trump seeks to leverage a massive detention center to create a destination for unaccountable mass deportations.\u00a0<\/p>\n The gleefulness in which Trump, Bukele, and others in that recent White House meeting discussed their plan was horrifying.<\/p>\n Today, there is much concern that Trump is planning to eliminate due process<\/a> of U.S. citizens by attempting to incarcerate \u201chomegrown criminals<\/a>\u201d in El Salvador\u2019s prisons.<\/p>\n During the Cold War, though, scores of U.S. citizens fell victim to U.S.-funded security forces. At least six U.S. citizens were detained in the soccer stadium<\/a> in Santiago, Chile, which Pinochet had turned into a concentration camp after the 1973 CIA-orchestrated coup. <\/p>\n During the Cold War, scores of U.S. citizens fell victim to U.S.-funded security forces.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Two of them, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi<\/a>, were disappeared by security forces acting on intelligence either provided or confirmed<\/a> by the CIA. Ben Linder<\/a>, who was in Nicaragua using his engineering skills to build a rural hydroelectric dam and his juggling and unicycle talents to entertain local children, was one of several U.S. citizens killed by U.S.-run Contras.<\/p>\n In El Salvador itself, the U.S. Embassy has shamelessly erected<\/a> a memorial to U.S. citizens killed in the country\u2019s civil war. It memorialized both U.S. soldiers who worked with the country\u2019s death squads and activists killed by those death squads, including Sisters Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan. The nuns were raped and murdered in 1980 by the Salvadoran national guard acting on orders from officials who themselves took their orders from U.S. patrons.<\/p>\n Ronald Reagan\u2019s Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick said, with Trump-like moral logic: \u201cThe nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists.\u201d OK then.<\/p>\n Images<\/a> of Bukele\u2019s gulags \u2014 with prisoners pushed one into another, stripped naked, and heads shaved<\/a> \u2014 have caught the world\u2019s attention. For many observers, the images evoke the dehumanization of slave ships<\/a> and Nazi death camps<\/a>. They represent a brutality that for many defines Latin America, reflected in the dark history of the Cold War from disappearances to torture, mass detentions to death flights.<\/p>\n Yet these histories aren\u2019t the totality of Latin America. Alongside all the dehumanization runs another story, one of humanization, an emancipationist current with roots stretching back to opposition to the Spanish Conquest.<\/p>\n The intertwining and clashes of these supernational currents \u2014 the subject of my latest book, \u201cAmerica, Am\u00e9rica: A New History of the New World<\/a>\u201d \u2014 is starkly visible in today\u2019s El Salvador. The country is not merely a prison colony; it\u2019s a land filled with people struggling to survive, and its reality is more than Bukele\u2019s and Trump\u2019s will to power, more than cruelty-porn photo ops<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most English-language coverage of resistance to Bukele focuses on middle-class lawyers and politicians. Often overlooked, though, are Bukele\u2019s poorer opponents: the peasant, labor<\/a>, environmental<\/a>, and feminist activists<\/a> who are, literally, putting their lives on the line.<\/p>\n Leaders of oppositions movements, especially women<\/a> but also environmentalists and trade unionists, are killed at a steady clip. Many of those who don\u2019t get assassinated are prosecuted on trumped up charges by a legal system that does the president\u2019s bidding. Bukele has placed the country under what appears to be under a permanent state of exception, accusing civil society organizations as being fronts<\/a> for gangs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
Lawless in Latin America<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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![\"SAN](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/GettyImages-2208002183.jpg?fit=5201%2C3467\")
\n Photo: Alex Pena\/Anadolu via Getty<\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHomegrown Horrors<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Democracy and Dehumanism<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![heads shaved<\/a> \u2014 have caught the world\u2019s attention. For many observers, the images evoke the dehumanization of](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/a87af6fbff20556700e82ed0c1f9ee9cbbfe982e\/0_224_6720_4032\/master\/6720.jpg?width=1300&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none\"){kind=link}
![cruelty-porn photo ops<\/a>.<\/p>\nMost English-language coverage of resistance to Bukele focuses on middle-class lawyers and politicians. Often overlooked, though, are Bukele\u2019s poorer opponents: the peasant, labor<\/a>, environmental<\/a>, and feminist activists<\/a> who are, literally, putting their lives on the line.<\/p>\nLeaders of oppositions movements, especially women<\/a> but also environmentalists and trade unionists, are killed at a steady clip. Many of those who don\u2019t get assassinated are prosecuted on trumped up charges by a legal system that does the president\u2019s bidding. Bukele has placed the country under what appears to be under a permanent state of exception, accusing civil society organizations as being fronts<\/a> for gangs.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re independent of corporate interests \u2014 and powered by members. Join us. <\/h2>\n \n Become a member \n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n\n \n Join Our Newsletter <\/span>\n \n Thank You For Joining! <\/span>\n <\/h2>\n\n \n Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. <\/span>\n \n Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept? <\/span>\n <\/p>\n \n Become a member \n <\/a><\/p>\n\nBy signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\nCenturies of violence seemed to have seared into activists an irrepressible ability to rec\u00adognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body \u2014 every illegally incarcerated human \u2014 with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity, ever more organizing.<\/p>\nOne anonymous feminist activist, referring to women sentenced to long prison terms for having had an abortion, said<\/a> that \u201cafter seeing this happen to someone, it courses through your veins. You carry it on your skin. When I think about becoming involved in women\u2019s rights, after seeing what women go through, how could I not?\u201d<\/p>\nIf democracy were to be measured by such courage, then El Salvador and all of Latin America, where social movement activists against great odds and facing great danger fight for a more equal society, must be considered among the most democratic places on Earth.<\/p>\nIf there is hope there, among Salvadorans, then maybe there is hope yet for their neighbors far to the north: not just that the U.S. will stop supporting and leveraging lawlessness in Latin America, but also that even lawfulness itself will become subservient to a higher aspiration \u2014 that we may all be humanized in each other\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"El Salvador\u2019s Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 2025. Photo: Ken Cedeno\/UPI\/Bloomberg via Getty It seems as if the entire, dishonorable history of U.S. lawlessness in Latin America is distilled in the saga of Kilmar \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda: the man whose illegal deportation to El Salvador and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gunowner-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffebaa29f-7b62-4f92-9eb4-77921a000df7_1600x1066.jpeg\"){kind=link}