The small Central American nation of El Salvador has of late assumed an outsize role in the western hemisphere. With a vengeful and reckless Donald Trump back at the imperial helm, Nayib Bukele, an elder-millennial advertising executive and crypto enthusiast, has fostered a productive alignment with Trump’s punitive politics.
El Salvador’s relationship with the United States has long been defined by an asymmetrical integration into both US-led accumulation patterns and security regimes, from the Cold War to the “war on drugs” and “war on terror.” In the 1980s, El Salvador’s military dictatorship was propped up by massive outlays of military and economic aid to sustain a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against a powerful leftist insurgency. Following the negotiated transition to liberal democracy in the 1990s, successive right-wing governments stewarded the country through neoliberal restructuring and a new, subordinate insertion in the global division of labor as a purveyor of cheap labor for export via outsourced, underpaid garment workers for US brands, and as a source of criminalized migrant laborers in the lowest segments of the deindustrialized US economy.
In the early aughts, these administrations used US aid to pioneer “mano dura” or iron fist security programs against the incipient street gangs that flourished among the abundant reserves of disaffected youth excluded from the postwar development model. These illicit groups had been deported from their US origins thanks to the same zero-tolerance policing paradigms that helped forge them to begin with, among refugees from the United States’ counterinsurgency wars who found themselves among a growing racialized relative surplus population in US urban centers and prisons.
In 2003, El Salvador deployed troops to join the US invasion of Iraq. In 2004, it was the first country to sign the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). In 2005, it became the…
Auteur: Hilary Goodfriend
