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.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.