Bukele's Bodies: Authoritarian Aesthetics and Transnational Repression
I am continuing to give as many interviews as my schedule permits to inform the public in the U.S. and abroad about the logic and dynamics of the authoritarian assault on our democracy. Here is my conversation with Katie Couric.
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Note: all images used in this essay are from El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s social media feeds. They are expressions of a carefully crafted state brand of mass captivity that depends on a visual rhetoric of dehumanization.
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The strongman would be nothing without bodies to control. He needs crowds to acclaim his projects of national greatness on camera, taxpayers and crypto investors to fund his bank accounts, soldiers to fight his wars, and enemy bodies to retain as captives. The possessive and paranoid strongman considers even those who flee from him into exile as “his bodies,” and his government may pursue them to silence them or return them to his custody.
The strongman’s own body is central to this corporeal politics: while the crowds of admirers and adversaries are tightly choreographed, he roams free, dominating the stage and monopolizing attention. If the leader has a background in advertising or mass communications, he may be skilled at turning politics, including repression, into an aesthetic experience. He has the starring role as the nation’s protector, the only man with the courage, cojones, and confidence to take extreme actions to solve his nation’s problems and replace a dangerous past with a glorious present.
And if he also comes from a small country but has regional or hemispheric ambitions, as is the case with Bukele, he may offer to lend a hand, la mano dura, to be precise, to help a superpower unburden itself of unwanted bodies – bodies of the wrong skin color, ethnicity, beliefs, or provenance.
This is the path chosen by Bukele, who has become the Trump administration’s fixer, generously stepping forth to receive shipments of gang members (and also people with no gang affiliation, who were wrongly arrested and deported). The $6million fee he gets from the Americans for this service is nice, but the political legitimation is even better, and gaining a new global audience for his brutal-everyman brand is priceless.
A case in point is the attention generated by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who graciously recorded a video on the grounds of Bukele’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Inaugurating a new chapter of transnational autocratic action, she stood on El Salvadoran territory and declared “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences that you could face…this facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
The tattooed and shaved bodies in the background, crammed together and tiered in ways that recall Fascist concentration camps, were an arresting sight. The setting was chosen as a deterrent, not just to foreign gang members and other criminals, but also to anyone in the United States who crosses the constantly moving line of what is grounds for being imprisoned as an enemy of the nation.
Autocrats such as Bukele and Trump have only scorn for rule of law and democratic notions of human rights and citizenship. It’s no surprise that Bukele dismissed as “preposterous” the idea that he should release and return Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported and imprisoned in CECOT despite being legally resident in the United States, with no criminal record.
Yet there is another reason Abrego Garcia is useful as a captive body: his fate speaks to the apparent randomness of authoritarian repression. Autocracies encourage compliance by telegraphing that anyone can be a target. And now “anyone,” including, theoretically, U.S. citizens born in the United States, could end up in a Salvadoran hellhole from which there is no exit.
The Trump-Bukele agreement, and the attention paid to CECOT, highlights the authoritarian aesthetics that has been a core element of Bukele’s brand since he was elected in 2019. To bolster his strongman credentials, he routinely stages authoritarian shows that visually allude to some of the most infamous mass captivities in history. Many of the bodies depicted in these official images belong to assassins or other criminals. According to Human Rights Watch, however, of the 85,000 people Bukele’s government has arrested as of March 2025, only 1,000 of those were convicted of crimes. So, some of the people depicted in Bukele’s videos have likely been wrongfully incarcerated.
Here are a few images from a 2023 video celebrating the recently opened CECOT. All of the prisoners are shaved, shoeless, and naked other than their shorts, even when they are transported. While the prisoners in Noem’s propaganda message were allowed to stand up and gaze straight at the camera, those who appear in Bukele’s propaganda are kept in a bent-over position, even when they are herded, running as fast as they can, to and from their cells to the staging areas.
There, cameras capture the magnitude of the achievement of mass captivity. The repetition of anonymous bodies packed together, which is a hallmark of the images produced in Bukele’s prisons, is designed to take away any individuality beyond the tattoos.
That camera work is prominent in a March 2025 video celebrating three years of El Salvador’s “state of exception.” Bukele has saturated the social media feeds of the millions who follow him with such depictions of faceless crowds literally bending to the will of the all-powerful state.
Bukele’s youth and his carefully manufactured “coolness” –in 2021, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender—have been the selling points of what Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez has termed “millennial authoritarianism.” But mass incarceration on the old-school dictator model, and the authoritarian aesthetics it generates, is at the heart of his brand and his appeal.
Bukele is popular because in his six years in office he has cracked down on criminals who were terrorizing Salvadorans with physical violence, and extorting vendors and business owners in ways that harmed the economy. In keeping with the authoritarian playbook, though, Bukele has consolidated his power by acting in a thug-like manner against the political opposition. In Feb. 2020 he mobilized heavily armed security forces to force legislators to approve an international loan. “You have one week, gentlemen. One week,” he told them, sitting in a chair reserved for legislators, surrounded by his goons and sounding like one of the gang bosses he imprisons.
He has also used the idea of an ongoing public safety crisis to justify a “state of exception” which has been renewed 24 times since it was first declared in 2022.
Already that year, Bukele’s evisceration of the Salvadoran judiciary and assaults on due process and human rights had led the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to denounce the normalization of state “trials” “held in absentia,” with judges’ identities kept confidential, the better to produce speedy convictions and more captive bodies to display.
Authoritarians such as Bukele do not accept the democratic idea that you are innocent until proven guilty. Authoritarian history has many examples of people deemed enemies of the state by virtue of their personal histories and characteristics, quite apart from any actions they may have taken. They are bodies that must be preventively confined regardless of what they say or do.
Partnering with Bukele, the Trump administration legitimates such practices abroad and prepares to move in this direction at home as well. “Homegrown criminals are next,” Trump told Bukele during the latter’s recent visit to the White House. “You gotta build about five more places.”
Can we deport Trump to that hellhole? He's a convicted felon 34 times over.
Awful awful pictures showing Trump and Bukele’s depravity.