From the vault: Who is El Salvador's Nayib Bukele and what does he want?

Yesterday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador to confirm that one of his disappeared constituents, Kilmar Abrego García, was alive, if illegally housed in a notorious torture prison. (I wrote about Abrego’s case in this newsletter on Tuesday and did a video for the youths soon after.) Rumors had swirled on the left that the illegally deported man was dead. The right meanwhile ratcheted up its baseless rhetoric to make him basically the head of the international Mara Salvatrucha network. The former rumors, at least, were put to rest by the visit. (Van Hollen has a press conference scheduled for later this afternoon.)

The senator’s humanitarian trip was mocked by El Salvador’s self-described dictator, Nayib Bukele, who seems to have photoshopped some sort of cocktail glasses into the photos afterward¹ . (Our president got into the mocking action soon after.) This was silly stuff, but as I wrote on Tuesday the fate of Abrego García and the larger threats to immigrants, U.S. citizens, and the fundamentals of our struggling democracy are no joke: Ahead of Bukele’s joint press conference in the Oval Office, Trump and his Salvadoran bro staged an intentional "hot mic” moment, in which they mused about building five more Salvadoran gulags to house U.S. citizens.

This brings up a host of questions. Among them: Who is Nayib Bukele? What does he believe in and want? And when and how did American fascists launch into what is becoming an essential partnership with a Central American caudillo of Palestinian descent?

As it happens, I tried to answer those questions two years ago, in a subscribers-only audio edition of this newsletter. That conversation featured my friend Michael Paarlberg, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and former senior Latin America policy adviser for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign who has spent years traveling to and writing about El Salvador. We talked about how decades of U.S. imperial policy helped create El Salvador’s gang crisis (can you say imperial boomerang?) and whether the “Bukele miracle” was real.

I’m now making that conversation available to everyone for free:

(My podcast editions were the only things I wasn’t able to port over to beehiiv in my exodus from Substack² , so you’ll have to open Spotify in the link above. Other podcast apps should update with the full version in the coming days.)

Thanks for reading and listening. And, as always, for your support.

1  Bukele claimed they were margaritas. Putting aside the fact that the physics of the glasses in the distributed photo makes no sense—who in God’s name puts cherries on margaritas?

2  I’m told that audio capability might be coming soon?