Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades

[Celerity]

So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores? Some personal reflections on Marco Rubio and me—and the roots of Trump’s imperial ambitions.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/greater-america-disunion-rubio-trump/

https://archive.ph/QchTp



I have lived in America for most of my life, but i had rarely traveled outside of that portion of America that is the United States, except for short trips to urban Canada and to Mexican resorts. That changed this past February, when I went farther south than I had ever been before, to El Salvador. My timing was perfect, for I arrived on the same day as Marco Rubio. The rumor was that Rubio stayed at the Hilton on his first international trip as US secretary of state, while I stayed two miles away at the less glamorous Sheraton. We were both in San Salvador as part of a project that I think of as Greater America: Rubio was there to build it, and I was there to criticize it and to excavate, for myself if no one else, a small piece of it.

Signs of the United States’ presence in San Salvador were unavoidable, from the fact that the national currency is the US dollar to the sight of the American servicemen and -women in uniform in my hotel. They were Air Force personnel, part of a band that was there to play at an air show at the nearby Ilopango air base. My hotel was itself enmeshed in the troubled history of the country: It was at the Sheraton in 1981 that two masked Salvadoran Army officers entered the hotel coffee shop and shot to death José Rodolfo Viera, president of El Salvador’s Institute for Agrarian Transformation, and Michael P. Hammer and Mark David Pearlman, two US labor lawyers providing technical assistance for a land-reform effort.

My vicarious sense of being immersed in history evaporated, however, when my translator told me that Rubio’s Hilton had once been a Sheraton, and it was there that the murders took place. So did a siege in 1989, carried out by leftist guerrillas of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in their final offensive against the government during the civil war that ran from 1979 to 1992. That siege trapped civilians and a contingent of US Special Forces on “temporary duty,” who would eventually escape after the Catholic Church reached an agreement with the guerrillas.

I was disappointed not to be closer to the history that I had come to investigate—a bloody and terrible one of which land reform was a part. But at least I arrived in time for an event whose full historical import has yet to be determined—but whose immediate impact has already been felt: Rubio’s signing of a deal with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, to use a Salvadoran prison to incarcerate alleged criminals from the United States. The agreement already seemed ominous, for Bukele had been reelected in 2024 with nearly 83 percent of the vote after he imprisoned more than 81,000 people without due process as part of a campaign against gangs that began in 2022. While crime had plummeted, the price had been a tightening of Bukele’s authoritarian grip via what the Catholic bishop of El Salvador called a reign of terror. Not to mention that many of those imprisoned were not actually gang members: At least 7,000 were later released, but many more are said to be innocent.

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