This piece appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
Over the 13 years I’ve worked at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) in Seattle, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about how to document and respond to human rights violations, particularly those committed during the 1980-1992 armed conflict in El Salvador, and those shaping contemporary struggles for immigrant rights in the Pacific Northwest. For years, these fields of inquiry mostly felt historically and geographically distinct, despite deep historical ties between patterns of migration and the violence of the past.
During the spring of 2025, however, these seemingly disparate topics collided in horrific fashion. El Salvador became the site of some of the most extreme actions of the Trump administration’s nativist campaign of mass deportation, bringing the legacies of Cold War violence into direct alignment with present-day immigration enforcement.
How can human rights research be better mobilized in the service of resistance against the rising forces of transnational fascism?
In March and April, 252 Venezuelan migrants were expelled to El Salvador after the administration invoked the 1798 “Alien Enemies Act” to skirt due process, ignoring a judge’s order to halt the deportation planes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) labeled the men as gang members on the basis of false allegations and deeply flawed criteria, such as having tattoos. In exchange for a $4.7 million State Department security grant and other concessions, the Venezuelans were transferred to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), one of the largest prisons in the world and a centerpiece of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang crackdown. There, they were held without charge and subjected to “constant beatings” and a multitude of other abuses, according to a report by Cristosal and Human Rights Watch, until they were returned to Venezuela in July as part of a prisoner swap.
At the same time, a campaign of anti-migrant terror was being unleashed across the United States. Communities have borne witness to warrantless, violent arrests carried out in public by unidentified men in unmarked cars, militarized assault operations led by Border Patrol units in major cities, and an unprecedented number of people imprisoned by ICE in draconian immigration detention centers under intolerable conditions. This violence has been accompanied by a steady barrage of racist and fascistic rhetoric by Trump administration officials, who scapegoate migrants through dehumanizing language and evoke far-right visions of demographic cleansing.
In this context, my colleagues and I have found ourselves returning to a question that has long animated human rights work, but now with renewed urgency: how can human rights research be better mobilized in the service of resistance against the rising forces of transnational fascism? Although there are no easy answers, we can perhaps find inspiration and perspective in the example of those who confronted similar alignments of state violence and repression in the past.
The Long Arc of U.S.-backed Torture in El Salvador
The 2025 CECOT episode feels like a nadir for U.S.-El Salvador relations in the decades-long wake of the Cold War. But it’s not the first such nadir. Looking back on the labor of human rights researchers during the armed conflict in El Salvador helps illuminate the conditions under which they struggled.
The Salvadoran civil war began formally in October 1980 with the founding of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) by a coalition of guerrilla groups, following mounting government repression and armed resistance during the preceding years and decades. From 1980 to the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in January 1992, an estimated 71,000 Salvadorans were killed or disappeared, the vast majority at the hands of the Salvadoran military and allied death squads. Over a million people were displaced, many seeking refuge in the United States. Over the 12 years of the conflict, the U.S. government provided the Salvadoran government with aid and military assistance to the tune of roughly $5 billion dollars.
The early years of the war were characterized by high profile assassinations, like that of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980, and by mass violence, including infamous massacres at El Mozote and elsewhere. State forces and death squads circulated kill lists and carried out disappearances; bodies bearing signs of torture were dumped in the streets. In response to mounting evidence of abuses, the U.S. Congress passed a law during the first year of the Reagan administration requiring biyearly certification of the Salvadoran government’s progress on human rights as a condition of continued aid. All of this generated reams of classified documentation which UWCHR and others have sought to obtain through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), both as evidence for accountability efforts and as a form of historical memory.
The UWCHR’s work on historic war crimes in El Salvador grew out of Center Director Angelina Godoy’s relationship with the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COPPES, Comité de Presos y Presas Políticas de El Salvador), an organization founded in the early 1980s by Salvadorans imprisoned in the context of the armed conflict. After a period of dormancy, COPPES was reconstituted in the early 2000s as former members came together to seek mutual support in healing and work towards historical memory, justice, and reparations.
In 2018, we published a short report about the case of Rafael Segura, a COPPES member who was detained and tortured by the Salvadoran security forces between 1980 and 1983, including during a stint at the notorious “La Esperanza” prison, known as Mariona for its location on the outskirts of San Salvador. We hoped our report would draw attention to Segura’s legal complaint, lodged following the repeal of El Salvador’s amnesty law in 2016, which opened the doors for accountability for wartime crimes in the Salvadoran courts. Two years later, Segura’s case and others were under investigation, and it seemed possible that trials might soon commence.
To build our knowledge of Segura’s case, we referenced a 1986 report titled “Torture in El Salvador,” published by the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission (CDHES), a non-governmental organization founded in 1978 to denounce mounting human rights violations. For its work, CDHES members were subjected to furious repression, including killings, disappearances, and imprisonment.
Authored by five imprisoned members of CDHES in collaboration with COPPES, the 1986 report documents the torture of political prisoners incarcerated at Mariona Prison from 1983 to 1986. The report was smuggled out of the country and published in English in the United States with the support of human rights lawyer Lisa Brodyaga and the Marin Inter-faith Task Force, with the goal of forestalling the U.S. government’s continued funding for the Salvadoran Armed Forces.
It is a remarkable document: 160 pages long and illustrated with stark line drawings of torture methods—an asphyxiating hood filled with lime dust, stress positions like “the airplane,” electrical shocks, and more. The researchers found that 99.7 percent of those detained were subjected to one or more forms of torture by state security forces, with the goal of inducing involuntary confessions and collaboration. “The essence of torture has not changed” since the earlier years of the war, the authors concluded. “It has taken root within the state apparatus, to the point where it has become a structural practice and is not subject to change.”
Beyond its quantitative findings—and the fact that it was written by researchers laboring inside the prison—“Torture in El Salvador” remains relevant for its political fury and radical critique of both the U.S. and Salvadoran regimes. “Some time ago, the Salvadoran Government introduced a new concept, called ‘The Policy of Respect for Human Rights,’” the report reads. “It is noteworthy that this occurred at a time when it was also intensifying its struggle against a clearly defined sector of the population: THE WORKERS.” By the mid-1980s, El Salvador had become a “proving ground,” in the authors’ words, for techniques of U.S. imperialism that would soon be deployed elsewhere. The Reagan administration’s anti-Communist campaign in the hemisphere sought to maintain a strategy of low intensity warfare while upholding nominally democratic governance and paying lip service to human rights.
One sentence from the report, originally written in all-caps, stands out for its stark rebuke of this dual project of repression and denial: “The Reagan administration, the declared enemy of humanity, requires that those in positions of responsibility in the oppressive governments and counter-revolutionary movements violate human rights, so they are obliged to learn how to simultaneously violate them and give the impression of being redeemers.”
Today, it would seem, no such pretense is required.
From Human Rights Theater to Authoritarian Spectacle
What once required denial and diplomatic choreography is now openly celebrated and broadcast. Trump, Bukele, and their surrogates revel in public displays of subjection. The arrival of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT in March 2025 was filmed and used as propaganda by the Bukele and Trump governments. Salvadoran authorities routinely allow reporters and social media influencers to tour and film the facility under tightly controlled conditions, while barring access to human rights groups. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem published her own exploitative video of a March 26 visit to the facility.
And yet there are some abuses that they would prefer remain hidden. Outside the view of the cameras, detained Venezuelans were brutalized from the moment the deportation planes landed. A November 2025 report by Human Rights Watch and the Salvadoran-U.S. NGO Cristosal, “You Have Arrived in Hell,” found Venezuelan migrants were systematically tortured at CECOT over the four months that they were held there. Detainees were subjected to daily beatings, sexual assault, isolation, denial of food, water, basic hygiene, and medical care, and relentless psychological abuse.
Read the rest of this article, available open access for a limited time.
Phil Neff is Research Coordinator for the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. He was an international accompanier and staff member with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, and has served on the volunteer board of NISGUA since 2016.