Solidarity with Salvadorans Fighting Fascism of the US-Backed Bukele Regime! End the State of Exception!
ILPS US stands in solidarity with the people of El Salvador in demanding freedom for prisoners unjustly detained by the Bukele regime under the State of Exception!
March 27, 2026 marks four years of a critical human rights crisis, as the declaration of the State of Exception suspended basic rights to due process and justified the increased militarization of state security forces. What is supposed to be an emergency measure constitutionally limited to 30 days has been extended 49 times during which over 89,000 people have been arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned indefinitely without trials or hearings, denied access to their families and attorneys, while enduring torture, abuse, deadly prison conditions, and medical violence that led to over 500 confirmed deaths and tens of thousands of enforced disappearances.
Families demanding freedom and due process for their loved ones have been met with silence and excuses from government bodies like the Human Rights Ombudsman, as these state agencies have been transformed to systematically act as arms to carry out the fascist offensive.
The ruling class of El Salvador has unleashed open fascist terror, utilizing violence and repression to preserve its domination against progressive movements and organizations, as Bukele’s clan aims to accelerate land privatization and opening of the country to intensified foreign plunder. 86 political prisoners including land defenders, human rights activists, and indigenous leaders remain imprisoned, arrested in targeted attacks using falsified charges or under “preventative detention” without any basis.
The Santa Marta 5 water defenders opposing destructive mining projects were charged and tried twice for allegations of a crime committed 34 years prior, for which no evidence was ever presented, violating their right to due process, a clear case of political repression in service of mining industry elites.
24 human rights defenders organizing the La Floresta community against eviction were detained and labeled as in “illicit association" with gangs, a label used by the state to carry out arrests without warrant and charge political dissidents in an organized crime court, a clear attack on the right to organize.
Human rights defender Fidel Zavala remains imprisoned under extended pre-trial detention. He was arrested again after publicly denouncing torture, abuse, and deaths inside Salvadoran prisons he endured during 2022-2023.
In February, heavily armed police escorted heavy machinery into the community of San Francisco Angulo, located less than a mile from the CECOT mega-prison, aiding in the illegal construction of a mega landfill against the community’s will. The community had been resisting for months with a daily vigil to block the construction.
Labeling land defenders as criminals and terrorists enables the state to disappear them, all while the largest landowning elites, including Bukele himself, grow their wealth and rural communities are robbed and displaced.
The rise of Bukele and the consolidation of fascist dictatorship is no anomaly. Across Latin America and in regions across the globe, US-backed fascism in the semicolonies is on the rise. As a declining empire, the US combines increasingly aggressive military force alongside tightening its control over regions by collaborating with fascist puppets in an effort to stabilize its economic hegemony and squeeze out profits to save itself from crisis.
Drug cartels, gangs, and mass migration, are highlighted as existential threats throughout Trump’s National Security Strategy, providing justification for deadly military operations against nations asserting their sovereignty and for a new US-led military alliance, the "Shield of the Americas", with reactionaries like Bukele, Noboa, and Millei. Through US military strikes or economic warfare, nations are forced to submit to intensified exploitation and militarization, in a desperate plan to consolidate US control over key sources of critical resources and export markets against China’s rise.
The “Bukele model” serves as a perfect strategy for the US to spread throughout the region, in which the US finances the militaries and political legitimization of fascist puppet dictatorships to grow its control. The US even uses these arrangements to attack neighboring countries resisting US domination, for example by stationing war planes in El Salvador to use in the attacks against Venezuela.
Bukele enthusiastically participates in Trump’s fascist agenda, coordinating with US immigration to detain 250 Venezuelan migrants in CECOT, and calling for the militarization of US cities in fascist attacks against migrants within the US. Salvadoran migrants whose livelihood was destroyed by militarization are met with Trump’s fascist attacks, deported back to El Salvador, and imprisoned.
In the face of military brutality, arbitrary arrest, and indefinite imprisonment, the working people of El Salvador continue to strengthen their resolve to struggle for an end to fascist attacks and for a genuinely democratic society. The ruling elites are working with their US backers to arrest, disappear, and kill communities resisting imperialist plunder and exploitation, and resort to fascist violence knowing their rule can only be maintained through force.
Time and time again, the people of El Salvador and the people of the world have shown the lifespan of fascism and imperialist domination is running out, as this only drives communities to fight back with greater strength, including the family member of victims of the regime that continue to take to the street to demand justice. The people’s movement in El Salvador is not alone in facing ongoing targeting, and should be supported with growing solidarity of the working peoples of the world.