The day after the offer of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to imprison convicted criminals from the United States, including US citizens, the question of whether such a plan could really be accepted and implemented was still unanimous.
Foreign Minister Marco Rubio, who stopped at El Salvador while visiting Central America this week, said on Tuesday that Trump’s administration should “study” the offer by Mr Bukele to the United States prisoners, against pay. “But it’s a very generous offer,” he said.
Mr Rubio himself said it was not clear whether the United States could legally send convicts, including the Americans, to a foreign prison.
But the proposal has drawn attention to the prisons used by Mr Bukele in recent years to obstruct the gangs that once ran in El Salvador. They have become symbols of his power and popularity, including Mr Trump – even when human rights groups say that full prisons hold pens for tens of thousands of people who are rounded to arrests who have deposited innocents.
Analysts say that such a plan is unlikely to be held in court, especially when it comes to US citizens.
But if Mr Bukele’s offer has ever been acted up, analysts have said it served as a way for the governments of the two nations to project a common vision of a harsh approach to Lawbreakers.
“The announcement is a PR victory,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University specializing in Latin America. He allows Mr Bukele to show that he is all-in for Mr Trump and strengthens Trump’s administration, “trying to prevent immigration without documents by increasing the bets if they are arrested”.
And yet, regardless of the chances of being implemented, Mr Bukele’s announcement immediately raised concern among the Human Rights Groups in the United States and beyond, which warned that the Crusade against the Bukele government groups has come to Weight of human rights.
“While gangs are no longer a threat, a system of terrorism and repression has emerged in the country,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, director of Central America at the Washington office for Latin America, a non -profit human rights group.
During the hearing before the International Human Rights Committee in July 2024, El Salvador’s Foreign Minister said that the country “meets all international standards” for prisoners and added that reports of human rights violations are “unfounded. categories and away from our reality. ”
What is Bukele’s approach to crime?
El Salvador was once known as the capital of the hemisphere murder – with one of the highest rates of homicide anywhere in the world.
But in 2022, Mr Bukele said a state of emergency to eliminate gang violence and sent the army to the streets, arresting tens of thousands of people across the country, accusing them of gang ties or other crimes. More than 25,000 were imprisoned in the first weeks of Mr Bukele’s repression.
Nearly three years later, the state of emergency has not yet been lifted.
At that time, the nation has undergone remarkable transformation. Homicides have been heavily reduced and blackmail payments that required gangs from businesses and residents have also declined.
As a reminder of the zero tolerance of the government, harsh crime policies, photos and videos are often released that present prisoners’ scores, sometimes without shirtless and invested in boxers, bending their hands on their shaved heads.
Mr Bukele won the attachment from the leaders in the area and beyond, and most of the Salvadorians support him, not despite the tactics of the powerful, but because of them.
In November, his approval rating was 91 %, according to a Cid Gallup poll, one of the highest in the world for a world leader – although support for him has recently declined, after his government reversed the correction ban.
Still, Mr Bukele’s approach has crossed the political rights in the country, human rights experts say: mass arrests, extreme overcrowding, torture reports and at least 261 prison deaths between 2022 and 2024 were documented.
How did Bukele use the prison system?
Mr Bukele’s prisons are not formal observations. El Salvador’s gangs once used prisons as operational hubs to issue orders, spread businesses abroad and hire new members – which was also observed in prisons throughout Latin America.
This no longer seems to be “because of the extreme measures taken to control prisoners”, according to an Insight Crime 2023 report, an organized research team.
The star of Mr Bukele’s strategy is the so -called MEGA prison: the Terrorism Center, known as Cecot, a detention center that opened in 2023 an hour outside the country’s capital, San San San San Salvador. The installation is large enough to keep up to 40,000 prisoners, some of them up to 12.
The overwhelming majority of the 85,000 Salvador arrested under the 2022 emergency situation – which allows for mass arrests without a fair procedure – have virtually disappeared in the prison system, where many have been kept here are alive.
While the imposing CECOT has gathered international attention, most prisoners are held in other, smaller facilities where “they have undergone harsh and inhumane treatment,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of the Salvador Cristosal defense team, were arrested under the state of emergency.
Cristosal and Human Rights Watch reported that the prisoners were tortured and deprived of food. Many degrees of prisoners were decided in mass tests with judges whose identities were kept secret.
Who could end up in Bukele’s prisons?
The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Mr Bukele offered to take immigrants without documents from any country, not only in El Salvador, who have been convicted of crimes, including members of the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gangs.
And in what the Foreign Ministry is called “an excellent gesture, which never expanded from any country,” Mr Bukele said had been offered to house “dangerous American criminals, including US citizens and legal residents”. Analysts say such a move is likely to be disputed, even if it had to be embraced by the Trump administration.
“I don’t think it will stand in the courts,” said Mneesha Gellman, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emerson College, citing many domestic and international laws that govern the treatment of both people who have not registered in the United States and us citizens.
However, the two governments could reach an agreement that would allow the United States to expel a large number of people to El Salvador, including non-Salvarans, Ms Gellman said. The United States is willing to find places for the liberation of immigrants whose countries do not receive regular US expulsion flights, such as Cubans and Nicaragus.
Whether inside prisons, immigrants will find themselves extremely vulnerable to El Salvador.
“They would not have citizens’ rights in this country,” Ms Gellman said, noting that immigrants to El Salvador said they were facing abuses in the hands of criminal groups as well as government actors, such as police and the army.
Is there a previous one for El Salvador’s offer?
In 2019, El Salvador signed an agreement with Trump’s first administration to receive non -immigrant immigrants held in the United States, after US officials cut some aid to El Salvador, accusing the country of not doing enough to limit the illegal migration.
He also agreed to process asylum requests to keep immigrants heading north to the United States.
Known as a “safe third country” agreement, the agreement was never implemented due to the crown’s pandemic and was eventually terminated by the Biden administration. Mr Bukele said Monday, saying that his new proposal was “more important and much wider than the agreements made in 2019.”
What could come out of this Bukele deal?
Mr Bukele appeared willing to reinforce his ties with Trump’s administration and the latest offer “clearly helps to consolidate this relationship between Maga World and El Salvador,” said Manuel Meléndez Sánchez, a political scientist and researcher at Salvador .
But relations between the two government was not always close.
In 2022, Mr Rubio criticized Mr Bukele during a Senate hearing, accusing him of “very openly” mocking the US institutions.
During his presidential campaign, even Mr Trump took off to Mr Bukele, saying he sent “all criminals, drug delegates” and adding: “He is trying to convince everyone what a great job he is doing to Function of the country – well, does not do a great job. “
In addition to covering the favor with the new administration, there is also an economic incentive in El Salvador’s offer, with its approach to prisons expensive to maintain.
“There is a cost that needs to be addressed. It is not viable for the Salvador people to maintain 2 % of its population in prisons indefinitely,” Mr Bullock said.
Gabriel Labrador contributed a report from San Salvador and Michael Cruyye From San Jose, Costa Rica.
