The video, set to a crescendo of drums, shows soldiers running around a tarmac in the wee hours of the morning as scores of police officers surround recently landed planes. One by one, the passengers, chained from hands and feet, are pushed along into armored vehicles and buses, transported to an infamous high-security prison.
The government of President Nayib Bukele is experienced in this kind of dramatic messaging. It has shown versions of this video since March 2022, when El Salvador declared a “state of exception” that has given the government sweeping powers to arrest and detain suspected criminals without warrants or evidence. Now, these tactics are being applied to third-country migrants, deported to El Salvador over the weekend by the U.S. government.
The United States has for decades positioned itself as a beacon of liberty, fighting to protect its citizens from corrupt governments and malicious justice systems abroad. While in 2023 the U.S. State Department referred to the “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” in El Salvador, over the weekend the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelans accused – but not proved – of having gang ties to languish there. The move is nearly a carbon copy of the model Mr. Bukele has so successfully adopted through his state of exception, and paying El Salvador to imprison foreigners who haven’t been charged with or convicted of a crime serves as an endorsement of an approach that has slashed civil liberties and human rights in the name of security.
Why We Wrote This
El Salvador accepted hundreds of third-country deportees from the U.S. over the weekend, expanding its president’s controversial philosophy on security and civil liberties beyond just Salvadoran citizens.
The world is watching the “transnationalization of the state of exception,” says Michael Paarlberg, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The Salvadoran government is now accepting prisoners from other countries, and the same lack of rule of law applies to them: indefinite detention, lack of access to an attorney, lack of knowledge of what they’re charged with or what the evidence is against them, inability to communicate with their family members,” he says.
“They have essentially disappeared.”
Suspending rights, consolidating power
More than 85,000 Salvadorans have been arrested since the state of exception went into effect in March 2022. But over the weekend it was 238 Venezuelan citizens, accused of being members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua, sent to El Salvador by the U.S. government.
The deportees are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, known by its Spanish abbreviation CECOT, Mr. Bukele’s flashy megaprison, for at least a year, according to the Salvadoran president. The White House said it paid $6 million dollars to El Salvador for the outsourced incarceration.
The legality of the whole arrangement is unclear: The agreement that allows the U.S. to rent El Salvador’s prisons is not public. The Salvadoran government hasn’t explained which legal provision allows it to incarcerate people who don’t have a criminal accusation in the country.
A U.S. court order to prevent the deportation flights was reportedly ignored by the Trump administration.
The bypassing of judicial orders is state of exception 101, experts say.
Mr. Bukele has been able to circumvent the law because he effectively runs all three branches of the government: the executive and legislative through popular vote, and the judicial through the removal of top judges in 2021, made possible by his legislative supermajority.
Salvador Melendez/AP/File
“The state of exception is not simply a crime-fighting tool, an anti-gang crackdown,” says Dr. Paarlberg. “It’s a tool for the consolidation of authoritarian control under a one-party regime, a general suspension of civil liberties, and effectively the introduction of military rule, although not under a military government.”
The justification for the deportations was that each person ejected from the U.S. was a dangerous criminal, but there are no details on their suspected crimes.
There were two groups sent to El Salvador, according to the White House press secretary. The first, made up of 137 Venezuelans accused of having gang ties, was deported under the 18th-century law known as the Alien Enemies Act. The second group of 101 deportees was processed under regular immigration procedures. Their hypothetical rap sheet could begin and end with entering the U.S. illegally, a misdemeanor, or residing in the U.S. without authorization, a civil offense. Still, all 238 were sent to a maximum-security prison in a third country. “Immigrants are viewed as equivalent to criminals” by the U.S. government, says José Miguel Cruz, associate professor and expert on transnational gangs at Florida International University.
Johanny Sánchez, wife of Franco Caraballo, a 26-year-old Venezuelan barber who was an asylum-seeker in the U.S., believes her husband was among the men sent to El Salvador. She told Univision she wasn’t able to find her husband’s name in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Online Detainee Locator System.
“He’s no criminal; he doesn’t belong to any [gang]. He came to [the U.S.] to look for a better life,” Ms. Sánchez said.
Another man, Jair Valera, suspects his cousin is among the deportees. “President Bukele, all we ask from Maracaibo [in Venezuela] is that you investigate the cases thoroughly,” he said in a TikTok video. “Not everybody belongs to the Tren de Aragua.”
A model gaining traction
These stories are reminiscent of the Salvadoran state of exception, in which the presumption of innocence has been replaced by the presumption of guilt. In El Salvador, the suspension of rights has effectively dismantled the control of gangs over numerous communities across the country. And it remains immensely popular, even if some families whose loved ones have been caught up in the system have spent years speaking out against it.
The perceived effectiveness of Mr. Bukele’s model has gained traction across Latin America in recent years. Honduras launched a focalized state of exception in 2022, and on Monday the government of Peru declared a state of emergency in the capital, Lima.
“Zero-tolerance and mano dura [iron fist] policies are not new in El Salvador,” says Dr. Cruz. “But the open challenge to institutions was not this blatant 20 or 25 years ago.”
There were other benefits for Mr. Bukele in imprisoning third-country migrants.
The U.S. also deported 23 members of MS-13, the transnational Salvadoran criminal gang that Mr. Bukele negotiated with in an effort to improve security at the beginning of his term. One of the men, César Antonio López Larios, was awaiting trial in New York, where his testimony could have harmed Mr. Bukele’s carefully crafted image.
In that sense, both leaders got something they wanted last weekend: one more deportation flight for Mr. Trump, and possibly one fewer witness speaking out against Mr. Bukele.
