Via the BBC: El Salvador offers to lock up US criminals in its mega-jail.
El Salvador has offered to take in criminals deported from the US, including those with US citizenship, and house them in its mega-jail.
The deal was announced after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele during his visit to the central American nation.
Bukele – whose iron-fist approach to gangs has won him plaudits from voters but been heavily criticised by human rights groups – said he had offered the US “the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system”.
Rubio said the US was “profoundly grateful” to Bukele, adding that “no country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this”.
This is a strange, sad, and disturbing metric of friendship, but it fits in well with the Trump administration’s obsession with force, incarceration, and authoritarianism.
I mean, French support during the Revolutionary War? The Gift of the Statute of Liberty? Our special relationship with the UK? The outpouring of support after 9/11? Support in the invasion of Afghanistan? It all pales in comparison to the offer of housing prisoners so we don’t have to!
I guess, technically, no country has ever made this particular offer.
At any rate…
As noted in the quote above, the Bukele has governed very much as a strong man.
Since he came into office in 2019, Bukele has made cracking down on crime his government’s priority.
The newly built maximum-security jail he referred to, Cecot [Terrorism Confinement Centre], is at the centre of his drive to lock up and punish the most violent gang members.
[…]
The treatment of inmates at Cecot, where scores of inmates are locked up in each windowless cell, has been criticised by rights groups.
But Bukele’s crackdown on crime continues to be very popular with the vast majority of Salvadoreans who say they can go about their lives without threats from gang members for the first time in years.
However, some relatives of the tens of thousands of people which have been rounded up and jailed under emergency measures brought in by Bukele say their loved ones have been wrongfully rounded up in sweeping police round-ups.
Amnesty International has criticised the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence” in the country – a criticism dismissed by Bukele, who points out that his hardline approach to crime last February won him re-election to a second term with more than 84% of the votes.
Without any doubt, El Salvador had a terrible gang violence problem. And yes, the crackdowns have been popular. But, there has been a real cost. See, for example, the BBC, El Salvador gangs: Mass arrests bring calm but at what price?
While most Salvadoreans applaud the ruthless new policy, it has not brought peace for everyone. Thousands of people with no discernible link to gang activity have also been swept up in the dragnet of arrests.
Far from the capital’s urban neighbourhoods, in the dusty village of La Noria, a young tractor driver, José Duval Mata, was among them.
Soon after the state of exception was imposed, soldiers entered his community and stopped him on his way home.
They took his telephone and accused him of “unlawful association”, a catch-all term under which tens of thousands have been detained for alleged gang affiliation.
His mother, Marcela Alvarado, has not seen or heard from him since and is desperate with worry.
This is one of the obvious costs of these types of actions. When due process of law is thrown out the window in the name of security, innocent people suffer.
It should not be acceptable to send US citizens to be housed in a country wherein the government is so cavalier about human rights. Really, the notion of out-sourcing criminal justice is a problems in and of itself. But, of course, Trump admires people like Bukele and Rodrigo Duterte, who was quite brutal in his own internal war against drugs during his time as President of the Philippines. They do the kinds of things he would like to do, which is just another problem with this administration.
It is unclear the degree to which this will happen. The NYT notes that a similar deal was stuck during the first administration, but was never executed due to COVID.
For details on Bukele’s approach, see this report from Human Rights Watch: “We Can Arrest Anyone We Want”.
This joint report by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal documents widespread human rights violations committed during the state of emergency, which the Assembly has extended eight times and remains in place at time of writing. These human rights violations include arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, and significant due process violations. In addition, the circumstances of many deaths in custody during the state of emergency suggest state responsibility for those deaths.
[…]
We found that human rights violations were not isolated incidents by rogue agents. Rather, similar violations were carried out repeatedly and across the country, throughout a period of several months, by both the military and the police.
[…]
The authorities’ campaign of mass, indiscriminate arrests has led to the detention of hundreds of people with no apparent connections to gangs’ abusive activity. In many cases, detentions appear to be based on the appearance and social background of the detainees, or on questionable evidence, such as anonymous calls and uncorroborated allegations on social media. In these cases, police and soldiers did not show people a search or arrest warrant, and rarely informed them or their families of the reasons for their arrest. A mother who witnessed the detention of her son said that police officers told her, “We can arrest anyone we want.”
This is not something to emulate, nor to participate in.
We shall see if Rubio is just being nice or if, in fact, the US will start shipping people to be jailed in El Salvador.
