It seems as if the entire disgraceful history of U.S. illegality in Latin America is distilled in the saga of Kilmar Ábrego García: the man whose illegal deportation to El Salvador and imprisonment in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) has sparked outrage in the United States among human rights defenders and opponents of the Trump administration.
Some see Ábrego García’s arrival in El Salvador as marking a new and dark chapter in U.S. history, but Washington has long supported and exploited lawlessness in Latin America to pursue its own goals.
During the 1970s and 1980s, U.S.-backed anti-communist regimes “disappeared” hundreds of thousands of Latin American citizens in a form of state terrorism that dates back to Nazi Germany. El Salvador became infamous for these political “disappearances.” Some 71,000 people, between 1 and 2% of the Salvadoran population, were killed or disappeared.
A key aspect of the terror at the time was ignorance. Friends and family members of “the disappeared” were exhausted from dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies. Government officials shrugged off their questions, telling them that their missing relatives had probably gone to Cuba or run off with a lover.
The “fuck you” impunity displayed during Bukele’s recent visit to the Oval Office is a higher order of terror.
Today, however, Trump, aided by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, feels no need for such evasiveness. The “fuck you” impunity displayed during Bukele’s recent visit to the Oval Office is a higher order of terror, intended not to generate doubt, but to instill helplessness. “Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked if he would return Ábrego García.
Around 2% of El Salvador’s population languishes in Bukele’s gulags, and the country has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, a figure comparable to that of some 7 million people in the United States.
It is as if, suddenly, no one could account for all the inhabitants of Arizona, only to find out that they have been sent to Cecot.
The movement to have Ábrego García returned, like any effort to stop the predatory Trump administration, is inspiring. However, all those deported to Cecot deserve our attention. The state crime is not that an innocent person was sent there by “mistake,” but that someone was sent there in the first place.
CECOT, however, must be recognized not as an aberration in the history of the United States in Latin America, but as an extension of it. We must not idealize the “good old days,” said Bertolt Brecht, when fighting against the “new bad times” of fascism. That advice is valid for the Trump administration’s efforts to use El Salvador as a dumping ground for its waste.
Washington was deeply involved in the profound historical repression of Latin America, helping to create a formidable system of death squads, extermination camps, and death flights: helicopters or planes that threw political prisoners into the ocean to drown.
Condemn Trump loudly and clearly. Demand the return of Ábrego García. Don’t forget, however, that the United States has a long history of perpetuating illegal acts in Latin America.
Illegality in Latin America
In Latin America, the line between combating and facilitating fascism has been blurred. During World War II, Washington invested enormous repressive capacity in its neighbors in the hemisphere as part of the Allied war effort against Nazism. Once the war was won, the region’s security forces, encouraged by the Truman administration, turned their guns on Latin American anti-fascists.
In 1948, for example, Chile suppressed a miners’ strike with its U.S.-fortified army. The military, according to historian Jody Pavilack, took “total control of the mines, the cities, and the surrounding countryside” and “sent hundreds of people to military prison camps and banished thousands more from the region.”
Just four years earlier, many of these strikers had heard Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, tell them that they were the front line of democracy. Now they found themselves on the front line of death, hunted by a young army captain, Augusto Pinochet, who was rounding up coal and nitrate miners. Many were detained at the Pisagua penal colony in the Atacama Desert (during his post-1973 dictatorship, Pinochet would again use the colony as a detention and torture center and a site for mass graves for victims of his regime).
Ecuador also used tanks and aircraft from the U.S. loan and lease program to besiege a student protest. Bolivia and Paraguay also deployed tanks supplied by the U.S. to break up strikes.
As the Cold War progressed, Washington backed a series of coups, beginning in Venezuela and Peru in 1948, which by the mid-1970s turned Latin America into a garrison continent.
The CIA interpenetrated almost every aspect of civil society. Among the recently declassified documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a report revealing that the CIA staged the 1966 elections in Bolivia as if they were a Broadway production, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on both the winning candidate and his opponent to make the elections appear “credible.” The agency judged its production to be a “real tour de force.” Five years later, Washington dispensed with pretense and simply backed a direct military coup in Bolivia.
Washington endowed the region’s security and intelligence agencies with enormous repressive power. Latin American death squads were not independent vigilantes, but the front lines of an increasingly integrated continental crusade. U.S. officials helped synchronize Latin American national intelligence units into a single operation, which operated under the name Condor. Its agents received information from the CIA and communicated through a continental system based in the Panama Canal zone. European intelligence agencies looked to Condor for lessons on how to build their own machines of repression.
The United States sent many men to Latin America, often under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to train Latin Americans in the art of torture. None was more notorious than Daniel Mitrione.
Mitrione arrived in Brazil before the CIA-orchestrated coup in 1964, as part of a team whose job was to apply a “scientific method” to torture. He did the same in Uruguay, where he invented unique instruments of torture. One of these was the “dragon chair,” made of conductive metal, with articulated bars that pressed down on the naked prisoner’s limbs each time a shock was applied, creating deep cuts in the skin.
Then, as now, the total absence of accountability was not simply a common thread among the United States’ partners; it was a basic condition for partnerships. In Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, the Hegemon’s designs for domination made such brutality necessary, just as it does today in El Salvador, where Trump seeks to exploit a massive detention center to create an unaccountable destination for mass deportations.
The glee with which Trump, Bukele, and others at that recent White House meeting discussed their plan was chilling.
Source: Mision Verdad, translation Resumen Latinoamericano—English