from the we’re-all-just-hourly-workers-on-the-US-Death-Star dept
President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador’s homicide rate since he became president, but it’s more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges of major cities. (Then there’s the fact that Bukele did the Donald Trump thing and fired prosecutors and investigators digging into allegations of corruption…)
President Bukele is tough on crime (that doesn’t directly serve his purposes), which is probably why Trump likes him so much and asked him to serve as a primary offloading ramp for the migrants Trump and his administration hate with a passion that’s only surpassed by their ineptitude.
Consequently, plenty of people wrongfully (or ignorantly) determined to be “foreign gang members” by the Trump administration and its extremely happy (to the point of near-orgasm) private prison contractors have been sent to what’s commonly known as CECOT in El Salvador.
CECOT stands for “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” which — as any person with a half-assed grasp on Spanish could guess — would indicate it’s a maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists. But it’s obviously not limited to terrorists. As of this time last year, the prison held more than 14,000 inmates. Those numbers have swelled now that the Leader of the Free World is sending as many Latino-looking people as possible to CECOT, utilizing a super-charged ICE (and super-charged funding) and an extremely dangerous, dubious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
CECOT has been a human rights hellhole for years. Before Trump’s subversion of the State Department with the installation of bootlicker/doormat Marco Rubio as the nominal Head of State, it had this to say about El Salvador and its most notorious prison, a report that notably follows President Bukele’s elevation to the top spot in El Salvador’s government:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
Given that, there’s no reason to disbelieve the personal accounts of the extremely small number of people who managed to secure their release from this third-party hellhole, one that now currently serves as the destination of choice for ICE-enabled deportations. Yes, the “Land of the Free” is aiding and abetting extrajudicial deportations that subject people only suspected of violating US civil law to all of this:
Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
Humiliation and dehumanization at scale… followed by more of the same once they arrived at CECOT:
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar.
And that’s just the stuff El Salvador government employees did to these detainees. And somehow, these prison guards managed to seem more threatening and violent than the thousands of alleged “terrorists” and MS-13 gang members these deportees were forced to share space with.
Of course, the DHS could not possibly give less of a fuck about what happens to brown people targeted by this administration’s racist policies. Instead, the diarrheatic mouthpiece of the DHS, Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, insists this is nothing more than another Trump administration success story every American should be proud to post to their own X accounts, like the DHS does when it wants to go full Lebensraum:
Asked to respond to some of the allegations in the accounts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. had deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
To be sure, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about crime victims. That’s why it has pardoned pro-Trump criminals and enabled multiple states to force victims of incest and rape to bring the offspring of their assailants to term. That’s why it has cut social services funding, even though it’s been demonstrated time and time again that a social safety net does more to reduce crime than throwing more money at cops. And that’s why ICE has just seen its funding quadrupled, despite most Americans (including Trump voters) actually being opposed to this regime’s mass deportation programs.
One direct quote from a victim of the bigoted evil now d/b/a “Donald Trump 2024-???” sums it up for all of us, even those lucky enough to be the fortunate(?) sons of the United States of America:
“This is hell,” Suárez recalled the prison director saying, “and you’re never going to get out.”
That’s the reality here on the home front. This administration has undone so much good and instituted so much evil (all the while being directly or indirectly supported by the top court in the land) that any successor to the Resolute Desk is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy undoing this damage before they can even get to the very important business of improving life for all Americans, not just the white guys with bad hairdos, nonexistent jawlines, and the insane belief that the problem with America is its intricate blend of nationalities, rather than the extremely shitty people that inevitably manage to stumble into positions of power.
Filed Under: bigotry, cecot, dhs, donald trump, due process, el salvador, evil, ice, kristi noem, marco rubio, mass deportation, trump administration
