Gloriosa victoria, mural by Diego Rivera
“They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . .
– Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre
“Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel.”
–Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs
There might never even have been an Israel without arms shipments from the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in 1939 during the British Mandate over Palestine. Nine years after that helping hand was extended, the Haganah, with assistance from the Irgun and Lehi, erased Palestine from the map, building the state of Israel literally on top of where Palestine had been while recruiting Nazis from Europe to help the fledgling Jewish state build up enough weapons. Not long after that, Israel took charge of assisting bloody repression in Latin America.
Israel actually trained the army of Castillo Armas that overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954, later shoring up repression across the entire Southern Cone by providing the same training and arms to the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. It also financed Colombian paramilitaries and developed the tactics and weapons used in Mexico’s “Dirty War,” which included forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, carried out against student protesters, political dissidents and campesinos.
The Central America connection was established early on. Israel started sending automatic weapons, tanks, and military planes to the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua in the 1950s, later increasing its support when the dictatorship faced an ultimately successful popular revolution in the 1970s. Israel was Nicaragua’s sole source of arms after Jimmy Carter belatedly cut off military aid to Somoza in 1978, who killed tens of thousands of people in his last two years in power, ultimately using Israeli planes to bomb Managua in a final paroxysm of futile violence. After the Sandinista revolution took power, Israel acted as a conduit to arm and train cocaine-trafficking mercenaries (the Contras) attacking schools, farming cooperatives, and medical clinics throughout Nicaragua in an attempt to destroy the popular achievements of the revolution.
By far the bloodiest Israeli policy in the region was directed against Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s, when indigenous Mayans rose up against European-descended oligarchs defended by a brutal Mestizo Army. Tel Aviv’s arms, intelligence, advisors, surveillance technology, and torture tactics helped kill two hundred thousand people and displace a million more in what the Catholic Church and Guatemalan courts determined to be genocide. Guatemalan army officers credited Israel with turning the tide against the popular uprising via mass extermination in the countryside and counter-insurgency techniques that wiped out guerrilla networks in the cities.
Such repression was by then a well-established Israeli policy in the region. In 1972, Tel Aviv had put itself at the service of the Salvadorean army, secret police, and death squads, and the following year El Salvador became the first country to receive a major shipment of Israeli military aircraft. From 1975 to 1979, the last years before El Salvador erupted in civil war, Israel provided 83% of Salvadorean military imports, and agreements between the two states continued throughout the war years, including deals for napalm, armaments, and military technology and training.
The scorched earth campaigns that Israel repeatedly relied on were deliberately focused on destroying Central America’s resources and crops in order to deprive popular guerrilla movements of the means to sustain themselves, thus forcing displaced populations into small, controlled spaces, which were easily subjected to targeted repression.
Civilian slaughters were a key feature of these efforts, and they occurred with mind-numbing regularity throughout the Cold War, the more famous among them being the Rio Sumpul massacre, where hundreds of civilians were mutilated and killed trapped between the Salvadorean and Honduran armies, Operation Scorched Earth (El Salvador), during which bodies were partially dissolved in acid and then dumped in a river, and the El Mozote massacre of 1981, when nearly one thousand Salvadoreans were variously shot, raped, beheaded, and burned alive in Church. There were also assassinations of priests and liberation theologians like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Ignacio Ellacuria, the former ordered by Israel-trained Roberto D’Aubuisson and the latter one of six Jesuit priests murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion along with their housekeeper in 1989.
These were not episodes of merely gratuitous violence, but rational repression that successfully crushed the threat of popular democracy posed by labor organizers, peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, and church-based Bible study groups “infected” by liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor, along with others working to improve the lives of ordinary people. A negotiated end to the Salvadorean civil war was finally signed in 1992, but the underlying class conflict remained unresolved, with land and other crucial resources concentrated in the hands of a microscopic minority, which is what produced the civil war in the first place.
Almost three decades of severe gang violence then ensued, after which Nayib Bukele was elected president promising to solve the nation’s crime problem. Descended from Christian Palestinians on his father’s side, Bukele believes the problem in Gaza is Hamas, not Israel, and is part of a group that makes up one percent of the Salvadorean population. Many members of this group fought on revolutionary fronts during the civil war, such as Schafik Handal, one of the general commanders of the FMLN guerrilla forces. In fact, Bukele’s own family collaborated with the FMLN after it became a political party, managing its communications for years through the family’s marketing firms, opening the way for Mauricio Funes to win the presidency in 2009. The FMLN later recruited Nayib for a political career, and he became mayor of San Salvador in 2012, and president seven years later.
Having crafted an anti-Marxist, anti-establishment, “cool” dictator image for himself, Bukele today upholds the legacy of the military dictatorship the FMLN fought against, relying on Washington’s counsel and Israel’s weapons. “To achieve good results in the war against gangs, it has been necessary to equip our institution. Today we are handing over 800 Arad rifles to Armed Forces units,” said Bukele’s Defense Minister René Merino in 2022, during a $1.2 million re-armament effort involving Israeli equipment. As a direct result of Bukele’s policies, one out of forty Salvadorean adults is now in jail, the highest incarceration rate in the world, many held at CECOT, a massively over-crowded mega-prison notorious for beating and starving prisoners who have have been granted no rights, no trial, and no visitors.
CECOT actually fits the definition of a concentration camp more than a jail, as prisoners are locked up there not for individual offenses they have been proven to have committed, but because they allegedly fit certain characteristics associated with gang membership. They are dissidents, the abysmally poor, and now even Venezuelans abducted from U.S. soil and trafficked to El Salvador.
In this incarceration model El Salvador receives $20,000 for each prisoner, a highly lucrative arrangement with prospects for limitless growth, since the ultimate target is not crime per se, but anyone who fails to comply with the aims and practices of the Bukele dictatorship. According to internal Salvadorean intelligence documents, 36% of those Bukele has jailed have no prior criminal history. Data from the National Civil Police originally claimed there were 58,270 gang members outstanding, but as of the end of March 2026, 91,000 gang arrests had been made. Meanwhile, Bukele’s “state of exception” suspending constitutional guarantees continues into its fifth year on the pretext of needing to arrest even more.
The lawless Bukele model has won the admiration of aspiring dictators throughout Latin America, which finds itself in the midst of an accelerating campaign to replace constitutional crime fighting with institutionalized state violence. In Chile, the Pinochet-aligned Jose Antonio Kast ran for president on a promise to suspend constitutional guarantees. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa is replicating the state of permanent emergency and moving ahead with plans to construct Bukele-inspired mega-prisons. In Costa Rica and Paraguay, preventive detention and harsh criminal penalties are increasingly entrenched. In Argentina, Javier Milei openly champions fascist Israel while his “zero tolerance” crime policy includes ritual public display of prisoners in degrading conditions. Niceties like the presumption of innocence are reserved for white collar cases.
At the other end of the spectrum are vast Latin American protest movements that know from bitter experience that some of the fiercest partisans of “never again” are actually committed to a policy of “over and over again” at their expense, having perfected extermination in Palestine and then exported it throughout Latin America.
It can’t be long before Bukele’s dungeons include dissidents trafficked from the U.S. for acting on the conviction that “we are all Palestinians.”
Sources.
Salvadorean Defense Minister Rene Merino quoted by Sasi Alejandre, “Palestine and The Global State of Exception,” (Spanish), https://www.naiz.eus/es
“The Dangerous Expansion of Bukele-ism,” La Jornada (Spanish), March 29, 2026
Isabel Rikkers and Noeli Brigden, “Christian Zionism in Bukele’s El Salvador,” NACLA, October 9, 2024
“Israel’s Role in the Guatemalan Genocide,” Middle East Monitor, October 5, 2015
“Israel’s Bloodstained Legacy in Latin America,” Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, March 24, 2025
“Israel’s Latin American Trail of Terror,” Al Jazeera, June 5, 2003
On Israel’s recruitment of Nazis to build up its base of weapons, see Trita Parsi interview on Breaking Points, “Israel’s Puppet Plan: Recruited ‘Terrorist’ To Run Iran,” July 14, 2026
