Lawfare Daily: Nayib Bukele's Crackdown on Dissent in El Salvador

[Intro]

Noah Bullock: We call these steps along the way. These are like the, we call them the rehearsals for autocracy. So there are these moments where autocrats sort of test the limits of power, stretch the limits of power, and normalize abuse, norm and reintroduce new, new norms. In this case, the, the armed forces are aligned with the leader who represents the will of the people, and he's willing to use that against anybody.

Quinta Jurecic: It's The Lawfare Podcast. I'm senior editor Quinta Jurecic with Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, an organization that focuses on human rights in Central America.  

Noah Bullock: In making a deal with President Trump, they get legitimacy. They get a platform to have their prison system, and therefore their security system lifted up as the way to do things, which is unfortunate that the United States is, is playing along with that.

Quinta Jurecic: We're talking about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador, and Bukele's agreement with the Trump administration to house immigrants removed from the United States in a notorious Salvadoran prison.

[Main podcast]

You're the executive director of Cristosal. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the organization and what you do?

Noah Bullock: Yeah. Well, Cristosal, we were actually founded 25 years ago here in El Salvador. We're a human rights organization. Our mandate is to provide assistance to victims of violence and, and human rights violations, and our programming is built around that, that mandate.

So we have programs to provide legal assistance, protection assistance. We have investigative teams that build evidentiary bases about patterns of human rights violations that's useful for advocacy, but also for seeking justice. And you know, we work with victims and victims organizations and their families also to amplify their voices to advocate for rights and, and access to justice.

Historically, you know, our organization really specialized in providing assistance to internally displaced people in, in Central America, people fleeing mostly gang violence in Guatemala and Honduras, narco trafficking groups, and to a lesser degree, sort of security forces and abuses of power.

In recent times in El Salvador specifically, our work has focused a lot on sort of a process that we call here a process of dictatorship—the dismantling of the democratic system that was put in place in 1992 here, that ended, you know, over a decade of civil war and decades of dictatorship in El Salvador.

Over the last six years under the Bukele administration, we've seen the president use his popularity and electoral victories to capture the institutions of the state and, and install a different political regime, one that is I think we can say without too much doubt is autocratic. And so our work has begun to focus much more on supporting the victims of the autocracy that's emerged in El Salvador.

Quinta Jurecic: Now I wanted to talk to you because I think people in the U.S. have probably heard a lot about Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele recently because of this partnership between Bukele and the Trump administration sending Venezuelan detainees, whom the Trump administration has identified on the basis of very thin evidence as members of Tren de Aragua, to the Salvadoran prison known as CECOT.

Before we go farther into those details, though, I wanna focus on one specific instance of sort of a sliding toward dictatorship, which actually happened just hours before we sat down to to speak, which was your colleague at Cristosal, Ruth Lopez, was arrested late on May 18 by the Salvadoran National Civil Police. What do we know about what happened? Do you know where she is? Where do things stand?

Noah Bullock: Well, that's right. Ruth was arrested at her house at about 11:00 at night last night. Actually police officers, you know, with machine, machine guns showed up at her house and tricked her husband in saying that they were responding to a report of an accident that involved her car. Then she came out and then when she was out there, they informed her that they had an arrest order from the attorney general's office, and they informed her partner that she was going to be taken to a specific holding facility.

And basically throughout the entire night, we weren't able to confirm where she was. She wasn't able to have access to her legal representatives or her family, and that, you know, produced a concern for us because those are conditions analogous to forced disappearances, at least short duration forced disappearances, which, you know, put the, the person who has been detained by the state at risk of abuses, but also causes trauma and psychological damage in the family who doesn't know where they are or if they are.

Well, we've been spending most of today trying to, trying to see her, trying to get her access to legal, her legal representatives. It's been pretty irregular the way the procedures have been going. She's been, we've been told she's gonna be in such and such place for medical checkups and we can come and bring her—she has to wear prison uniform now, so, but we have to buy it—and medicine, she needs to take medicine daily, but she actually doesn't have access to that right now. And when we get to the places, then they, they moved her to somewhere else and so it's been a little bit of a whack-a-mole just to try and verify her whereabouts and her wellbeing and have her have access to legal representation, which is concerning.

Quinta Jurecic: And so I know that she has been working on your, leading your anti-corruption team. Have there been any firm allegations against her? Like to what extent does this just seem retaliatory?

Noah Bullock: Well, last night, almost minutes after, you know, she was, she was detained, the attorney general tweeted out with a photo of her, with, with the police officers who were the arresting police officers and alleged that she was involved in some sort of a corruption scheme while she was working at the, the electoral tribunal here in El Salvador.

Obviously we don't have any evidence about that. It does seem like this action happens right now kind of on the crest of a repressive wave that's been sweeping through the country over the last 10 days or so, maybe a little bit more, starting with the journalist from an online media outlet called El Faro that published interviews with, with gang members who gave testimony about their partnership with the Bukele administration and how they provided political support for, for them, and those journalists had to leave the country.

Then there was an incident where the president basically ordered on Twitter, the, the detention of owners of a series of bus companies here, because they didn't obey a tweet he sent out on a Sunday night.

And then last week we had a group of a cooperative of 350 people that were, they did, they were doing like a vigil outside of the president's neighborhood, his private residency, asking for his clemency so that they wouldn't be forcibly evicted from the land that they make a living off of, and, and they sent the military police to break up the vigil and detained five of the people. One of 'em was a evangelical pastor that serves that community, the other one was their legal representative.

And then, and sort of, sorry it's getting long, but I mean, it told you it was a wave, it's a, it's a big wave. And sort of after that the president tweeted out the, in reprisals for what he said was like NGOs manipulating these poor people who are asking not to be evicted, he is gonna pass a foreign agent's law similar to those ones that you know, that, that we've seen in Russia or Nicaragua and authoritarian contexts. And so that was the end of last week, and so Ruth's detention comes at the back of that sort of that wave of repression.

And for people who don't know Ruth, she, she was named by the BBC as one of the most hundred influential women in the world last year. She's one of the most credible and outspoken voices about corruption and human rights violations in El Salvador, so when they decided to persecute her, it's clearly an attempt to send a message that dissent that, that has, has a consequence. It's an attempt to intimidate and to quiet critical voices, and they chose probably the one of the loudest and most credible critical voices in civil society to, to target first.

Quinta Jurecic: So you described this as a, a kind of a wave of repression. It seems like what you're sketching out is kind of a moment of consolidation or attempted consolidation by Bukele of sort of authoritarian control. Do you have any sense of what is, what sort of sparked this crackdown?

Noah Bullock: Yeah, I, I, I think it might be worse than a consolidation. The power of the state has already been most entirely consolidated into the president's hand and his family. I don't think anybody in El Salvador doubts that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants. There's no institution in the country with sufficient independence to intervene and protect rights or check power. That's, that's just a fact of Salvador and life that's been in existence for, I would say at least two, three years.

What I think has changed is that this has been probably his worst two months politically. He had a approval or a job approval rating of about 80% in January, and polls came out, we, we saw three different polls last week that said that he's about at 50% right now. So he’s had a 30% drop in approval rating.

And it's important to, to, to like put nuance on public opinion here. In the year end poll that was done last year, the president, people 80% said that they support his job, his job approval, but 83% said that they would be afraid to express an opinion that doesn't align with him and his party. So that you have a El Salvador population that says that I sure I support the president, but I'd be afraid to tell you if I didn't, and now we have a population that feels compelled now to say that maybe they're not in agreement.

And so they, I think that when the dictatorship begins to lose control of the narrative, they go and use the repressive apparatus of the state, which they've been building, to send new messages about what will be tolerated and what, what won't be tolerated.

Quinta Jurecic: So I wanna rewind a little bit and just sketch out for our listeners who are less familiar maybe how we got here. You said you know that in the last two to three years, the state has really consolidated control, and Bukele specifically has consolidated control.

What do, what does the process look like from Bukele coming into office in 2019 and kind of seizing that power? How did he go about it? How did he build that political legitimacy, those approval ratings that were maybe in the 80s, maybe not, and how do we end up where we are today?

Noah Bullock: Yeah. Bukele is similar to other contemporary autocrats in that, you know, he came to power through electoral means, legitimate electoral means. It's worth noting that the electoral system that Bukele came to power and is the one that our colleague Ruth Lopez helped to build, when she was there as a, as a, as a technical advisor.

He had popular support. He came to power and as part of a popular opinion, backlash against traditional party politics in El Salvador. So that's something similar to the kind of frustration that's happening elsewhere in the world.

But what, what is really important about this, the way that autocrats and Bukele use electoral victories and popularity is they convert an electoral victory, in which he ascends to the presidency of a democratic country, and then says that he has a unique mandate, that he represents uniquely the, the will of the people and therefore the actual seat of power that he won that comes with certain constraints and checks on it should be changed. Any institution, any check on power, any persons who would check his power become posed as against the will of the people because he is uniquely that.

And so he used that popularity to delegitimize institutions, political parties, opposition voices, and then he very quickly consolidated control over the army, which in El Salvador and Central America, one of the greatest achievements in terms of human rights normative achievements would be the separation from the armed forces, from the political life of the countries. These are countries that have had military dictatorships for decades, and under those dict, military dictatorships suffered atrocities, right? So achieving that was a huge victory.

Bukele emblematically signaled that that was the end, there was an end of that separation of the military from political life when he invaded the legislative assembly with the, with the armed forces. He, he threatened to dissolve the, the, the legislature, which he didn't control at that time, if they would, didn't approve a security loan that he was insisting on.

We call these steps along the way, these are like the rehearsals, we call them the rehearsals for autocracy. So there are these moments where autocrats sort of test the limits of power, stretch the limits of power, and normalize abuse, norm and reintroduce new, new norms in this case, that the armed forces are aligned with the leader who represents the will of the people, and he's willing to use that against anybody.

And then the other big one was when they won a super majority in the legislature in, in 2022. In the very first night, they used the super majority to overthrow the Supreme Court, which had, you know, checked his power during the pandemic, and and overthrow the attorney general that was investigating him for negotiations with gangs, partnership with gangs, and for acts of corruption during the pandemic.

And then they proceeded to purge a third of the judiciary. And then I think just really targeted acts of repression that sent messages to the business community, to the general population that more or less the expectation was for people not to speak out, not to be critical.

But for us, the state of exception here was a huge turning point. And we can talk more about it, but generally when the agreement between Bukele and the gangs broke down in March of 2022, then he declared a state of emergency where they suspended due process rights, and the soldiers and the police proceed to round up 85,000 Salvadorans without judicial warrants, imprisoned them indefinitely without access to their families.

That's the period of time where the prison system that then is contracted by the United States is really built, so we could talk about that a little bit more. But these are, these were the rehearsals for autocracy, that it's a process of stretching power and normalizing abuse and setting new norms.

Quinta Jurecic: And I think if I'm, if I'm correct, that in part because of that push for sort of mass incarceration, that El Salvador has the highest rate of the population imprisoned worldwide. So it's, it's topped out there because of that, that prison system.

So let's talk about the negotiations between Bukele and the gangs. You've mentioned that a couple times, and this is something that, as you say Bukele has been the subject of some scrutiny by, including by previous U.S. administrations. What exactly was going on there? Why were those negotiations entered into and why were they so controversial?

Noah Bullock: Yeah. There, I mean, the background about how do we know that he had entered into a partnership with the gangs? We know one, because of investigative journalist reports. We've actually heard audios of members of Bukele's security team negotiating with gang members. And so we heard that, that, that news we had already known.

But in President Trump's first term, he created a task force called Vulcan in the Justice Department to invest the transnational criminal operations of the Mara Salvatrucha and that investigation produced an indictment in the Eastern District of New York by federal prosecutors of the, basically like the high command of the Mara Salvatrucha, like 14 leaders who are, they call it Ranfla.

In the indictment, they're being charged with terrorism, and there's a part that describes how the Mara Salvatrucha exercised political power specifically under the Bukele administration. And the phrase that the attorneys general, the federal prosecutors in New York use, is that the gangs provided political support for the president and his party for the first in, in the first two elections where he was elected president and when he won the super majority.

And what they're alleging is, is that there was an agreement in which the gangs would create a perception of improved security and intimidate their bases to give their vote to, to, to President Bukele in his party. So it was like kind of a carrot and stick thing, like helping to collaborate and creating the perception of improved security while also intimidating people in these areas where as you control into voting in favor.

I, I think that the, more recently—I mentioned this already—that when we hear the interviews with gang members who participated in these negotiations the phrase that stands out is that if there's no body, there's no crime. And that was something that was communicated by Bukele’s lieutenants to the gang members to say that you could disappear people, but just stop throwing bodies on the streets, and so that, that's what the attorney general says as well, that the, that the Mara Salvatrucha continued to order killings, but the, that they had to keep the hide the bodies.

And this first three years, four years of the Bukele administration, there were like these movements of families of people who were disappeared, began to emerge to demand, demand the state search for their, their missing people. And the response from the state was visceral and hostile towards them. They accused them of being bad parents, that their children were involved with gangs and any number of things.

So that, that's how we know about it and that's kinda what it is, but it's really important because so much of Bukele’s popularity and international fame is predicated on his security model, but his security model is predicated on lawlessness. He is a, he is one of the principal benefactors of, you know, terrorist groups in this country, and he's built a political regime around that popularity that now is responsible for mass human rights violations as well.

Quinta Jurecic: Yeah, so, so with that sort of set on the table. Let's move then to, to this declaration of the state of exception, which as you say is really, as far as I understand it, crucial to the groundwork of those, those mass human rights violations. What brings it about and what has it enabled since then?

Noah Bullock: You know, the state of exception, it's sold in Bukele's marketing campaigns as like a new model for security. This is how things should be done. This is how we treat the worst of the worst.

And what's interesting about that is though that Bukele has two things in common with almost all of his, the, all of the dictators that came before him in El Salvador. One is that he sought illegal reelection, which in the Salvador constitution is absolutely prohibited seven times, specifically, and two, all of his dictatorial predecessors governed under permanent states of exception.

So states of exception, emergency declarations, are the favorite tools of autocrats, I think in El Salvador, but around the world. Because they get to use the, the, the context of an emergency 1) to install a narrative about internal enemies, that, that, that there are internal, there are groups and individuals in the society who shouldn't be protected by law. They represent a unique threat, and the executives should have unique powers to address them, right?

So there are escalators, there are accelerators towards autocracy, and in the case of El Salvador, you know, the, the, the emergency decrees are constitutional powers that exist, but they're limited to one month, to certain, certain rights, but not as broadly as it's been applied here. But I think what, what gets lost when we talk about the state of exception is that along with the state of exception, the exceptions have become the norms. So they have transformed sort of how due process rights are guaranteed and implemented in the criminal justice system itself.

Ruth is being detained. She was detained last night. She probably won't know what she's formally charged of for 15 days or probably a lot more. She could be held indefinitely in pretrial detention, similar to other cases. These are things, these are the outcomes, these are the, the, the new norms that come from the state of exception.

But concretely, the state of exception, green-lighted you know, mass roundups of people. People who, like in my neighborhood where I live, that a cattle truck rolled in at 11:00 at night. They pulled people out of their beds in their underwear without even checking their IDs.

And like in a country of 6 million people in the last three years, 85,000 people have been detained, had their due process rights stripped, have been disappeared into prisons without access to legal representatives or families. And, and in our investigation, we have demonstrated systematic practices of torture via physical abuse or the systematic denial of access to basic necessities, food, clothes, medicine. That physical abuse combined with the, the, the denial of access to basic necessities has caused at least 384 deaths according to our researchers who have been investigating them. We think that there are many more.

And so in the state of exception, you know, prior to the state of exception, we warned that the institutional guardrails that protect people's rights against abuses of power are gone and therefore conditions for serious human rights violations were, were present. With the state of exception, we consummate that. In El Salvador, the return of mass, the systematic violations of human rights, mass arbitrary detention, mass forced disappearances, torture, and killings. Those crimes are the crimes that could constitute crimes against humanity.

Quinta Jurecic: And so CECOT, the Center for Terrorism Confinement, which people in the U.S. are probably familiar with at this point, is only one of many detention centers around the country, right? Can, can you kind of explain, you know, what, what it is and how it fits into this bigger picture?

Noah Bullock: So CECOT was built during the state of exception. It was built in the secret contracting process—that actually Ruth, one of the things that she did was ask for public information about that contracting—and when it was opened in 2023, the people who were transferred to CECOT, which was the terrorist confinement center, were clearly people who were gang members, older gang members, who had convicted of crimes prior to the state of exception and were serving time in other maximum security prisons. We know this because of testimonial evidence inside the other prisons, the prisoners saw who, who were moved and and that's the profile of people.

And so when you see the prisoners in the videos of that the government produces, or that are, you know, come out of those orchestrated visits between like content creators and journalists, those are the, those are the faces, the fully tattooed bodies of gang members, you know, who have probably been in prison for a very long time.

But they're very intentional about using those faces as props, props to eliminate doubt that innocent people might be caught up in this, that innocent people might be getting harmed, that there might be something unjust. When you see somebody with the name of their gang tattooed on their face or their chest, it proves the narrative of an internal enemy that, that, that it is true that a group of people exist that shouldn't be protected by law.

And so the CECOT, from like a, like a marketing standpoint has become a prop to install that narrative and to reinforce it. And that's why the, the, the, the regime itself has made a great effort to publicize the CECOT, whereas our research indicates that the overwhelming majority, if not practically, universally, the 85,000 people detained in the state of exception, are held in other prisons.

Even though the propaganda celebrates the harsh and cruel conditions in CECOT, we think that the conditions in the other prisons are probably much worse. Just to give you like one, one indicator of that when you see the, the physical appearance of the prisoners in CECOT on the videos, they're not emaciated, whereas people who are released from the other maximum security prisons, or even the bodies that we have seen that have been released are skeletal.

We know that the overcrowding is so great in the other prisons that prisoners take turns sitting, standing, lying down. They almost universally have scabies. And you know, like I, I, I would say that it's probably more likely that the prisoners people detained in the state of exception, have the scars of scabies and torture than tattoos of gangs, and we've been able to demonstrate that in, in some of our research.

So it, it is, people have had a hard time understanding what CECOT is. It is a, a prison that is unique as are all the prisons in El Salvador because in a democracy, prisons are supposed to be places where people serve sentences, they receive support for rehabilitation and reintegration to the society. And the prisons in El Salvador are now meant for permanent punishment and isolations of prisoners. So they're really, you know, more similar to like a penal colony in Russia than they are like a modern criminal justice system.

Quinta Jurecic: Out of curiosity, I mean, do you think that the prisoners in sect, sort of paradoxically look better, don't appear to be under fed in part because there's video of them constantly being produced? Like is, is there a kind of playing to the cameras in that as well?

Noah Bullock: Well, I think that what, what, what's trying to be, the narrative that they're trying to communicate is like, this is how strong men deal with the worst of the worst and it's harsh and it, and it's brutal, and the lives of these people are not better than your lives, right, you sitting at home. But at the same time, it's fair in some ways, right?

So I think that they, they, that's what there's like a cleanliness aesthetic that's not consistent with a lot of the prisons. I've been to a lot of them. And, and so I do think that that's part of it, there's like, there's that duality between the cruelty and yet fair I think is what, what maybe they would like to say.

Although like, I mean, if you just watch, watch the videos, listen to what, what the people tell you about what life is like there, you know, they reduce human life to the act of not dying. That in itself is, is, is a tremendous act of cruelty. I've been in maximum security prisons where, where you feel that silence and it's brutal.

Quinta Jurecic: Let's then talk about at what point the second Trump administration enters the picture. So in about mid-March we have this plane that takes off from Texas against a court order from the, in the United States and sends this cohort of mostly Venezuelan men to CECOT, along with a handful of people who are not Venezuelan, including a name that U.S. listeners are probably familiar with—Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is a Salvadoran citizen, lives in Mar, lived in Maryland and is moved to CECOT by mistake essentially—and the administration has been fighting since then to not have to bring them back.

I have a lot of questions for you about this sort of sequence of events, but the first one, and the, the one that I feel like I really don't understand is, what does Bukele get out of this? Like, what is the, what is the game? What is the play for him here other than receiving a lot of media attention, which he's certainly very good at and seems to enjoy?

Noah Bullock: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple layers to that question. The, the first one is linked to what you're saying. Media attention for the Bukeles is not a small thing. They, they crave above all things legitimacy, and they desire deeply to be seen as a model of governance and security, and, and the president himself desires deeply to be seen as like a, a new generation of leaders. That's the, that's the narrative that, that they have tried to install.

And so the prison system has brought them infamy rather than fame. The human rights reporting that we've done and others have done, you know, have, have created, brought evidence forward about brutality, torture, about killing that is sort of contrary to this idea of a glorious new model.

And so I think in making a deal with President Trump they get legitimacy. They get a platform to have their prison system, and therefore their security system lifted up as the way to do things, which is unfortunate that the United States is, is playing along with that.

Secondly, I'm not sure which one comes first in terms of orders of priority, but we now know that the president's brother, who doesn't have an official role in the government was the one who negotiated with the Trump administration the deal where the U.S. allegedly is gonna send $6 million to El Salvador in exchange for holding these people in prison.

In those negotiations, the president's brother offered to give a 50% discount to the United States if they send back nine of the leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha that are being prosecuted in the Eastern District of New York. There was a deep desire, the very first day that actually the ambassador to El Salvador in the U.S. you know, said that she, she sort of celebrated like, and we'd love to have them back.

And so I think that there's like a real interest in making sure that the gang members who could give testimony about their partnership and collusion with El Salvador, with the Bukele administration are disappeared into a prison of El Salvador and not singing in a court in New York. In that first plane ride, one of the people who is named as one of the, the interlocutors of this, this agreement with the administration was sent back, was sent back, and then the, the district attorney dropped the charges against them.

It, it, it gets lost in the bigger picture, but here, this deportation deal also is a coverup of a major crime. It allows the, the Bukele administration to put a top on a black hole that they would don't want to get out. And so, I mean, I think that those are the two major motivators behind it all.

Quinta Jurecic: So it's sort of a, it's a PR stunt. Well that, that might be underplaying it, but in two ways, both that it gains legitimacy from sort of having the prison system put forward as a model in the U.S. and around the world, and then also that it covers up these negotiations between the Bukele administration and the gangs.

Noah Bullock: Yeah. Well, to be honest, like as astute as they are as marketers. I think that this has created a backlash. I like, I'm, I'm part of a transnational family myself. Like, to see the president of a country of migrants be assuming like the executioner role in a campaign of terror against migrants is shameful, right? Instead of using his popularity and standing in the world to defend rights of, you know, nationals in El Salvador and other migrants in the U.S., he is the part that installs fear in them. And so I think that that's deeply shameful.

And Salvadorians in polls say, you know, that they don't believe that this deal really will benefit the Salvadorian people and that the Bukele should be doing more to protect rights of migrants rather than offering a way for the United States to disappear them indefinitely into his terrorism confinement center.

I think it's another part, like you asked about what the motives for the Bukele administration are and the deal, but what are the motives of the Trump administration? You know, I think there's some lessons to be learned from Guantanamo for them. They're trying to learn those lessons, right? The United States doesn't have like a lack of detention facilities, we have tons of jail cells in the United States.

What, what the Trump administration was looking for jail cells that exist outside of the rule of law, that are out of the reach of court orders or, or even basic human rights standards. And that's the unique thing that Bukele has built. These are jail cells that only an, that only an autocrat could offer the United States—jail cells that operate absolutely at his discretion.

Like people, I think there was that visit with Senator Van Hollen when he came down to try and to meet with Kilmar and he ended up meeting with him, but it's a bizarre meeting. How is it possible that a person being held in a maximum security prison could get taken out of that prison? They put civilian clothes on him. They bring him to a hotel. They sit him at a table. They put two fake margaritas in front of him. They take pictures of him. Do you think a, like a judge ordered that to happen? No. It was entirely the president. The president has absolute control over the freedom of the people in the prison system.

And you know, like he went to Washington and said, how is it possible for me, I couldn't possibly traffic a, a terrorist back in the U.S. Like days later he went and tried to make a deal with the dictator in Venezuela, he offered you a prisoner swap like, I'll release 250 other Venezuelans I have if you release 250 of your political prisoners. So like that can only happen in an autocracy. You have two, two dictators negotiating the lives and freedoms of men at their own whims. That's, that's an absolute breakdown of rule of law.

Quinta Jurecic: And so just to underline what you're just saying, the, the Trump administration has of course been saying in court regarding Abrego Garcia, you know, oh, how could we possibly get him back? He's under control of a foreign sovereign, you know, we have to respect the rule of law in El Salvador, and so on and so forth. I mean, is it fair to say that if, if the U.S. asked Bukele to send him back and Bukele agreed, he could make that happen.

Noah Bullock: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I mentioned at the top of this that like 16 owners of bus companies were taken prison last, last week. You know what happened here was there was like a landslide that caught off access to the highways and really embarrassed the president 'cause this was like they’re, they're making a expansion of the highway. It's like one of their emblematic public works project. This was really embarrassing and caused chaos in the capitol. Like the traffic was just insane.

And so on a Sunday night, he, he tweets out that the buses are gonna be free tomorrow, and the government's gonna pay the bus owners for it. And like, you know, it was all improvised and, and like caused actually, end up causing more chaos 'cause nobody knew how it was gonna be implemented. And, and so his reprisal was that he orders on Twitter and that these people get arrested, and they get charged with disobedience and like, and crimes that are usually attributable to like public officials, like for, for non-compliance. And, and they're, they've been in prison now for over a week, and I understand that, you know, they haven't been charged formally with anything. So everything is at, at discretion, at the discretion of the president.

Like, I'm going on a little bit, but this is an interesting new development here too, because the bus line owners have like a, like a, not like a union, but they have like a sort of a group and they put out a statement and they asked the president for clemency on behalf of their detained colleagues. And that same group of people who was gonna had, was gonna be evicted from their land asked the president for clemency.

So it is, it's an interesting scenario where the Salvadoran population doesn't pretend anymore that that institutions, democratic institutions exist, or that the law protects them or, or, or that these institutions could resolve their problems. You go to the president as if he were a king and you plead clemency.

Quinta Jurecic: Right. There's no, there's no pretension that you're gonna be able to go in for, in front of a judge and plead your case. It's just the president.

So another question that I have had about Bukele's role in all this is to what extent it creates some vulnerabilities for him. So domestically you'd mentioned his poll numbers have gone down and that the role of El Salvador in sort of accepting detainees from the U.S. in CECOT is unpopular.

I've also been wondering, you know, obviously Bukele is in the good graces of the Trump administration for as long as this administration runs. But if there is, you know, a, a free and fair election in 2028 and a presidential candidate wins who is not so kindly inclined toward Bukele, that he could potentially be putting himself in some serious trouble if he then gets on the wrong side of the United States. So I'm curious for your read there, both domestically and in terms of sort of Bukele’s international positioning. Is he, is he walking a tightrope here?

Noah Bullock: Yeah. I think the Democrats would like to send that message, right? They, they're trying to do symbolic actions in the, in the Congress and the Senate to let Bukele know that the Congress will outlast like this current political distribution of power, and if there is a shift, they won't forget that he was an accomplice to disobeying Supreme Court orders and, you know, undermining due process rights for legal residents of the United States and offering it to citizens of the United States.

So there is that, that sense they want, they wanna send that messaging. But autocrats, collude, and they see themselves—you know, I think that the trip of the President Trump to Middle East, you know, was, was sort of an indicator, shows us that there is this affinity for strong men who can make decisions autonomously and make deals. And this idea of transactional diplomacy in which, you know, these types of leaders can sit down and figure out what the quid pro quo is and make an agreement without being restricted by laws or, or Congresses and things like that.

What's, what's important to note about all that—and I think like listeners to this podcast, after like describing for the last half hour, the Bukele administration— transactional diplomacy is, is implicitly lawless and, and criminal because there are implicitly individ- like individual interests and benefits that are actually being negotiated using the resources and power of nations, right? And, and so Bukele is right now playing that line, that the, using his relationship, what he has to offer and, and trying to generate both reputational benefits and also judicial sort of, impunity guarantees.

But I think also, like, you know, this is what's happening right now as well, is that the United States has very imperfectly backed democracy and rights movements in the world—and probably nowhere as imperfectly as they have in Central America. But to be fair, in recent years, they have built, built trust among democracies and rights movements because the State Department has played an important role in defending civic space. And that's gone. I don't think that we can make that assumption anymore.

And so, you know, I think what's interesting about what we're seeing happening in the last, you know, two weeks or three weeks here is a little bit of a Bukele freed from the, the, the fear of maintaining appearances. They just don't necessarily care anymore about creating the facade of freedoms and freedom of speech and freedom of association.

He went to the UN—I think in his last speech at the UN, he said, no, in El Salvador, we don't have political prisoners, we, we have freedom of speech, we have freedom of assembly. He told me once in a private meeting that people have the right to criticism, but that his government reserves the right to respond to the criticism. And, and I, I tried to point out, this was like four years ago, I heard about four years ago, I pointed out to him that there's a, there's a difference between when the population criticizes his government and when he uses the power of the state to respond.

And, and that's, I think what we're seeing right now is a little bit of a Bukele administration concerned 'cause they're losing the narrative, but feeling unrestrained now to, to use the repressive power of the state.

Quinta Jurecic: I wonder if there's also a dynamic where, you know, not only is it a situation where Bukele doesn't have to be concerned about the U.S. State Department coming in and pushing back, but it seems as far as I can tell, sitting in Washington, D.C., that the White House looks at what Bukele has and says we would like, we want that for us.

That there, there's a level of envy that he is able to essentially govern without any checks, to respond to criticism as, as he put it, you know, as he sees fit, that he's not encumbered by the courts in the same way that, that Trump is. And I, I think you kind of saw that in that Oval Office meeting where Bukele is sort of, you know, talking about how much success he's been able to have, and Trump is kind of looking on admiringly.

So there's almost a sort of, I don't know whether egging each other on is the right term, but it's not just that the State Department isn't gonna push back; it's that the White House looks at, at that sort of crackdown, admiringly, almost.

Noah Bullock: Yeah, I mean, I, a senator, a U.S. senator was retweeting our press statement about Ruth's detention today and, and expressing concerns that human rights defenders are being, you know, detained in El Salvador, and one of the responses was like, don't you get it? The, the globalist agenda is dead.

Like so, so it is interesting, I think, that that's part of this conversation that's happening among autocracies, is that what, what, what unites them is not a shared ideology, like maybe in the Cold War or something like that; it's the idea of being able to exercise power unrestrained by multilateral institutions, international norms, or any rule of law. Like that’s, it's cool to get together with your friends and say, how about me and you get free reign, you know.

But that's, and you know, if we, if we read—and we should—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I'm remembering that these are the, this is the World War II generation that writes this and signs this and say, you know the, the shock, the, the events that happened in World War II shock the conscience of mankind, and they attribute that one of the most terrible moments in human history to indifference to rights of other people beyond borders. National sovereignty is the oldest argument and detracting argument to human rights, and those, those are arguments that always favor the autocrat, the perpetrator, and, and never the victims.

And sooner or later, I mean, this is like a classic civics lesson here, right? Like being indifferent to the Bukele administration steamrolling democratic institutions, three years of massive and systematic human rights violations with abundance of evidence brought forward by human rights organizations, and the world mostly stood by because he's popular. And so being indifferent to the human rights and democracy situation in El Salvador in a unique way has created an interconnection between the rights of Salvadorans and even the rights of people in the United States.

Quinta Jurecic: So I wanna close by asking you, you know, given all of that, that's a pretty bleak picture—how do you understand your role right now?

Noah Bullock: Well, I, at first, in the first rehearsals for autocracy, we were convinced that our role was to defend standards, to sort of counter the normalization as they try and do new norm setting or set new norms, to counter that and just to constant, even if we were the only voice. But for a long time it felt like we were trying to say, no, we have democracy; human rights norms are not capricious, they're not ideological, they’re lessons learned from the past so that we don't repeat our worst moments, right, just that we felt like that was our role.

As the society began to close, we felt like, you know, because we had positioned ourselves, we had to protect victims. We had to be, you know, with the people who are directly suffering the consequences of autocracy. And in doing that, this is kind of a, a spiritual part of human rights work that we learned from prosecuting war crimes—and here we, we, we prosecute them, the El Mozote massacre, for example—that the idea that, that the truth of the victims will impose. That when it's heard, it transforms. And so our support of the victims was oriented towards making sure as many people as possible could hear their voice because it's un, it's undeniable. And I think that worked. the truth of the victims, whether it takes decades or not, sooner or later imposes.

And now I think we're not alone in denouncing abuses, in denouncing autocracy in El Salvador, and so I think our role is to continue to be part of a movement of people. I, I was reading a book of a, from a professor of mine called “Power and Prejudice.” It's about the racial history of diplomacy and international politics. And when they, when people were advocating for the end of the slave trade, it was interesting to see their arguments because they couldn't, at that time, you know, appeal to or cite a constitution or an article of a human rights treaty. 'cause none of that existed. Slavery was legal. They had to appeal to, to morality, to God, to the goodness of humanity, and, and I think that that's where we are right now.

Right now laws in El Salvador and courts won’t protect us, but we will find protection in movement, and we have to affirm that movement based on our sense of shared human dignity and morality. I mean, it doesn't, the bad part about that is that we are unprotected, but we aren't alone. Ruth is not alone. There are thousands of people right now on the internet and, and, and on the streets and in their homes seeing themselves in Ruth.

You know, even, even beyond El Salvador, just sort of in the situation of the world today, I think that more, if we wanna avoid the worst consequences, if we want to avoid the repetition of acts that shock the conscience of mankind, then we need to see ourselves in the victims and, and act accordingly.

Quinta Jurecic: Noah Bullock, thank you so much for coming on.

Noah Bullock: My pleasure.

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