One of the ways that brutal right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet would terrorize the Chilean people into patriotic submission to his authority was by disappearing people. This was different from simply torturing and executing them. He and his goons certainly did that too. But disappearing people was different. With executions and bodies, families at least had certainty with respect to what had happened to their loved one. With disappearances, they never could be certain that their loved one really was dead. There was always a small part of people that retained some amount of hope that maybe — just maybe — their loved one would show up after being released from years or decades in some prison. It was a brutal way to psychologically torture the family members of the person who had been disappeared and everyone else in society.
In a sense, disappearing people is what the U.S. government has been doing with immigrants that it is sending to El Salvador. Once U.S. officials deliver people into the clutches of El Salvador’s brutal dictatorial regime, the U.S. government ostensibly loses control over them. At that point, people are taken to the country’s infamous terrorism confinement center where they are subjected to torture and indefinite detention and even the possibility of extra-judicial execution.
Equally important, the inmate is denied any contact with the outside world. His family does not know his condition. For all they know, he could be dead. He has been disappeared into the bowels of the terrorist confinement center for as long as El Salvador’s dictatorial regime wants him there.
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, one of the 110,000 people who have been incarcerated in El Salvador is 37-year-old René Mauricio Tadeo Serrano, who was arrested in 2022 while working at a factory. His mother, Maria Serrano, says that she has not heard from him for nearly three years. According to the Times article, “On a recent morning, Serrano stood outside the prosecutor’s office begging for information on her son’s case, alongside dozens of other mothers whose children have disappeared.”
Three years! Imagine sitting in this brutal prison and not receiving visitors, including your very own family. Imagine not knowing whether you’ll ever get out. That’s assuming, of course, that Serrano is still alive.
It’s worth mentioning that the people who the U.S. government is disappearing into the Salvadoran system for an undefined period of time have not been convicted of any crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador.
Unfortunately, El Salvador’s system of disappearing people is now our system too. That’s because of the partnership that the U.S. government has entered into with El Salvador’s brutal dictatorship.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that was not the type of system envisioned by our American ancestors who founded our nation. In fact, it was the Allende-Bukele type of system that our ancestors fiercely opposed.
That’s why our American ancestors demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights immediately after the Constitution was adopted. They wanted to make it clear that the American system would never become an Allende-Bukele system. Their mindset was clearly reflected in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, which guaranteed that what is being done in El Salvador and what was done in Chile under Pinochet would never happen here in the United States.
That’s how we got due process of law, trial by jury, the right to a speedy trial, right to counsel, the presumption of innocence, protection against cruel and unusual punishments, and other protections, along with the writ of habeas corpus, which has been called the linchpin of a free society.
Many people in El Salvador love Bukele and his brutal system. Indeed, many right-wing Americans do too, just as they loved Pinochet and his brutal system. That’s because they don’t care about freedom as much as they care about being kept “safe.” Thus, like people throughout history, they are eager and willing to trade their liberty for the pretense of safety. But as one Salvadoran put it, “We used to be afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the state.” In other words, the chickens who eagerly and willingly enter into their cages to be kept safe finally start realizing that being guarded by the fox comes with problems.
Appellate Judge Alex Kosinski once pointed out that people who surrender their guns will only make that mistake once. The reason is that once they have surrendered their guns, their regime will never permit them to get them back in order to be able to make the mistake again.
The same argument applies to civil liberties. If Americans surrender their civil liberties for the pretense of safety or security, they will likely find that they will only make that mistake once, especially after a few hundred of them have been disappeared into the bowels of the terrorism confinement center of El Salvador or some other brutal dictatorial regime. At that point, many people will immediately go silent or, even worse, suddenly becomes ardent supporters of the system, as they did in Chile and as they have done in El Salvador.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.
