For years CECOT was known in the US primarily as evidence of a young autocrat clamping down on his population. Then, in March, the Trump administration paid Bukele a reported $6 million to take 288 Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants, the vast majority of whom have no criminal records, into custody. Bukele announced their arrival with what has become the prison’s visual signature: a slick, medium-production video, with dramatic music, of people being frog-marched off a plane, shackled, forced onto their knees to have their heads shaved, and pushed into a brightly lit dungeon full of four-tier bunks overcrammed with dozens of rail-thin men in white boxer shorts. The migrants would be held for a year, Bukele said—but the term is “renewable.”
What laid the groundwork for this level of exhibitionistic state violence? To understand why the US is leaning so heavily on this tiny Central American country—and its millennial autocratic leader—as Trump tests the limits on illegal deportations, one must grasp both the profound political changes El Salvador itself has undergone since 2019 and the longer history of US–Salvadoran relations. The US has a long record of relying on other countries to deter and detain migrants, and its anti-immigrant right has long found Salvadorans particularly inconvenient. During the civil war that decimated the country in the 1980s, the US denied legal entry to the vast majority of people fleeing the violence even as it funded, trained, and provided material support for the military. (The asylum grant rate for people fleeing El Salvador during the war hovered around or below two percent.) But hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans still managed to relocate to the US. Many ended up in Southern California, where some joined small gangs and picked up strategies for defense and extortion in American prisons.
After the war ended with the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992, the US, having just helped rip their country to pieces, expedited the process of deporting these young men back. Weakened by years of clientelism, corruption, and violence, El Salvador was hardly ready to receive them or reroute them into the formal economy. Extraordinary levels of gang violence soon gripped the country. Unlike the US, however, El Salvador doesn’t have an El Salvador to dump the people it deems disposable. So it built a CECOT. By selling space in CECOT to the US, Bukele has in effect brought this long history of violence full circle.