By JOSE MONTEROJO
Right-wing populist figures, such as Donald Trump in the United States, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and the rising far-right in Europe, are gaining power and support worldwide. The capitalist economic crisis and the social instability and chaos it generates create an opening for these reactionary political parties to speak to working people’s real concerns around their personal safety and economic well-being. Once in power, the right wing intensifies economic exploitation of the working-class through attacks on social services and living standards, in addition to strengthening their social control over our lives through increased surveillance, violence, and incarceration, in violation of our political rights.
While the Trump and Bukele regimes have some key differences, such as the fact that Bukele came out of the left-wing FMLN, they share important commonalities. Both gained prominence by appealing to voters’ desire for an alternative to the status quo. They frame themselves as “outsiders” who speak to the common person’s desire for security and gainful employment. Both are strengthening their executive power by replacing judges and officials with those who are friendly towards their policies, while directing their ire at agencies, media organizations, and legal entities that may challenge their authority.
Since Bukele’s rise to power in 2019, with the negotiated support of the country’s major gang leaders, he has arrested nearly 90,000 Salvadorans. Some sources believe that around 30% of those detained have no links to criminal organizations and were taken for living in certain neighborhoods, having a tattoo, or a family connection to a gang member.
Since Trump and Bukele began associating more closely, Bukele has intensified his reign of terror against the Salvadoran population. Most recently, he arrested social movement activists fighting displacement, bus drivers who didn’t comply with the arbitrary call for a day of free public transit, and a human rights lawyer known for her criticism of Nayib Bukele’s authoritarianism. The military and police enforcing martial law now enact some of the same violence in working-class communities that gangs used to.
Yet Bukele retains the support of the vast majority of Salvadorans. To understand this, we have to consider the daily gang violence that working and poor Salvadorans faced for decades. Gangs extorted at will, murdered without remorse, and stole the lives of thousands of young people. They were a parasitic organization that worsened poverty, fueled waves of immigration to the United States, and led to the desperate search for answers that Nayib Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, promised to address.
With the gang structures destroyed throughout El Salvador, Nayib Bukele can boast of victory and serves as the darling of the world’s far right. Yet improved security in El Salvador comes at the cost of its citizens’ political rights. Most recently, journalists from the Salvadoran media organization El Faro fled the country after the state issued arrest warrants against two of its journalists for exposing the president’s secret negotiations that facilitated his 2019 presidential victory.
In addition, abortion remains criminalized, and there are dozens of women in prison for attempting to obtain abortions or for suffering miscarriages. The Salvadoran congress, dominated by Nayib Bukele’s party, also passed a “foreign agents” law that applies a steep tax on NGOs, reminiscent of similar laws passed in the Central Asian country of Georgia, in Nicaragua under the Ortega dictatorship, and an attempted one in the United States. These measures aim to stifle dissent against his regime.
In the Trump regime’s flailing attempt to keep up with the pace of deportations that he promised, he’s recruited Nayib Bukele as a prison warden. Violating the U.S. Constitution and instilling fear amongst immigrants in the U.S., Donald Trump has sent hundreds of immigrants, including well-known Kilmar Abrego García, a legal U.S. resident from El Salvador, to Bukele’s dungeons. In return, Bukele receives millions of dollars to finance the CECOT (Center for Confinement against Terrorism, in English) and greater confidence in cracking down against dissidents.
Workers in the U.S. are encountering an authoritarian government, which workers in the countries oppressed by imperialism know all too well. The arbitrary arrests, denial of due process, and incarceration in concentration camps are part of the Trump and Bukele regimes’ broad assault on civil liberties.
Photo: Trump and Bukele meet at the White House. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)