BREAKING: The tide has shifted.
by Bo Forbes
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, it turns out, has been having second thoughts about the illegal abduction and deportation of U.S. residents by the Trump Administration and their internment in El Salvador.
It seems much less funny to him than it did just weeks ago, when he laughed with Trump in the Oval Office and claimed he couldn't "smuggle a 'terrorist' (by which he meant Kilmar Abrego Garcia) into the U.S."
Beneath his jocular exterior lurked a rising tension. And now, we know several reasons why.
The New York Times has just published an investigative piece revealing a shocking behind-the-scenes look at the agreement between Trump and President Bukele.
A piece I'm publishing tomorrow on Substack (sign up for free at Bodies of Knowledge) shows how on April 18, Trump began to post photoshopped pictures of what he claimed to be Abrego Garcia's knuckles.
(In the badly botched attempt, someone had inserted the number-letter combination M-S-1-3 above the real tattoos on Abrego Garcia's hand- in a font completely unlike the one that MS-13 favors.)
But Trump's disinformation was a day late and, perhaps, millions of dollars short.
Trump's doctored photo directly contrasts several pictures that President Bukele posted on his own Twitter account one day earlier, on April 17, when Senator Chris Van Hollen came to visit.
In the caption that accompanied the posts, Bukele wrote, "Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹"
But in Bukele's own photos of himself, Abrego Garcia, and Van Hollen, there are no M-S-13 signifiers on Abrego Garcia's knuckles.
And as you can see from the photo that accompanies this post, no such numbers are tattooed on his knuckles there, nor are they on any of the photos that Abreego Garcia's fiancee Jennifer supplied to the government.
This is, to put it mildly... awkward.
The NYT piece explains one reason why Trump attempted to save face by parading around this ridiculously photoshopped image in the hopes that no one would figure out that it was photoshopped, or that the images already there on Abrego Garcia's hand do not signify MS-13.
Many in Trump's base had claimed that the letter-number combination was merely a symbol to indicate gang membership rather than actually present on the hand. This would have given Trump an "out," but his hubris wouldn't let him take it.
The NYT piece (and now, dozens of others reporting it) explains why Trump got very testy in an interview with Terry Moran of ABC this week. In the interview, he insisted that the photoshopped M-S-1-3 were not signifiers but were actually on Kilmar's hand, a fallacy even a five-year-old child could detect.
Trump then badgered Moran to just "accept" the photoshopped picture as the real deal. When Moran wouldn't do so and tried, oddly, to give Trump an out by changing the topic to Ukraine, Trump insulted the journalist by saying that the only reason he agreed to the interview, which he tried to pass off as the "big break" of Moran's career, was because he'd "never heard of" Moran.
The NYT piece explains why the administration continues to insist that Abrego Garcia was "deported" when he was not, or that he's an MS-13 member when he is not.
And it explains why the Trump administration trotted out the mother of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old autistic woman who was raped and murdered by a fugutive from El Salvador in 2023. They were trying to put forth a racist trope that associates Salvadorans with rapists and murderers.
This trick is as old as... Lee Atwater, the blues-playing political operative who envisioned the racist Willie Horton ad that won George H.W. Bush the election in 1988. (Lee taught Karl Rove everything he knew, which gives you an idea of how despicable he was, and how unprincipled.)
My brother Stefan Forbes (Interpositive Media Awareness Campaigns) made a film about Lee in 2008, called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
It's an electrifying film, which you can view on multiple outlets. Stefan won the Polk award and Edward R. Murrow award for journalism for the work he did in that film.
For the short version of the tricks the film uncovers, you can also catch Stefan's appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe (way back in 2008), here: youtube.com/watch?v=XXZn-Vafi8…
Lee died of a brain tumor in 1991 at the age of 40. He had a deathbed conversion of sorts, in which he apologized for the ad, and for his "naked cruelty" to Dukakis in the 1988 campaign. Many say the apology was just another of his cons.
While reviewing the trailer for Boogie Man in preparation for tomorrow's article, I was shocked to see a photo of Lee standing next to none other than a young Donald Trump, who likely admired Lee's racist strategies.
Back to Bukele. According to several sources in the current administration who spoke to the NYT, the Salvadoran President agreed to house only "convicted criminals" (the operative word here being "convicted") in his prison, and not people abducted and deported without due process, which is what the Trump administration decided to do.
Bukele began quietly to express reservations about these abductions, which grew more pronounced when Senator Chris Van Hollen and several members of Congress visited.
President Bukele agreed to let the U.S. use his prisons, but with conditions, he had told Marco Rubio and Mauricio Claver-Carone, Mr. Trump’s Latin American envoy.
Bukele asked the U.S. for assurances that each of the people sent to CECOT, his prison, were members of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the situation and documents obtained by The New York Times.
But Trump's strategy for mass deportations depended on invoking the "Alien Enemies Act," an 18th-century wartime law which would treat migrants as though they were citizens of a country at war with the United States.
According to the NYT, the strategy was employed so haphazardly that 8 women were deported to the prison, a males-only facility, and had to be flown back to the U.S. immediately.
Among his conditions, Bukele in particular did not want to bring in noncriminal migrants. As he explained to Trump's aides, he could not convince Salvadorans he was prioritizing their national interests if he turned their country into a "dumping ground" for U.S. deportees from other countries.
But for a fee, he did agree to take in violent criminals, no matter their nationality, which would help subsidize the country’s prison system.
Bukele is now in a difficult position.
The deal was only for convicted criminals, not people with no criminal records and no evidence concerning involvement either in Tren de Aragua or MS-13.
Bukele continues to hold Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others who have been deported without due process, many without criminal records, and who he imprisoned in CECOT.
Abrego Garcia's name and story are have become internationally known. He is the focus of human rights groups worldwide.
And now, the eyes of the world are upon Bukele, too.
Bukele was content to imprison and torture his own people under the veneer of economic gain.
Now, people will forever see him as the Gulag Keeper, a far cry from his self-described image as the world's "coolest dictator".
It's abundantly clear to much of the world that these abductions and deportations have been conducted illegally and without due process.
Now, not only the world but Bukele's own people believe the rumors that he imprisons innocent people.
And should he return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. where he belongs, he'd cause a massive "political blow" to the Trump administration.
The Trump-Bukele bromance and the problems it leaves in its wake also signal to Trump's other would-be authoritarian allies that Trump's cabinet is crooked, unable to cover their tracks, and are security risks. Oh, and that colluding with Trump in these ways may well prove to be a liability.
There's more, too, having to do with U.S. attorneys spending years building cases against the actual leaders and members of MS-13, whose extradition Bukele has requested before they can give up their secrets in U.S. courts of law.
Please note: Like all my work here and on Substack, this one is cited and has evidence to support it; the full piece is coming out on Thursday. Bodies of Knowledge.
To complement this post and offer background as well as historical comparisons to Stalin's Gulag, Hitler's network of concentration camps, and of course, the U.S.'s removal of First Nations people from their land and Japanese internment camps, try: The New American Gulag or The Geography of Dehumanization
The point of this extra-judicial prison system, where Trump has also voiced his desire to send "really bad" U.S. citizens but also, as we see, people whose beliefs do not agree with his, is also to foment bias and prejudice for the citizens of the countries (like El Salvador) in which these prisons are located.
The idea is that eventually, of course, anyone sent to these concentration camps will be considered "terrorists". We won't need proof; we'll simply take Trump's word for it. Or so he thinks.
The people claiming that the illegal abductions and deportations taking place against court orders and beyond the reach of U.S. jurisdiction, are a "much-needed reset", or trying to associate Salvadorans with terrorists, are (like Trump and his cabinet) deeply out of touch with reality.
Feel free to share (with attribution, naturally).
(A gift subscription to the NYT piece.)
#immigration #deportation #crime #politics #authoritaranism #dictatorship #resist #MadKingDonald #UnitedStates
