Despite its small size, El Salvador is crucial for understanding the long-term plans of the far right in the Americas. From fomenting violent civil conflict, to stripping away constitutional rights, to the exploitation of natural resources and migrant workers, right-wing extremists have used El Salvador as a laboratory for their global project.
At the same time, the Salvadoran left has adeptly cultivated an international presence, which it uses to combat the designs of the global right and defend the rights of Salvadorans both in the nation and abroad.
Pilar Gálvez, previously based in Los Angeles, now works in Boston as one of fifteen international representatives of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation (FMLN) party. Gálvez organizes commemorations for important national celebrations, including significant historic dates and elections, and supports the Salvadoran migrant community in their struggles outside of the Central American nation.
She emphasized that this effort is “not only me, but the party” and underscored “temporary protected status, immigration reform, workers’ rights, and housing rights” as central issues for the Salvadoran diaspora in the United States. As Gálvez put it, “the flag of Salvadorans abroad becomes our flag.”
The struggles of the diaspora are not disconnected from what is happening in El Salvador. As such, the FMLN also works to organize Salvadorans abroad to advance progressive change in El Salvador. Democratic participation, environmental justice, and immigrant rights rank among their top priorities.
Civil War and migration
The Salvadoran migrant community remains caught between exploitation abroad and the influence of U.S.-backed policies that forced them to leave home in the first place. Throughout the decades, the FMLN has continued its fight against far-right policies of dispossession and displacement.
In late 1980, Salvadoran activists and community leaders unified their different points of view into a political coalition that would form the basis of the FMLN and the resistance to a cruel military dictatorship.
In addition to joining their forces at home, the Salvadoran left organized and created a political-diplomatic front abroad. The FMLN’s Secretariat of International Relations and its global allies organized the people of the United States and Europe to show solidarity with El Salvador, marching in the streets to demand an end to the war.
“The FMLN had more diplomatic missions than the Government of El Salvador abroad. Where many Salvadorans went into exile, we formed committees, and those committees established diplomatic relations,” Gálvez explained.
In August 1981, Mexico and France recognized El Salvador’s leftist alliance of guerrilla and political groups as a representative political force that should be included in negotiations to find a solution to the nation’s crisis.
José Alemán, Consul General of El Salvador for the New England region from early 2010 to the end of 2013, was a student activist in El Salvador during the civil war and later worked with refugee communities living in Honduras and Nicaragua.
“When I entered university, El Salvador was already experiencing a process of open civil war where there were two armies: a guerrilla army and an institutional army supported by the United States… so that process, those experiences as a university student in a context of civil war, radicalized my thinking,” Alemán explained.
This inspired Alemán to work with refugee communities, where he heard testimonies “of massacres, of murders carried out by death squads in complicity with the police authorities, with the army, and with the government in power in El Salvador.”
For example, after receiving training from U.S. military forces in 1981, the Atlacatl Brigade went into the mountains to search for guerrillas. Instead of finding guerrillas, however, the Brigade came across the village of El Mozote, where it massacred the villagers even though they had no clear connections to the rebels.
“It was the scorched earth policy of Plan Condor,” under the Ronald Reagan administration, and a plan of the Heritage Foundation, “which is the same foundation that created Milei’s government plan, Bukele’s, and now Project 2025,” Gálvez said.
Over the course of the war from 1979 to 1992, 75,000 people died and many Salvadorans left the country. Today, of the approximately three million Salvadorans abroad, almost two million reside in the United States. Salvadorans fleeing war and persecution moved to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Houston, and Denver.
In response, the FMLN’s “Secretariat of International Relations became the Secretariat of International Relations and Salvadorans Abroad” to respond to the needs of Salvadorans as a transnational community, Gálvez noted.
“Now it’s not just about finding allies… It’s about responding to the needs of the migrant community.” Today, many Salvadoran migrants work in some of the toughest, yet least compensated jobs in the United States.
“Because this Heritage Foundation’s plan is exactly that, right? How to commodify the flight of people from their countries? And they turn human beings into commodities and objects,” Gálvez mentioned.
“We have to respond to the needs of that community that is displaced… That is why it is so important to the FMLN its militancy abroad and the community abroad,” Gálvez concluded.
After emerging from a brutal civil war that left deep scars, El Salvador’s transition to peace in 1992 promised democracy and reconciliation. But three decades later, the return of the hard right under Nayib Bukele has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism, mass incarceration, and alignment with global far-right forces—threatening the gains of the postwar era.
Significantly, the peace agreements at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City allowed FMLN guerrillas to enter politics and compete head-on against the hard-right Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party, the political arm of their wartime enemies.
In some ways, however, the postwar period was harder than the war itself.
“There are orphaned children, there is trauma. The economy was destroyed for a long time because of the war… and poverty worsens,” Gálvez explained.
Moreover, ARENA controlled the government for two decades. Gradually, however, the FMLN gained ground, at first winning local elections, and then finally winning the presidency in 2009, when Mauricio Funes of the FMLN defeated former police director Rodrigo Ávila of ARENA.
The FMLN won the presidency for a second time in 2014 with the victory of Salvador Sánchez Cerén. A landmark achievement to protect public health and the environment during this period was signing a law to prohibit any type of mining in El Salvador in 2017.
After two periods of FMLN governance, the extreme right has returned forcefully in the form of Nayib Bukele, from the new ultra-conservative party, Nuevas Ideas.
Bukele has advocated for the return of mining despite the unpopularity of the industry in El Salvador, arguing that it will bring in billions of dollars and create thousands of jobs.
Didn’t issue a permit
When the Canadian-based Pacific Rim Mining Corp. sought to establish a gold mine in the Cabañas region of El Salvador in the late 2000s, the government at the time did not issue a permit because of popular disapproval. The corporation sued El Salvador, claiming that the government violated the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement.
Bukele remains committed to representing and defending the interests of an international and domestic oligarchy, which is critical to the anti-democratic designs of the global far right.
Alemán described how “the Bukele model is based on the idea that power must be concentrated and used not only to persecute and take revenge on your political enemies, in other words, to annihilate them, make them disappear, nullify them, minimize them, which is what has been attempted with the FMLN in El Salvador… but also to concentrate power… from there, a new model of resource accumulation emerges… for personal business activities or for the benefit of an elite, which can be a dominant class, which can be an oligarchy… in the case of El Salvador it is an oligarchy.”
“They need governments in Latin America to help them implement” neoliberal, pro-war, and anti-democratic policies. “And that’s where Bukele, a useful pawn and servant, appears,” Gálvez added, speaking of the international collaboration of extreme right forces in the Americas.
In other words, in addition to serving the interests of the Salvadoran oligarchy, another primary purpose of a Bukele regime in El Salvador is aligned with the interest of the most conservative and reactionary forces within the United States, as is the MAGA movement.
Most recently, Bukele and Trump collaborated on the deportation of over 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to be processed and held in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. The removal operation defies Judge James Boasberg’s block on President Donald Trump’s malicious use of the Alien Enemies Act, a broad law that has been invoked to detain and deport citizens of an “enemy” nation without due process. It was last used during World War Two to intern Japanese-American civilians.
In an official statement, the Venezuelan government condemned Trump’s actions for unjustly criminalizing “Venezuelan migration, in an act that evokes the darkest episodes in the history of humanity, from slavery to the horror of Nazi concentration camps.”
In El Salvador, Bukele’s “Mano Dura” (“Iron Fist”) policies have bolstered mass incarceration in privately run prisons by treating social issues caused by the civil war—like poverty, family disintegration, and social decomposition—as criminal problems requiring punitive correction.
Gálvez stated, “Instead of giving these poor, young people options, they are jailed.”
She noted how there are many young people who, despite having no links to crime, are now being incarcerated in unprecedented numbers. Bukele has instituted intensely authoritarian measures that have essentially stripped people of basic constitutional guarantees.
Alemán explained “For almost three years now… El Salvador has been experiencing something called a State of Emergency… which is the suspension of certain rights and certain citizen guarantees… which means that, arbitrarily, in an authoritarian manner, authorities in El Salvador can detain you, lock you up, and keep you incomunicado for months…. more than 300 people have died under these conditions… that is, while they’re incarcerated, not sentenced, but waiting to go to trial to find out if they’re guilty or innocent.”
Under Bukele’s far-right regime, fear reigns supreme over people who might otherwise speak up against injustice and inequality.
“Fear paralyzes us,” Alemán soberly admitted.
Fighting fear and fighting back
Despite deteriorating democratic protections in the U.S. and El Salvador, Alemán works with other activist and working-class leaders against metallic mining in El Salvador, especially gold. Environmentalists argue that the return of metallic mining will lead to the exploitation of workers by foreign corporations, the contamination of the country’s water supply, and the destruction of local ecosystems.
Alemán is now working “in an initiative to—through the Catholic and Protestant churches—inform and educate the Salvadoran community in this area about the dangers and risks of metal mining and gold mining in El Salvador.”
El Salvador was the first country in the world to ban metallic mining in its territory, reaffirming the right to health, a clean environment, and sustainable development. Cidia Cortes, an environmental biologist, has pointed out that the Lempa River, which is a water source for 70 percent of the population, “needs intensive care to survive agrochemicals, mining and stone extraction, as well as the four hydroelectric plants located within the watershed.”
As Alemán explained, from the very beginning, FMLN “had committed itself to a democratic country, a country that respected human rights, but that also respected the responsible use of resources,” to protect above all water, forests, and biodiversity.
Alemán expressed how the reversal of the ban on metallic mining is part of a wider attack on years of progress, saying, “We feel that this reversal of the law is also an attack against everything we have worked towards for years… those commitments we made… that we finally expressed in law as FMLN.” The Bukele government has instead chosen gold over water.
“Now it turns out that the current government has changed [the ban on metallic mining] without the support of the population, which by more than 57% rejects the repeal of the law against metal mining,” Alemán said, citing polls from Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas.
He also added that these authoritarian policies have only been augmented and legitimized by Trump, who himself promised in his inauguration speech to “drill, baby, drill… that liquid gold beneath our feet” and increase U.S. oil exports.
Perhaps because of proximity to the disaster that metallic mining causes, communities in El Salvador are more openly and radically against the reversal, while communities in the diaspora are tougher to organize.
“The topic of mining in El Salvador is discussed daily at all levels: in the media, in universities, in churches, in the streets… it is [in the U.S.] where we have made very little progress in educating and informing our diaspora about how negative this will be for El Salvador, for our families,” Alemán commented.
In the United States, Salvadorans fear that “If the authorities feel like it, when they identify you as an opponent or someone who is organizing or disseminating information… they can accuse you in the media or in court… of being undocumented in the United States and then that becomes a threat to your stability in this country,” Alemán said.
A horrifying “fun video”
The White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, admitted that fear is key to the Trump administration’s immigration policy, stating, “We are encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self-deport to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos.” The video referenced was an official White House social media post featuring shackled men being deported without due process as Semisonic’s “Closing Time” plays in the background.
As a public high school teacher, Alemán works “in a community where 70 percent of families are born or have their roots in a country other than the United States. I’m talking to you about Brazilians, Colombians, Moroccans, Salvadorans, Hondurans.” This is the community that Trump’s policies target most violently.
In fact, the Guardian reported that in February of this year, the U.S. immigration authorities arrested more people than in any month over the last seven years.
In times like these, Alemán believes the only solution is to build a mass movement for humanity and the planet. Hiding or conceding to right-wing policies is not an option.
“Popular struggles that succeed, succeed in the streets. Not through closed-door negotiations, not through professional lobbies. They are won through organized people. Of course, to organize ourselves, we must overcome fear. To overcome fear, we must arm ourselves with information, we must be creative, and above all, we must be close to the people,” Alemán said.
This last point, about being close to the people, about meeting the working class where they are, is the logic behind the organizing strategy of Alemán and others in the Boston area.
“This idea of going to churches, it’s simply a matter of recognizing that one has to be where the people are, and if the people are in the churches, and if the people are on social media, that’s where we have to be present and tell our story and organize and mobilize,” he said.
On March 18, Catholic Church leaders in El Salvador arrived at the Legislative Assembly to deliver 150,000 signatures supporting the demand to repeal Bukele’s reintroduction of mining.
The FMLN and their continued legacy of progressive militancy in El Salvador and across the world leaves us with a plain lesson—to fight the fascist threat of the global far right, we must fight it head-on.
“That’s why in El Salvador we are mobilizing every week to send a clear message. And even though we might be scared, fear hasn’t paralyzed us to the point of not going out into the streets to say what we think, to say what we are doing, and what we are going to do,” Alemán resolutely concluded.
“It’s a very clear struggle between one system versus another. One system is centered around the dignity and well-being of humans, and in the other… economic production is more important than human beings,” Gálvez voiced.
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