Fascism in El Salvador and France: Mega-Prisons and Imperialism
May 20, 2025
Theauthoritarian crackdowns of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Emmanuel Macron in France reveal a shared blueprint of repression disguised as security. Bukele’s CECOT “mega-prison”,a dystopian complex holding 50,000 inmates under brutal conditions,exemplifies how mass incarceration becomes a tool of state control, celebrated by U.S. conservatives as a model. Meanwhile, Macron's plan to build a high-security prison in French Guyana's Amazon rainforest mirrors this logic, targeting drug traffickers and so-called "radical Islamists" while ignoring systemic racism and colonial neglect in the territory. Both projects weaponize fear to justify expanding carceral states, yet only the Global South faces Western scrutiny for such measures.
The media’s framing of these prisons exposes glaring hypocrisy. When Macron’s Guiana facility is labeled a necessary measure against "drug networks" and "Islamist threats," it echoes the U.S.-driven War on Drugs narrative,a racist, imperial project designed to criminalize poverty and dissent . The term "radical Islamist" is particularly telling, reducing resistance to a security threat while ignoring France’s history of marginalizing Muslim communities in its overseas territories, where healthcare and education remain chronically underfunded . This Islamophobic rhetoric, exported by American media hegemony, serves to legitimize repression under the guise of counterterrorism.
Bukele’s regime, however, takes fascism further by directly servicing U.S. imperialism. His prison-industrial complex now warehouses deportees from Trump’s raids, including Venezuelans falsely branded as gang members, in exchange for millions in U.S. funding . The state of exception,suspending due process for over 110,000 detainees,mirrors the extrajudicial tactics of colonial powers, yet Bukele is lauded by the right as a "strongman" success . Meanwhile, Macron’s Guiana prison, though less overtly brutal, reinforces France’s colonial grip on a region ravaged by illegal mining and poverty, where Indigenous and Maroon communities face systemic discrimination .
The War on Drugs, a failed imperial project, remains the common thread. France’s Guiana prison claims to target drug lords, yet ignores how European demand fuels the trade, just as Bukele’s mass arrests ignore U.S. complicity in arming gangs during Central America’s civil wars . Prohibition has always been a pretext to jail the poor: in Guiana, Black and immigrant communities are scapegoated for crime, while in El Salvador, working-class youth are swept into prisons to appease U.S. demands for "order" . The real traffickers,corporate and state-backed,operate with impunity.
Bukele and Macron’s policies also reveal the asymmetry of fascism’s reception. While Bukele is condemned (yet tacitly supported) by liberal outlets, Macron’s Guiana plan is framed as pragmatic, despite its colonial violence. The difference? France’s crimes are laundered through "republican values," while El Salvador’s are exoticized as Third World barbarism . Both leaders exploit crises to consolidate power,Bukele by dismantling democracy, Macron by ignoring Guiana’s protests for autonomy,yet only the former is branded a "dictator" by Western media .
The resistance lies in exposing these parallels. From Guiana’s quilombos to Salvadoran favelas, communities already face state violence disguised as security. Solidarity means rejecting the racist, imperial logic that paints prisons as solutions,and recognizing that fascism wears many masks, from Macron’s "enlightened" colonialism to Bukele’s U.S.-approved tyranny . The drugs will keep flowing, the poor will keep filling prisons, and the war will rage on,until we dismantle the systems that profit from both.
Apres moi, le deluge