After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its "Harvard boys" off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile's economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar "benefits" to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.
Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the U.S. acquired a new, if amorphous, "enemy" and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington's geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the U.S. began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon's advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed "benign neglect."
An Evil Harvest
As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico's gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as U.S. imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or "Twenty-two-B" crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We'd watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.
As for climate change, we obviously can't pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he'll get one for the World's Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the U.S. was the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world's largest user of fossil fuels.
One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the "Dry Corridor," running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean's surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the west coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.
Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.
It turns out that not only has the U.S. historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden's presidency, the combination of U.S. "exports" -- murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought -- had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.
In El Salvador: Trump's BFF Nayib Bukele
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself "the world's coolest dictator." He's young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the "tejido social" -- the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city's youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D'Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.
Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city's disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele's agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don't miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)
His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador's congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the U.S.-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital's murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal's Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador's citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.
In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT "terrorism confinement" prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.
When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump's second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: the United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a U.S. federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.
As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela's quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in ICE roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS 60 Minutes report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.
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