Graphic By Ashley Tolteca
By Kevin Fox
In a stark display of neoliberal authoritarianism, El Salvador has entered into an unprecedented agreement with the United States: to incarcerate violent criminals deported from the U.S., including American citizens and legal residents convicted of serious offenses. This maneuver exemplifies the imperialist strategy of outsourcing social contradictions—transforming El Salvador into a prison-state designed to absorb the human surplus of America’s decaying capitalist system.
A Neocolonial Prison Pipeline
Secretary Rubio lauded the initiative to send American “criminals” to El Salvador, stating, “He has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those with U.S. citizenship or legal residency.” He further emphasized the uniqueness of the proposal, describing it as “the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.”
El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele elaborated on the plan, highlighting its potential to make El Salvador’s prison system more sustainable. He proposed that the U.S. could outsource part of its prison population to El Salvador’s mega-prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), in exchange for a fee. “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele stated. “The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
The proposal has elicited significant criticism from both international observers and American political figures. U.S. Congresswoman Rishida Tlaib had this to say on X, “The Trump Administration wants to deport U.S. citizens and immigrants alike to suffer in El Salvador’s prison camps, famous for mass torture and human rights abuses. We cannot let this unconstitutional cruelty happen.”
“Natural-born U.S. citizens maintain their citizenship through the Fourteenth Amendment,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at the Cornell Law School, relayed to McClatchy News. “Just as President Trump can’t eliminate birthright citizenship by himself, so too the U.S. government cannot deport U.S. citizens, even if they have committed crimes. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens could be deported.”
Manuel Flores, the secretary general of the leftist opposition party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, criticized the “safe third country” plan, saying it would signal that the region is Washington’s “backyard to dump the garbage.”
America’s Exile Colony: Guantanamo and the Logic of Disposability
Parallel to El Salvador’s initiative, the Trump administration has begun transferring undocumented migrants to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. This marks a continuation of America’s strategy of racialized carceral capitalism, wherein the surplus populations of the Global South are either locked in detention centers or forced into precarious labor.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt encapsulated this ideology, stating, “President Trump is not messing around and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world.” In reality, this policy represents the latest phase of America’s historic strategy of violent population control, wherein the state criminalizes and incarcerates those who capitalism deems disposable.
Guantanamo Bay has long served as a black site for America’s most egregious violations of human rights. Originally leased from Cuba in 1903 as part of U.S. imperial expansion in the Caribbean, it has since been transformed into a site of extralegal detention and torture. From its use in detaining Haitian refugees in the early 1990s—many of whom were held in inhumane conditions without trial—to the post-9/11 era where it became synonymous with the torture and indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants,” Guantanamo has operated as an offshore prison outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Detainees have been subjected to forced feedings, waterboarding and prolonged isolation—tactics designed to break bodies and minds under the guise of national security.
However, the latest shift in policy marks an even more dystopian turn. Unlike the past, where Guantanamo was used primarily as a detention site for those deemed threats to national security, its new role as a migrant detention facility signals a normalization of mass incarceration beyond wartime exceptions. The criminalization of undocumented migrants mirrors the racialized policies of America’s prison-industrial complex, but with even fewer legal protections. This move transforms Guantanamo from a wartime exception to a permanent fixture in America’s expanding network of exile and containment.
This development underscores how the logic of disposability under capitalism has reached new heights. The United States and its allies, like the Bukele administration, are no longer merely criminalizing dissent and warfare—they are criminalizing existence itself. This expansion of Guantanamo’s use solidifies its role as an international dumping ground for those whom global capitalism has rendered redundant. It is the logical endpoint of a system that sees human beings as obstacles to accumulation rather than as people deserving dignity and rights.
The Bukele-Trump Alliance: Extralegal Governance and the Disposability of Human Life
El Salvador’s so-called “war on crime” is, in reality, a war on dissidents and the working class. The Bukele government has engaged in mass arbitrary detentions, snatching individuals from the streets and imprisoning them without due process. This strategy reflects the state’s need to neutralize potential sources of social unrest and proletarian resistance.
What is most striking is how both Bukele’s administration and the Trump administration operate outside legal norms, bending or outright discarding laws when convenient. Whether through mass incarceration without due process in El Salvador or the Trump administration’s migrant detentions and deportations to Guantanamo, both regimes share a camaraderie in their disregard for human rights and legal accountability. Their shared authoritarian instincts enable them to see human life—particularly the lives of the poor, the racialized and the politically vulnerable—as disposable.
Prisons such as CECOT, where inmates are held in abysmal conditions, operate as instruments of state terror. Reports of extreme overcrowding, torture and deprivation of medical care demonstrate that El Salvador’s carceral policy is designed not for rehabilitation, but for the maintenance of ruling-class power through sheer brutality.
If U.S. prisoners are transferred to El Salvador under this arrangement, they will find themselves subjected to the same violent repression. The systemic lack of due process, the rampant use of torture, and the absolute disregard for human dignity that define El Salvador’s prison system could become the grim reality for American inmates. This shift would mark a further escalation in the commodification of human suffering, where the incarcerated are reduced to economic transactions between states.
The precedent this sets is alarming: it legitimizes the outsourcing of punishment to authoritarian regimes with no regard for basic rights. If successful, it could pave the way for similar arrangements elsewhere, transforming the prison-industrial complex into a globalized for-profit enterprise, where the lives of the poor and marginalized are traded like commodities in a neoliberal market.
At the same time that El Salvador tightens its grip on its working class, it has tied its economy to Bitcoin—a volatile asset dominated by Western capitalist speculators. Bukele’s decision to make Bitcoin legal tender has facilitated the siphoning of wealth from the Salvadoran economy into the hands of U.S. crypto oligarchs and former Trump administration officials who are deeply invested in the market.
This integration of crypto-capitalism into El Salvador’s economy is not about financial sovereignty, as Bukele claims, but about further exposing the nation to the speculative whims of global finance. It is a modernized form of imperial extraction, where digital currency functions as a tool for siphoning wealth from the periphery to the core.
The Capitalist Convergence of Incarceration and Financialization
The alignment between El Salvador’s prison expansion and its embrace of Bitcoin signals a broader shift in capitalist governance and subservience to Western interests. On one hand, surplus populations, both in the U.S. and in El Salvador, are criminalized, incarcerated, and exploited. On the other, financial markets historically are weaponized to extract value from the labor and resources of the Global South.
These interlinked policies demonstrate that neither incarceration nor financialization can be understood in isolation; both are mechanisms through which capital seeks to maintain its dominance in the face of crisis. The question now is: how long will the Salvadoran and American working classes accept this arrangement before they rise up against it?
The world must stand in solidarity with those resisting the expansion of carceral capitalism and crypto-imperialism. Only through collective struggle of workers can we dismantle this system of predatory capitalism and oppression.
