El Salvador has become a key player in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has been leading the country since 2019. He’s concentrated executive power and carried out an aggressive mass incarceration campaign against suspected gang members. Since 2022, El Salvador has been under an emergency “state of exception” which suspended constitutional rights. In 2025, the country's legislative assembly removed presidential term limits.
Bukele and Trump have bonded over their “tough on crime” stances and have forged deals allowing the United States to deport people to the country to be housed in its mega prison, CECOT.
The most high-profile example is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to El Salvador last year, and is now back in the U.S.
Journalists trying to report on this in El Salvador have been met with intimidation, surveillance and other forms of retaliation. Some now work in exile in other countries.
Jose Luis Sanz covered the region for over 20 years, formerly leading El Faro, the first digital news outlet in Central America. Sanz is originally from Spain, but currently lives and works as an independent journalist in Washington, D.C.
He was in Milwaukee recently, for a talk called "Detained, Deported, Disappeared: How U.S. Deportees were illegally sent to El Salvador by ICE." He was joined by Adriana Beltran, the executive director of the Seattle International Foundation, which advocates for human rights in Central America and for the journalists working for democracy and accountability in the region.
"There's a farther story beyond CECOT and the detention that we think is important to share because of this connection between El Salvador and the U.S.," says Beltran. "We wanted to share more behind the creation of CECOT, what lead El Salvador down this path, and what is that relationship between El Salvador and the United States."
CECOT was built in 2022, as a a part of Bukele's crackdown on violent gangs in the country. Inmates are denied access to legal representation, stripped of their identity, denied family visitation, and subject to mass trials. The entire facility operates under tight security and is often closed to outside eyes.
"Only a few independent journalists have been inside CECOT," says Sanz. "The conditions there are extreme, not only because it was built...but because it's part of a whole regime of political control in El Salvador."
The talk also highlighted similarities between the two presidents. Both spout tough on crime rhetoric, harsh immigration policies and the discrediting of the press, but they also believe that they are what new democracy looks like.
"This idea that they are building this new kind of democracy, obviously it's maybe a new kind of autocracy, at least in the case of El Salvador," says Sanz. "That's one thing that I think they have in common, how they play with the concept, how they distort words and concepts to build confusion about what they really are."
Throughout the talk, Sanz brought up examples of the ways journalists have been targeted for reporting on the actions of the Salvadorian government. They have been met with intimidation, surveillance and other acts of violence to try and curb their coverage.
"Most Salvadorian journalism is now working in exile, from Mexico, from Guatemala, from Spain, not many of them from the United States because the United States is not perceived anymore as a safe country for independent journalists," says Sanz.
Authoritarianism is trending in Latin America and Sanz says that even countries like Costa Rica, known for it's pura vida (pure life) and safety have been taking notes on the "Bukele Model."
For Sanz and Beltran, support for those doing the work to defend democracy comes in various forms, like financial aid and safe spaces to work through their own experiences. But they say it must also be met with honest, real-world conversations about the actions of each country, and what democracy actually looks like.
