[bakuninsbart]

Bukele, who calls himself "the coolest dictator in the world" [0], won his first election in 2019, and his second election in 2024 in landslides. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world and was basically dominated by brutal cartels. Bukeles solution to this was to use the military to round up everyone who is a suspected gang member. Note that this includes people who simply have too many tattoos or are young male who have relatives related to gangs. They built a mega-prison, aka concentration camp to contain these people, but it seems like it is significantly below capacity, estimated at 16k prisoners while being able to "house" up to 40k people. The conditions in the prison are aweful [1].

It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.

But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/26/naybib-bukele-...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-pris...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#I...

[Yeul]

What El Salvador did is not new. But they will run into the same problem as every other SA dictatorship that is "tough on crime": the military will become the new cartel.