Trump’s El Salvador Prison Is Historic U.S. Brutality Playbook

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.

Washington was deeply implicated in Latin America’s deep history repression, helping create a formidable system of death squads, death camps, and death flights — helicopters or planes that dumped political prisoners into the ocean to drown.

Condemn Trump in voices loud and certain. Demand Ábrego García’s return. Don’t forget, though, that the U.S. has long been lawless in Latin America.

Lawless in Latin America

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’s security forces, encouraged by the Truman administration, turned their guns on the Latin America’s antifascists.

In 1948, for example, Chile cracked down on a miners’ strike with its U.S.-fortified army. The military, wrote historian Jody Pavilack, took “total control of the mines, towns, and surrounding countryside” and “sent hundreds of people to mili­tary prison camps and banished thousands more from the region.”

Just four years earlier, many of these strikers had heard Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President Henry Wallace tell them they were democracy’s 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.)

Ecuador likewise used tanks and planes it received from the U.S. wartime Lend-Lease program to lay siege to a student protest. Bolivia and Paraguay also deployed U.S.-supplied tanks to break up strikes.

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.

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 that the CIA staged Bolivia’s 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 “credible.” The agency judged its production a “genuine tour de force.” Five years later, Washington dispensed with the pretense and just backed a straight-up military coup in Bolivia.

Washington loaded the region’s security and intelligence agencies with enormous repressive power. Latin America’s death squads weren’t independent vigilantes but the front lines of an increasingly integrated, continentwide crusade. U.S. officials helped synchronize Latin American national intelligence units into a single operation, which functioned under the name Condor. Its agents were supplied with intelligence by the CIA and communicated through a continentwide CIA system based in the Panama Canal Zone. European intelligence agencies looked to Condor for lessons on how to build their own machines of repression.

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.

Mitrione arrived in Brazil before the country’s 1964 CIA-orchestrated coup, as part of a team whose job it was to apply a “scientific method” to torture. He did the same in Uruguay, where he invented unique torture instruments. One was the “dragon’s chair,” 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.

Then, as now, the complete absence of accountability wasn’t 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 — just as in El Salvador today, where Trump seeks to leverage a massive detention center to create a destination for unaccountable mass deportations. 

The gleefulness in which Trump, Bukele, and others in that recent White House meeting discussed their plan was horrifying.

Homegrown Horrors

Today, there is much concern that Trump is planning to eliminate due process of U.S. citizens by attempting to incarcerate “homegrown criminals” in El Salvador’s prisons.

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 in Santiago, Chile, which Pinochet had turned into a concentration camp after the 1973 CIA-orchestrated coup.

Two of them, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were disappeared by security forces acting on intelligence either provided or confirmed by the CIA. Ben Linder, 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.

In El Salvador itself, the U.S. Embassy has shamelessly erected a memorial to U.S. citizens killed in the country’s civil war. It memorialized both U.S. soldiers who worked with the country’s 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.

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