Is El Salvador the new Poland, Cambodia, or China?
- Karen Levi
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
The thought occurred to me in a random moment like most thoughts do. My inner voice said "Is the prison in El Salvador the new concentration camp?" Then I met a Jewish couple at the local Tesla Takedown who expressed a similar thought while we discussed the latest awful news. I said to myself we are on to something.
A little more than a week ago, Trump and his evildoers instructed ICE officers to gather 200 Venezuelan "undocumented" people, supposedly dangerous gang members. The deportees had not received due process, so there are most likely innocent individuals in the group. They were arrested based on their tatoos which is a flimsy rationale for arrest. Planes took the unfortunate souls from Texas to a distant prison about 60 km from the capitol of El Salvador, San Salvador.
The displacement of targeted individuals occurred in 1940's Europe--to occupied Poland--and the 1960's during the Cultural Revolution in China. The Pol Pot regime chased people to the Killing Fields in Cambodia in the 1980's. The cogent point: sending unwanted people to far-off places enables the victims to be forgotten and subsequently starved, tortured, and murdered.
The prison in El Salvador, called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, has been designated by human rights advocates as one of the worst prisons ever. Prisoners are not allowed visits, exercise outdoors, or reading material. Rehabilitation does not exist. The prisoners are not granted basic legal rights, such as a lawyer, trial, and evidence for the latter. Prison sentences are for life. The identity of the prisoners appears unclear. Families often have no idea where their relatives are imprisoned and why. (There are other prisons in the country.)
The current president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, asked the legislature of El Salvador to pass a law of "exception" in 2019, which allowed massive incarceration of individuals suspected of being gang members. Bukele has transformed El Salvador into a harsh autocratic state reminiscent of countries behind the "Iron Curtain" during the Cold War. Ostensibly, the dictator created a highly controlled society for the purpose of eliminating gang violence. El Salvador transformed its designation as the murder capital of the world to the country with one of the lowest murder rates in the hemisphere by 2022. Bukele accomplished this by suspending due process rights for Salvadorans and taking over all aspects of the government. Strong indications for corruption have been documented, such as deals with gang leaders not imprisoned.
Obviously, this man is the type Trump venerates, an extreme dictator among dictators. The prisoner deal is not based on goodwill but money. President Bukele and his government will receive 5 or 6 million for the 200+ prisoners who landed in El Salvador last week. Bukele expressed a willingness to help Trump with more deportee transports. One can be certain that the impoverished people in El Salvador will not see any of the money.
Trump and his cronies have committed all sorts of crimes, but the cruelty demonstrated in this transaction sickens me. How do possible gang members, whose criminal records have not been revealed or proven by authorities, deserve life imprisonment in a facility in a foreign country, not the country of their origin or the one they hoped would protect them? During my lifetime, the government of the United States of America has been engaged in some dastardly acts. To me, this latest one surpasses other actions in its immorality and brutality. Trump demonstrates no remorse or embarrassment, nor do any of his associates. The only person brave enough to step forward is the judge who tried to halt this major transgression to no avail.
© 2025 Karen Levi
Comments