Jacob Montag
On February 3, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele offered to hold migrants deported from the United States and imprisoned U.S. citizens in El Salvador’s prison system during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Trump administration indicated a favorable stance toward the proposal, with Rubio calling Bukele’s offer “unprecedented” and “extraordinary”.
Since assuming office in 2019, Bukele’s U.S. imperialist lackey regime in El Salvador has become notorious for its repressive policies and presidential absolutism. Ruling the country under a broad set of emergency powers, Bukele has suspended due process and allowed security forces to make arrests without warrants, including of children as young as 12 years old. El Salvador’s prison population has skyrocketed to one of the highest in the world, with 1 in 57 Salvadorans imprisoned according to Time. Bourgeois human rights organizations have reported systemic abuse and torture in the Bukele regime’s extensive prison network, including against children with no connection to criminal activity.
The proposed deal between the U.S. and El Salvador comes as U.S. imperialists are attempting to claw their way out of the ongoing imperialist economic crisis by foisting it onto the Third World and seeking to increase their domination over those countries. In this case, the US is attempting to weaken the working class at home through terror and deportations aimed at migrant workers, serving to decrease the labor pool to meet the needs of the capitalists amid mass layoffs across industries as well as using terror to drive down wages and increase exploitation.
The so-called “migration crisis” is really a crisis of imperialism, which through wars and plunder has ravaged Third World countries across the world, leading to a record of 120 million people displaced in the world today. The imperialists respond to crises by tightening their grip on these colonies and semi-colonies, offloading the crisis onto them to temporarily alleviate their own. Several countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, and Colombia have been threatened with retaliatory sanctions and tariffs if they refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to repatriate migrants.
The crisis of imperialism also manifests in the over 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S., the largest prison population in the world. As a result of the social and political degeneration caused by the decomposition of imperialism, U.S. prisons have been filled with poor workers, another method of terror designed to quell political unrest amid the reactionization of the state and strip workers of democratic rights.
As Trump intensifies the violent crackdown against migrants, a trend that proceeded throughout the Biden administration and his predecessors, resistance to these policies from the Latin American masses as well as the broader working class continues to grow. By making a mockery of the formal independence of the countries oppressed by imperialism in Latin America, the Trump administration increasingly exposes the parasitic nature of U.S. imperialism and engenders sharper popular resistance to it. The more U.S. imperialism seeks to escape the general crisis it faces, the more it accelerates its own decomposition.
Photo: El Salvador prison. Credit: Thiago Dezan / Farpa
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