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Another Person Who Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded
Bukele is having second thoughts...
mister mix
May 03, 2025
Reader Gloria Drygarden found a post on Facebook by writer Bo Forbes (the link is to Forbes’ Substack) which is a great run-down of the Abrego Garcia situation and the jam that El Salvador President Nayib Bukele finds himself in:
According to several sources in the current administration who spoke to the New York Times, the Salvadoran President agreed to house only "convicted criminals" (the operative word here being "convicted") in his prison, and not people abducted and deported without due process, which is what the Trump administration decided to do. of course, this is itself a lie designed to cover Bukele’s own human rights abuses.
Bukele began quietly to express reservations about the abductions, which grew more pronounced when Senator Chris Van Hollen and several members of Congress visited.
President Bukele had agreed to let the U.S. use his prisons, but with conditions, he had told Marco Rubio and Mauricio Claver-Carone, Mr. Trump’s Latin American envoy.
Bukele asked the U.S. for assurances that each of the people sent to CECOT, his prison, were members of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the situation and documents obtained by The New York Times.
The whole piece is worth a read, because it takes a detour through the life and times of Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush’s political operative who was responsible for the famous Willie Horton ad. Forbes’ brother is responsible for the great Atwater documentary, Boogie Man. As Forbes points out, the campaign to deport immigrants is of a piece with Atwater’s strategy of portraying darker-skinned people as inherently violent folks who need white people to control them. It’s no surprise that Trump was a fan of Atwater’s.
Anyway, back to Bukele: I don’t know if he’s really having second thoughts, or if his people are just shopping that story around to credulous media outlets in hopes that Bukele will be seen as an unwitting pawn. Either way, anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that he was an active participant in the scheme to send people to a gulag in El Salvador without benefit of due process. And that shouldn’t be a surprising move from a bro who made Bitcoin official tender in his country. He’s clearly easily duped.
The whole Abrego Garcia case remains one of the best opportunities for Democrats to make Trump less popular, but they’re apparently too chickenshit to make serious hay with it. Jeffries may or may not have put a stop to further trips by Congressional delegations to El Salvador (he denies it), but the fact remains that the last trip was ten days ago. If the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be spending weeks, months and perhaps years on this issue.
There’s a lot of talk about how Americans don’t really believe in due process and the rule of law, but I think there are two sides to that story. Yes, there are a lot of popular films and TV that shows due process as an impediment to justice, something that is abused by the guilty. (Trump’s many, many brushes with the law and ability to delay legal proceedings almost indefinitely make a good case for that, ironically.) But we also have a rich history of innocent people being freed by efforts of good lawyers and new science like DNA. So I don’t know exactly what people believe on this.
As usual with most public opinion, the unreflective first thoughts of people measured by opinion polls are not where they will land after a competent political party pushes their narrative. Chris Van Hollen’s trip changed the way that the majority of Americans look at Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Since his trip, however, Trump and his goons have been chipping away at Abrego Garcia, with photoshopped MS-13 tattoos and allegations of domestic violence. That, of course, doesn’t matter: what matters is whether Abrego Garcia gets to plead his case in a court of law.
Bo Forbes is promising to post part 2 of her Abrego Garcia series soon, so watch her Substack for that.
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