Posted by Avshalom 4/4/2025
The only comparable situation is the Japanese internment camps from WWII.
> carrying water for MS13 and Tren de Aragua
Cruel and offensive words.
https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-san-salvador-el-arre...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/12/07/we-can-arrest-anyone-w...
Frankly it's shocking every time I see people praise Bukele on Hacker News.
Also, for the most part, prisons in the US don’t practice torture and political reprogramming. Nor are there concentration camps with indefinite detention save for a handful of black sites like Guantanamo.
People have gotten years-long prison sentences (which are de facto death sentences with regularity) in Russia for donating a few bucks to Ukraine or speaking out against the war. Nothing comparable happens in the US (for now).
Communism was a failure because it was incompetent. But the authoritarian-capitalist government China has had since the late 1980s was nothing short of a miracle.
In the 1970s, China was as poor per capita as Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh is still a deeply impoverished country, while China is an advanced middle income economy.
The El Salvador President’s Informal Pact with Gangs (2020)
https://insightcrime.org/news/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs...
There's more to the dramatic drop in homicide rates than simple analysis might reveal .. is it an actual drop or simply a drop in recording, etc.
As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.
None of this is applicable to the United States. It is a problem in some other countries but wasn’t the case here.
"The Trump administration admitted in court documents that 'many' of those sent to El Salvador did not have criminal records. As more information about those deported was unearthed, it became clear that some of the 'evidence' against them was as absurd as a tattoo of a Real Madrid CF logo, or an autism awareness tattoo."
"These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'"
No, they are not violent criminals. The authorities don't even bother to check.
"There is zero probability that a normal innocent US citizen will be sent there."
I'm 99% sure that we'll start seeing US citizens sent there in the coming months for crimes as basic as vandalism of Trump or Tesla properties.
If the Tesla vandals deserve to be in a lunatic asylum or charged with hate speech, fine. Go through the legal process to prove it in court. But to suggest that they deserve to be sent to a foreign black site for a lifetime of torture is simply unhuman.
Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act.
If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.
No.
For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.
A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at the Old Bailey could be sentenced to hang.
This body of statutes, which later came to be criticised as a “Bloody Code”, meant that one could be executed for stealing as little as a handkerchief or a sheep. Nevertheless, judicial procedures prevented a blood bath by ensuring that sentences could be mitigated, or the charge redefined as a less serious offence.
[..]
As a result, as documented on the Digital Panopticon website, between 1780 and 1868 less than a fifth of convicts sentenced to death were actually executed.
The US in 1700 was about 1 per 100,000: https://www.cato.org/blog/despite-federal-return-capital-pun...
The number of executions in the US annually today is only 0.008 per 100,000.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its president now is serving second term which is not allowed by their constitution.
The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc.
England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa.
This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.
I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0.
Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.
I feel sorry for El Salvador. It may now have to experience several generations of Soviet-style repression and suffering before a new regime is able to overthrow the current one. Meanwhile, thousands of families will never get to find out what happened to their loved ones in those horrifying concentration camps.
FYI, many of our (Americans') ancestors fled their home countries precisely to escape this sort of state-enacted brutality.
Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous state, they might even be warranted - but it is still inhumane. Inhumanity sometimes has to be fought with inhumanity, Americans of all people should acknowledge that. If you want to argue that it is not inhumane, however, then you are wrong. Imprisonment without due process is inherently inhumane.
As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite?
The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over and over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries — and you still can't see it happening? You may enjoy it now, but consider this the honeymoon phase: it only gets worse from here on out.
You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?
But you can just read the article if you don't believe me: "While polling consistently shows that Bukele is quite popular in El Salvador, surveys also show a steady increase in fear of public criticism of the government — to degrees that sometimes match the president’s approval rating. 'There’s a sector of the population that feels better, because it’s true that we perceive more security, we’re no longer afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the regime,' says Ramirez. 'We see soldiers everywhere, police everywhere, patrol cars, and they’re arresting people.'"
It will get worse anyway; that 2% will rise and that gov will never go away, killing everyone who opposes them. History shows this every time.
Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's a noble thought, but those 100 criminals can cause suffering of 100s of others. So his assessment isn't necessarily accurate. Every innocent father jailed in El Salvador might save 10 children from losing their own father.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000...
I also have to doubt the accuracy of such data collected in the 1700s.
There are many sources online that agree, so I won’t bother to link them, that the population of New England was ~100k in 1700 and ~300k in 1750.
The claim that that actual rate of murder in all of New England was 2-6 per year is not believable.
https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-vio...
Do you really believe that fewer than 300 murders occurred during this time?
The FBI maintains murder statistics for most policing jurisdictions in the US. Many of them are under 2 per 100,000 per year: Sunnyvale, CA; Hercules, CA; Novato, CA, Brookline, MA; the Twin Cities. The rate in Beverly, MA, is 0.946.
Japan's rate is 0.4.
The population reached ~300k in 1750. A murder rate of 2 per 100k times 300k people equals 6 murders. Multiply that by 50 years to get 300 murders.
This doesn't affect my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs though.
It was a violent time.
Just one 'dataset': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article30...
https://apnews.com/article/trump-deportations-el-salvador-ju...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Doesn’t fix everyone else who is there, but ugh.
Also, war is peace.
Perhaps this sounds familiar ...
"While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205." -- Senator Joseph McCarthy
>all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies. The President is authorized in any such event, by his proclamation thereof, or other public act, to direct the conduct to be observed on the part of the United States, toward the aliens who become so liable; the manner and degree of the restraint to which they shall be subject and in what cases, and upon what security their residence shall be permitted, and to provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to depart therefrom; and to establish any other regulations which are found necessary in the premises and for the public safety.
Nothing there about the President needing to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. Presumably he would need to prove the particular facts, in habeus corpus proceedings, should they be brought, only on the balance of probabilities?
> Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/21
Which nation is invading us? All of them? It's extremely obvious ordinary crime wasn't what this was intended for.
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hres211/BILLS-119hres211r... - page 4
In other words, they are so afraid to publicly vote on whether this “war” should continue that they have to play stupid games with the legislative calendar.
IF those things can be demonstrated as true, then prevent from prior supreme Court rulings cover this scenario pretty well.
If they can't demonstrate that, then the deportations are clearly outside of the scope of the law and judicial interpretation.
((Declared war OR (invasion OR predatory incursion)) IS (perpetrated OR attempted OR threatened)) BY (foreign nation OR foreign government).
The law was drafted in the early 18th century when nation was more of an ethnographic term than a political one.
So "a predatory invasion threatened by Venezuelans" would satisfy that definition.
Edit: typo
You should read about the obvious problems with a circa 1798 law that was as odious and abusive then as it is today.
Just saying that we need a more neutral medium for the HN crowd if that kind of discussions afen't allowed. Turning a blind eye to what's going on is what got us into this mess.