The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador has long been a U.S. ally. A snapshot of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele last week shows the men smiling, out on a sunny deck in front of a beautiful lake. Rubio, wearing a suit without a tie, beams at someone off camera, with Bukele next to him in sunglasses, khakis and an unbuttoned shirt. The tableau exudes the casual rapport of close friends.
But let’s not fool ourselves. Bukele is not a friend who shares our values of respect for the rule of law or for basic freedoms. El Salvador can’t be a “safe third country” partner, accepting deportees from other nations, because it isn’t a safe country.
The big headline from Rubio’s trip to El Salvador was that Bukele had offered to take in deportees from other nations and also American convicts — for an undetermined fee. Rubio called it “an act of extraordinary friendship,” and President Donald Trump said he would jail Americans in El Salvador “in a heartbeat” if his government had the legal right to do it.
We’re not aware of any law or provision in our Constitution that would allow the United States to deport its own citizens. That the offer was floated publicly as a possibility worth contemplating should be shocking to all of us, regardless of how we feel about the current White House.
Opinion
El Salvador has an obligation to accept its own citizens deported from the United States, but Bukele goes too far in offering its overcrowded prisons to house citizens from other nations. The demand for a fee, for one, shows that this isn’t a selfless act of friendship; it’s a business transaction dependent on a perverse incentive. Here is an impoverished nation of 6 million that has crammed its own prisons with its own people, now offering to take extra prisoners for payment that, according to Bukele, would make the prisons “sustainable.”
Gangs terrorized El Salvador for decades, and Bukele’s crackdown has been understandably popular with Salvadorans. Bukele took advantage of the pandemic to make his office’s broad emergency powers permanent, directing police to arrest people en masse, without due process. Caught in the net were career criminals as well as innocent, everyday Salvadorans who have been jailed on as little evidence as an anonymous allegation.
Bukele often publicizes the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, a new maximum-security megaprison built by his government. We see far less of the country’s other prisons — unsanitary, overcrowded and beset with allegations of torture.
The Salvadoran official who oversees the prison system, Osiris Luna, appears on a State Department list of foreign corrupt and undemocratic actors, in his case involving government contracts and bribery. Luna has also been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his role in covert negotiations with Salvadoran gang leaders to secure a truce between the gangs and the Bukele administration. When that truce fell apart in 2022, Bukele began his crackdown.
It is true that our allies don’t always reflect our values. But we should be wary of accepting an invitation to violate the rights of our own citizens as an “act of extraordinary friendship.”
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Publish date : 2025-02-08 19:00:00
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