El Salvador’s monstrous new prisons, built under a legally ratified "state of exception", are another such example of even more naked bourgeois power, albeit in another nation, where the state’s use of force to suppress dissent and control populations was justified under an “emergency declaration”, where a year ago more than 100,000 Salvadorans (1.6% of the population) have been detained without the need for evidence or much process and explanations that make no sense.

An estimated 109,000 people are being held in prisons, which makes them wildly overcrowded, as those prisons are only supposed to hold 70,000 people. The Bukele administration was “incentivized” to fill these prisons indiscriminately in part due to the sanctions that the US put on the nation, officially as a result of the negotiations that the administration and prior administrations were having with gang leaders. After these sanctions the brutal dictatorial repression was set in and gang members and regular workers alike were being imprisoned indiscriminately to fill quotas.

The Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang emerged initially within LA, in the United States in the 1980’s, forming among Salvatorian refugees, who fled the civil war in El Salvador. The civil war borne out of the inter-imperialist struggle between the United States and Soviet bloc. On the US side was the US backed government of El Salvador and on the other side was the National Liberation Front, leftist guerillas that got support from Cuba and Nicaragua, countries aligned with the Soviet bloc. When the conflict ultimately ended, the country was still reeling from the effects of the war and the MS-13 gang members were deported back to their home country. This mass deportation and the economic and political instability caused by the imperialist war, led to the explosion of the gang in El Salvador, where it was deeply embedded into every aspect of the society. Today the gangs are used as an excuse to discipline the international proletariat across the Americas, for which El Salvador is increasingly becoming one of the prison colonies of the US, benefiting the El Salvadorian bourgeois, which is playing its subservient role within the larger imperial order.

The conditions inside the infamous El Salvador prison called "Center for the Confinement of Terrorism" (CECOT) where deported migrants are held include "systematic physical beatings, torture, intentional denial of access to food, water, clothing, health care", leading to the deaths of at least 368 people officially. Access to anyone from the outside is denied, be it legal counsel or family and over 3,300 children with no gang ties have been subjected to torture and inhumane conditions.

The Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a mega prison, located in Tecoluca, opened in January 2023, with an initial capacity of 40,000 inmates. It cost approximately $100 million and was primarily financed by the Salvadoran government’s public funds but some of the funding also came from a $6 million deal with the US government to house deported migrants, including the alleged gang members that the US used as an excuse to begin the deportations.

The effect on workers since the introduction of these facilities has been some growth in capital leading to higher employment but the jobs are ones with precarious conditions, low wages, limited social protections and large portions of the population are still in poverty and relying heavily on remittances from abroad. Also, since the country has been in a “state of exception”, their workers have been subject to arbitrary arrests and worsening labor protections and generally are living in a state of fear.

US government officials have been in negotiations with close to 20 nations for expanding the system of international immigrant detention facilities, which have even less “oversight” than the already deadly ICE domestic facilities.

Speaking of the "equality of men", an old bourgeois sentiment that garners little to no respect anymore, is a cruel joke when thousands disappeared into a prison system with no due process and rampant abuses. Despite their brutality, US prisons and ICE detention centers are clearly not deemed terrorizing enough to scare immigrant workers away from demanding concessions at the workplace and so the United States bourgeois and their political administration are willing to pay to detain these workers and others in these more terrifying prisons as an effective tactic of attempting to further scare workers into compliance.

For those who analyze history, this is of course nothing new, as we can easily recall the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, which is now also a sight of proposed expansion for immigrant detention. Guantanamo and “black sites”, of course, became famous during the Iraq war as being sites of sadistic torture and death, whose official reason for existing was to extract information from “terrorists” but whose unstated reason for existing was to fully terrify both the domestic proletariat of any “enemy combatant” nations of the United States as well as the domestic proletariat of the United States itself. Those “black site” facilities are still in operation today and prisoners of the “war on terror” are still being held captive in these locations. What was started under prior administrations for the War on Terror has been expanded further to include detention of immigrant workers, striking legal precedent to do this without having to even show any kind of even tenuous link to terrorism, thus providing more pathways of terrorizing workers “legally”.

But even this is not new, as similar actions were performed during the Japanese internment in World War 2, the system of chattel slavery and systematic state and private terrorism and oppression against black workers, slaves and former slaves alike before after the civil war, the Palmer Raids of 1921, the Red scare of the 1940’s and 1950’s as well as the countless daily abuses that workers face at the hands of the law.