Bulletins and News Discussion from April 28th to May 4th, 2025 - Competent Fascism? - COTW: El Salvador

Image is from the Britannica article on CECOT, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in English.

This megathread's topic is inspired by our lovely news regular, @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net, who talks often about the conditions inside El Salvador and gives nuanced and informative takes.

As the Trump administration continues to make foreign policy blunders that would make even the staunchest anti-imperialist accelerationist blush - and we are barely three months in! - it's interesting to compare and contrast his policies of incompetent imperialist and domestic management to the dictators in other countries.

Bukele is somewhat unique among fascists, in that he seems to not hide - and seems to even admit to - his evil, self-describing as the world's "coolest dictator". El Salvador has no particular shortage of prominent fascists in their history, but one major example is Maximiliano Martínez, who led the country over much of the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was responsible the deaths of many thousands of communists and indigneous people, and yet joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies and against the Nazis.

The comparisons between Martínez and Bukele - and, indeed, between Bukele and Trump - in terms of their impact on minority groups are slowly growing as world attention is being drawn to the country. The recent meeting between Bukele and Trump has shifted a spotlight onto El Salvador's crime policy; the internal conditions of El Salvador's prisons are genuinely monstrous. One gets a similar feeling as when reading descriptions of the conditions of Holocaust victims in German concentration camps. Trump has made statements to the effect that he want a similar crime crackdown inside the United States, and I certainly believe that he wants this (ICE is already just kidnapping people off the streets into vans), but his administration has been so chaotic and mismanaged that it's difficult to determine whether this will be an interest he rapidly drops in favor of some other hair-brained scheme.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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Israel indirectly places blame on the United States, with the Israeli Air Force stating that the American 'THAAD' system missed the Yemeni missile, allowing it to impact at Ben Gurion Airport – Kann
Telegram
- Not really, the Israeli full statement also says that the Israeli Arrow 2 and 3 systems also failed to intercept.
  Israel’s Arrow air defenses, US THAAD system both failed to intercept Houthi missile, sources say - The Times of Israel
  Both the Israeli Air Force’s long-range Arrow air defense system and the American THAAD system failed to intercept the Houthi missile this morning, defense sources say.
  The IDF says it made several attempts to down the missile, which ultimately landed within the perimeter of Ben Gurion Airport.
  To understand what happened, we have to understand how the layered air defence shield works. There's Israeli Arrow 3 and optionally US Navy SM-3 for midcourse interception, then Israeli Arrow 2 and THAAD for terminal phase intercepts (and David's Sling if the missile is fired at a military site). No Iron Dome, it's not designed to intercept ballistic missiles.
  Here's an exaggerated not to scale graphic showing the phases of flight of a MaRV equipped ballistic missile, the captions are based on the flight behaviour of the Iranian Fattah-1 missile:
  The first chance to intercept after the launch of the missile is detected by US Space Force early warning satellites, is early in the midcourse/unpowered flight phase, or even late in the boost phase with a US Navy SM-3, if a US Navy warship is close enough to Yemen and has an SM-3 to spare. That was not the case according to reports, no mention of SM-3. Then the next chance to intercept is with an Arrow-3 in the midcourse, the missile evidently evaded midcourse interception, the Palestine-2 and Fattah-1 missiles can do that better than others.
  Then there's the terminal intercept systems in Arrow 2 and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense). The reason THAAD was brought in was to plug a defensive gap in the Arrow-2 system, which has a maximum altitude ceiling of 50km. Thus, a Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle (MaRV) capable ballistic missile could glide above that ceiling, before diving straight down towards the target at a steep angle, giving Arrow 2 a very short time to engage (around 36 seconds to illuminate, fire and intercept if the average speed of the Marv is 4200kph, Arrow-2 can engage targets at altitudes between 8-50km). THAAD plugs this gap as it's maximum altitude ceiling is 150km, so MaRVs can't glide above that (hence terminal high altitude air defence acronym). THAAD can't engage targets at lower altitudes though, it's minimum altitude floor is 40km, meaning that THAAD on its own could be defeated by MaRVs gliding under this floor. Thus THAAD is designed to be used in conjunction with systems like Arrow-2 or Patriot which cover those lower altitudes, they compliment each other as a layered terminal air defence net. To make interception as difficult as possible, a MaRV could glide say at an altitude between 40-50km before diving down to the target, at the edge of both THAAD and Arrow-2s floor and ceiling respectively. So I'd guess what happened was something like that, and both THAAD and Arrow-2 fired interceptors and both missed this time.
  Graphic showing THAAD engagement envelope, with a hypothetical Iranian Dezful MaRV trajectory plan to glide under the engagement envelope:
- the zionists are ready to open another front!

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