Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador and Trump’s number one Latin American buddy, is a renaissance man for our era. Crypto, memes, reddit. Repression, megaprisons, anti-communism. We take a look at the history of El Salvador and the ascent of the “coolest dictator in the world”.
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Caio Almendra: https://x.com/caioalmendra
The U.S. is Not Special: https://caioalmendra.substack.com/s/the-us-is-not-special
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 320, Bitcoin and Mega Prisons, El Salvador's Naibu Kelly.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Kaiwo Almendra, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Hello, listeners.
Hope you're having a great week.
I wish I could be the bearer of good news, but it seems there's little of that these days.
Instead, I bring you tidings from El Salvador, a country few Americans paid much attention to until Trump began illegally deporting people to a mega prison there without due process.
But instead of covering this ongoing human rights crisis through the breaking news mill, we prefer to explore El Salvador through its contemporary history and current president, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele is a renaissance man for our era.
A dictator, crypto bro, and bargain bin Andrew Tate impersonator.
He also, and I'm sorry to bring this up, but he could pass as Jake Rokitansky's Latin American brother.
What?!
No.
Come on.
I have a picture in here.
You're not going to admit to this.
You don't want to be related to the dictator.
But Caio, Travis, what do you guys think?
Oh, man.
You know, well.
I could totally be your bro, dude.
He looks like if I rubbed Rogaine on my cheeks and chin, I feel like maybe that would be closer.
He has a very penciled-in beard, but he's wearing the kind of hat that I would have worn at 16, which is like white hat.
Very bent brim, kind of tilted back, very much like a high school Jake style here.
Yeah, he doesn't look like you younger.
I feel like he has a kind of resemblance to you now, but you're right.
The beard has that over-manicured look.
That Drake beard.
It's like a Drake beard.
Yeah, it's true.
His mind's kind of patchy and gray.
Look at this shit.
It doesn't grow in.
We should do.
Honestly, I think we should, every person we cover, we should compare physically to Jake.
For a few minutes.
For no reason.
That's going to be disappointing for a lot of people when the final consensus is that I'm much more handsome.
Well, you know, I think we all just assumed that was true, but now that it's been spoken, listener, you know what to do.
You've got to write it and tell Jake who's more handsome.
You've got to write it and tell me how cute I am.
Him or the president of El Salvador.
Our guest writer and Latin American correspondent is joining us all the way from Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil, that's right, it's Caio Almendra.
How's it going, Caio?
I'm doing fine.
In Brazil, we're expecting Bolsonaro to be arrested every day soon, so I have some packed beers on the bottom of the fridge, just waiting for the day.
Sorry, I'm doing fine.
That's good.
It sounds like you guys are ready for queuing on someone from the inside promising that he's already been arrested and or is imminently going to be arrested.
Just more 22 hours.
Just more 22 hours.
You know, it's interesting here because if Trump did get arrested, I think I would start drinking again.
But if he doesn't get arrested, I might start drinking again.
I really, I really, I really, I, hey.
What matters is the bottle.
What matters is the baby bottle.
What matters is the wine bottle.
What matters is the bottle episode, which this is one of.
All of our character arcs are going to resolve by the end of this.
I mean, I don't know.
I think there are a few things we don't do in America.
We don't regulate guns regardless of how many children are killed.
And we don't prosecute elites regardless of how many terrible things they've done.
So I don't know.
It's not going to happen in my lifetime.
El Salvador is a small strip of land in Central America that faces the Pacific Ocean and shares borders with Honduras and Nicaragua.
The country's economy is largely sustained by the export of sugar, coffee, and fruit, mainly to the U.S. Half of its 6 million inhabitants live below the poverty line, and one-sixth suffer from hunger.
18% are illiterate, and the infant mortality rate stands at 2 per 100 births.
One of the country's main sources of income is remittances sent by immigrant workers to their families back home.
For this reason, since 2001, the country's official currency has been the U.S. dollar.
One million Salvadorans live abroad, most of them in the U.S. So you might expect the country's president to be concerned about Donald Trump's promise to deport all immigrants.
But President Nayib Bukele thinks outside of the box.
History of El Salvador El Salvador's history is not so different from most Latin American and Caribbean countries.
After independence, engineered by the country's landowners, land remained concentrated in the hands of a few.
This led to popular uprisings that were violently suppressed by military forces backed by the U.S. The land conflict and authoritarianism were so defining in El Salvador's history that the country even experienced an unusual dispute with its neighbor, Honduras.
Facing overpopulation, or rather an unequal distribution of land, many people began migrating to the less densely populated Honduras and occupying unused plots.
Now, they should have known free real estate is for Americans!
This land may have been vacant, but it had owners, and they responded by violently expelling the Salvadoran immigrants.
This created tensions between the authoritarian governments of the Honduran and Salvadoran Codillos.
But since this is Latin America...
Everything, quote-unquote, got resolved in a soccer match.
The 1970 World Cup qualifier played in 1969, where the players, fans, and caudillos hugged it out, settled their differences, and lived happily ever after as good neighbors.
Just kidding.
In fact, the fans escalated insults into physical attacks, and the Salvadoran government cut diplomatic ties with Honduras and launched a military invasion.
The conflict lasted four days until the Organization of American States intervened and ended what became known as the Football War.
I mean, it feels like every time we do a Latin America episode, all the prejudice is just confirmed.
Yeah, yeah.
It seems like the purpose of these episodes is to reinforce negative stereotypes about this region.
No, it's to reinforce the fact that football...
AKA soccer is the best sport in the world.
And that you guys are on some weak sauce, some weak shit.
You guys are on weird derivative shit.
Until you get your national team to the level, you know?
We need at least a semi-final.
If not, reach the final before we have any respect for you guys.
Unless you point a gun at us.
In which case, I as a Latin American will say yes sir.
I was sort of hoping this would be like a robot jock situation where, like, they settle all wars, like, on the football field.
Like, it's just kind of a big event and only a handful of people get hurt instead of, like, thousands and thousands of soldiers.
But apparently not that type of situation.
But keep looking out, like, in our scripts for, you know, a robot jocks.
I think this is about number three or four.
Yeah, there's been a few robot jocks related situations.
Over 300, well, many more than that.
But yeah, I'll keep my eye out and I'll keep perusing the scripts the night before to see places where I might be able to fit that reference in.
Where can I get this reference in?
Do you know the Gracie family, the inventors of BJJ, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?
Yeah.
Yeah, one of the most important, I don't know if it's Elio Grace or other, he actually have a long book about how everything could be solved by changing wars with BJJ matches.
Every country should have their own BJJ team and no more wars.
Just one year, everything could be solved by a single match of BJJ.
That is so awesome.
You don't think this is kind of like, it's like, he's like, listen, this is the sport from my country.
Also, I am the best at it.
Why don't we use this to resolve all conflicts?
That's interesting.
Interesting take.
That's like if I were to write a book.
About, like, I'll be like, well, I'll be like, we disagree about these tariffs.
Meet me on the court in NBA 2K and we can get this solved.
Well, there is Fuchivoli.
There is really more Brazilian sport than BJJ.
There's a lot of BJJers in the U.S., right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We just don't, like, emphasize the word BJJ because it just sounds like blowjob, yeah.
So, unfortunately, the next line of the script is, this was the most violent case of hooliganism slash sports-related violence ever recorded, leaving 5,000 dead.
Jesus Christ!
I hope you had a good chuckle, guys.
Oh my God, that's like two 9-11s.
Comparison.
Yeah, it's not good.
It's not good.
It was a full-mouth war for six days, so it started as a rulligan case, it started as a soccer match, but it goes all the way to a full war.
But the war was sponsored by Heineken!
In the background of all of this was the U.S.'s explicit prohibition of any form of agrarian reform in Latin America, triggering a migration and social crisis that was, quote-unquote, pacified through sheer force.
The Civil War.
Like other Central American countries, El Salvador experienced a delayed Cold War, culminating in a civil war during the 1980s in the final days of the USSR.
During Carter's administration, Mika Brzezinski's father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had a policy of arming paramilitary organizations to hunt down the left.
This was the case with the Mujahideen and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and El Salvador experienced a smaller-scale version of this reality.
Thus, during the Carter, Reagan and Bush senior administrations, the U.S. sponsored a civil war between the military government and paramilitary organizations, the infamous Reagan death squads, against leftist guerrillas, particularly the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front,
or FMLN.
Fuck my life now!
Sorry.
Farabundo Marti was a communist from the early 20th century who fought against the American occupation of El Salvador and was executed at the behest of the U.S. government.
He's a kind of Salvadoran Emiliano Zapata.
But who were the FMLN's enemies?
The Salvadoran government not only had financial support from the U.S., but also one of the most famous figures in the country's history, Roberto Dobisson.
A former military officer and founder of the far-right party Aliança Republicana Nacionalista, ARENA, the same acronym as the Brazilian Dictatorships Party.
Of aristocratic French descent, Dobrisson was trained at the School of the Americas, a U.S. military institution known for training Latin American dictators and torturers.
He absorbed the doctrine of counter-revolutionary warfare, which justified kidnappings, assassinations, and most notably...
He helped organize death squads that terrorized peasants, union leaders, and intellectuals.
He was also directly linked to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Connected to liberation theology, Romero became one of the greatest symbols of the fight for human rights in El Salvador.
Dovison's strategy of terror was peculiar.
He would go on TV to denounce communist infiltration in the government, and those he named were often found dead or simply disappeared thanks to his group or other far-right militias.
This created a permanent atmosphere of terror, forcing those mentioned to flee or go into exile.
In 1984, Debusson was called before the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America, also known as the Kissinger Commission, which aimed to investigate what the U.S. was sponsoring in the region.
On that occasion, the AFL-CIO questioned him about the suspicious number of people he mentioned on TV who later ended up dead.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, this sounds like the worst game show ever.
You know, it's like running man shit, dude.
Stephen King would come up with this.
Every day you get to get up and the president will tell you who's gonna die!
It's like when I was in high school, you would have to call this hotline to see if you made the cast list for the school plays.
They would read out all the names.
Yeah, it's exactly like that.
Or we could just simplify it as an oral death note.
You just say the name and the person is dead.
Yeah.
So when Dobusson was asked about this by the AFL-CIO, he said, many I mentioned are not killed.
Don't worry.
Yeah.
You're paying so much attention to those that I mentioned who do get gruesome deaths within days.
What about those who survive?
Sometimes I inspire stochastic terrorism against people and they manage to escape.
No one gives me credit for that.
In another instance, feeling comfortable among German journalists, he made this shocking statement about the country's history.
Quote, You realize that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism, and you began to kill them.
I love telling them that, like, they're going to be like, yeah!
Great!
Yeah, yeah, man!
Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah.
Germany in the 80s, totally fine to be like, you know that thing we did?
That was pretty cool, right?
And people like me are like, hmm, I guess I am responsible.
Jake, you can't be agreeing with them.
Known as Blowtorch Bob for allegedly using blowtorches to torture prisoners, Dobisson was one of the main architects of violent repression against any opposition to the regime.
And I just imagine this man is the most evil French bastard.
Just a mustache-twirling villain.
I could look at a photo.
I was looking for a photo.
Oh yeah, I'd love to see what this gentleman looks like.
Wow.
Oh, wow.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
Uh-oh.
Julian, you're in the same exact position as he is right now.
Look at your hand.
Look at your cig.
We both smoke cigs.
He's not smoking a Roli, though, right there.
That's a proper...
Proper sick.
Good hair.
I mean, he's a handsome guy.
Yeah, he was.
All right.
Okay, we're going to move on.
We're not actually going to do the handsome guy thing right after we...
He's got a chain on, too.
We've got that in common.
This is Blowtorch Bob, okay?
You can't be lusting after Blowtorch Bob.
I like his chain.
I like his watch.
Regarding my previous instance, on the song, he was not handsome.
Blowtorch Bob.
We don't have to give it to Blowtorch Bob.
He was a horrible creature.
He was a torturous asshole.
Torturous asshole.
That just reminds me of those bumper stickers you'll see around here where it's like, don't be mean.
Being an asshole doesn't net you any points.
Anyways, despite his history of massacres and torture, Dobysol managed to turn this violence into political capital.
He founded ARENA, a party that mixed ultranationalism, neoliberalism, and militarism, and ruled El Salvador for almost 20 years after the war ended, implementing economic reforms that still shape the country today.
The FMLN's story begins with a peasant strike at Hacienda, California in 1979, during which they demanded better wages and the shortening of their 70-hour work weeks.
The National Guard was mobilized, stoking the peasants'revolt further.
This rise in militancy led to the merger of El Salvador's five communist organizations.
The Farabundo Marti Popular Liberation Forces, or FPL, the People's Revolutionary Army, or ERP, the National Resistance, or RN, the Communist Party of El Salvador, or PCES, and the Revolutionary Party of Central America.
Together they formed the FMLN.
Despite their names, a significant part of this coalition consisted of Catholic leftists who educated and politicized peasants, encouraging them to organize collectively for their rights and affirming that it was their religious duty to fight alongside the poor.
Caio, you've done some work in this kind of, like, leftist religious world.
Yeah, I did.
I worked for Pastoral Carceraria, that is the Catholic left organization that takes care of prisoners.
And a lot of the stories here is a little bit about Catholic left in prisons.
We used to do revision criminal cases and some social workers among people arrested and so on.
But I'm not a Catholic.
This is the weird thing.
I'm an atheist.
But they are so relevant in Brazil that mostly we often deal with the Catholic left.
Especially, you know, Brazil Worker Party was founded by the Catholic left, as is the Landless Workers Movement, MST, and MTSD, the movements of ruthless people, people without houses.
They are all...
Here in America, we like to separate our religion and communism.
Here in America, we killed all our communists.
The FMLN trained peasants, especially those expelled by landowners, to fight against the government.
Think Shane or The Magnificent Seven.
Where do you get these references, Caio?
I wrote an episode of a podcast in Brazil about Westerns, movies.
It's out on next Friday.
Oh, nice.
And I'm talking about the connection between Shane, liberty violence, and the story of the Westerns and U.S. imperialism.
So, yeah, I get a lot of...
That sounds very interesting.
Yeah, unfortunately in Portuguese, but you know, I can translate the script and send to you.
These peasants were called Salvatrucha.
A combination of the words Salvador, or savior, and alert.
Between October 15th, 1979 and January 16th, 1992, the U.S. financed the Civil War by sending $7 billion to paramilitaries.
This is equivalent to roughly $1,500 per Salvadoran, the price of a Volkswagen Beetle and a year's worth of gas.
I love when, like, at the end of a U.S. intervention, you like...
Tally all the money, and you're like, oh, we could have just, like, literally paid off every El Salvadoran, like, manually made them decently well-off.
Goddamn.
I made this comparison with Volkswagen Beetles and your worth of gas because, you know, it's a means of production, a simple one.
People can become taxi drivers.
Their life would be way better off.
Yeah.
The result?
No free cars and 75,000 dead.
Mostly peasants and indigenous people in what is called the Salvadoran genocide.
The war also destroyed the country's infrastructure and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
This accelerated Salvadoran migration to the U.S. Even churches were accused of communist infiltration and persecuted, further damaging an important part of local culture and life.
Similar to what happened in other Latin American countries like Brazil, dismantling guerrilla movements led to organized crime in two ways.
First, guerrillas produced a large number of individuals skilled in evading repression, knowledge that bolsters drug trafficking, while police and military, who became untouchable during the dictatorship, started running crimes like kidnappings, illegal gambling, protection rackets,
and even illegal abortion clinics.
Which, that might be the one cool thing they do, I guess.
I have a recommendation of a movie.
It's called Como Dois Irmãos.
Since, you know, Brazil won an Oscar this year for our first time, if I'm still here.
Como Dois Irmãos tells a story about two guys that were friends, despite one being black and poor, the other one being middle class and white.
And the white guy was part of the guerrilla.
the black guy was arrested for some minor charges and they remet in the prisons during the democratization, the end of the dictatorship.
And there, the guys from the guerrilla taught common prisoners how to evade the police.
So it began what was called Comando Vermelho, or Red Commando.
It's one of the main gangs in Brazil.
It's deeply associated
When did it come out?
I think 15 years ago.
Okay, cool.
The name is Like Two Brothers.
Como Dois Irmãos.
Over time, these factions—drugs, police, paramilitaries—formed mafia-like organizations.
In Brazil, for example, this led to the rise of milicias in Rio de Janeiro.
This might explain why Mara Salvatrucha, literally the Gang of the Salvatrucha, or perhaps the Gang that Helped Salvadorans, became the official name of MS-13.
Just as the Mujahideen later evolved into international terrorist groups responsible for 9-11, the U.S.-funded Salvadoran civil war led to the rise of MS-13.
But of course.
MS-13.
MS-13 was created in California.
Not Hacienda, California in Tierra Blanca, El Salvador, but California, USA.
Specifically, MS-13 is as much a product of Los Angeles as the Hollywood sign and police brutality.
During the mass migration caused by the Salvadoran Civil War, impoverished Salvadorans fled to California.
Many were children, some orphans.
MS-13 is infamously composed mostly of children.
First, the Civil War took their parents.
Then migration uprooted them from their homeland, where they might have had extended family or even a communal way of living, which is common in indigenous-influenced Latin America, where orphans would have been better cared for.
Instead, they arrived fleeing violence and were left to fend for themselves.
They weren't seen as war victims in need of special government attention.
This was the Reagan era, marked by massive cuts to social programs and an increase in policing in prisons.
Facing institutional violence from migration officers, racial tensions, and incarceration, some of them formed what they called a self-protection group, especially in jail, for Salvadorans.
It didn't take long before it became a criminal gang.
The carceral state, as always, served as a training and recruitment center for organized crime, while also providing networking opportunities.
Sometimes that networking extended into the police, prosecutors, and judges.
Those networking opportunities grew further in 1992 when the Chapultepec Peace Accords dismantled the FMLN's armed forces and ended the civil war.
The truce was followed by mass deportation of Salvadorans, particularly MS-13 members.
Now entrenched in El Salvador's carceral state, MS-13 replicated the same model as in the United States, recruiting and training criminals, extorting inmates, and networking with police, prosecutors, and judges.
If the Civil War granted MS-13 local power, post-war deportations made it an international force.
Gang members returned to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, where they found environments conducive to the gang's expansion due to the political, economic, and social instability caused at least partially by U.S. interventions in the region.
The absence of effective governmental structures in these countries facilitated the recruitment and consolidation of MS-13.
Furthermore, the connections they made during their time in the U.S. remained intact.
Meanwhile, a large number of ex-combatants from the Civil War had to re-enter the labor market.
Many of them had spent years solely fighting, many had been trained by the CIA, and few had job prospects outside of organized crime.
Lastly, with the U.S. dollar being significantly stronger than local currencies, bribing politicians, judges, and police officers became remarkably easy.
The same process happened with the Barrio 18 organization, also Californian, founded in the 1960s.
Initially formed by the descendants of Mexicans, it absorbed many Salvadoran refugees from the beginning of El Salvador's civil war.
It became a major rival of MS-13, and also expanded internationally with the wave of deportations in the 1990s.
More decentralized than MS-13, Barrio 18 is notorious for its violent internal wars over territorial and managerial disputes.
Today, the two gangs employ over 60,000 people in El Salvador.
In the U.S., according to a 2009 estimate, MS-13 had 10,000 members across 42 states and Washington, D.C. The gang is also strong in neighboring Honduras and Guatemala.
It spread to Mexico under the name Ramfla Nacional.
There are even indications of Salvatrucha activity in Canada and Spain.
Globally, estimates of the number of MS-13 members ranges from 30,000 to 50,000 individuals.
The gang's main source of income includes drug trafficking, extortion, human trafficking, and smuggling.
While it's difficult to determine the exact amount of money MS-13 moves, its operation generate millions of dollars annually, financing its criminal activities and expanding its influence.
I didn't know all that much about MS-13 other than it being used as a sort of catch-all for people that the Trump administration wants to threaten their fellow conservatives with.
Yeah, what people don't realize is MS-13 is actually awesome.
I'm actually joining them.
I mean, well, you do live in Highland Park, so.
Yeah, yeah.
I have a stick-and-poke tattoo.
I hope they don't make fun of me for being a bit on the hipster side, but I'm sure they have, like, I don't know, a small part of MS-13 that's just, like, has glasses and shit.
I don't think you're, like, crazy enough.
Like, to be a white guy in that kind of gang, you have to kind of be crazier than most.
Like, you have to make up for your whiteness, I feel like.
I'm pretty sure they need graphic designers as every organization that sells products.
You know what?
That's true.
How fucking dare you make fun of me and half of our audience?
I'm joking, but in real, the worst kind of hemp that you can do is kind of marijuana that you can buy.
They came with small stickers saying their brand, and it's usually the funniest graphic designer ever.
A joke, a pun about something that's really happening.
So Neymar, a soccer player, came back to Brazil, and everyone was called Neymar because he used to fall down.
And he'd say, we'll fall down as Neymar does, and so on.
And there's this sticker on the small package of marijuana.
It's a small joke and the worst graphic design you can ever found.
It's awesome.
That's awesome.
They're hoping that, like, the shittiness of the graphic design, like, somehow distracts from the low quality of the cannabis.
Exactly.
I do remember in France getting, like, given some hash in, like, a little, like, plastic Ziploc that had, like, custom printing on it.
And it was, like, one of these, like, anti-COVID denier doctors that got big over there called Dr. Raoul.
And, like, he's just, like, smoking weed.
He's like, this shit fucking cures COVID.
They're the same in France.
They have, like, themed drug bags.
That's so funny.
Yeah.
Awesome.
In America, now with, like, all the dispensaries and stuff, the graphic design, oh, man, I mean, it looks like you're buying...
Nah, it's annoying.
Yeah, it's Apple.
It looks like you're buying teas.
It looks like you're buying something at, like, World Market.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It's crazy.
You know what this reminds me?
This reminds me of the scene from Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind that Kate Winston was saying, oh, I would love to be the girl that decides the names of the...
That would be like purple hash and blah blah blah.
It's such a pompous, useless name.
Yeah, absolutely.
Mine would all be, like, Ghostbusters and Turtles references.
That's how you know it would be my brand.
You'd be like, oh, oh, it's a Slimer.
Oh, it's the trap.
You're gonna get trapped on the couch.
Yeah, I feel like weed culture's always been really annoying, but now I actually miss it because everything is, like, gentrified apple store bullshit and, like, hipster weed brands.
And it's like, ah, man, bring back, like, I don't know, like, the weed plant that has red eyes.
Because it's also smoking.
The neoliberal era in El Salvador.
After the Civil War ended, the FMLN was legalized as a political party.
Salvadoran politics became divided between two parties.
Arena, founded by Blowtorch Bob, and the FMLN.
Essentially, politics became a continuation of the Civil War.
Right-wing paramilitaries versus peasant guerrillas.
With Arena's victory in the 1990s, El Salvador was plagued by a force even worse than war.
Economists.
With the country devastated by conflict, the shock doctrine was applied without mercy.
The country underwent neoliberal reforms encouraged by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, and the World Bank, which aimed to stabilize the economy, attract investment, and reduce state intervention.
However, the effect of these reforms were mixed, leading to both some economic growth and increased inequality.
In the early 90s, the Salvadoran government privatized banks, telecommunications, and public services.
This policy aimed to modernize the economy and court foreign investors.
Investors that failed to materialize.
Unemployment skyrocketed, as did labor precarity.
Many public employees lost their jobs and ended up in the informal sector.
Becoming increasingly dependent on remittances from Salvadorans living in the U.S., the country gradually moved towards adopting the dollar, until in 2001, the full dollarization of the economy was formally implemented, and the Salvadoran Colon was retired.
Over the decade, remittances became a significant part of the Salvadoran GDP.
Money sent home by foreign Salvadorans was a fundamental pillar of the economy and helped millions of families survive.
At their peak, right before the 2008 financial crisis, remittances accounted for 17% of the country's GDP.
Despite moderate economic growth, the benefits were not distributed equally.
Social inequality remained high, with much of the population living in poverty and working under the table.
Unemployment and the lack of opportunities pushed many young people into criminal gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18. El Salvador also sought greater integration into the global economy by signing trade agreements with the United States and other Central American countries.
Market liberalization brought cheaper imported products, but it also hurt local industries and small farmers who could not compete with large foreign corporations.
This further concentrated land ownership in the country and shifted agricultural production towards export-oriented plantations.
So, this is, like, the story of so much of Asia and all South America.
I mean, everyone that, like, that weird Clinton, like, wave of economists came for was left in utter fucking ruin.
It's crazy, man.
What a terrible, terrible fucking turn of events.
I mean...
It's still relevant in Brazil and in Latin America today.
it has a sort of a coincidence because after the wall fell and the USSR was dissolved, inflation got lower in everywhere in the whole world.
So if you're leaving
In the 90s, you were not.
And immediately what you said, well, this is what neoliberalism gives to us.
Curb inflation.
So everything will be fine.
So we'll have to have neoliberalism forever.
And it worked.
It worked.
In Brazil, we have eight years of FHC plus four years of color, so 12 years.
In El Salvador, they have 20 years of unstoppable neoliberalism until the pink tide won there.
The Salvadorian pink tide.
The pink tide refers to the wave of center-left governments elected in Latin America, many of which included former guerrilla fighters such as Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Pepe Mujica in Uruguay.
Initiated by Hugo Chavez, Lula, and Evo Morales, the trend quickly spread across several Latin American countries.
The process can be described as a consequence of the decline of neoliberalism in the region, particularly due to the growing unpopularity of its policies.
In 2009, the pink tide finally reached El Salvador with the election of Mauricio Funes.
Funes was not a guerrilla fighter.
He was a journalist.
He studied at a Jesuit school and university, aligning himself with the Catholic left.
During the Civil War, he lost his brother Roberto, a leftist militant who was assassinated by the police.
This event radicalized him, leading him to interview guerrilla fighters and gain some notoriety for his work.
Later, he worked for CNN's local branch, where he hosted an interview program and became identified with the center-left.
His arrival to the Pink Tide also fueled a conspiracy theory that deeply fed the far-right's paranoia.
Funes was married to Vanda Pignato, a Brazilian workers' party militant and advisor to Lula's government until 2011.
Pignato was an advisor in Funes' administration where she implemented the Women's City Program, which consolidated different social benefits into a single location exclusively serving women.
The program was considered a model and was later implemented in Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala.
For the far right, this was proof of a grand Latin American coalition, aiming for the spread of communism, and that Pignato had been sent on a mission to seduce Funes on Lula's behalf.
Which, of course, makes perfect sense, considering they met in 1992, 10 years before Lula became president, and 17 years before Funes was elected.
But, of course, none of these details matter to people who want to see a conspiracy in action.
Not to mention, like, it's so great.
Like, anti-communists accusing communists of, like, being in on a conspiracy, like, in this era is fucking awesome because they're basically just like, yeah, they must be as organized as we are, right?
And unfortunately, the left rarely is.
But, you know.
As a whole, conspiracies criticizing Latin American unity and harmony are a staple of the local far-right.
Research organizations, international cooperation programs, or even leftist international forums, such as the Sao Paulo Forum, are rebranded in memes as URSAL, Union of Soviet Latin American Republics, and so on.
For some reason, regional integration is seen as a leftist policy, while antagonism between Latin American countries is considered beneficial, perhaps because this serves the U.S. interests in the region.
Many such memes involve fantasies about links between the Latin American left and drug trafficking, despite numerous studies demonstrating the close ties between anti-communist paramilitaries and the drug trade in Colombia, El Salvador, and elsewhere.
The fact that the first lady worked on a women's assistance program was a historic feminist, met the president while covering the Civil War, and so on only added fuel to the conspiratorial fires.
In 2010, one year after his election, Funes became the most popular president in Latin America, and possibly in the Democratic world, achieving an approval rating of 88.2, which that's like very near, like, listeners...
Yeah, that's crazy.
Listeners give me an 88.1.
So, I'm soon...
Sucks for you.
Yeah, I'm sure you're at 88.3.
So...
This was the peak of the pink tide, with Lula leaving office after his second term with an 81% approval rating and Chile's Michelle Bachelet at 78%.
However, not everything was perfect.
The Salvadoran economy remained dollarized, its industrial sector was weak, and gang power was still on the rise.
Funes was highly competent in mitigating some of these issues, implementing minimal social policies, but transforming El Salvador would require much more time.
To address the problem of organized crime, the FUNA's government took an extremely delicate but quite logical measure.
Throughout this episode, we've seen how prisons with inhumane conditions were essential to the reproduction and growth of gangs.
So the government partnered with the Catholic Church.
It's worth noting that historically, the Latin American Catholic Church, especially the left-wing, has been active in prisons, fighting for better conditions for inmates, rehabilitation, and strengthening public belief in the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.
Together, the government and the church facilitated a secret peace agreement in March of 2012 called Trega Entre Pandillas, or the Gang Truce.
The government committed to improving prison conditions, increasing inmates'visitation rights, improving food quality, and investigating reports of torture.
In exchange, MS-13 and Barrio 18 would reduce the number of homicides, kidnappings, and extortions.
There was no legalization of any activity.
The gangs would remain illegal and continue to be
In March...
30 gang leaders were transferred from a maximum security prison to lower security facilities.
The negotiations involved the Minister of Public Security, David Mungayapayas, a former congressman, Raul Mijango, and Bishop Fabio Colindres, under the supervision of President Mauricio Funes.
During the first 21 days of March 2012, the daily average of gang-related homicides dropped to 5, compared to 14 in the previous months.
The government began celebrating the achievements of its security policy, which never celebrate.
Serious mistake.
The government initially denied negotiating with gangs, insisting that the reduction in violence was due to security policies.
However, in September 2012, it officially acknowledged its role in brokering the truce.
Two months later, as signs of fragility in the truce emerged, peace zones were created, where gangs agreed to cease criminal activities, surrender weapons, and seek reconciliation with rivals.
In return, the police reduced nighttime operations and the government implemented employment programs for those willing to leave gang life.
By March 2014, the daily average of homicides had risen to eight, indicating the truce was weakening.
In May 2014, amid conflicts between gangs, President Funes declared the agreement a failure, with homicide rates returning to previous levels.
This information may shock American audiences, but police forces negotiate gang truces all over the world.
In Rio de Janeiro, when a left-wing congressman became the security secretary and cracked down on police corruption, he gave a perfect definition.
Crime is a bunch of young, shirtless, flip-flop wearing orphans holding guns, but the state is the one that organizes crime.
This logic applies from Fort Bragg to Afghanistan, from the Central American cocaine route to distribution and consumption in the United States.
When we talk about the hypocrisy of the war on drugs, we're not just referring to the fact that poor consumers are imprisoned while legislators use drugs freely.
We're also talking about how police forces know they can never fully suppress the drug trade, so they become its informal regulators, and in many cases, participants.
To make matters worse, violent crackdowns on gangs end up serving the purpose of increasing the bribes that drug traffickers must pay to the police.
Post-Civil War El Salvador fell into a horrific cycle.
Social calamity was exploited by gangs, which in turns worsened the calamity.
With all of its flaws, improving prison conditions, ensuring jobs for those leaving gangs, and reducing police violence were measures that pointed towards breaking this cycle.
It was also, of course, illegal.
In May 2023, former President Mauricio Funes was sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison for his involvement in the truce, accused of participating in illegal groups and dereliction of duty.
He died of a heart attack on January 21, 2025, while in exile in Nicaragua.
Despite the scandal, Funes managed to elect his successor, Comandante Leonel Gonzalez, one of the FMLN guerrilla leaders during the Civil War.
Leonel had served as Fuenas' vice president and won the election with just 50.11% of the vote in the second round.
His administration was marked by progressive initiatives such as legalizing abortion in cases of rape and risk to the mother's life, re-establishing diplomatic relations with China, and restricting mining for environmental reasons.
However, with such a narrow margin, his political power was very limited.
Bukele, the radical leftist.
Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was born in 1981.
His grandparents were Palestinian Christians who fled during the early 20th century wave of immigration when Palestine transitioned from Ottoman to British rule.
His father converted to Islam and became a successful businessman.
He was also a well-known leftist and founded a marketing company specializing in political campaigns to support the FMLN.
In his high school yearbook, Bukele labeled himself a class terrorist.
Shortly after graduating, Bukele founded his own marketing company and worked for his father's company, always serving the FMLN.
In 2012, at the height of Funes' popularity, Bukele entered politics, running for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a town with fewer than 8,000 people.
Sort of Mayor Pete, you know?
Son of a leftist, becomes the mayor of a small town, eventually rules through Bitcoin and prison.
We can only hope to find out what Mayor Pete has under the hood.
During his municipal term, Bukele used funds from ALBA, the Venezuelan PDVSA branch in El Salvador, where that's an oil company.
To create social programs for young people.
He also showed signs of megalomania.
He launched a high-altitude balloon to take pictures of El Salvador from the stratosphere as a way to encourage science and technology education among children and teenagers.
Kind of a micro-SpaceX.
Just two years later, he ran for mayor of the capital, San Salvador, leaving a city councilor as the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan.
In his campaign, he continued to claim his radical leftist stance, but began talking about directly confronting gangs.
It always starts with like a hard-on-crime thing and goes to shit.
As I said, being hard-on-crime is a way to raise bribes.
Yeah, yeah, the price of bribes.
Bukele inaugurated a municipal market as a way to reduce the number of street vendors.
The market was built on gang-controlled lands and rumors began circulating that Bukele had negotiated with the gangs to allow its construction.
Additionally, many vendors who moved into the new market started accusing gangs of extorting them.
Extorting street vendors is a common type of organized crime throughout Latin America.
The apple of discord.
After taking office as mayor, Bukele's relationship with the FMLN began to sour.
He criticized Funes for failing to turn social investments into real improvements for the population.
With Leonel's narrow election as Funes' successor, Bukele started playing a bold game.
He wanted to run for president as a member of the FMLN while criticizing the party from the center.
You ever heard this one before, guys?
The situation exploded during the municipal budget vote when members of his own FMLN party voted against him.
In a tense hearing, Bukele called Councilwoman Shoshitle Marcelli a damn traitor and a witch, and he threw an apple at her.
Classic politics.
Yeah.
The act of misogyny was strongly condemned by the FMLN, but it went viral on social media.
Pages called Throw Apples at the Witch gained thousands of followers overnight.
Oh my god.
I know!
This is straight up a Simpsons thing.
I love it.
Bukele supporters took advantage of the controversy, creating campaign-style graphics where he was seen kindly offering apples to the public.
This is such an American thing, too.
It's like, oh, do apples trigger you, libs?
Oh, well, our new flag is the apple.
Just everything is symbol.
The FMLN also stepped into a big pile of dog shit.
A month after the incident, Bukele was expelled from the party.
At his expulsion hearing, they brought an apple, supposedly the one he had thrown.
The internet quickly pointed out this was impossible since an apple over a month old would be completely rotten.
The whole thing took on a kind of harambe effect, while the left used it as a symbol of its own victimization, the right used the supposed overreaction to portray the left as cringe, unreliable, overly dramatic, and cynical.
The apple then became a polarizing symbol in the country's politics, a negative symbol of gender-based violence and sexism for feminists, and a symbol of resistance against feminism for the far right, spawning thousands of memes and even appearing in right-wing street protests.
In the end, the apple came to represent the idea that the left was more interested in its own internal drama than in improving the country's living conditions.
Up to that point, Bukele had remained silent about the sudden support he was receiving from the right.
Expelled from the party, the once-class terrorist joined center-right parties before founding his own, called New Ideas, with which he ran for president.
In his rhetoric, he positioned himself against the traditional parties, both the FMLN, which had expelled him, and the right-wing arena, presenting himself as the ultimate outsider.
But unlike Bolsonaro, he didn't call both sides leftists.
He simply called them corrupt, claiming to represent a centrist position that would take the best ideas from each side.
He repeated the empty centrist liberal mantra, neither left nor right.
Forward.
This is so Michael, man.
This is the awful path of Michael as well, who became an insane right-wing pro-police lunatic.
And a huge piece of shit is like, he's like...
Yeah, no, France forward, man.
His party's just called, like, France is walking.
Like, we're all going.
I love this shit where people are like, yeah, the political spectrum's fucked, man.
We just, like, need to, like, move forward.
And then it's like, oh, what do you mean by that, man?
And under his breath, he's just like, mega prisons, Bitcoin.
France is walking sounds like a bad Gerard Butler action movie.
Yeah, France is walking.
It literally means, like, France is marching, is more like it, actually, you know?
Which also, actually, that sounds bad.
That sounds like we're all in, like, Nazi uniforms.
Yeah, we don't need to...
2025, nobody needs to march.
Don't march anywhere.
Also, don't go forward.
But also, don't go backwards.
Just don't move.
We need a party that offers no movement.
Yeah, we need, like, the Otter Pop Party.
Wait a second.
We already have the Democrats.
The presidency.
With massive and highly aggressive use of social media, including insults and the blocking of critics, Bukele was elected in a landslide ending 30 years of Arena vs.
FMLN duopoly.
His campaign was largely devoid of policy, with his main proposals being investment in infrastructure and the creation of security zones.
He seemed like a typical centrist, until he took office in mid-2019 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At this point, things started to resemble the scene from Woody Allen's Bananas when the dictator takes over and begins making insane proposals.
I am your new president.
From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.
Silence!
In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour.
Underwear will be worn on the outside.
So we can check.
Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.
What's the Spanish word for straightjacket?
Power has driven him mad.
We must have a new leader.
The one about children being 16 years old is a very libertarian project.
Yeah, exactly.
His first authoritarian measure, however, did not immediately reveal a clear ideological shift.
Contrary to the global far-right response from figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, Bukele took extreme measures to enforce COVID-19 quarantine.
30 days in prison for anyone caught outside their home without permission, with no trial.
If the police or armed forces found you on the street, they would send you to jail immediately.
El Salvador's Supreme Court intervened, prohibiting the order, but Bukele simply ignored them.
Not even the fact that the prisons were overcrowded and completely overrun by COVID made him reconsider the measure.
In the city of Puerto de la Libertad, or Freedom Port, things were even more drastic.
When he learned that businesses had not shut down as he ordered, he commanded a military siege of the region.
Many cases of police violence were reported.
The president also prohibited leaving home even for justified reasons.
Only hospital visits were allowed.
And no, there was no home food distribution or any welfare measures for those under quarantine.
So this is just, yeah, stupid.
During this period of social isolation, Bukele's tendency to use social media as a political tool exploded.
I am become meme.
Yeah, pretty much.
I'm just I was living the meme.
It's like this living the dream and there's living the meme and it's pretty much what's happening
The comparisons between Bukele and Musk don't stop there.
Becoming a kind of meme actor, he was placed into various personas depending on the trending topic.
In the fight against gangs, he appeared in AI-generated slop edits as Rambo or other action heroes.
On economic issues, he embraced the crypto-bro persona, and sometimes even what could be described as a racist caricature of a pimp.
He also began posting the stonks meme, seemingly unaware of the irony that it was originally meant to mock bad investors.
He started tweeting about buy the dip.
When critics emerged, he responded with, okay, boomer.
See, like, we just never, like, elder millennials, we should not be allowed the internet.
It's become clear that we also could not handle the internet.
No, I think that it's generally a mistake when you allow Reddit to rule your country by proxy, which seems to be what's happening here.
Straight up.
Behind this facade, extreme social and political transformations were unfolding.
Just six months after being elected, Bukele invaded parliament with heavily armed guards to force the approval of a police salary increase and a loan for purchasing more weapons.
A year later, after a midterm election victory, Congress dismissed the judges of El Salvador's Supreme Court, as well as the Attorney General, who had resisted some of Bukele's early reforms.
Bukele declared himself...
The coolest dictator in the world!
And a philosopher king, which smells a lot of like this, you know, return with a V type shit.
Bukele imprisoned more than 1% of the country's population in his first term.
Dude, that is truly impressive.
His strategy for eliminating the societal woes caused by drug trafficking was simple.
Arrest entire families for gang association.
That way, there would be no more fatherless or motherless children joining gangs in place of their imprisoned relatives.
Many family members of gang violence victims or prisoners were arrested for possessing gang-related items at home.
The most prudent recommendation became burning all personal belongings of any deceased or imprisoned relatives to avoid being arrested for gang association.
Bukele combined these practices with intense data manipulation regarding violence and police-related disappearances.
Credible reports suggest that his government began disappearing the bodies of those killed in gang wars to manipulate homicide statistics.
Salvadoran prisons are severely overcrowded, with 250 women crammed into cells designed for 20 bunk beds, forcing them to sleep in shifts.
The food served is often infested with insects and rotten.
Data on prison deaths and illnesses are considered unreliable by international human rights organizations monitoring the country.
During his first term, he built Seacot.
Or Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners.
This is the prison where deportees from Trump's administration are being sent.
The prison recently visited by the dog-killing Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem.
And that's, uh, in her own words, this is not slander.
Despite his rhetoric, data manipulation, and repressive abuses, gang violence remains rampant in El Salvador.
In March of 2022, a surge in gang violence left 62 people dead in a single day, marking the bloodiest crisis of Bukele's presidency.
In response, he issued a decree granting himself emergency powers under the pretext of permanently eliminating gangs.
This measure has been renewed by Congress every single month and remains in effect to this day.
Constitutional guarantees were suspended, allowing police to detain individuals without formal charges for up to 15 days and wiretap anyone's phone without a court order.
The military was deployed, and the number of arrests skyrocketed.
Despite his anti-corruption promises, in his second year in office, Bukele dissolved the International Commission Against Impunity in El Salvador, while it was investigating 12 alleged corruption cases in his administration.
The government justified the decision as a response to the appointment of Ernesto Moixont, former mayor of San Salvador, as an advisor to the Organization of American States, an entity that supported the commission.
In 2023, however, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation revealed that a New York court showed that Bukele had been secretly negotiating a truce with gangs, which is exactly what the leftists did and then were accused of being bad for.
Bukele denied any negotiations were happening.
The press was also heavily repressed under Bukele, not only facing restrictions but also seeing many journalists arrested on dubious charges.
There is strong suspicion of a pact between the government and gangs.
Journalists, critical of the government, are often kidnapped and disappeared by gang members.
The newspaper that first reported Bukele's alleged negotiations with gangs was subjected to a money laundering investigation, causing significant legal trouble for El Faro and disrupting its operations.
Leaked recordings suggested that Bukele's government planned to create a secret intelligence agency to monitor journalists and opposition figures.
Today, El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate in the world, beating longtime champion...
The United States of America.
All right.
Well, at least that.
At least we're not number one in another bad category.
That's why Trump loves him so much.
He's like, you know what?
He's number one, and now we're number two.
And for some reason, in this case, number one is bad, actually, is what I'm being told.
The Salvadorian economy.
Bukela's defining economic policy was the adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar.
The logic seems straightforward.
A significant portion of El Salvador's GDP comes from remittances sent by immigrants to the U.S. like we explored, and Bitcoin transactions promise a faster, cheaper alternative to traditional banking.
To implement this, Bukele launched Chivo Wallet, a state-managed digital wallet backed by a government-held Bitcoin reserve.
But the rollout was a disaster.
Technical glitches, fraud, and security flaws plagued the app from the start.
Many Salvadorans downloaded it just to claim the government promised $30 Bitcoin bonus, then abandoned it.
Widespread skepticism and Bitcoin's volatility made everyday use impractical, and most businesses stuck with dollars.
The government's Bitcoin purchases were just as opaque.
Bukele made high-profile announcements about buying Bitcoin with public funds, but there was no transparency about where or how these assets were stored.
The losses were substantial.
Bitcoin's price plummeted, further straining the country's finances.
Meanwhile, reports emerged that Bukele's family engaged in insider trading ahead of major Bitcoin announcements, allegedly acquiring $9 million in properties with that money directly.
I mean, this is exactly like...
What just later happened here with Trump?
And what's happening with Malay?
It's so cool that they all just did crypto scams on their countries, like, that that's, like, their whole way of extracting money is, like, possibly the dumbest.
Well, it's also the most legal because it's still so new that there's just, like, no real regulation around it.
So they're like, wait a minute, a criminal scheme that I can't get in trouble for?
Like, it's perfect.
Yeah, as if he's gotten in trouble for any of the other ones.
Yeah, sure.
The Bitcoin push was inspired by the Bitcoin Beach Project in El Zonte, a small coastal town where, starting in 2019, anonymous Bitcoin enthusiasts funded an experiment to create a circular crypto economy.
Enthusiasts were building anarcho-capitalist-slash-radical-libertarian enclaves like that all around the world.
The Acapulco crypto story was told in the HBO docuseries The Anarchists, for instance.
Most of them ended really, really badly.
Bukele is seized on the story, selling it as a model for national adoption.
But what worked in a tiny surf town where businesses catered to foreign crypto tourists did not translate to the rest of an entire country.
In fact, a poor population forced to deal with digital money makes them easy prey for all kinds of crypto scammers.
And obviously, widespread crypto usage helped a lot of the drug gangs finance.
Surprise!
Yeah, surprise!
Bitcoin didn't fix it.
Soon, no non-criminal locals wanted to be associated with crypto.
This is, I guess, one of my problems to how, like, incoherent, I guess, the modern right is nowadays, because it's like, if you adopt this international decentralized currency to the exclusion of a national currency, doesn't that weaken your nation in some ways to the benefit of globalists?
Uh-oh, all of us right-wingers are stumped.
Yeah, we got nothing to say.
They're gonna clip this.
Travis owns three right-wingers.
Despite all of this, Bukele's pro-Bitcoin stance earned him praise from international crypto figures like Michael Saylor and Max Keiser, who saw El Salvador as a pioneering example of state-backed Bitcoin adoption.
Saylor also spoke at CPAC, actually.
The government actively cultivated this image, hosting crypto summits and courting foreign investors.
But as time passed, even some Bitcoin advocates distanced themselves, criticizing the administration's lack of transparency and top-down approach.
On a macroeconomic level, El Salvador's growth remained sluggish, barely exceeding 2.5% annually, one of the lowest rates in the region.
Bitcoin adoption didn't spur foreign investment as promised, and the experiment made negotiations with the International Monetary Fund more complicated.
The IMF repeatedly warned against state-backed crypto adoption, and Bukele's Bitcoin gamble contributed to El Salvador's credit rating being downgraded.
This is so between a rock and a hard place, man.
Stuck between fucking Bitcoin and the IMF.
Really bad place to be, folks.
You know your economy's fucked when those are like the two main forces.
The Bitcoin Beach Initiative still exists, but its impacts remain limited.
While it attracted attention in crypto tourists, adoption among locals was minimal.
The project became more of a niche curiosity than a revolutionary economic shift.
At its core, Bukele's Bitcoin experiment was more about branding than economic transformation.
It positioned him as a rebel challenging global financial institutions, but in practice it was a poorly executed, highly speculative gamble with taxpayers' money.
While Bitcoin advocates initially cheered it, the lack of transparency, failed implementation, and financial risks turned El Salvador's Bitcoin experiment into a cautionary tale.
So, I feel like that, you know, if you're having some arguments with your loved ones, listeners, you can have some background now.
Here's some free background.
You want to understand how we got here, what produced Bukele, how it works to make Bitcoin part of your, you know, national currency strategy?
It's all here, baby.
But there's been a lot more since we wrote this script, right, Caio?
Right.
First of all, the Bitcoin was revoked.
It's not Salvadoran currency anymore.
It's only the dollar, you know.
What?
Bitcoin denied?
Yeah, like two or three weeks ago.
The government said it was a failure.
It's a negotiation with the IMF.
The IMF won.
And it's good to talk about other kind of digital projects that doesn't involve crypto, like Brazil's Pix.
Pix is a digital wallet.
Everybody has money on it and everybody can use their cell phone to buy things and exchange money.
It's a total digital currency.
It's not crypto, it's just US reais, but you change it with your cell phone everywhere you want.
It's using the beach to buy caipirinhas or anywhere you can see people are using PIX.
And it's way, way, way, way more successful than Bukele's Bitcoin.
Yes, dude.
You don't need to fucking adopt crypto.
You could just do some version of Apple Pay, which is what you're describing, basically, or Venmo.
Yeah, so it's a central bank Apple Pay.
So everyone has the same central bank Apple Pay.
That's kind of nice.
Yeah, it really works.
I mean, this is also like, I feel like in China as well, right?
Like they'll have like the one app that does everything.
I think the most successful ones are in Brazil and India.
India also has a name.
I don't remember exactly the name, but it's also, it has like 80% of the population using it.
It's like 800 billion people or 1 billion people using the same stuff to buy stuff.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
So, you know, we explored, like, how these mega prisons were set up and why there was so much gang activity.
But, yeah, there's been some reporting recently about the conditions inside the mega prison and all of that.
How has that developed?
So, the whole stuff is really still surrounded with secrecy.
We know that there are two kinds of prisoners.
The one that are just in concentration camps and the one that are in work camps.
There is some accusations that they arrest a lot of abuelas, a lot of grandmothers, as I said, for a gang association because their grandchildren were arrested.
So they were arrested because they had their personal objects in their home.
And they are accusing this of being a strategy to teach the young kids how to make clothes.
There is this video of a really huge warehouse with everyone sewing.
It's like a permanent work camp.
Conditions seem to be getting worse.
Food is not getting better despite the money that Bukele is earning due to the deportations.
Like $2,000 for intern, right?
I think Trump is paying like $2,000 for each person sent to El Salvador.
But the food condition is still the same.
And we still don't have the number of people that die there.
This is the worst part.
We have no numbers of hospitalization, no numbers of death.
We don't know how many people survive getting to this prison.
Torture and, you know, suppression is still a discussion, how the police works in this prison, and also gangs activity there.
There is a huge discussion about how the leaders are still hugely benefited by the system, having bigger cells and less crowded places, better food, and being allowed to drink, and so on.
You know, in almost every prison in Latin America.
But since this one is the worst one and the greatest one, this discussion is being pressured a lot.
But also the worst part of Saccot and Trump is that it's been highly influential.
Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, recently went to El Salvador to study SECOT because he wants to run for governor and wants to have a good, very popular public safety, public security platform.
And SECOT is that.
And so did Noboa from Ecuador that just cooped the country.
And to get here, he elected, he went to El Salvador before his election to study SACOTS so he could do the same in Ecuador.
He's also talking with the Trump administration about building another one of SACOTS in El Salvador so he could also receive deported people from the U.S.
Yeah, it feels like the mega-prison aspect of the Verhoeven movie that we're all living in is like...
Properly getting installed.
That's really, really great.
What a good, like, augur for the future.
It's just like, oh, mega prisons are popping up globally to, you know, keep the incarceration rates soaring.
I saw a video on Blue Sky today and I compared it to Sorry to Bother You from Boots Riley.
A guy, an American influencer, saying, oh, look how awesome.
Everyone here is suing.
Everyone here is working.
And for every two days they work, they reduce their cents by one day.
And they are learning a job and so on.
And people are saying, dude, this is slavery.
This is slavery.
This is also a way to industrialize El Salvador.
The whole project is, well, we can't get remittances during a Trump mass deportation project, so what are we going to do?
We're going to earn money to have slaves to have clothing factories here so we could earn some money back.
You want to see this clip?
This clip is awesome.
It's a one-minute clip of a young guy.
I don't know who he is.
Talking about how people are lying, about how awesome the El Salvadorian prison is.
Sure. This is a prison here inside of El Salvador.
Each and every single person you see right now in this video are prisoners.
And they made this factory so that way, they can now use this factory to create new clothes worn for the prisoners, for the schools, for the government themselves, the hospitals, anything they need, they can now use it and make it here inside of El Salvador versus having
Go get it from a country like the United States or China, helping create a more self-sufficient El Salvador.
And each and every single day that a prisoner is working here inside of this factory, they then get two days taken away from their sentence.
So imagine you have 10 years on your sentence, and by working in here, you can get your sentence reduced all the way down to five years.
Technically, if you work for five years inside of this prison, you are then going to get your time cut in half every single day you work inside of one of the systems they have here set in El Salvador.
It is actually pretty amazing.
And what price would you personally pay on two extra days of your life?
Imagine you're a sentence of 10 years in prison.
By working in a place like this, you can then get five years of your life back and you can learn a new skill while you're at it.
Obviously, it's not ideal to be a prisoner.
However, here in El Salvador, they're helping the prisoners rehabilitate themselves into society, helping them be able to get a new job if they were to decide to go in the field like this when they're done with their time here.
Dude.
Oh, man.
Having this broccoli head sell you on this is fucking insane.
Obviously, it is not optimal to be in jail, but while we are here, we can still be time-maxing.
Get five years back, ten years total, you'll be a billionaire by 40. And it's massive, right?
It's insane how massive it is.
It's crazy.
It's a huge, huge place.
Yeah, it looks like dozens of rows of people in front of sewing machines working in these yellow shoes.
Yeah, just whirring everywhere.
A massive factory.
I mean, it really is, you know, a factory owner's dream.
Like, whenever, you know, for whatever reason, your pool of labor starts shrinking, you just call up ICE and say, can I get, like, 10, 20 guys?
Yeah.
This is also, like, when they offer sales on websites.
It's $20, but today on the TikTok shop, you can get it for $9.99.
It's like, well, the original sentence probably would have been five years, but we'll give him ten, and we'll make him work, and so he can serve his...
Like, why wouldn't you just then inflate the sentences to get the free labor for the amount of time that you probably would have given the sentence, you know, in the first place?
He was also wrong on the math, right?
It should have been three and a half years and not five years.
But it's straight off of the Verhoeven movie.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hey, guys!
I'm here at the El Salvadoran mega prison.
I mean, it's like we're going to be doing pranks on lifers.
He's trying to do a Mr. Beast thing, right?
Yeah.
It sucks so fucking bad, man.
I mean, this seems like a massive, larger scale version of a scheme that was done by the villain in the Shawshank Redemption.
Like, you know, the warden was so cartoonishly evil, like he got kickbacks and profited from the labor of preceptors.
Yeah, Evil Warden is a crypto-millionaire.
So, Caio, Bukele recently visited Trump, and, I mean, one of my favorite parts of that, you know, conversation was, like, them both pretending they have no power to bring back the wrongfully deported and incarcerated guy.
So, yeah, tell us a little bit about that situation and the latest between Bukele and his buddy Trump.
Yeah, I got a little bit mad with even left-wingers in the U.S. about it.
The first thing I thought was, great, now everybody,
A liberal screenwriter in Hollywood is reenacting the crazy dictatorship from Bananas and putting that on their script.
And we have this new Saddam thing that Saddam fucks, Bukele fucks the Satan in South Park and so on.
Throughout this episode, I was trying to push you with the idea that, you know...
El Salvador is a vassal state.
It's a puppet government.
It doesn't have any power.
But Caliano says two words to Trump.
It's yes and sir.
He was asked if he could bring people back because he just rehearsed with Trump that he would say, no, I can't.
I won't.
I don't want to.
Why?
Because he said, yes, Mr. Trump, I'll do this for you.
And it's all.
So we should stay in line that, you know...
I'm okay with Luca Braz's Sleepy Fishes, but we should stay in line that the Don Corleone of this whole stuff is Trump.
And Trump is trying to make Noboa build another one, Millet is offering to build another one, now Rwanda is offering to build another one for people from the Middle East and Africa.
The whole idea that this is an spectacularly evil guy...
He's sort of a joke.
And of course, he was a dictatorship before Trump got to power.
But we should keep in mind that intervention and the whole idea of malignification, treating him as the most evil person in the world, and so on, will only help the U.S. to further U.S. imperialism in the house of the next cycle.
That always does.
And so I think it's hard to talk to Bukele like that.
I don't empathize with him at all.
I hate the guy.
But we should just keep a little bit calm about it.
that this is a US-made problem from the US provinces, from a place that has no sovereignty at all.
He's a goon.
He's Trump's goon.
And that's all.
He's also highly influential because being Trump's goon, you are Trump's favorite.
And therefore, everyone wants to be Trump's favorite for a long time in a lot of the world around.
You see the whole tariff stuff.
It's the same thing.
Everyone wants to kiss his hand and say, please do me stuff.
Please.
Everyone.
Major countries in the world faced Trump and said no, China, even Brazil, France and so on, Canada and Mexico and so on.
But Central America went to the U.S. and said, please don't hit me with terrorists.
Because they are small vessel states, they are more corporate governments.
And I got mad about it because, you know, when I was a young kid, I really loved that South Park sketch.
And then I was not a kid anymore when I saw One Million Rirakis Dead.
And I think that we don't put the weight.
We should in this kind of situation.
Yeah.
Have you tried calling Bukele something funny?
Like, instead of Elon Musk, you call him, like, Melon Tusk?
Or, you know, like, there's a lot of cool ways to be politically active.
This is really kind of where my area of expertise is, is coming up with silly names.
We could call him, like, a ukulele something.
Hey, more like Pukele.
People are calling him Bukkake.
Oh, wow.
People are calling him freaking Dookie, Dookie Man, Dookie Poopoo.
People are calling him Orange, Orange Man, but it's due to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Man bad.
Yeah.
We're so fucked.
We're so boned.
I know I say it often, but...
Yeah, it's really terrifying listening to you talk about this idea that El Salvador, in a lot of ways, is kind of just the trial run, that they are going to be opening these slave camps, essentially, in all areas of the world where the United States can deport their...
You know, can disappear whoever they want.
Because, you know, it's a lot harder for family to visit their loved ones or even find out where they are the moment they leave, you know, domestic grounds.
So, yeah, it's really terrifying to imagine how this is going to beautifully fit in with capitalism and the Trump administration and, you know, this sort of these tough-on-crime threats.
You can already see how it's working itself out.
It's really discouraging to watch...
The world at large head in this direction as opposed to, you know, the utopia meme with the flying cars and the monorails.
No, no, no.
We're going to be living in Paul Joseph Watson's prison planet.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean...
And, you know, there's this concept, and I don't want to be overly academic, but there's this concept, and I think the latest Nami Klein's concept is very close to it.
That's Anthropocene Necropolitics.
The idea is the world is dying.
There won't be enough biosphere for everyone.
So politics will be tougher and tougher and tougher.
So we need forms of control of poor population, rebels and so on.
And we have been having labs, different experience in Latin America of how to do it.
In Rio de Janeiro, we have Milicia, and it's an export product, an export way to deal with poor people.
In Honduras, close to El Salvador, they have a full city privatization, like 10 years ago.
They tried to fully privatize cities.
And now we have the second model, you know?
Prison town.
Creating a worry-free from sorry to bother you.
We just enslaved a lot of people.
Moving to a company town, but it's just like...
The prison is the factory at the center of it.
I mean, it does fit with the offshoring of, you know, of, like, essentially prison jobs.
I love that Trump is not only not going to re-industrialize the United States, he's going to, like, move some of the remaining jobs, like prison guard or prison janitor abroad as well.
But that feels like the right direction.
Hassan was talking about how the MAGA merch industry would be impacted by tariffs.
And I was thinking, no, they would just...
They move their production to second.
Soon every MAGA hat will be producing in second for...
The scariest thing that I think we're talking about is this idea that slowly over time, you sell these mega prisons as, well, yeah, they work for eight hours a day.
Hey, you know what?
We're giving them their own housing on the property.
And, oh, hey, there's going to be an in-house chef who's cooking meals.
So that slowly over time, what you end up with is a bunch of people who, it almost doesn't, they forget that they're in prison.
And they forget that they're being put to...
And, like, to me, that's the scariest thing, is that you slowly, over time, create these mega facilities, and you essentially sell them, you use influencers, and you use PR, essentially, to sell them as,
like, hey, guys, like, things aren't so bad, you know, five years off your sentence, and they're learning actual skills.
They can go and work at a seamstress once they get out, you know, once they get out of prison, that slowly, over time, people start to forget that they're in jail.
To me, that's so scary.
Yeah, I don't think that the Salvadorans are forgetting that they're in jail, and I don't think they have an in-house chef.
But I'm saying that could be the direction that they're going when they try to sell these things.
It's like, hey, we're doing the progressive version of jail.
Yeah.
Well, another awesome episode.
Thank you so much, Caio.
Thanks for your writing.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
Terrifying stuff, but...
Well-written, terrifying stuff.
Where can people find you and your work?
Oh, I have a new announcement.
I have now an English sub-stack.
The first episode, the first text in article will be a longer version of this script talking about El Salvador, but it mainly will focus not exactly on Latin America history and so on, but telling people in the U.S. about what's happening, but also telling how we see what's happening in the U.S.,
like discussions about what Trump talks about, Trump means to people that live under detectorship.
What's the difference between Brazil's detectorship and Trump's regime and so on?
It's on Caio Almendra, Substack.
It's in a different section called The U.S. is Not Special.
The U.S. is Not Special.
How dare you, first of all, and second of all, we will have that link in the description.
The idea is to curb a little bit of American exceptionalism, talking how we're all connected, how we're all living in a capitalist society, and so on.
All right.
Thank you so much once again.
And thank you, listener, for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast.
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