By Ben Emos & Don Terry | Friday, April 18, 2025 | 8 min read
In the humid lowlands of Central America, behind the locked gates of a concrete leviathan, men sit in silence, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder, stripped of identity, and erased from the outside world. This is not a war zone—it’s a prison. But in Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, the two have become indistinguishable.
Bukele didn’t look like the typical strongman when he stepped into power. He was young, tech-savvy, and armed with a social media presence that rivaled world leaders twice his age. With Palestinian roots, a Catholic mother, and a father who converted to Islam and became a prominent imam, his background reflected a mix of cultures and faiths that defied easy labels.
He spoke the language of the people—sharp, confident, and unfiltered. He vowed to end the gang violence that had long terrorized El Salvador’s streets, and for many, he seemed like a fresh start.
But when questions about his religious identity began to circulate—sparked by photos of him praying in a mosque during the 2019 campaign—Bukele was quick to clarify. He didn’t claim one faith over another. Yes, he believed in God and in Jesus, but no, he didn’t subscribe to any single religion or ritual. In his own words, he stood outside formal institutions, grounded instead in a personal spirituality shaped by his family’s mosaic of beliefs.
Bukele rose as a paradox in motion—the outsider who mastered the game, the rebel in a tailored suit, the millennial reformer who talked about change while tightening his grip on power. He wasn’t shackled by old norms, but he knew how to use their language to his advantage. He moved fast, talked big, and sold the idea of a break from the past.
But what unfolded wasn’t the justice he promised. It was something colder. Something calculated. Prisons began to overflow long before courts could keep up. Mass incarceration wasn’t just a strategy—it became a stage show, a message broadcast in high definition. Rights that once defined a functioning democracy were quietly pushed aside, buried beneath steel doors and the roar of approval on social media.
Safety, once the goal, turned into performance. Accountability faded. And in its place, a new order emerged—built on fear, fueled by spectacle, and held together by the illusion of control.
Welcome to the Machine
They call it the Terrorism Confinement Center—CECOT for short—but it’s not really a prison. It’s a statement carved in concrete. A monument to fear. With its massive walls, 24/7 surveillance, and a total absence of hope, CECOT wasn’t built to rehabilitate anyone. It was built to break them.
Inside, there are no classrooms, no phone calls, no sunlight. Just packed cells, harsh fluorescent lights, and endless silence broken only by the echo of commands barked by guards. Men sit chained, stripped down to their underwear, their heads lowered—not out of shame, but because that’s the only posture the system allows. It doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like a battlefield with no exit.
For many, the scenes inside CECOT draw chilling comparisons to Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison—a place where the walls didn’t just hold people, they held proof of how easily power can slip into cruelty. In El Salvador, as in Iraq, the architecture of punishment has become a reflection of something deeper: the erosion of human dignity in the name of control.
Here, inmates are not referred to as prisoners. They’re “terrorists.” No charges. No hearings. Just suspicion and the State’s blessing to disappear them. Ask any of the families standing outside the prison gates day after day, begging for scraps of information: most haven’t heard from their sons, husbands, or brothers since the day they were hauled off the streets in mass sweeps.
The Trump Connection
This isn’t just Bukele’s mess. The United States—under Donald Trump—helped pour gasoline on the fire. In a backroom deal worth $6 million, the Trump administration quietly funneled Venezuelan migrants, many accused (but not proven) of gang affiliation, directly into CECOT. The deportations defied a federal judge’s order, yet they went forward anyway. Out of sight, out of mind.
The message was chillingly clear: human rights end at the border, and justice is whatever the strongest man in the room says it is. In Bukele, Trump found a kindred spirit—a leader more interested in spectacle than law, more eager for applause than accountability.
A Fortress Built to Break
The scale of CECOT is staggering. Cells designed for 20 hold nearly 70 men. There are no toilets—just open buckets. Inmates sleep on bare concrete. Days stretch into months without sunlight. And when you ask officials why, they don’t flinch. “They’re not getting out anyway,” Bukele’s security minister once shrugged on national television.
The few glimpses from inside—government-produced videos showing tattooed prisoners shuffling in silence, hands zip-tied—are more propaganda than transparency. They are choreographed brutality, engineered to boost Bukele’s image as the region’s iron-fisted savior. But what they truly show is something else: a state teetering into authoritarianism, one shackled body at a time.
The Numbers Don’t Lie—But They Don’t Tell the Whole Story
Yes, the homicide rate has dropped. But so has due process. In just two years, El Salvador’s prison population ballooned from 36,000 to over 110,000. That’s the highest incarceration rate in the world, beating even the United States.
Thousands were arrested under a “state of exception” that suspended constitutional rights. No warrants. No legal counsel. Just whispered accusations, anonymous tips, and the cold thud of a prison door slamming shut.
Human rights groups say the abuses are systemic. Torture. Starvation. People dying in custody. Families with no answers. This isn’t public safety—it’s state-sponsored fear.
Exporting the Model
And now the danger spreads. From Latin America to the U.S. border, Bukele’s hardline playbook is turning heads—not just among strongmen, but inside the halls of Congress. Some Republican lawmakers and their allies speak of him with admiration, holding him up as proof that fear can be tamed with force.
What they want are his numbers, his headlines, his illusion of control—without the public backlash. But here’s the quiet truth they won’t say out loud: you can’t copy the results without also copying the methods. And those methods come soaked in cruelty, built on silence, and paid for in lives no one bothers to count.
That’s why El Salvador matters—not just for what’s happening inside its prisons, but for what it signals to the rest of the world. If democracy means anything, it must mean restraint. It must mean dignity. It must mean accountability, even for those we fear.
Bukele’s grip on power won’t hold forever. And Trump—at most—has three years left. If he refuses to step down, time itself may intervene; age doesn’t negotiate with ambition. Authoritarian regimes like theirs tend to burn bright and then collapse under the weight of their own hubris.
When authoritarian regimes collapse—and they always do—there comes a moment of reckoning. The fog lifts. What was whispered behind closed doors gets shouted from rooftops. Torture chambers once hidden are exposed. Voices once silenced rise in chorus. And the democratic norms that were quietly dismantled under the banner of “order” are laid bare for what they truly were: power grabs cloaked in lies.
History doesn’t forget. And eventually, neither do the people.
That’s what makes Senator Chris Van Hollen’s recent trip to El Salvador more than just a diplomatic visit. It was a statement. A refusal to look the other way. In confronting President Nayib Bukele’s government over its human rights abuses, Van Hollen showed what principled American leadership actually looks like—direct, moral, and rooted in human dignity.
This is miles away from the performative bluster we saw in Trump’s administration, where diplomacy was replaced by photo ops with strongmen and human suffering became just another bargaining chip. Van Hollen didn’t go to El Salvador for headlines. He went to remind the world that values still matter.
And Bukele’s government? Their awkward attempt to spin the visit into some kind of vacation snapshot—the infamous “margarita moment”—reeks of insecurity. Because deep down, they know: real accountability can’t be staged.
To every would-be dictator watching: take note. America’s brief flirtation with authoritarianism wasn’t a transformation. It was a detour. We’re back on course. And yes, we remember who tried to rewrite the map while we were lost.
The deeper meaning of Van Hollen’s visit isn’t just diplomatic—it’s moral. It’s a reminder that real leadership isn’t about dominating press cycles or tweeting threats. It’s about showing up, speaking hard truths, and standing firm in the face of injustice.
That’s how democracies fight back—not with swagger, but with unshakable principles. Not with fear, but with clarity.
To autocrats who mistook our chaos for collapse: don’t get comfortable. The American experiment is still very much alive—and we will defend it, whether in El Salvador, at home, or anywhere democracy is under siege.
And as for Bukele—he may envision himself a reformer, but history has a cruel sense of irony. It tends to remember strongmen not as saviors, but as warnings. Not in parades, but in trials.
Because cages built on injustice don’t just trap the innocent. Eventually, they close in on the ones who built them.
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