Nadene Goldfoot
El Salvador is a small country in Central America. It's History goes way back to a civilization to Kingdom of Cuzcatlan (c.1200–1528), Spanish conquest (1524–1539), Intendancy of San Salvador (1785–1821).
The history of the Jews in El Salvador goes back to the 1800s. Jews have been present in El Salvador since the early 19th century, starting with Sephardic Jews and continuing with the arrival of refugees from Europe during World War II. El Salvador has the second largest community in Central America, the majority established in San Salvador, which is the second city with the most Jews in Central America, behind Panama City.
- José Castellanos Contreras, diplomat who provided Salvadoran nationality papers to tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
- Bernard Salomon Lewinsky, doctor and medical researcher, father of Monica Lewinsky, was born in El Salvador.
1811 Independence Movement, Mexican rule (1822–1823, Greater Republic of Central America (1895–1898), Military dictatorship (1931–1979), and the Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992).
Carlos Dada: CECOT is a poster child of our prison system. It’s a high security prison, built allegedly to exclusively hold gang members. It has been heavily used by Bukele’s propaganda machine, producing, as you might have seen, highly professional videos in which every single image is meticulously taken care of. If you see something from that prison, it is because the regime wants you to see it. But that prison is only one of 32 in our system.
So some people have described CECOT as basically a black hole. Is that accurate?
I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them. They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. According to President Bukele, they don’t see the light of the sun ever.
How did it ever get involved with the USA? Their Civil war in El Salvador ended in ’92. In 1989 the United States had begun to deport young men with criminal records involved in gangs in Southern California. This was a cocktail with two very dangerous ingredients. El Salvador had just clawed out of a violent hole after 12 years. There were many orphans, a lot of poverty: it was a tumultuous region. The government couldn't handle it.
The Salvadoran state was far too weak to deal with the influx of this criminal element. They came down here as experts in organizing gangs having learnt in the world capital of Latino gangs, which is in Southern California, specifically Los Angeles, where there are over 60 Latino gangs.
CNN
El Salvador has agreed to house violent US criminals and receive
deportees of any nationality, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
announced Monday, in an unprecedented – and legally problematic
deal – that has alarmed critics and rights groups.
Rubio unveiled the agreement after meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, as part of a tour of several Central American countries intended to consolidate regional support for the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
Right before the Salvadoran Civil War, the Jewish community was actively involved in organizing a Zionist Organization, of which Ernesto Liebes and Carlos Bernhard were its main leaders. The kidnapping at gunpoint a week ago of Ernesto Liebes, Honorary Consul General for Israel in El Salvador, now appears to be politically motivated according to knowledgeable Salvadorean and American sources. Radio Station YSU in San Salvador broadcast yesterday that if had received a manifesto from the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN) which claimed credit for the kidnapping and demanded the release of political prisoners held by the government of El Salvador. FARN is described as a leftwing, extremist and terrorist organization.
Liebes, a Salvadorean, who is reported to be 75 years old, was abducted Jen. 17 on the Panamerican Highway five kilometers outside San Salvador following an accident between his car and one used by four armed men. According to sources here, when the driver of Liebes' car left it to talk with the men from the other car who had emerged from their vehicle, Liebes was seized and whisked away.Ernesto Liebes, Israel's honorary consul in the Cen-tral American Republic of. El Salvador, was found dead. March 22 with two bullet wounds, in an abandoned car....according to Detroit News March 30, 1979.
Members of the community were also involved. According to American writer Jane Hunter in her book, Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America, in facilitating the sale for arms from Israel in El Salvador, particularly the sale of 18 Dassault Ouragan jetfighters aircraft in 1973, of which Liebes was perceived by guerrilla groups as the primary representative.
Prior to the Civil War, there were about 300 Jews in El Salvador, most of whom lived in the capital. During the Civil War many Jews left the country after the 1979 kidnap and murder of a community leader and Israeli Honorary Consul for cultural relations Ernesto Liebes by the RN-FARN, (National Resistance Armed Forces-of Socialism) the armed wing of the RN, one of the groups that formed the FMLN.[(guerrilla rebel group).
From 60 Latino gangs it grew and grew. Those 4000 deportees, have now become 60,000 gang members. They are now present in all 14 states of El Salvador. After years of disregarding the problem, and hard line measures taken since 2003 to address it (when repression was thought to be the avenue to a solution, though each year only proved to show that repression increased gang violence in terms of homicides and gang numbers), these failed policies left El Salvador with the highest murder rate in the world by 2009. The rate was of 71 homicides per 100,000 people.
When this very same party, this same government, won the presidency in 2014 they decided to change course. They began a strategy of extreme repression the likes of which had never been seen. In El Salvador there’s an average of three armed confrontations between the police and the gangs daily. We resemble a war zone more than a problem of public safety. So has been the author, Oscar Martínez, Writer at ElFaro.net, Author of the History of Violence.
In addition, Bukele “has offered to house in his jails dangerous American
criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal
residents,” Rubio said.
It is unclear whether the US government will take up the offer, however, with
questions around the legality of such moves. Any effort by the Trump adminis
tration to deport incarcerated US nationals to another country would face sig
nificant legal pushback.
whose research examines how law is shaped by culture and identity.
“The US is absolutely prohibited from deporting US
citizens, whether they are incarcerated or not,” Leti Volpp, a law professor at
UC Berkeley who specializes in immigration law and citizenship theory, told
CNN over email. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993,
Volpp clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson ’62
of the Northern District of California, and then worked as a public inter
est lawyer for several years. Volpp served as a Skadden Fellow at Equ
al Rights Advocates and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, both in
San Francisco; as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S.
Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C.; and
as a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New
York City.
President Donald Trump says his attorney general, Pam Bondi, is looking into whether it would be legal for him to expel U.S. citizens who commit certain violent crimes to El Salvador, where he has shipped hundreds of alleged immigrant gang members to be held indefinitely in a notorious prison.
- Even without any critical details about the process, it can safely be said this would be an unprecedented use of presidential power, one that critics would rank alongside the World War II-era detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps.
Resource:
Update: 4/16/25 9:00am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_El_Salvador
https://newamericanstoryproject.org/context/brief-history-of-el-salvador/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_El_Salvador
https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/djnews/djn.1979.03.30.001/35
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassault_Ouragan
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