El Salvador Offers to be an Out-Sourced Prison for the US
This would include US citizens.
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.
Sounds like we’re not going to be sending them our best people.
@James Joyner: Ba-dum-tssssss
Sound like the ‘ship them to Rwanda’ gambit the Tories tried recently.
@James Joyner: Or maybe, in respect (relative) to some (no names mentioned), we are.
Surely the US prison industrial complex will have something to say about this.
Sending off American citizens to be imprisoned in another country is a complete refutation of rights accorded by our foundational laws and principles. I expect (hope) some serious legal challenges await.
For Presidente Bukele, it’s a business proposition.
https://apnews.com/article/migration-rubio-panama-colombia-venezuela-237f06b7d4bdd9ff1396baf9c45a2c0b
American First: tariff war on imported goods, plus export of American citizen criminals. Trump’s concept of “balance of trade.”
Somehow I’m reminded that Danzig was in Poland
I keep thinking of Devil’s Island
@James Joyner:
You really hit it out of the park with this comment.
@Kathy: Cayenne was French territory at the time. It was hideous but not foreign. Your comments remind me of Papillon, a very good book turned into a very good movie.
Like the use of the Mexican national guard to contravene drug trafficking, isn’t this outsourcing American jobs and thus contrary to Trumpian principles?
@Slugger: Trumpian principles? Really?
ABC and Fox are both reporting that flights of immigrants to Gitmo have started. So that’s fun.
I honestly wonder if they are going to be dropped into the ocean along the way.
Idid a lot of reading on the El Salvador prison issue a while back. It is extremely popular there. The gangs were out of control. Now people can go out at night without fear of being attacked. The price for this was a couple thousand people were falsely imprisoned. Other than the relatives of those people the rest of El Salvador was quite happy to pay that price. I think there is a good lesson(s) there.
People will tolerate almost any abuse of “other people” if it helps them. Talk about human rights and abuse by the govt is abstract talk and it turns out lots. probably most, people dont care that much. They want to have jobs and safety.
Steve
This is an outsourced foreign-owned prison situation. Unlike the Guantanamo Bay Prison operation. To me, this seems like an open and obvious effort to ensure that it’s difficult for any (American) journalist to bring what’s going on down there to light.
@steve: A horrifying, yet quite apt, observation.
FashionPort1’s spam posts brought some levity into this thread.
Steve, I agree that in theory a lot Americans might be okay with some folks who are not illegal immigrants but still convicted of a crime being caught up in the round up that deports illegal immigrants convicted of a crime, no matter how minor or not, to an out of Nation prison like the one in El Salvador, but I think too many folks would notice and make noise about Americans being basically disappeared, even if they were due to go to prison in the United States.
I think folks on both sides of the political aisle would be aghast at learning American Citizens, even criminals, were being disappeared.
I am aware that during Argentinas Dirty War thousands of citizens were disappeared and I could be wrong but I believe that Maga, Maga Adjacent, and the GOP in general would have a very public meltdown if some of their comrades in arms started to disappear without a trace.
Again, I could be wrong, but I do not think Trump will get anywhere close to enough buy-in from the GOP/MAGA wing of he GOP to make deporting citizens to a Latin American countries prison, no matter show well that prison has worked out for citizens in El Salvador, a reality.
@steve:
The implication being of course, that we are witnessing here in this country, apathy towards MAGA attacks on settled civil rights issues in favor of a perceived increase in personal and job security.
But that is the thing, the US isn’t like El Salvador. Not by a long shot.
It has been the constant drumbeat of rightwing media (mainstream and social) magnifying incidents of violence and distorting the statistics, that has pumped up public perception of threat.
Anecdote has replaced data.
I realize this essay was yet another in a stream of essays just “criticize all things Trump”.
However, let’s suppose your objective is to discourage illegals, heh, criminals, from coming here. What do you want in their head: free breakfast at a decent NYC hotel, or potential deportation to criminal hell.
We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Taylor. We have a real problem. Sex trafficking anyone? Or do your politics trump that?
The issue is complex. I’d think you might want to pay it a more serious treatment. But…
@steve:
I think this is an interesting case in point for the “do we shield voters from the worst impacts of Trump or do we let ‘em learn good and hard what they voted for?” debate started in the Schatz Puts Hold on Trump Nominees thread of yesterday.
Human rights are abstract until they are real. People will be convinced that they are immune from the human rights abuses of The State applying mass, indiscriminate arrests to control “crime” until someone who they know is innocent is swept up by the “We can arrest anyone we want” enforcers. Sadly, I suspect this is a case where any attempt to shield those who might be hurt by this Trumpist extremism will fall on deaf ears until there are actually abuses being documented. As @al Ameda notes, hiding this inhumane approach in El Salvador will make the journalistic documentation harder.
@Connor:
Tissue?
“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” – Donald Trump, on his one time best friend, Jeff Epstein.
Trump would then attempt to make another teen sex trafficker, Matt Gaetz, the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
Neither Epstein-bestie pedo Trump nor his bootlicking MAGA sheep give a damn about sex trafficking. Phony af, just like pretending Trump cares about drug trafficking at the border, after Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht — facilitator of millions of dollars of narcotics trade.
Just the usual fake preening of rightwing frauds dedicated to their stream of comments blindly and obediently making excuses for everything Trump. Because MAGA hats are all that give meaning to their mediocre beta male lives.
@Connor:
Oh fuck you Drew. Ringing the ‘sex trafficking’ bell may work for you Pavlov’s dog culties, but out here in reality we ain’t so easily trained. If deterrence is the point why not flay people alive on TV? I assume that’s cool with you because there isn’t really anything left inside of you but impotent rage and self-pity. What a loser you are.
@Connor: funny…sex trafficking. As if ya boi didn’t just pardon someone who dealt in child porn.
@Connor:
It is sweet watching you win and instantly lose. The whole world is laughing at Trump. The whole world sees the truth. And there you are, a little nobody pimping for a clown. You stupid, stupid man.
@Connor: Hmmmm a serious treatment would be implementing a massive guess worker program that allows us to vet who is coming to work in the US and track their departure.
But Republicans have figured out illegal immigration is a golden turnout lever for simple thinkers like you, who think petty theatrical intimidation tactics are effective. Republicans will never fix their golden goise. Tell me–did your media tell you that the majority of illegals come to the States on planes? Why not?
Now run back to RW media and fetch us some more common sense to laugh at. I look forward to your posts– they’re like American Borat
@Connor:
Just because you’re a simpleton doesn’t mean things are complex.
Concentration camps are bad. Concentration camps we run in foreign countries are bad. Concentration camps we get foreign countries to run on our behalf are bad.
Lack of transparency in how prisoners and detainees are treated is bad.
Pardon my French, but Monsieur, you are a fucking moron.
And of course Connor and JKB were delightedly quoting Bukele just yesterday (or was it the day before?).
@inhumans99:
“I believe that Maga, Maga Adjacent, and the GOP in general would have a very public meltdown if some of their comrades in arms started to disappear without a trace.”
What makes you think any of their comrades would get caught up in this? It would only be the “right” people getting caught and exiled and they would wholeheartedly approve.