Three commercial airliners are parked on a tarmac. A mass of men wearing riot gear begin unloading their cargo: human beings in orange jumpsuits, their hands and ankles tied. The guards drag these prisoners, doubled over and shuffling, towards a fleet of armored police vehicles and white school buses. Electronic music pulses as the motorcade makes its way to a hulking prison facility, emerging out of the darkness against a surrounding countryside. Within its enormous concrete walls, there are rows of buildings that resemble warehouses. Inside, under fluorescent lights that appear almost medical, the prisoners have their heads shaved one by one before the guards lock them inside an enormous communal cage containing long rows of bunk beds. As the gates slam shut and the prisoners gaze out at the camera, presumably never to be seen again, the dehumanization is complete. They are nonpersons forgotten inside a nonplace. The screen goes black and encourages the viewer to press “replay.”
This video, posted to X by the account of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in mid-March, and swiftly shared by US President Donald Trump and other senior government officials, depicts the transfer of 238 men deported from the United States to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in Spanish, or CECOT for short), a recently-constructed maximum-security facility in rural El Salvador designed to incarcerate thousands of prisoners indefinitely. CECOT is where Bukele says he detains the most dangerous members of El Salvador’s street gangs; now, despite most of the men deported from the US having no criminal records, Trump has attempted to portray them as dangerous gang members as well.
Much of Trump’s cruelty here is familiar—the US national security state has long used extensive, extraordinary, and questionably legal methods of apprehension and punishment—but what is remarkable is the crafting of a short film celebrating the process. The human rights violations of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, while serious, were not typically so openly advertised; the very name “black site,” as the secret CIA torture and detention facilities were called during the Global War on Terror, suggests as much. In those years, a certain discretion, if not secrecy, used to characterize most US deportation proceedings. In contrast, Trump and Bukele have gleefully turned deportation and incarceration into theater, circulating images of their power to detain, deport, and incarcerate unfettered by law or custom. Understood this way, Bukele’s video, featuring deportations to a Salvadoran prison from which no person has ever been released, functions as a digital advertisement for efficient disappearance—testifying to authoritarian leaders’ total power to take people, and our powerlessness to bring them back.
In turning to disappearance as a tactic of political control, the US is building on precedents from across the hemisphere, particularly Latin America. Throughout the Cold War, the region’s military dictatorships tortured and murdered political prisoners in remote rural areas or secret detention centers. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the right-wing governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay all collaborated on Operation Condor, a transnational kidnapping and torture program targeting political dissidents. Right-wing governments and combatants in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and, indeed, El Salvador, also employed disappearance as a political technique, principally during the Central American civil conflicts of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. These operations were at least notionally conducted in secret, but people knew their loved ones were being disappeared, even as they didn’t know what happened to them next—a mystery that was, in many ways, the point.
Now, Bukele is leading contemporary Latin American fascists in reimagining the tactic of disappearance for the social media age, producing slick videos that are beamed to digital screens around the world as symbols of his power. One June 2024 Bukele video features a masses of undressed prisoners being corralled by heavily armored and helmeted agents, with captions celebrating the captives being “incomunicados con el exterior, sin posibilidad de salir” (“incommunicado with the outside world without the possibility of leaving”). For Bukele, these spectacles of enforcement and punishment are important as evidence of the “order” that he claims to have brought to El Salvador through the authoritarian powers he’s granted himself over the past three years, during which he has created a “state of exception” that has entailed the indefinite suspension of civil rights. Bukele has used these capabilities to manage El Salvador’s gang violence crisis, but absent a way to jumpstart the economy, he has not been able to effect the total transformation of the country he once vowed. In this context, his videos have served as a major tool for building legitimacy, offering him an opportunity to project his narrative to the Salvadoran people even as his promises remain unfulfilled.
Much like his southern ally, Trump, too, is turning to mediated spectacles of force and coercion to create the impression of progress on his unfulfillable political promises. Immigration has been a signature issue of both of his presidential campaigns, and his victory in 2024 came with a pledge to begin mass deportations in his second term. Yet even as ICE has accelerated its operations under the new administration, Trump’s promised “millions and millions” of deportations have not materialized, and it’s reasonable to think that they never will. There are an estimated 11 million immigrants without legal status in this country, many working in essential sectors like agriculture, construction, foodservice, and the caregiving professions; deporting them all lies beyond the institutional capacity of the American state. But Trump’s team knows they don’t actually need to enact deportations at a mass scale so long as they can create a sense that immigration enforcement is swift, omnipresent, impossible to challenge, and—to their supporters at least—carried out in the name of justice, with or without the consent of the actual justice system. So we get the spectacle of arbitrary enforcement, theatrics that do not always require government-produced videos to sow terror. Bystander footage of random and violent arrests has been enough to do the job, including a video of an anti-war graduate student being snatched off the street by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Somerville, Massachusetts; another of a family in New Bedford having their car broken into by a sledgehammer-wielding ICE agent; and a third still depicting the aftermath of ICE stopping a bus carrying migrant workers in upstate New York, where the agency plucked off a small, handpicked group of worker leaders. Ultimately, such images end up serving the same function that the stories of the disappeared have long done across the Western hemisphere: advertising the capaciousness of state power, suggesting that no one is safe from its grasp, and projecting an omnipotence it does not yet possess.
The present conjuncture, where US policymakers are looking to Latin America for inspiration, inverts the history of Latin American governments importing repressive tactics from the US. The historian Greg Grandin has characterized the region as the “workshop” of empire, a place where techniques of soft and hard power—from dollar diplomacy to death squads—are tested and refined by US elites and their local clients before being exported worldwide. Institutions like the US military’s School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), for example, have trained many of the region’s most brutal military and political leaders who have, in turn, gone on to spread torture and indiscriminate violence across the hemisphere. In Central America in particular, the US has backed dictatorial, kleptocratic, and even genocidal right-wing governments in devastating civil wars against left-wing popular insurgencies—aiding Guatemala’s military in committing a genocide against the country’s indigenous Maya; funding and arming a guerilla counterrevolution against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and supporting the far right politician and American-trained military commander Roberto D’Aubuisson (a School of the Americas alumnus) in El Salvador. D’Aubuisson went on to assassinate political opponents, torture suspected enemies with blowtorches, and command death squads like those that killed thousands of Salvadorans, including nuns, priests, students, union leaders, and the rural poor. Notably, each of these conflicts involved thousands of disappearances: Some 8,000 to 9,000 people were disappeared in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992, while in other contexts—like the Guatemalan civil war—estimates suggest the number may exceed 45,000.
US intervention has continued to destabilize Central America for decades beyond the official conclusion of military conflicts. After the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992, for instance, gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 grew in power and influence across the country. But such groups, now synonymous with Salvadoran street violence, were a distinctly North American export, with roots in Los Angeles’s longstanding youth gang culture. Many Salvadorans fled north to places like LA to escape the violence of the war, and some ended up in US prisons. Starting in 1989, the United States began deporting Salvadorans who had served time back to El Salvador, and the returning gang members brought their associations with them. As a result, even after the peace settlement, US-style gangs quickly made El Salvador among the most dangerous places in the world, devastating the government’s ability to achieve stability and laying the groundwork for a return to all-out repression. And indeed, by 2019, the gang problem provided a political opening that helped sweep Bukele into power.
Bukele became president with a mandate to finally address El Salvador’s most intractable problems, including gang violence. Initially, he disavowed repressive policies and looked to combat the issue in part by negotiating a secret truce with the gangs to reduce homicide rates. After that deal broke down in 2022, however, Bukele had the legislative assembly declare a 30-day “state of exception” that suspended many civil rights, making it easier for government authorities to arrest and imprison suspected gang members. Since 2022, Bukele has detained nearly 80,000 Salvadorans, almost all of them young men, in conditions that independent human rights organizations have said amount to torture. (Since El Salvador has a population of just 6.5 million, that’s the proportional equivalent of locking up 4.1 million Americans.) In many cases, suspected gang members have been taken in on flimsy evidence, or no evidence at all: Stories abound of young men arrested because they’d been turned in by a neighbor, faced accusations on social media, had a previous encounter with police, or had tattoos. Sources both within and outside El Salvador suggest that many non-gang affiliates have been swept up in the dragnet, with one report estimating that as many as a third of the Salvadoran prisoners incarcerated in CECOT are ordinary civilians, thousands of them children. Like the disappeared during Cold War civil conflicts, these people were snatched off the streets, imprisoned, and, in some cases, never heard from again. Eventually, Bukele’s government has been forced to release 7,000 prisoners due to lack of evidence. The vast majority, however, remain in custody, and nearly 400 are confirmed to have died. So while Salvadorans got their cities and streets back from the gangs—guaranteeing that Bukele remains extraordinarily popular at home, with around 85% of the public supporting his government—they also ended up with a country where the state of exception has been renewed over 30 times and remains in effect today, and where the incarceration rate is now the highest in the world.
Despite the crackdown, however, a total transformation of El Salvador still evades Bukele. The president came into office at the head of the political party “Nuevas Ideas” (New Ideas); these turned out to be a combination of several old approaches, including personalism, techno-utopian mystification, pro-market ideology, and old-fashioned mano dura (iron fisted) security policies. Such ideas could contain gangs, but they could not deliver a strong economy, without which Bukele’s promised golden age is incomplete. And while Bukele has said that the improvement in the security situation means that prosperity waits just around the corner, analysts suggest that his restrictive political program has actually hampered economic growth. In response to this inability to remake El Salvador, Bukele has doubled down on showmanship. He has long held international attention as one of the first millennial heads of state, commanding millions of followers on social media, where he regularly broadcasts his own accomplishments (real or exaggerated). Using these platforms, as well as the free publicity his allies in the tech industry have provided him, Bukele has defended his security policies, dramatized his support for (and from) the armed forces, trolled his enemies by gleefully accepting the role of the “dictator,” advertised his government’s extensive use of prison labor, and most notably, created a regular feed of CECOT promotional videos that remind the public of his expansive power to disappear.
By aiding Bukele in projecting total control, this media strategy has helped curtail dissent and weaken democracy in El Salvador. As sociologist Jocelyn Viterno has described, Salvadorans are increasingly reluctant to publicly share their political opinions, a fact which casts Bukele’s high approval ratings in a somewhat more dubious light. Further, in light of Bukele’s escalating persecution of journalists, some of El Salvador’s best-known investigative reporters have chosen to flee the country; labor and environmental leaders have also been caught up in his sweeps. As a result, government transparency is almost nonexistent, means for recourse against corruption scarce, and checks on presidential power impossible to exert. In the gap left by this democratic decline, Bukele has cemented his personal power through procedural manipulations and outright bastardizations of the political process. He got pieces of his first crime package passed in 2020, for example, by having the military occupy the legislative assembly, where his party did not yet hold a majority. Bukele has also attacked judicial independence, illegally replacing the magistrates of the country’s Constitutional Court; the new appointees later allowed him to seek a second consecutive presidential term despite a clear constitutional prohibition on re-election.
If this story of fascist consolidation sounds familiar—save, mercifully, for the sky-high approval ratings—it’s because Trump, seeking to install his own “state of exception,” appears to have turned to Bukele’s El Salvador not only for a place to warehouse the people he deports, but as a model for the entire program. (Trump is one of many leaders across the hemisphere who admire Bukele, from the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, to the rising star mayor of Panama City, Mayer Mizrachi, to failed presidential hopefuls in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru.) To be sure, nothing that Trump has attempted yet goes nearly as far as the extreme measures Bukele has taken: Trump has not called the armed forces into the halls of Congress, illegally removed judges from their positions, or conducted sweeps of the size and scale of Bukele’s. But this is cold comfort. Even a drastically reduced version of Bukele’s current powers of arrest and detention would come close to ending civil liberties for noncitizens in this country, and this is the direction in which Trump is moving. Recently, Trump’s supporters have not only claimed that due process requirements do not apply to certain immigrants—building on the immigration system’s already weak protections for noncitizens—but also floated the idea that longstanding constitutional protections like habeas corpus should be suspended if they interfere with ICE’s ability to effect arrests and deportations. This is the Bukele formula, adapted to local conditions. Because the gang situation was so dire for everyday Salvadorans, Bukele has been able to rule principally by consent, using force—and the spectacle of force—as a way to shore up his control around the edges. But, contra right-wing pundits’ complaints about supposedly immigrant-driven crime, the US, in reality, has no analogue to El Salvador’s gang problem that would deliver Trump a mandate for Bukele-style levels of repression. So Trump has inverted the approach, with the threat of escalating violent repression serving to advance the authoritarian goals that popular consent won’t yet countenance.
In pursuing his increasingly extreme interpretations of executive authority, Trump has found the dissemination of images of repression to be a useful tool in offering adherents online spectacles of cruelty in place of any positive vision for the government’s role in public life. As a result, we see the arrest, deportation, and confinement of human beings on the same screens we use to order socks on Amazon or share an ETA with an awaiting friend, a fact that underscores digital media’s centrality to contemporary US fascism. Indeed, tech platforms’ fascist utility goes hand in hand with the newly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the second Trump administration: Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO Elon Musk; Palantir’s Peter Thiel; the artificial intelligence mogul Sam Altman; and the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen are all in Trump’s circle, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sergey Brin remain glad to donate to and dine with the president. Trump thus naturally turns to Silicon Valley products to promote his disappearances, and his functionaries have even suggested that they may count on the industry’s mastery of logistics and supply chains as a model for more efficient deportations: ICE director Tom Homan was recently quoted saying that he wants to operate deportations in the mode of an Amazon supply chain: “like Prime, but with human beings.”
These techno-fascist visions of a deportation machine may appear terrifying, but that is precisely the point. Ultimately, the spectacles of violence are intended to compensate for core deficiencies. Bukele markets himself as a dynamic, innovative, and pathbreaking young leader abroad to conceal the ways in which his governance of El Salvador amounts to a rerun of the same old right-wing repression. And Trump celebrates each new innovation in state cruelty to conceal the fact that he cannot fulfill his promises—not on immigration, not on cost of living, and certainly not on “making America great again.”
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