Photo: Salvadoran Government/Getty Images/Salvadoran Government via Getty
When President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador eagerly volunteered to receive 261 deportees the Trump administration had possibly illegally airlifted from the U.S. in mid-March, he instantly became one of the biggest stars in American conservative politics. After the planes landed, disgorging alleged members of Venezuelan and Salvadoran gangs, Bukele wallpapered his X profile with shout-outs from from Elon Musk, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Jr., Matt Gaetz, U.S. Senators Mike Lee and Eric Schmitt, and Libs of TikTok, among others. “Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social. When Judge James Boasberg ordered the flights carrying the deportees to return home, Bukele posted, “Oopsie … Too late,” followed by the “tears of joy” emoji.
Bukele’s social-media blitz was arranged around a slickly produced three-minute video — basically an extended commercial for his regime. Over pulsing music straight out of a Sicario-style organized-crime thriller, the footage captures the dramatic nighttime arrival of the deportees at a Salvadoran airport. With guards gripping their hair and the backs of their necks, the men are perp-walked down a jetway amid a small army of security personnel in helmets and body armor, then escorted as part of a militarized convoy along jungle-lined highways and through the Olympian front gates of CECOT, the largest maximum-security prison in the world.
Once they are inside, it becomes apparent how brutal the conditions will be. The new prisoners are forced to kneel inside a massive processing hangar, then ordered to shout their names for the camera before guards shave their heads. They are changed into white uniforms and herded toward a series of 80-person cells, where they will be locked for 23∏ hours a day, with overhead lights that are never turned off. “The only furniture is tiered metal bunks with no sheets, pillows, or mattresses,” CNN reported after a visit in February. The response from American conservatives to this Leni Riefenstahl–style display of authoritarian theater was sheer delight. “This is exactly what I voted for!” wrote Libs of TikTok. Schmitt described the prison as “beautiful.”
It was easy to mistake this episode for an example of a Central American leader expediting the inevitable, offering up his country as a dump site for Trump’s deportees before the administration could resort to threats, as it has against Panama and Costa Rica. But that would underestimate how much of an aspirational figure Bukele is for American conservatives, many of whom yearn to implement his authoritarian transformation of El Salvador at home. In fact, in many ways, Bukele’s El Salvador is already here.
For more than a week, Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder, has been held without charges for participating in pro-Palestine protests while he was a student at Columbia University and, in his only public statement, has described the Louisiana detention center where he was being held as a place where prisoners are “precluded from the protections of the law.” Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen, was spirited to a series of ICE detention centers where the filthy cells were ice cold and the “fluorescent lights shined on us 24/7,” all because of an apparent visa mix-up. On March 17, masked ICE agents abducted a Georgetown University researcher named Badar Khan Suri, whom the Trump administration claims, without offering evidence, was “spreading Hamas propaganda.” All while the administration openly flouts orders from the judiciary, determining by fiat who is a terrorist or gang member and can therefore be deported and left to rot in a Central American prison. Legal scholars tell the New York Times that it is no longer a question of whether the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis — rather, whether Trump’s contortion of the constitutional system will be permanent.
It is worth stressing that none of the hundreds of deportees now in Bukele’s prisons appear to have undergone due process or been charged with any crime. One of them, Jerce Reyes Barrios, is a Venezuelan professional soccer player who was tortured by the Maduro regime in Venezuela, applied for asylum to the U.S., and has no criminal record in either country. This indiscriminate persecution is of a piece with Bukele’s general approach to law and order that has endeared him to the global right. Since he took office in 2019, he has received credit for dramatically curbing his country’s gang problem, especially homicides. Combined with his edgy appeal to young voters — he has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” — he has become the most popular leader in the Americas with a January approval rating of 83 percent, according to a Gallup poll. Bukele’s methods include the mass suspension of civil liberties and the arrest of more than a full percent of El Salvador’s population of 6.8 million — or more than 80,000 people, including children.
When, in 2022, El Salvador’s National Assembly declared a “state of exception” that allows cops to arrest anyone they deem suspicious and imprison them without due process, it presaged Trump’s invocation of obscure legal codes, like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to grant himself sweeping powers to jail and deport any non-citizen he wants — even people who have not been convicted of crimes, from pro-Palestine protesters on college campuses to anyone he claims is a member of Tren de Aragua or MS-13. When Bukele replaced key Supreme Court magistrates with loyalists who would allow him to run for a second term as president, which was not allowed under El Salvador’s Constitution, it anticipated Trump’s defiance of the judiciary, his disregard for democratic processes, and his own musings about running for a third term.
But it was Bukele’s 2023 opening of CECOT that truly captured the scale of his ambition and cemented his relationship with the American far right. In February, CNN reported that the 40,000-capacity facility, intended as a regional lockup, was open to receiving prisoners from as far away as the U.S. — a topic that Rubio had met with Bukele to discuss earlier that month. It took almost no time for that concept to reach fruition. “They were immediately transferred to CECOT,” Bukele wrote on X on March 16 about the Trump deportees. “The United States will pay a very low fee for them.” He explained that the financial sustainability of the prison, which reportedly costs $200 million a year to operate, will depend in part on payments like the $6 million that Trump is sending, thereby layering an economic incentive for Bukele to fill its beds.
He also has a political incentive: Once he ran out of gang members to jail, he started rounding up people with only tenuous connections to gang activity to keep his campaign going — which has ominous implications for Trump’s tough-on-crime-and-immigration agenda back home.
Some of these implications are evident in the work of Bukele’s most ardent acolytes, the right-wing intellectual muses, like Richard Hanania and Christopher Rufo, who lay the conceptual groundwork for what often becomes Republican policy. In a 2023 Substack post, Hanania, a onetime regular on white-supremacist websites like VDare, argued that Bukele’s draconian policies must be imposed on high-crime Black neighborhoods in the U.S. “As I argue in my articles on El Salvador, any polity that has a high enough murder rate needs to make solving crime its number one priority,” he wrote. “This was true for that nation before Bukele came along, as it is for major American cities today. It’s not a big mystery how to do this, it’s just politically difficult, because literally everything that works is considered racist.” One of the data points he embedded was a screenshot of Elon Musk remarking on the mortal danger that Black people supposedly pose to white people.
In an X post promoting the article, Hanania stated plainly, “We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.” One of the lessons of Trump’s infatuation with Bukele-ism is that, increasingly, they do.
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