Let’s start by retracing some ground. Briefly, can you break down each of these countries — Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador — and explain their distinctive revolutionary movements and how they compared to each other organizationally, programmatically, and ideologically?

The Guatemalan insurgency begins much earlier and has a much more diverse and varied trajectory, because it’s so much longer than the other insurgencies in the region. In Guatemala, you have insurgent groups that are formed by a diverse cohort over the years of enterprising Mexican Trotskyists, dissident nationalist militarists, militant peasants, and trade unionists from very different traditions, who end up taking up arms against the military dictatorship that’s installed, beginning with the 1954 CIA-backed coup that ends the process of the October Revolution and the Guatemalan Spring.

In that way, the Guatemalan insurgency is consistently more heterogeneous and fragmented and dispersed, both territorially and ideologically, over the course of the many decades that they are fighting, but drawing on the same mass movement, student organizing, labor union organizing, and rural worker organizing that guerrilla movements across the continent are using.

In Nicaragua, you similarly have a heterodox group of both nationalist and revolutionary leftists who come together in this fusion of new and old left traditions to defeat the US-backed Somoza dictatorship, and manage to do so in a relatively quick turnaround after some initial defeats in the 1960s, as compared to their neighbors.

Whereas in El Salvador, you have these distinct political-military armed groups from equally diverse traditions of communists, Maoists, and liberation theology coming together to form a Marxist-Leninist-led insurgency that ends up fighting a prolonged popular struggle over the course of twelve years of civil war.

I think that new-left–old-left combination is really important when we think about this old-school Communist Party tradition — Farabundo Martí, from which El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí Liberation Front [FMLN] takes its name, together with more heterodox left traditions inspired by the Cuban Revolution, radicalized even further by the failure of [Salvador] Allende’s democratic project in Chile, and then further energized by the Sandinistas’ 1979 victory in Nicaragua. That gives these insurgencies a particular flavor that is neither orthodox Soviet puppet nor social democratic reformers, but a combination of these different traditions.

In the first episode, we discussed the consolidation of military-oligarchic regimes centered around agro-export economies in Guatemala, in El Salvador, and, to some degree, in Honduras. We get to the pressure cooker of the 1980s thinking about ways to undo this cemented power structure that has defined most of these countries since their independence.

There’s a moment when these liberal oligarchies are crumbling and no longer able to contain the social stressors and the misery of Central American populations. This gets you closer to the 1960s and ’70s, with the failure of the CIA to contain the Guatemalan Spring and that intervened in order to stop that, dealing a huge blow to reformist approaches. That coup against [Jacobo] Árbenz made reformism a dead end for Central America, and it inspired the guerrilla option.

This is where you have the forking path of 1954 that leads to the ’59 Cuban Revolution, and then the feedback of that struggle into Central America once again, with the animating of other guerrilla groups — the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinista National Liberation Front [FSLN] in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity [UNRG]. What happens in the Guatemalan context is the longest internal conflict in the Americas. In El Salvador, you have a political stalemate essentially, where a decisive victory cannot be won by either the guerrilla forces or by the US-backed Salvadoran state. Honduras still remains a place for launching missions and counterinsurgency operations into neighboring countries.

Nicaragua stands alone as the victorious entity, a political project that through the Sandinistas is able to take state power, but not without complications. There are many years where the Reagan administration attempts to discredit, dismantle, and make it challenging for the FSLN to do anything. But the FSLN’s internationalism in this moment allows them to govern and creates spaces for them to institute some key transformations in Nicaragua.

There’s a foreclosure of an institutional, transformative project of reformism or redistribution, which Árbenz wanted to be. The military option, this direct confrontation with the inequalities that structure Central America, became the only way forward. This leads to quite distinct national struggles, but they share the same roots of agrarian inequality of oligarchic rule and US meddling and intervention, which leads to the eruption of these revolutionary movements in the latter twentieth century.

What accounts for the absolutely perverse depravity, this performative sadism that’s such a common feature of these US-backed repressive regimes also on the part of the Contras?

The brutality and scale of the slaughter with which these movements are met is astounding, but at the same time, it is not that unique. The strategy that is carried out in Central America is being implemented by Vietnam veterans, Cuban exiles — who also went to Vietnam and cut their teeth on the horrific counterinsurgency that was implemented there — and is also being aided by allied anti-communist regimes with horrific records of their own, from Argentina and Venezuela to Israel. The colonial and counterinsurgent violence is recapitulated in the Central American theater in a way to avenge the failures of the past and also to prepare for future struggles that will be waged elsewhere in upcoming imperialist exercises.

The continuities there are so critical, and they’re not abstract. They are personified in the life trajectories of individuals who are part of the Reagan administration, the Bush administrations, the Trump administration, and many in between. A lot of these anti-communist cold warriors embody and incarnate this crusade that is very much central to the exercise of US imperial power.

I want to talk about the level of performative sadism, and the scale of massacres that were part of all these struggles. These numbers are still causing a crisis in Central America, as we are never going to know exactly how many people were disappeared, abducted, and killed during these struggles. The performative sadism was meant to not only have an effect in the moment but also to have a perpetual traumatic effect in these societies. Not only was it about stomping out the communists in the moment, but these policies also innovated what we now know as “scorched earth.” It was meant to not only eliminate the guerrilla threat in the Guatemalan countryside or the Salvadoran countryside, but to destroy entire ways of living. It had a deliberate, multilayered, enduring effect on the lifestyles that people can have in Central America.

The effect was to subdue Central America, its people, and all imaginaries of liberation once and for all. These places are no longer perceived to be hospitable to many people precisely because of the sociopolitical conditions that were established during these civil wars, which these countries still haven’t healed from and which the political systems haven’t directly reckoned with.

In the postwar period, these atrocities appear to defy reason. But of course, these were strategies and tactics that were implemented quite rationally. They were designed, codified in training manuals, imparted in US courses to Latin American troops and US-forged Central American special forces and battalions at the School of the Americas, and they were dispatched systematically.

In the 1980s, for example, a lot of the aid that Honduras received for developing its country — building roads, putting up lights, all sorts of infrastructure like ports on the Caribbean coast — was conditioned by Honduras having a very strong counterinsurgency stance against what’s happening to its neighbors.

This is another latent effect of the violence that develops in these countries. They established, in the 1980s, a political habit of having a really strong anti-communist counterinsurgent stance, allowing the state to be a vehicle in order to quell all dissent, which results in the military getting new weaponry or producing more employment. It’s an effort to get on the right side of the United States and not be subjected to more violence. The goal becomes to be as anti-communist as them, and it becomes a really important measuring stick as to how politics is done in the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Israel played a direct role in Central America, just as it played a direct role in backing apartheid South Africa. What’s the exact Israel connection here?

In Guatemala, for example, a lot of the supplies that were coming into the state and to the military were coming directly from Israel, alongside counterinsurgency training. There was a sense that what was happening in Palestine was very similar to the “internal enemy” situation of the indigenous Maya people in the Guatemalan countryside. This calculus of internal and external threats was another ideological similarity between Israel and Guatemala, and the reason why these strategic alliances came to be around the selling of weapons and training.

Central America was also a market for the expanding Israeli arms manufacturing industry that was selling weapons to people all over Latin America, with Guatemala becoming one of its main clients. But El Salvador and others were, too. Meanwhile, the United States looked the other way.

In some ways, Israel is able to act as an intermediary against congressional human rights restraints that are placed on US military aid to regimes like Guatemala. But of course, Israel has its own autonomous interests as well. The Palestinian resistance is very much a part of that Third-Worldist moment in the 1970s and part of the ’80s as well. Israel is fighting against these national liberation movements, even as it’s still managing to play this coy game of ingratiating itself with social democratic and left-leaning governments and movements across the world.

In Guatemala, these connections are explicit. There’s the creation of the model villages that were used to house displaced indigenous Guatemalans who were driven from their communities that were raised by the Guatemalan military. Those are based precisely on Israeli tactics and developed with Israeli advisors. You can find quotes from Salvadoran and Guatemalan military commanders where they make that connection very explicit.

These connections continue through the postwar period when the region becomes vulnerable to forms of organized crime. The Israeli private security industry is present all throughout Central America. There are also some curious resonances with evangelical Christianity that was also becoming hegemonic in this period as a response to liberation theology.

Under the Reagan administration, how did these wars both reflect and help to consolidate certain political coalitions between, for example, anti-communist zealots and the religious right?

As historian Greg Grandin argues, the Central American theater provides the New Right with an arena in which to unite both the neocons with the far-right nationalists and the Christian evangelicals into a coalition that proves sufficiently robust to elect Reagan and continue to shape politics in the US as we know it.

The question of evangelical Christianity actually begins much earlier, with [President John F.] Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress — dispatching missionaries to the region in a way that often backfires. Many of these young, impressionable missionaries were sent to preach the American way of life — of the free market, democracy, and reform — at the same time that these same policies are arming these militaries to the teeth and creating paramilitary structures that will assassinate many of these same reformers that they claim to be training. But many of these missionaries are radicalized by the inequalities, poverty, and repression that they witness firsthand in the region.

An excellent example is missionary Maura Clarke, who was one of the four US churchwomen assassinated by the Salvadoran National Guard in 1980. She was a Maryknoll missionary in Nicaragua who ended up supporting the Sandinistas and was martyred in El Salvador. She was very active in the solidarity movement and a very fierce advocate against US intervention in the region.

This strategy of deploying Protestant evangelical Christianity in particular as an antidote to what is perceived as communist liberation theology has a long trajectory. Throughout the 1980s, you have the likes of Pat Robertson, who was instrumental in moralizing the New Right’s project in the region, and bringing back some of the moral high ground, allegedly, to the US imperial project — sanctifying not just counterinsurgency, but the free market and the profit motive. That’s really what sets the stage for today’s prosperity gospel and the evangelical churches that flourish now in this franchise form throughout the most immiserated regions of Central America, much in the way that gangs have.

Also in the Guatemalan case, the US-based evangelical churches that are part of this Reagan coalition see an ally in authoritarian figures like Efraín Ríos Montt. His evangelical Christianity is perceived to be aligned in the scramble for souls in Central America, a place that evangelical Christians are very much interested in expanding. Fundamentalist groups in the US were very key in supporting the provision of military aid by Reagan, by [President Jimmy] Carter, by various US presidencies in Guatemala and El Salvador. Evangelical beliefs become a justifying force for the immense repression and the brutality against the communist liberation theologians and the radical Catholic Church.

Like Hilary mentioned, there’s a moral impetus from their perspective. Groups in the United States pushed to build out churches in the wake of scorched-earth policies, thinking there are souls that need saving. It’s a dialectic of displacement and repression that produces the spaces for evangelical Christianity to step in and offer a moral remedy to people as they thought that liberation theology and the Catholic Church appeared to be too far gone, too radical.

Together, this becomes a method to exert social control not only through military violence, but now moral discourse becomes a justifying force to make sense of what is really senseless. Ríos Montt and his successor Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores follow the same playbook, where authoritarianism requires evangelical Christianity as its handmaiden to justify the brutality and the scale of the repression that’s happening in the 1980s.

We should take account of the Miskito indigenous people who played an important role in the US-backed Contra war. These are a people who inhabit the Mosquito Coast, a region of Nicaragua that for much of its history was dominated by the British. How did the conflict between the Miskito and Sandinista government develop to the point that it did? And to what extent were those patterns rooted in longer histories dating back through the Somoza regime and even before that to the region’s time as a British protector? And then what exactly did the Miskito role as a counterrevolutionary proxy force look like?

The history of the Mosquito Coast, especially as it is connected to US influence in the region, begins before the Sandinista Revolution. There’s all these connections between that Mosquito-Caribbean coastline and attempts to jeopardize governments in the region. The Miskitos themselves are not only used by the United States in different ways for counterrevolutionary activities, but they have their own sense of and desire for autonomy and self-determination that’s against the elites in León and in Managua. They’re opposed to this settler-colonial project that’s coming from the Pacific side, which is where the cradle of Nicaraguan state power is located. But they become subsumed in these larger geopolitical Cold War projects, where they’re often used as a base of counterrevolutionary operations in the way that Honduras is for the wider region, to destabilize the Nicaraguan central government.

This is also part of that long colonial relationship with elites in Managua and León in the Pacific coast and this black, indigenous, and underdeveloped countryside that is represented by the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The Miskitos themselves are regionalists and nationalists. They’re the ones who will later broker deals with the Sandinista government to create the autonomous zones that are one of the first forms of self-determined indigenous leadership. This demonstrates that they’re political actors in their own right, and they’ve been doing this back and forth for quite a long time since before the founding of the Nicaraguan state.

There are attempts by the Sandinistas to work with them to imagine alternative forms of governance; there’s a social agenda geared toward developing that Caribbean side of the country. But it’s the CIA that plays on these internal differences within the country, that breaks down a lot of those conversations between the Sandinistas and the Miskitos, that then places them in the role of counterinsurgent forces and as being part of the Contra effort to discredit what the Sandinistas are doing.

Case in point: there’s this organization called MISURASATA, which means “Miskitu, Sumo, Rama, Sandinista All Together.” This organization, which represented the possibility of Sandinista, Miskito, and indigenous cooperation in the postrevolutionary moment, has its organizational capacity attacked by the CIA, and ideological wedges are placed in those groups in order to dismantle them and to make them impossible to exist.

There are also policies in the United States at this point that allow them to be perceived as being in favor of indigenous rights, juxtaposed to the Sandinistas. There are also many Miskito refugees in places like Honduras who end up joining the Contra forces, sometimes for ideological reasons because of internal issues in Nicaragua, but also at the same time because it puts food on the table. There are these situations of how the Miskitos get caught up in a geopolitical drama that they think is a national one, but it becomes much wider.

Honduras was a critical staging ground for US operations across the region, including as the operation center for the Contra war. Meanwhile, Costa Rica was economically subsidized by the US for supporting the Contra war until the election to the presidency of Óscar Arias, who ran on a political program of antiwar neutralism. Meanwhile, Panama was led by Omar Torrijos, a left-leaning military ruler, who came to power in 1968 and negotiated the return of the Panama Canal with Jimmy Carter, until he suddenly died in a plane crash in 1981. Then, a man named Manuel Noriega established his military regime and worked as a CIA asset, until the US invasion.

What was going on in the region more broadly, particularly in these neighboring countries in Central America that weren’t themselves directly consumed by armed rebellion and mass repression? How did Central American states relate to each other during this era of US-backed war?

Honduran social movements were also met with counterinsurgent violence, having their own martyrs and disappeared in this period. Many people from Honduras also participated in the insurgent movements in neighboring countries. These are very porous borders; they’re very close societies. A lot of people have family on both sides of these borders, so it’s hard to draw a clean line between them.

Costa Rica was a critical place of solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution despite the government’s participation in the Contra war. Many revolutionaries found periods of exile in Costa Rica. There’s a lot of circulation of militants through the region, and obviously Nicaragua under the Sandinistas is a really important space for the region’s insurgent leaders and wounded to recover, meet, plan, take shelter, and so on.

Costa Rica emerged as a critical broker for peace negotiations in the late 1980s under Arias in a way that helped create the frameworks that eventually led to a negotiated end to the armed conflicts that failed to seize power in both Guatemala and Honduras. It plays the ambiguous role as both a supporter of the counterinsurgency and a broker of peace in the region.

I like to think about what was happening in Panama at this point through the story of Hugo Spadafora, a Panamanian medical doctor who went to Guinea-Bissau and is in the guerrilla struggle with Amílcar Cabral and others. He returned to Panama in the 1970s. He attempts to produce a political transformation in Panama and get rid of the United States presence in the canal zone. Spadafora joins the Sandinista Revolution as a member of the Victoriano Lorenzo Panamanian Brigade. His story is emblematic of that era’s internationalism as well as the porous borders that Hilary mentioned.

Spadafora goes on to become a key player in the Torrijos project that will come in later in Panama. He, to me, is precisely a Che Guevara–like figure — a medical doctor who becomes a guerrilla, has this incredible transformation in his political consciousness, and then uses those lessons in a revolutionary context in Central America.

That internationalism is so important. These are very much regional conflicts, and not just because of the US intervention and the way in which the US is leveraging them into this world-historic geopolitical significance, but because the entire region is being recruited both into revolution and counterrevolution, the wars are inescapable throughout Central America.

But they’re also magnets for international solidarity — both armed and civilian — from across Latin America, North America, and far beyond. There are internationalists fighting in Nicaragua, in Guatemala, and in El Salvador from Mexico, Argentina, and Europe. There are medical workers and aid workers who joined the struggle in various capacities. It became the center of left internationalism as well as this far-right anti-communist international that is also forged there.

Can you lay out briefly the regimes in power and the roles they’re playing in Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica? There’s a change in Panama with the end of the Torrijos regime and Noriega coming to power in Costa Rica; Oscar Arias came to the presidency in 1986 on a platform of neutrality; and Honduras is this key US garrison state from which the US is running its bloody anti-communist proxy wars all over the region.

Omar Torrijos is a general in Panama who came to power through a coup and later brokered the deal with Jimmy Carter on December 31, 1977. This is a really interesting moment in Panamanian history because it now puts on the agenda the eventual possibility of getting rid of US presence in the region. This doesn’t happen quite as smoothly as anticipated. Torrijos is killed in a freak plane crash similar to Spadafora. (There are plane and helicopter crashes in El Salvador, too.)

During this same time period in which Torrijos was incredibly popular, you see the emergence of another character within his ranks as part of the Panamanian armies, who represents a new politician for Central America: CIA asset, School of the Americas–trained goon Manuel “pineapple face” Noriega. Noriega, too, is a very interesting figure in the sense that he rises on the coattails of the populism garnered by General Torrijos, a nationalist who spoke about taking back the canal, implementing some level of social and land reform, and so on. Torrijos himself is a very complicated figure, because he also stamps out a lot of dissent to his rule, and many people claim his rule constitutes an authoritarian regime as well.

Noriega will intensify this by disappearing people and through outward, violent clampdowns on dissent. But Noriega is in the model of a Torrijos, a kind of populist nationalist leader that plays this moment extremely well. He also builds on some of the nonaligned connections that Torrijos has built in this moment in order to garner international support for the eventual return of the canal to Panamanian hands. This is an anti-imperial struggle, Panama needs to be free from the yoke of colonialism.

Noriega plays this up, but he’s also still the darling of George H.W. Bush’s CIA. Eventually, it’s discovered that he’s also connected to emerging economies and interests coming from further south in the Americas, from Colombia and narco-trafficking, and Noriega is taking a piece of this. He’s in a strategic location where commodities have always flown through, and so he becomes intimately connected and linked to the drug-trafficking economy. But to me, this period marks an incredible transition from the turning over of the canal to Panamanian hands and the emergence of the drug economy with Noriega as a broker between this new regional phenomenon and the shifting of power in southern Central America.

It creates a double-whammy effect where you have the emergence of the drug economy and people like Noriega who later become stubbornly problematic and inspire a regime change approach again from the United States, which we hadn’t seen for some time at this point. By 1989, we hadn’t seen anything like that, and with the justification of intervention because he’s a “narco-dictator,” a word that we’ll come to connect to Honduras and other places later on. The Noriega moment becomes a model of this.

In other countries, through the 1980s into the ’90s, Costa Rica, for example, turned to Israel for assistance not for military aid but for security aid. That’s different in the sense that Costa Rica doesn’t have a standing army in the traditional sense, but it has police officers. It has a security apparatus, but it just doesn’t look the same as it does for other countries. It’s also a part of this Israeli network of buying weapons, learning how to quell dissent in order to run a “democracy.”

Transitioning from the presidency of Luis Alberto Monge in the early to mid-1980s to the late 1980s with President Óscar Arias, we arrive at a very important figure in Central American history broadly. Arias’s key role is in initiating conversations around peace processes in the region and attempting to stop the bloodshed. With Arias’s support, this is where you get to the Esquipulas Peace Agreement, which earns him the Nobel Prize. It’s precisely this moment where the role of a relatively stable Costa Rica is to help the diplomatic process to bring closure to these open conflicts, though this is relatively unsuccessful because the anti-communist crusaders of the United States continue funneling cash into the region in order to keep these conflicts going. They still thought at this point that they could secure a decisive victory, which in the end we know was impossible.

And so, Óscar Arias was a peace luminary in Central America in his recognition that there was no way out of these conflicts without serious negotiation and a diplomatic resolution.

That drug connection that became the pretext for invading Panama in 1989 and ousting Noreiga is, of course, not a coincidence. The illicit connections of US intelligence agencies are not incidental, they are structural. The CIA and other intelligence groups that are orchestrating this covert counterinsurgency require black markets to move cash, weapons, and commodities outside of official channels, and so they turn to all kinds of networks of organized crime, including mafias of Cuban exiles out of Miami and emergent Colombian narco-trafficking networks. This is no small thing, especially considering how further US anti-drug strategies in the region convert Central America into such a critical corridor for the drug trade.

At this time, there’s also a class recomposition process at play in Central America and elsewhere, as these agro-export economies are slowly becoming incorporated into the new neoliberal accumulation regime. Costa Rica has its first debt crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, and it’s actually Óscar Arias who eventually comes back to tarnish his own legacy and brings Costa Rica into the Central American Free Trade Agreement, despite massive popular protests and public opinion against it.

In El Salvador, there are shifts in the ruling coalition from the more recalcitrant landowning oligarchy toward their more transnational financialized cousins. Political electoral vehicles of the ruling class will shift accordingly. In Honduras, you have a shift from standard military rule to this brokered power-sharing agreement between the National and Liberal Parties trading off power. It’s an interesting moment of contestation in terms of what the dominant accumulation patterns will be, and what the role of the region will be in the new international division of labor that’s emerging.

From the 1970s, with General Policarpo Paz García, there is a string of military leaders in Honduras. This is part of the rapid modernization of the Honduran military that happens through the 1960s into the late ’80s. A lot of the political leadership is coming from the military ranks in Honduras, so this might explain the predispositions of Honduras as a nation-state to accept the support of the United States and to allow the country to be used as a base of operations for counterinsurgency.

But from General Policarpo to Roberto Suazo Córdova to José Azcona del Hoyo into the 1990s, the country is dominated by militaristic interests that are often tied with that same landed oligarchy, families like the Facussé’s. All of these actors are in bed with these governments and a lot of the benefits that they derive for the expansion of their business operations is done through the deeply militaristic 1970s and ’80s governments, which are supported by the United States and whose aid is conditioned by allowing Honduras to be a site of surveillance for the neighboring revolutions.

A model in Honduras, which you can see in Panama as well, is the gathering of intelligence that becomes a mode by which the governments of Central America can offer something in return for the military aid that they’re receiving from the United States. We offer you information on these Communist parties that are developing in our countries; now let’s snuff them out. This is the role that many Central American governments were playing in the 1980s and ’90s, but Honduras is the crown jewel because of its size and central location in northern Central America.

It’s US militarism by invitation. They want this because it is a path for the development of Honduras, and the military is seen as a determinant political force in the region. I think in most countries of Central America, the military is still the arbiter of political contests throughout the twentieth century, but in Honduras, it’s much clearer in the sense that this isn’t challenged by any mass movement in quite the same way as it was in nearby countries.

Honduras is chosen to play that role in part because of its size, as Jorge mentioned, but also it is relatively sparsely populated, certainly compared to a country like Guatemala. It also doesn’t have the consolidated landed oligarchy that El Salvador and Guatemala have that sometimes create competing nationalist interests that might come up against US designs for the region. Honduras from very early on is under the thumb of these transnational monopolies like United Fruit Company — it is the Banana Republic.

Because the ruling class is not united in the same way as elsewhere in the region, the military, which is US-allied and dependent, is able to play this critical role in the region.

One key thing about Honduras is its long-standing relationship with United Fruit Company and the symbiotic relationship with US foreign capital and the Honduran state that also makes it more amenable to US foreign policy more generally.

That’s precisely one of the reasons that Honduras is receptive to being the “USS Honduras” and the base of operations for counterinsurgency. That relationship with United Fruit really establishes a lot of the networks of political influence in Honduras that go very deep.

The brutal US-backed repression and the resulting massive migrant exodus sparked these interlinked Central America solidarity and refugee sanctuary movements in the United States — mass movements that supported revolutionary struggles across the region, opposed US intervention, and organized for the rights of migrants being driven from their homes.

At this moment now, when we’ve seen renewed internationalist solidarity politics that’s come about around Palestine, what should we know about and what should we learn from the Central America solidarity and sanctuary movements?

These are movements that were deliberately and strategically organized by Central American exiles and militants in the US in different sectors to achieve political goals, at the same time as they autonomously attracted solidarity activists from across North America. They sought to organize, on the one hand, Central American exiles and refugees into a political bloc that could advocate both in solidarity with the liberation movements with which they may have sympathized, but in particular against US intervention and for immigration reforms that would allow them to make their lives in the United States.

But in parallel, North American activists were also organized separately into a solidarity movement, specifically to put pressure on the US government and advocate against those interventionist policies. These different constituencies were mobilized by these very politically savvy movements in Central America to help achieve their goals. And of course, they became a political home for a US left that was very much adrift in the post-1968 moment after the horrific repression of the 1970s and COINTELPRO had ravaged so much of it. These solidarity movements became a last bastion of this Third Worldism and a place for New Left refugees, and then of course, over time, a place for younger left activists like you, Dan, and me to also become radicalized.

I frame it in this way, because when we talk about the solidarity movement, we’re talking about several different movements. There’s the sanctuary movement, which is mostly composed of refugees, tied to the Church, and oriented around immigration policy. As refugees of US-allied governments, these migrants and exiles are not being recognized for asylum, because to do so would be to recognize the atrocities that are being committed with US tax dollars by these governments. And then there’s also the movement for solidarity, which is both a movement in solidarity with these national liberation movements and a front through which to combat US intervention in the region.

Those are groups like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador [CISPES], the Nicaraguan Network, and the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala [NISGUA].

The sanctuary movement is fascinating and very complex. There is an interfaith element with different churches, the anti-Vietnam movement and other antiwar contingents, and civil rights movements — they all feed into that. I think the sanctuary movement looks different in different locales depending on what the pre-existing struggle is there. For example, in the Midwest, in places where there was the Underground Railroad, a lot of the sanctuary movement is built on top of those layers of organizing past. In places like Los Angeles, you have the establishment not only of groups like CISPES but also the Central American Refugee Center [CARECEN], which is an incredible organization that gives material aid to refugees coming to the United States.

Organizations like CARECEN, La Clinica Óscar Romero, and El Rescate are, to me, very Salvadoran. In El Salvador, there’s an incredible associational culture. You, me, and Hilary share some ideas, so we form an organization — it’s very grassroots. That associational culture is also performed and practiced in transnationalism, when people are displaced, when people arrive at new places and join with preexisting struggles. In Los Angeles, a lot of sanctuary was about finding people jobs, and that became another way of offering practical support to people.

There’s a recognition within that space of “sanctuary” of the incredible violence of the US, the US being the prime force of displacement. It’s clear they focused on exposing those US policy contradictions and putting pressure on the US government against the warmongering in Central America.

These groups were the target of significant government repression and destabilization, interference, surveillance, and harassment, from CISPES to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Organizations had their offices broken into, files stolen, people were followed and kidnapped. CISPES was under FBI investigation in the 1980s. There was very much a COINTELPRO-style strategy to disorient these groups as well.

One of the reasons that I stress the connections that these groups had to varying degrees with these national liberation struggles is that I think that’s one critical element that is missing in today’s internationalist landscape. Many of these organizations, the ones that did survive like CISPES, did so because they were able to maintain relationships with social movements and structures in Central America. But those formations could only survive on those terms to the degree that their allies in El Salvador were able to do the same.

The neoliberal landscape of today is quite different, and that creates a different context for internationalism. Many of these groups that have survived were able to do so because, whatever that initial moment, the distinctions between these refugee communities and US citizens become increasingly blurred as these diasporas are so well established in the United States.

The decade ended with negotiations to end the civil war underway and also with the 1989 US invasion of Panama, an invasion to overthrow, arrest, and extradite Manuel Noriega. As we’ve discussed, he had been a major CIA asset and exploited the populist energies around his rather different predecessors.

Why did the US invade Panama and turn on their one-time ally? And what does that military intervention reveal about the broader changing shape of US power in the region? And also globally, how it was evolving at the end of the Cold War during the early years of the war on drugs in the lead-up to the first Gulf War and George H. W. Bush’s ominous proclamation of a new world order.

Noriega is such an interesting character in the contemporary story of Central America because he represents the entanglement of so many different kinds of interests from the mid-to-late twentieth century for the United States. What’s clear here is that, despite what’s happening in other civil conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, the United States still wants to project power and assert its role as a regional hegemon in Central America, and this becomes a reason to do so.

Panama has always been formally occupied by the United States militarily. There are still bases in Clayton, in Panama City, today. There is an intimate connection of colonialism with Panama and the United States, and for Noriega to so openly defy the United States was not permissible. Noriega simply knew too much as well. He was caught in a web of counterintelligence that, similar to the kind of scandal that the Reagan administration experiences with Iran-Contra, Bush was worried might escalate.

First, the United States tried to prevent Noriega from consolidating his power and installing himself as a dictator by backing another candidate, Guillermo Endara. But Noriega refused to step down, because he said that it’s an illegal election bought by the United States. He annulled it, which made it clearer to the United States that Noriega was digging his heels in.

In December 1989, when negotiations to force Noriega to step down failed, the Bush administration, five days before Christmas, bombed the El Chorrillo neighborhood in Panama City, which was primarily poor, black, working-class people who were perceived to be the base of support for Noriega. This was one of the most bloody scenes of the invasion, and it still lingers in Panamanian memory.

The interest in getting Noriega out was, for many people, still very complicated and very controversial because many people still did’t believe that Noriega was a drug trafficker or that he was doing anything politically manipulative. In fact, he was actually a very well-supported populist. A lot of people still revere Noriega in Panama. But this is, for many people, another example of how the United States will not let the Central American nations determine their own political futures.

The year 1989 is a turning point. They throw everything at Noriega to discredit him, and unable to get rid of him, they bomb the country in attempts to scare him into submission, and Noriega doesn’t go quietly. He was harbored by the Vatican Embassy for some weeks, and there are all these incredible scenes of them playing Van Halen or Metallica really loudly in order to psychologically damage the guy and get him to turn himself in. Eventually he turns himself in, and then he’s tried in US court for narco trafficking and is then extradited back to Panama where he dies in jail. But this episode of the invasion is a part of that long history of the US having a sense of ownership over Panama.

Putting that episode in a broader context, the invasion of Panama in 1989 comes after the 1983 invasion of Grenada, which also gives credence to the perception by Central American revolutionaries that the threat of US invasion was very real and very present. There was a sense that at any moment, the US could give the order, and they’d have boots on the ground in El Salvador or in Nicaragua — to a greater extent than they already did.

By December 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen, so it’s also inaugurating this new post–Cold War moment. The US was preparing to redeploy, having regrouped in Central America throughout the 1980s. The very mediatized invasion of Panama is followed by the Gulf War and the whole shock-and-awe televised spectacle of that intervention. It’s a critical precedent for this very aggressive redeployment of US imperialist military power abroad.

How did the civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador end? And how did the way that they ended shape the future of the region? In other words, what political and economic orders did the civil war settlements impose?

The new order was of course neoliberalism, but neoliberalism always takes on local and national characteristics. What was Central American neoliberalism? What was the form of neoliberalism that took root in these countries that had just undergone so many years of revolution and bloody repression? And what’s the relationship of the peace accords and the transitions to democracy on the one hand and the imposition of neoliberalism on the other? Is the former reducible to the latter or is it more complex?

The transition to democracy, which is also a transition of neoliberal restructuring in Central America, takes very different forms in the countries in which it’s implemented, and it happens unevenly. It happens in different time periods according to when peace agreements are brokered — in El Salvador that’s 1992; in Nicaragua, it’s after the Sandinistas lose the 1990 elections; in Guatemala it’s not until 1996, and elsewhere in the region it’s a little bit earlier.

But broadly speaking, we’re talking about an insertion of the region into the international division of labor in the new, globalized, neoliberal economy as essentially cheap labor reserves for a US-dominated global economy. Central America is refashioned into a platform for low-wage, maquiladora exports — manufacturing ensemble exports — as well as extractive economies for raw materials. And of course, labor reserves, in the sense of the mass export of all these working majorities that are dispossessed and displaced by neoliberal restructuring. They are driven into the deindustrializing US economy, where they can be exploited in the lowest segments of a booming service sector.

This happened not just in Central America, but in Mexico too, so the migration pattern that emerged is very much part of this broader accumulation pattern across the region, in which you have low-wage exports from manufacturing platforms in the maquiladora sector, on the one hand, and the mass movement of low-wage workers into US labor markets on the other, whose remittances will subsidize this entire system by providing foreign reserves to restructured Central American governments and critical income to impoverished households to maintain reproduction of the entire thing.

It takes different shapes in different places, and despite the eventual triumph of neoliberalism, the peace accords that are negotiated to differing degrees of the postwar settlements should not be entirely discounted. Read through the lens of today — the neoliberal triumph and the subsequent disintegration of the postwar political economy and states and the disintegration of the postwar democracies — these peace accords can be dismissed as a failure or a sham. But certainly, the demilitarization of Guatemala and El Salvador, for example — the establishment of basic civil rights, basic human rights guarantees — was no small thing. Especially in the Salvadoran case, where the guerrillas were able to begin negotiating much earlier from a position of relative strength.

Guatemala, less so. In Nicaragua, after the Sandinistas were forced out of office after losing a 1990 election after ten years of debilitating Contra war, neoliberalism was imposed pretty savagely. It’s important to recognize the relative achievements [of the peace agreements] in their context for democracy, while also recognizing how that transition also facilitated a broader process of restructuring that ended up subsuming the region and subordinating them.

The peace accords, like Hilary mentioned, are a triumph that needed to happen. There was no way that these conflicts would have ended without that diplomatic solution. But in the Guatemalan context, they actually just cemented the inequalities that could simply not be resolved through the conflict.

For example, extractive projects became a boon after 1996. You have hydroelectric projects, damming, and logging, which led to a scramble for resources, almost as if capital had been waiting on the flanks for these conflicts to end. On another level, too, we have to recognize the racial contradictions of the conflict itself, which now is more or less known as the Guatemalan genocide, precisely because of its ethnic dimensions, and those racial contradictions are not resolved by establishing what is a nominal democracy, at best.

So in some ways these peace accords enshrine these inequalities, which mutate in really perverse ways that will lead to a mass exodus from Central America to the United States, which then becomes the cycle of deportation back. It becomes a whole distinct economy — the NGOization of social movements, electoralism as the only way to do politics. It’s a democratic achievement, sure, but it is also a foreclosure on forms of political transformation that no longer have any validity in the new postwar terrain.

The Salvadoran case is another example of how the peace accords, which needed to happen to stop the unprecedented brutality and carnage, give way to an informalized displacement that’s not coming from an open conflict but rather from the continual miserable economic conditions of these countries that remained unresolved. They ended conflict, demilitarized society, displaced violence in different ways momentarily for elections to happen, and so on — and we’ll see how that boomerangs back into Central America — but they don’t resolve the fundamental contradiction that these struggles in the 1980s and 1990s attempted to resolve, which was land inequality and the fair distribution of resources.

This was not resolved, so in my view, they politically enshrined these things and made them more difficult to disarticulate. They become the struggle of NGOization; they become the struggle against transnational capital; they become the question of deportation and migrant reintegration; they become all of these other discrete issues. But fundamentally the problem of economic inequality that these conflicts attempted to resolve was never achieved.

The material basis for the movements for both reform and insurgency are not only unaddressed there, but those material conditions are aggravated. These inequalities are worsened with neoliberal restructuring in many ways. Neoliberalism doesn’t only institute a packages of reforms — structural adjustment of trade liberalization and privatization and deregulation — but, ideologically speaking, it makes impossible the vocabulary and the frameworks with which to understand this enduring violence and inequality.

The terms of struggle turn inward and are individualized. We embrace these notions of personal responsibility. Violence is somehow a question of managing personal risk and becomes the abstract social violence of criminality and delinquency, rather than political violence with recognizable actors and victims. Restructuring and “democracy” is a demobilizing process that also robs people of many of the tools with which to struggle and substitutes them for entrepreneurial start-ups and NGOs, and if that fails, a migration project.

For example, in the Salvadorian case, with the Truth Commission that is part of the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords, there’s demilitarization and demobilization of weaponry, but that also is a sweeping amnesty law that now does not allow for people, who just a couple of days before were killing people rampantly throughout the country, to be processed for those crimes. That creates an incredible psychosocial problem for many of these countries, of a culture of impunity and persistent injustice. All these problems are kicked down the road, and then they get mutated into these other concerns without ever being addressed directly.

In many cases, these crimes of the war were perpetrated by the state and by the military, not armed insurgents. This becomes a sacred silence, so to speak, in war-torn Central America and in these postwar societies, that this “transition to democracy,” which is supposed to deliver the equipment and the tools to address through process, through the justice system, fails profoundly.

A huge number of Central American refugees fled to the United States to get away from violence in the region — violence fomented, of course, in large part by the United States. Two street gangs were formed in Los Angeles, Barrio de Asunción and Mara Salvatrucha. How did the founding of these gangs come about? And how did these initially modest street gangs, through deportation policies that took off under the Clinton administration, become such a catastrophic problem in Central America?

The gangs get started in the 1980s in places like Los Angeles. Essentially, a mix of stoners, high schoolers, and punks band together to create street organizations that are called “maras.” Maras in Salvadoran speak really means a group of Salvadorans. They organize themselves into a formal gang in response to preexisting urban gangs, particularly Mexican ones, in neighborhoods in Los Angeles. So, Barrio Dieciocho, or 18th Street, is actually a Mexican gang, and MS-13 is created in response to that.

They become transnationalized through the fear of migrant criminality that is stoked by figures like Donald Trump all the time, and it manifests in this boogeyman figure of MS-13. There is also the adoption of rules like the three-strike law in places like California, where having some marijuana on you becomes grounds for deportation. Many of these kids, young men primarily, are deported back to Central America, starting toward the tail end of the 1980s when the deportation machine is already greasing its wheels.

They are being sent back to places like El Salvador and Guatemala with no sense of what these countries had been going through. They were not embedded in Central American societies. It’s in this context where people who are part of gangs begin to establish new networks in the countries that they’ve been deported to.

This is not a moment of reinsertion programs to rehabilitate deportees, find them jobs, and connect them to resources (nor do I think that is the case now). People ended up building those networks for themselves, often with other deportees and other people who speak Los Angeles Spanglish or, in many cases, only English. In El Salvador, there were already existing gangs that are connected to local soccer teams and neighborhoods that fuse with the Los Angeles gang culture in places like San Salvador, which mutates their character and increases the prevalence of them.

The security apparatuses of these countries didn’t know how to respond, because they’d just emerged from civil war. They’re more concerned with elections than they are with social issues and investing in working-class communities and rebuilding entire towns. This becomes a cauldron where gangs begin to gain more influence in the social terrain of El Salvador. This breeds what then will become the repression-retaliation cycle against gangs, which doesn’t eradicate them but in fact accelerates their growth. Fundamentally, the economic inequality that’s left unresolved is the breeding ground for this kind of associational culture among deported and dispossessed Salvadorans.

The refugees who are eventually deported to El Salvador in this emergent postwar landscape are coming back to economies that have been deliberately restructured to create massive labor reserves. What does that mean? They’re deliberately restructured not to be able to provide gainful employment for most of the working population across Central America. Most people are employed in the informal sector. In this context, it’s not surprising that a significant portion of that informal sector becomes an illicit economy; there’s fertile ground from which these people can recruit disaffected, dispossessed young people who have been totally excluded from the postwar development model.

Initially, these are basically economies of subsistence: petty extortion, street criminality. It’s only over time that they become more sophisticated in response to these cycles of repression and US-backed strategies of zero-tolerance policing, the likes of which produced these cycles of incarceration and deportation in the first place. This also sets the precedent for the US style of mass incarceration in the region.

Let’s zero in on the current Central American situation starting with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, a young, world-famous, ruthlessly authoritarian, anti-gang crypto enthusiast. What path did Salvadoran politics take in the decades after the civil war? Why did postwar conditions that we’ve been discussing result in this nightmarish new hegemonic order emerging? The FMLN managed to win power for the decade leading up to Bukele’s 2019 victory. Why did FMLN governments fail to sufficiently change the conditions of postwar? Why was this period of FMLN governance followed by the extreme law-and-order victory of Bukele?

Beginning in 1989, the far right governed in El Salvador for four consecutive presidential periods. It’s during this time of totally uninterrupted right-wing rule that neoliberalism is imposed, restructuring is executed, and the FMLN very slowly is able to get its footing, demobilize its militants, and become a functioning political party. The FMLN slowly made territorial gains at the municipal level, legislative gains, and eventually, in 2009, won the presidency.

Many critiques of Bukele actually accept his premise and posit an equivalence between the FMLN and the far-right ARENA party as equally responsible for the failures of the postwar. This argument claims that the FMLN accomplished nothing in power, dismisses both as equally corrupt, and then positions Bukele as the savior.

I disagree with that framing. It’s important to recognize the limits and accomplishments of FMLN governance and all of their contradictions. But I encourage people to consider the social and democratic reforms that were implemented under the FMLN, to consider the great sacrifice and heroism of so many of the FMLN militants and leaders, both in the wartime struggle but also in the postwar period and in public service, much of which has been erased and slandered subsequently.

That said, the shortcomings of the FMLN governments and the very strategy of alliances with bourgeois sectors outside of the oligarchy that allowed them to take power is what undermined them very clearly in the form of Bukele. Bukele is the son of a key FMLN financier and important public intellectual, Armando Bukele, who had close ties with the Communist Party wing of the FMLN. After watching his son fail in different entrepreneurial ventures, Bukele’s father decided to put him into politics.

Bukele first runs as an FMLN mayor in a suburb, and he’s very successful at branding, which positions him to win the mayorship of the capital city in 2015. But Bukele is very ambitious, and when it becomes clear that he’s not going to be chosen as the presidential candidate for the next elections, he increasingly bucks the party leadership. He’s expelled by the ethics committee, and he allies with a small far-right party to launch himself into the presidency in 2019.

The whole postwar political economy, both in El Salvador and in Central America, by 2009, when the FMLN won the presidency, is entirely in crisis. Neoliberalism at this point has proven itself an utter failure, even on its own terms of macroeconomic growth. The global financial crisis has hit, and it’s starting to impact the region. Central America is hit earlier than a lot of Latin America because remittances fall when the Great Recession hits. It’s this moment of economic crisis and a total loss of neoliberal hegemony that allows this opening that the FMLN is able to enter as this post-neoliberal alternative, as a more social democratic option.

The contradictions and shortcomings of FMLN governance — very much aggravated by aggressive US-backed, right-wing destabilization, which Bukele is then able to expertly leverage for his own gain — open space for Bukele to posit a much more reactionary and sinister response to the same crisis.

When he becomes mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán and then San Salvador, he starts showing his own colors and distancing himself from the party, which prompts a whole crisis within the party of whether Bukele is actually one of them. But even before this, the FMLN experiences the “celebrity figure as a politician” with Mauricio Funes, who’s another politician that doesn’t come from the traditional left, is not a historic leader, and didn’t participate in the armed struggle. So, the FMLN has experimented with this type of politician, and it yielded electoral victory in 2009, so they think that they have another Funes on their hands.

The FMLN is operating in what has been twenty years of ARENA governance. Neoliberalism is in crisis, but still also embedded in every facet of social and political life in El Salvador. These are the conditions that the FMLN, in its first time as a governing force, has to do politics. That is a relatively tall order when the game has been assembled by a right-wing bloc for the last twenty years, and even before, with the emergence of FUSADES in the 1980s as part of the structural adjustment package for El Salvador. So by the time the FMLN gets into power, this is a neoliberal system that’s fully private, fully deregulated, and the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement is fully in effect. Austerity measures were the policy of the day. This all created the conditions for the FMLN to fail as a ruling party.

That’s not to say that there weren’t successes; there were incredible successes at the level of social policy, education, and health care. But in terms of the actual structure, the political economy of El Salvador, it was already path-dependent at that point. It would take forty years to undo the last twenty years in order to actually have any serious lasting alternative policies for the country.

The neoliberal economic crisis of 2008 also impacted El Salvador through remittances, and again constrains the FMLN government in different ways. Most of the electoral messaging from the ARENA party at this time was that if you vote for the FMLN, the remittances are going to stop. That’s the only thing they would say, and it was precisely a way of using the global financial crisis to complicate the governance of the FMLN as a party in power.

We can’t discount how these errors of governance had an impact on the political culture and the political ideas of people in El Salvador. There is a sense of exhaustion that cannot be discounted, and from which comes generalized disaffection in Salvadoran political culture. Nayib Bukele sinks his claws in using these false equivalences of ARENA and FMLN as being one of the same. He creates narratives about the need for a clean break from the past, that the two political parties are war criminals, and there’s no way to reform them. It’s this kind of rhetoric that seizes on a general exhaustion in the Salvadoran people. On a macro level, we can understand that this is part of structural adjustment, a warped political economy of neoliberalism sinking its teeth into every aspect of daily life. But from the point of view of the people, they’re just exhausted.

It’s precisely that kind of dynamic, that we can’t live in this repression-retaliation cycle, that has created a generalized sense of insecurity, criminality, and displacement. This is one of the errors of the FMLN — they have a security policy that is very similar to the ARENA governments, which puts them into a continuum that in some ways makes some of the narratives that Bukele comes up with, which are generally falsified, still resonate with the Salvadoran public. It’s precisely those things that create the conditions for Bukele’s rise and his incredible popularity as this kind of novel “third way,” which is obviously not true. He represents an emergent bourgeois project and an attempt to integrate himself into the oligarchy.

It’s the playbook for how the state acts as a vehicle for personal accumulation — which is precisely what Bukele is doing with Bitcoin, construction, displacement, and the gentrification of the capital city. This is just a new narrative justification for that same personalist project of attempting to become a new elite in El Salvador by trampling down all political efforts before it.

The FMLN is not only constrained by these financial instruments, constant US threats to funding and aid, but by the balance of power and the rule of law of this postwar institutionality: a reactionary Supreme Court that rules every FMLN reform unconstitutional, a legislature that starves the government of funding sources. Bukele learned the lesson of that experience very well by essentially abolishing that division of power entirely: Bukele fires the Supreme Court and the attorney general and unlawfully replaces them. He restructures the legislature to reduce the number of seats, he restructures the entire map of the country to reduce the number of municipalities to erase the jurisdictions where the FMLN was regaining support at the local level, and thus entirely destroys what remained of that postwar democracy.

It’s really with Bukele that the crisis of that institutionality, which was already evident under the FMLN, culminated, and we enter this new period of the “post-postwar,” which is “pre-liberal” in many ways. With the crisis of these neoliberal accumulation patterns, we start seeing this return to extractivism in a much more robust way across the region: this shift toward rentier economies, land grabs, real estate speculation, and an abdication entirely of any kind of developmental project for the working majorities.

Over the past four years of his government, how under Bukele has this process of law-and-order repression, the resulting imposition of a brutal but real form of public order, and then this hegemonic consolidation played out?

In the previous government of Bukele, one of his crown achievements that he touts is that he eliminated the gangs. We can’t discount the real qualitative effects this has on people’s everyday life, and Bukele has been an expert in using his social media to disseminate this. But it’s the way that he is doing it that is a problem — the dismantling of all country institutionality, remaking the state in his image, authoritarian consolidation. But for some segments of the Central American population, this caudillismo is seen as effective governance.

Bukele comes from that long line of political leadership that uses strong-arm methods to get “results” — even though those results criminalized everybody in the country and prevented people from going out onto the streets in groups of more than a certain number for many years. He also utilized the pandemic as a justification to remilitarize society.

From 1992 to the present, most people are living day by day in a reality where the future has been denied to them because of the levels of insecurity and violence, because the future is actually located elsewhere in the Global North. That’s what allows for people to latch onto this form of governance as being effective, even though it’s actually a dismantling of all democratic levers and constitutionality. It’s this quagmire that Salvadorans find themselves in, even though it’s a false one, because there are other forms that were never explored in order to quell the social insecurity that has plagued the country. The country ended up just taking on repression and retaliation as the only way forward.

Punitivism became the issue that any president could not vacillate on. We talked about the FMLN being binded by that premise, and Bukele leans into it. But what we already are seeing is that this war against gangs is unsustainable. You can’t incarcerate your way out of this crisis through the building of this new prison, which is part and parcel of a new accumulation strategy for this government and for Bukele individually. People are still migrating at numbers just as high as before the pandemic, and so even Bukele’s security achievements haven’t impacted those issues at all. We can’t talk about land redistribution, economic inequality, a post-neoliberal order, and policies that look beyond the free trade world that Central America is always supposed to be to the global economy.

Just to recap: Bukele imposes a state of exception under the pandemic, which provokes a constitutional crisis and acts as a rehearsal for the permanent state of exception to come. By 2021 — after he has imposed Bitcoin as legal tender, which is massively unpopular in a country that has already been dollarized and hasn’t had its own currency since 2001 — Bukele is actually beginning to lose popularity, and there’s massive marches both against Bitcoin and also in defense of the peace accords against Bukele’s discursive and material attacks on both their legacy and materiality.

Bukele responded in the spring of 2022 with the state of exception in the context of the apparent fracture of the secret pact that he had negotiated with the gang leadership to keep homicides low. When that falls apart, they respond with this state of exception and a regime of mass incarceration, which to this date has seen maybe 100,000 arrests without evidence, the suspension of constitutional rights to due process, to an attorney, and to prison visits for families. Hundreds of people have died behind bars, and it has been renewed for nearly three years.

The 2024 elections took place in a context of the state of exception for the first time since the civil war, amid these massive electoral reforms that totally changed the rules of the game, and even under those conditions, Bukele’s legislators and mayors received significantly fewer votes than he did. (It should also be said that Bukele’s election is also entirely unconstitutional — there are at least six different articles of constitution that expressly forbid presidential reelection to consecutive terms.) So, it’s also not true that there is a uniform enthusiasm among the Salvadoran public for one-party rule, and Bukele has been very reluctant to put his agenda to a popular vote.

While the Salvadoran constitution doesn’t allow for referendums, it doesn’t allow for reelection either, and Bukele has not tried to hold a referendum on his reelection or on many of these unpopular reforms like Bitcoin and the state of exception. Instead, he has consistently unilaterally imposed his agenda from above, then bolstered support through propaganda.

But like Jorge said, people — and this is true of supporters of any far-right regime — are not dumb. People are not just mindless fools and victims of expert propaganda. While Bukele’s media machine is very successful and savvy, people are responding to real material conditions. I think the sense is that as long as the apparent relief from street-level extortion and harassment from street gangs holds, people are somewhat willing to tolerate the rollback of their rights.

That can only go on for so long, but then the question is: What avenues remain to contest Bukele from below? And the answer is: very few.