'America' is a Death Cult
On the week's unending horrors and the transnational 'state of exception'
I don’t know what to say. Everything is supremely fucked and we live in absurdly dark and dispiriting times. The pace of authoritarian consolidation is staggering, the machinery of state terror grinds louder and faster each day, the scale of suffering and death grows more immeasurable by the minute.
We are witnessing a profoundly sick society, already frayed and unraveling, unmake itself entirely.
As I type, my five-year-old daughter is sitting on the floor behind me, singing and coloring. I can’t believe—I refuse to accept—that this is the world she will grow up in.
Yesterday, Congress passed Trump’s big, blood-soaked bill: a massive wealth-transfer / kill-the-poor / jobs-program-for-fascists budget package, which, on top of shredding whatever scraps of a social safety net exist in this death cult of a country, and granting the fossil fuel industry historic access to federal lands while ending tax credits for renewable energy, provides $170 billion to expand the already prodigious machinery of racist US immigration enforcement, including $45 billion to build more ICE concentration camps.
That agency—ICE, an instrument of cruelty since its founding, now an explicit forced-disappearance Schutzhaft squad—will now enjoy an annual funding stream that surpasses the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined. This doesn’t even include Border Patrol—a separate and equally inhuman agency—and the more than $75 billion the bill allocates to militarized enforcement at the southern border, including $45 billion for more wall construction.
A mere hours after this insanity passed the House (it passed the Senate earlier this week), the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can legally deport people kidnapped by ICE or Border Patrol to any country in the world—including, and by design: conflict zones, dictatorships, and places where migrants are systematically tortured and enslaved.
“What the government wants to do, concretely,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion, “is send the eight noncitizens it illegally removed from the United States from Djibouti to South Sudan, where they will be turned over to the local authorities without regard for the likelihood that they will face torture or death.”
Meanwhile, in this moment of unprecedented fascist consolidation, Democratic elites are hard at work celebrating their own impotence while the gatekeepers of liberal common sense at The New York Times race-bait Zohran Mamdani in a pathetic attempt to prevent a moderate democratic socialist—a Muslim and a beacon of opposition to the regime, whom Trump is now threatening with deportation—from becoming mayor and destroying America by instituting free public transportation.
Earlier this week, Trump celebrated the speedy construction of a new ICE detention and deportation “transfer center” in Florida’s Everglades (a facility, surrounded by miles of swampland, that flooded the day after it opened) while Republicans salivated over the prospect of feeding immigrants to reptiles and the Department of Homeland Security posted an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats and predating outside the gates of a prison.1 Meanwhile, barely registering in the news: a top Trump advisor openly called for the extermination of all 65 million Latinos living in the U.S.
That was this week. The week before that, the US bombed Iran.
And in the month leading up to all this—and still, now, today—Israeli forces and US mercenaries have gunned down more than 600 starving Palestinians as they attempted to receive “aid” from Trump’s so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose team leaders jokingly refer to Palestinians as “zombie hordes” while instructing their staff to shoot first and ask questions later.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller tweeted on Thursday, this has, indeed, been “the most incredible opening 6 months to an American presidency in history.”
Happy Fourth of July! 🇺🇸
This week, I want to share two pieces I translated for the Salvadoran media outlet El Faro in 2023, which provide some deeper context to the discourse swirling in the US mediasphere around Trump’s deportations to El Salvador.
As I and others have been saying for the past three years, reflecting on the American right’s fawning admiration for Nayib Bukele, the president and dictator of El Salvador, the “state of exception” in force in that country since 2022—an indefinite regime of police terror characterized by the suspension of due process and the mass incarceration and enslavement of working-class Salvadorans under the pretext of combating gang violence—provides a concrete vision for the dystopian future that the MAGA right wants, and is currently building, for the United States. It is, in a word, a future of prisons.
On Wednesday, in a legal complaint filed in the District Court of Maryland, details emerged about the abusive conditions endured in Salvadoran custody by Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one of hundreds of people deported from the US and disappeared into that country’s notoriously violent prison system—and the only one to be returned to the US, where he now faces felony charges manufactured retroactively by the Trump administration as retribution for their own scandalous fuck-up.
These new details, presented by some as ground-breaking revelations, confirm what many Salvadorans, and those of us who have been paying attention, already knew: In El Salvador, prisoners are tortured as a matter of state policy. We know this thanks to the largely unacknowledged work of Salvadoran human rights organizations like Cristosal and Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, Salvadoran journalists, outlets like El Faro, and the testimonies of Salvadoran victims who survived Bukele’s prisons and were brave enough to talk about it publicly.
Abrego Garcia was deported to the now-infamous mega-prison officially known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, for its Spanish acronym. To my knowledge, he is the only person to have ever left that cursed fluorescent dungeon alive, and his testimony is the only reliable first-hand account detailing the conditions inside. But it is not the only account of conditions inside El Salvador’s prisons in general: Cristosal and other organizations have collected and published many more, and outlets like El Faro have been reporting on the situation for years.
CECOT is the Bukele regime’s model prison, used to stage propaganda videos filmed by the YouTube influencers and Trump regime officials invited on guided tours of the facility for propaganda purposes. This is why most of the inmates held there are legacy gang members arrested prior to the state of exception: because they have the most tattoos and can therefore be made to look the most menacing. By all indications, conditions in CECOT are actually better than in El Salvador’s other prisons, where, according to the human rights monitor Socorro Jurídico, more than 400 people are known to have died since the start of the state of exception, with the true death toll estimated at upwards of 1,000.
The first piece I want to share, translated from the Spanish, is an interview that Salvadoran journalist Julia Gavarrete conducted with Zaira Navas, the director of the law and security program at the Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal. Navas and her team interviewed family members, specialists, doctors, and mortuary employees who handled the bodies of people who died in prison under the state of exception.
“We found that the majority [of those who died in custody] showed signs of being beaten: in the head, in the stomach, in the back, in the legs,” she told El Faro. Her team documented evidence of strangulation or asphyxiation, burns, fractures, and lacerations on the bodies of the deceased. “If guards beat prisoners, it’s because they’re following orders, so it’s not just the guard who is responsible, but the head of security at the prison, the prison director, the deputy director of the Bureau of Prisons, the minister of security, and the president. It’s not random. It’s a systematic policy of generalized torture.”
You can read the full interview here:
The second piece I want to share is a story by Efren Lemus, which contextualizes the first-hand testimony of Alexander Eduvay Guzmán Molina, a schoolteacher who survived six months of torture and starvation in Izalco and other prisons in El Salvador, following a brutal initiation by guards that left him beaten within an inch of his life.
“Guzman’s case is far from exceptional under El Salvador’s state of exception, as the teacher himself witnessed firsthand,” Lemus writes. “On the morning of March 30, 2022, Guzmán, a teacher for over two decades who runs a small taxicab business on the side, watched as state agents beat his employee and fellow inmate, Marco Tulio Castillo Reyes, who was arrested alongside Guzmán and three more of his cab drivers three days earlier on charges of ‘illicit association.’ Castillo would die in prison two months later. […] What the teacher witnessed and experienced firsthand was not an isolated case of exceptional violence, but part of a documented pattern of state abuse and torture... His testimony explains why the corpse of Castillo Reyes showed obvious signs of torture when his family went to retrieve the body from Medicina Legal, the state medical examiner’s office.”
You can read the full story here:
That’s all for this week. For more in-depth, independent reporting from El Salvador and Central America, subscribe to El Faro English.
In the next week or so, I plant to publish an interview with a long-time environmental justice and prison abolition organizer in Florida, discussing “Alligator Alcatraz,” the resistance to it, and the deeper context behind it—so keep an eye out for that.