On February 9, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele deployed dozens of heavily armed soldiers and police inside San Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, a stunt designed to strong-arm legislators into cooperating on a $109 million loan for Bukele’s pet national security project, the Territorial Control Plan. After engaging in an exaggerated bout of prayer, Bukele revealed that god had told him to have “patience” — and so he gave lawmakers an additional week to get their act together.
In a subsequent op-ed for the Miami Herald — penned in response to suggestions that his antics may have been a little antidemocratic — Bukele contended that both El Salvador’s “unchecked violence” and Salvadoran migration to the United States had decreased under his enlightened rule. And things would only improve, he insisted, with his loan, which was “earmarked exclusively to purchase equipment and logistical support for the police and military, who have been neglected for more than thirty years.”
Lest anyone feel too sorry for the Salvadoran security forces, recall that these very forces have for over thirty years done more than their fair share to sustain the violent landscape in El Salvador — from the US-backed right-wing slaughter of the civil war (1980–1992) up to the present era. Consider, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s recent reminder that “Salvadoran security forces have…committed extrajudicial executions, sexual assaults, enforced disappearances, and torture” — all within a context of essentially institutionalized impunity.
The reminder incidentally appears — speaking of Salvadoran migration to the United States — in a report titled “Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse,” which shows how, for many deportees (among other sectors of Salvadoran society), the country is still a place of “unchecked violence.”
The paper draws on 138 cases, between 2013 and 2019, of Salvadorans killed following their expulsion from the United States, as well as more than seventy cases in which deportees were disappeared, sexually assaulted, tortured, or otherwise harmed by gangs, security forces, or other actors. But given El Salvador’s position as one of the homicide capitals of the world — where crimes frequently go unreported — the problem is undoubtedly more vast.
Often, Salvadorans are sent from the United States back to the very violent threats they were trying to get away from in the first place. There’s the case of Camila Díaz Córdova, a transgender woman slain by police in 2019 after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in the States. There’s “Angelina N.,” who fled abuse by her husband and threats from a gang member — the same gang member who raped her after she was deported and who threatened to murder her father and daughter. And there’s “Javier B.,” who fled gang recruitment in El Salvador only to be found dead shortly after his forced return. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.