President Donald Trump’s recent Oval Office photo-op with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator”, was staged to unveil a shiny new “alliance” against crime. Both leaders congratulated each other for achieving something U.S. courts forbid at home: rounding up alleged gang members (including longtime U.S. residents with pending protection orders) and locking them away offshore. When pressed about a Maryland man who had been deported in defiance of a court ruling, Bukele shrugged off the case, implying he couldn’t risk letting a “terrorist” back into the United States—and Trump nodded in approval. The exchange distilled a stark message: Human rights are expendable when the political spectacle is good television.
Since March 2022, El Salvador has operated under a rolling “state of exception” that suspends basic constitutional rights. In just three years, more than 110,000 Salvadorans—nearly 2 percent of the country’s population—have been put behind bars. This draconian crackdown gives El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. Official homicide rates have indeed plummeted by over 80 percent under Bukele’s campaign, but that drop has come in tandem with the collapse of due process. Mass arrests are often indiscriminate, mass hearings process hundreds of defendants at once, and detainees meet lawyers only fleetingly, if at all. At least 261 prisoners perished inside Salvadoran prisons during the crackdown, according to the human rights group Cristosal. Reports have emerged of abuse, torture, and medical neglect of those swept up in Bukele’s anti-gang dragnet.
El Salvador’s flagship “mega-prison,” the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), epitomizes President Bukele’s hardline approach. Built to hold 40,000 inmates in eight fortress-like pavilions, CECOT keeps prisoners in near-total isolation. Inmates receive no family visits and are never allowed outdoors; there are no workshops or educational programs to rehabilitate offenders. Bukele’s own justice minister once remarked that those sent to CECOT will never return to their communities—that the only way out is in a coffin. Harsh images of tattooed prisoners hunched together, shuffling in shackles, are routinely broadcast on government social media. These dystopian visuals have become Bukele’s calling card in the name of “security.”
