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In recent days, President Trump has embraced prisons in El Salvador. On Friday, he took to his Truth Social page to threaten anyone caught vandalizing Tesla dealerships with prison sentences in El Salvador. Those remarks and the president's decision to deport hundreds of migrants that he says are in a criminal gang there have put the country's prisons in the spotlight. And, in fact, for the past three years, El Salvador has repeatedly touted the cruelty with which it treats its prisoners. Its methods have been condemned by human rights groups. NPR's Eyder Peralta reports.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Back in March of 2022, the world was shocked by the videos being released by President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. The government had just declared a state of exception, suspending some basic civil rights. The videos showed alleged gang members dressed in white boxers being manhandled by guards.
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PERALTA: At the time, human rights groups and even the U.S. State Department decried what they called human rights abuses, including torture and cruel and inhuman treatment. In the end, El Salvador jailed some 85,000 people. In 2023, President Bukele inaugurated a massive new jail, the Terrorism Confinement Center, with a 30-minute documentary that aired on national TV.
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PERALTA: It showed the president touring a pitch-black solitary confinement cell, taking pride that prisoners would have to sleep on concrete or cold steel and especially that the prisoners here - terrorists, he said - would never leave.
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PERALTA: "They won't leave for any trial dates," Bukele says. "They won't have the opportunity to cause any more chaos." That prison is where the United States sent more than 200 Venezuelan migrants the U.S. says are suspected gang members. And this time, both the U.S. and Salvadoran authorities released videos showing the rough treatment of the migrants.
NOAH BULLOCK: We should be very concerned.
PERALTA: That's Noah Bullock who runs Cristosal, a human rights organization in El Salvador.
BULLOCK: And essentially, they're in, like, a judicial black hole, disappeared into one of the most brutal prisons in the hemisphere.
PERALTA: Bullock says El Salvador is running an intentionally brutal system with little due process. Cristosal has documented at least 367 deaths. At the same time, President Bukele has consolidated power. Three years into a state of exception, his party now controls all three branches of government, and the government has jailed people not connected with gangs. Bukele did bring peace to El Salvador, and he often says his wide popularity is proof this is the approach Salvadorans want. With that, Bullock says, Bukele has succeeded in normalizing both cruelty and an all-powerful executive.
BULLOCK: The state of exception in El Salvador has become so normalized that I think that nobody questions the premise that the state can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants, and there's no institution that could intervene to protect your rights.
PERALTA: Fionnuala Ni Aolain, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, was one of the U.N. experts who warned that El Salvador was using the threat of terrorism to trample on the rights of its citizens. She says what Bukele is doing is nothing new. Invoking terrorism to subjugate a country was done in Cold War Europe or in present-day China and Russia. What's different is that the United States is not only endorsing the Bukele tactics but is paying El Salvador to jail its deportees.
FIONNUALA NI AOLAIN: We have a very dangerous situation in that we have a P5 member of the Security Council, the United States, acting like a rogue state.
PERALTA: Ni Aolain says, historically, people have tended to accept and applaud a period of, quote, "ill-mannered leaders doing ill-mannered things." It happened during the military dictatorships of the '70s and '80s in Latin America.
NI AOLAIN: But ultimately, people understood that the violence and the cruelty and the harm of that was simply intolerable to a decent society.
PERALTA: What's clear, she says, is that sooner or later, El Salvador and the United States will have their own moment of reckoning. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Mexico City. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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