The White House is taking cues from El Salvador. Activists can also learn from Salvadoran leftists.

The most revealing part of the historic meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Monday, April 14, came in the form of a joke:

Bukele: Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands, I like to say that we actually liberated millions…

Trump: Who gave him that line? Do you think I can use that?

[Laughter]

Bukele: To liberate 350 million you have to imprison some.

Beneath the levity, there’s a deadly seriousness. As a San Francisco-born Salvadoran journalist and student of technofascism, I see great danger ahead.

Trump and Bukele’s joke and the goal for the White House meeting – “working closely together to eradicate terrorist organizations, and build a future of prosperity” – contains familiar codes harkening back to the repressive statecraft of the Cold War.

Until recently, Nayib Bukele was a global pariah.

Bukele’s quip reveals not what El Salvador has learned from the U.S. but what the U.S. is learning from El Salvador. Looming above the meeting is the possibility that Trump will expand El Salvador’s traditional role as a laboratory for U.S. and global repression.

At the same time, just as El Salvador’s fascist history provides a model for neofascist domination in Argentina, Ecuador, the U.S. and other countries, so does El Salvador’s history in fighting – and defeating – fascists provide us with valuable lessons. What can Salvadoran activists teach us about the tech-media-enabled fascist creep and the resistance we need to defeat the far right in El Salvador and the U.S.?

On Truth Social Trump stated, “President Bukele has graciously accepted into his Nation’s custody some of the most violent alien enemies of the World.” These deceptive statements have immediate consequences for immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Centre. (Bukele said he had no intention of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S.)

Until recently, Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” was a global pariah. He was condemned by governments around the world, including by the Biden and Trump State Departments for abuses such as unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture.

Understanding how Bukele’s human rights violations are being erased to transform him from persona non grata into a hero holds lessons in what Latin American leftists call memoria historica, or the deploying of historical memory in the present to define the future.

Salvadorans and their history of struggle help me see the outlines of the broad antifascist front that has always been the antidote to the reactionary right. Those of us preparing for the possibility of a better world will have to organize general strikes and other actions in response to the Salvadorization of the U.S.

ROBERTO LOVATO is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas and an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This story first appeared in The Nation.