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Gangs and Climate Change, Born in the USA

Rebecca Gordon

Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing — and resisting — repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.

So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.

Benign Neglect?

During the years when our main political work involved opposing U.S. aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.

Take Nicaragua, for example. U.S. Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, U.S. companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that U.S. commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.

When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their U.S. owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly-installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.

Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.

Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the U.S. acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the U.S. began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”

An Evil Harvest

As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as U.S. imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.

As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the U.S. was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.

One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the west coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.

Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.

It turns out that not only has the U.S. historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of U.S. “exports” — murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought — had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.

In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social” — the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.

Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)

His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the U.S.-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.

In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.

When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: the United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a U.S. federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.

As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in ICE roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS 60 Minutes report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.

In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The U.S. was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as the Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: some of those prisoners were U.S. informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post,

“To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

“Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.”

Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.

Eyes on El Salvador

These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:

• Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
• Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
• Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”;
• Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.

Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strong man, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator — and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.

[Rebecca Gordon taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture, and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a US based web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, an American editor, journalist and author. It is aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”, by presenting critical perspectives often missing from corporate news outlets.]

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New Gangsters for Capitalism

Edward Hunt

Some lawmakers have grown so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America that they are beginning to accuse the administration of gangsterism.

Representative Stephen Lynch (D-MA) saw the possibility of gangsterism at the start of the second Trump administration when he warned that the United States could “join the ranks of gangster nations,” but there is a growing sense in Congress that the day has arrived.

At a congressional hearing last month, Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX) asserted that the Trump administration is exploiting the U.S. military to take Latin American resources for U.S. corporations. Castro seemingly channeled the anti-war critiques of Smedley Butler, the U.S. military hero of the early twentieth century, who condemned war as a racket and lamented his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism.

“For decades, our men and women in uniform who volunteered to protect our country became mercenaries ordered to risk their lives to protect the profits of U.S. corporations,” Castro said. “Today, President Trump is ordering them to do so again.”

The Case of Venezuela

The Trump administration’s critics in Congress have been warning about the administration’s gangsterism due to its actions in Venezuela.

Since the Trump administration directed a military operation earlier this year to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and take control of the country’s oil and minerals, several lawmakers have suggested that the administration has begun to employ force and intimidation as its basic tools of statecraft.

Lawmakers have condemned the administration for conducting a military operation without congressional approval, meddling in Venezuela’s internal politics, displaying contempt for Venezuela’s political process, facilitating corruption in Venezuela and the United States, and using the U.S. military to take control of Venezuela’s resources.

“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year.

Although Congress has not held the president accountable, as the Republican majority in each chamber supports the president, critics have kept pressure on the White House, prompting officials to defend the administration’s actions.

At the congressional hearing last month, State Department official Michael Kozak claimed that the intervention in Venezuela advanced U.S. interests. He cited the Monroe Doctrine, which marks Latin America as a sphere of influence. Like the president, he boasted that the United States now controls the country’s resources.

“We’ve got very significant control over the oil revenues at this point,” Kozak said.

Several Democratic lawmakers responded with strong criticisms. They condemned the Trump administration for acting so aggressively in the hemisphere, and they warned that its actions would create a backlash against the United States.

Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) described the administration’s approach as “shameful.” She insisted that the United States should not be “reviving a policy of domination and subjugation in the Western Hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine.”

Castro repeated his warning that the Trump administration is focused on commerce and profits. He suggested that the president is using the U.S. military to enrich people close to him.

“What has happened now is that there’s a group of folks that the president favors in his circle that is able to commence commerce and make money off of, whether it’s valuable minerals, oil, anything else in Venezuela,” Castro said.

Kozak expressed disagreement with Castro’s analysis, but he acknowledged that the Trump administration has established significant controls over Venezuela. Once again, he boasted that the Trump administration controls the country’s resources.

“People can lift oil and sell it on the open market, but all that money goes into an account that we have control over,” Kozak said. “All the revenues that are coming from the mining sector and everything, instead of going into their bank accounts, are coming into the Treasury accounts, and then we can dole it out as we see fit.”

The Case of Cuba

Now that the Trump administration has moved against Venezuela, establishing new leadership and doling out profits from its resources, lawmakers anticipate that it will move against Cuba next.

For months, Trump has been openly threatening Cuba. He has moved to block oil shipments to the country, causingan economic crisis. Knowing that he has put tremendous pressure on the Cuban government, he has demanded that the country’s president leave office.

“I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said in March. “I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth.”

Although the Trump administration’s military intervention in Iran has shifted its focus away from Cuba, the administration is maintaining an economic stranglehold over the island nation, making its recovery impossible. The U.S. military continues blocking the free flow of oil to Cuba, even while Trump demands the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The few oil shipments that have reached Cuba, for instance a recent tanker from Russia, have provided little relief.

At the congressional hearing last month, several lawmakers argued that the Trump administration is a major reason why Cuba is facing such tremendous hardship, including island-wide blackouts and preventable deaths at hospitals and health clinics.

“We cannot ignore our own country’s role in the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba,” Castro said.

Representative Jonathan Jackson (D-IL), who recently visited the country, made the strongest criticisms. Warning that the administration’s policies are causing tremendous harm to the Cuban people, he indicated that the Trump administration is violating international humanitarian law.

“We have engaged in collective punishment,” Jackson said.

The congressman also accused the Trump administration of trying to make life so miserable for the Cuban people that they would rise up and overthrow the Cuban government. He described it as a failed “policy of starving” Cuba.

“It was one of the most cruel things I had ever seen in my life,” he said.

Just as the Trump administration has been able to get away with its actions in Venezuela, however, it has been able to continue its policies toward Cuba. The administration maintains support among Republicans and some Democrats, few of whom oppose the administration’s goal of regime change.

The president, who knows that he faces little opposition in Congress, continues threatening to direct a military intervention in Cuba, even citing the operation in Venezuela as a precedent.

“In January, our warriors flew straight into the heart of the Venezuelan capital, captured the outlawed dictator Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to face American justice,” Trump said last month. “And very soon this great strength will also bring about a day 70 years in waiting. It’s called, ‘A New Dawn for Cuba.’”

War Is a Racket

When Smedley Butler spoke against his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism nearly a century ago, he made a criticism of the American way of war that was considered to be so radical by U.S. leaders that it has been largely excluded from mainstream political discourse.

Only a few politicians, such as former Representatives Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Ron Paul (R-TX), have cited Butler and his warnings. Rarely, if ever, does the mass media report on war as a racket in which the country’s leaders are exploiting U.S. military forces as gangsters for capitalism.

Today, however, some elected leaders are beginning to issue the same kinds of warnings about the Trump administration. Alarmed by the president’s insatiable lust for wealth and power, they are starting to suggest that the president is engaging in a kind of gangsterism across Latin America. The president, they say, is using the power of the U.S. military to steal the wealth of Latin American countries to enrich himself, his family, his closest business associates, and U.S. corporations.

“By any measure, this is the most corrupt administration in American history,” Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) saidearlier this year.

Now that the Trump administration is openly pillaging Venezuela and getting away with it, several lawmakers are warning that it may apply the same approach to other Latin American countries.

“It’s making me think that the goal in Cuba is going to be the same,” Castro said at the hearing in April. “It’s who’s going to go over there that’s friends with the president to make money and who’s going to profit off of Cuba and the Cuban people.”

Indeed, there is a growing sense in Congress that the Trump administration is turning to gangsterism. Moving beyond standard establishment critiques of the president’s contempt for norms and traditions, critics are giving serious consideration to the idea that Trump’s wars are a racket and that Cuba may be next.

[Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary. Courtesy: Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a “Think Tank Without Walls” connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. FPIF is directed by John Feffer.]