In a propaganda video broadcast by the Government of El Salvador, a group of people detained and chained were taken by force of airplanes, while drones filmed from above.
While the music intensified, the men went up to armored vehicles that transferred them to a great prison.
There they rapped their heads and transferred them in rows organized to large cells. The camera did not stop filming.
In the video, recently deported Venezuelan migrants from the United States appear, to whom the US authorities accuse of being members of bands, according to Salvadoran officials. In the video, alleged members of the MS-13 band are also seen, according to the officials. Deportation flights landed in El Salvador despite the fact that a federal judge ordered the planes to turn back and return the detainees to the United States.
The three -minute video, broadcast on Sunday morning by the president of El Salvador, was seen almost 39 million times in three days on social networks and has been reproduced in repeated opportunities in the news of the cable channels.
Although the United States did not make the video public, it is an extraordinary representation of detained migrants who are subject to US deportation procedures, which are rarely disseminated so openly.
But the use of these videos is not something new in El Salvador.
President Nayib Bukele, an expublicist who in 2019 was elected as president of the country, has turned the persecution and imprisonment of Salvadoran bands into a fundamental part of his mandate.
He has highlighted his severe approach against the entrenched violence of the bands through high quality audiovisual productions that show arrests and imprisonments, such as this carefully produced video of 2023 that shows the transfer of detainees to a new penitentiary center.
“They are videos that typically humiliate and try to dehumanize the people who are detained, and in this case deported,” said Juanita Goebertus Estrada, director of the division of the Americas of Human Rights Watch.
The Trump government has revealed few data on men, including any proof that they are gang members. He states that videos like this show how President Trump is fulfilling his promises to stop illegal immigration and make mass deportations.
Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador. He announced that the Salvadoran president had offered to receive deportees from any nationality, including American citizens, and accommodate them in exchange for a quota in a new megaprision called the terrorism confinement center, or CECOT, a huge enclosure with capacity for up to 40,000 inmates.
Opened in 2023 to stop people accused of belonging to bands, the center was presented with videos very well produced by the Bukele team, in which the transfer of the detainees was shown.
“It’s a resource to impact,” said Ricardo Valencia, head of the Salvadoran Embassy in Washington between 2010 and 2014, and Public Relations professor at the California State University in Fullerton. “But this tells you about the little rule of law in El Salvador. Cruelty is the purpose.”
During the weekend, the Trump government said that El Salvador would receive 6 million dollars for hosting hundreds of deportees, most of whom, according to the US government, were members of the Venezuelan criminal group Train de Aragua, without offering evidence or names of the detainees. The authorities said the agreement also included the transfer of around two tens of alleged members of the MS-13 who were detained in the United States waiting for charges against them.
Normally, US official representations of deportations or detention centers are more reserved and do not show migrant faces, if there is even video.
But under Trump’s mandate, who campaigned with a hard -line anti -migration position and the promise of mass deportations, US authorities have presented a new and more visceral propaganda campaign.
Rubio and Elon Musk shared Bukele’s video on the Internet. Trump thanked him by saying: “We will not forget!”
In recent weeks, the White House has published videos celebrating its deportation efforts.
The White House also published photos presented in the style of the posters of “Search” of the old west, in which men “arrested” by immigration officials appear, of whom they say they have been accused of crimes such as violation, murder and kidnapping.
These images, sealed with a White House logo, were promoted to demonstrate what for the government is the determination to comply with the country’s immigration laws, but also served to publicly embarrass immigrants, some of whom had not been convicted.
On Monday, the White House published in X a video of a migrant chained being registered, accompanied by the music of “Closing Time”, the success of Rock of the Semisonic that was released in 1998.
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said the video intended to motivate “illegal immigrants to actively self -lead, to be saved from appearing in one of these funny videos.”
These types of videos were common for the first time in El Salvador in 2022, after an increase in the violence of the bands in the Central American country took the government to impose the state of exception, which is still in force three years later. The Army and the Police began a campaign of mass arrests, with many imprisoned people without due process.
Although the repression significantly reduced the violence of the bands, also eroded civil liberties and centralized power under Bukele.
Human rights groups denounced the lack of procedural guarantees for tens of thousands of detainees (some people without links with bands were arrested), and due to the conditions in which they were held. More than 300 people have died in government custody in the last three years, according to Human Rights Watch.
When the Bukele government inaugurated the new detention center in 2023, he published a 30 -minute guided tour. Since then, they have invited international media and social networks to make tours that have obtained huge numbers of visits on YouTube.
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It is likely that Bukele’s new association with the United States further encourages the production of this type of propaganda videos by its government.
“We continue advancing in the fight against organized crime,” Bukele wrote on the weekend next to the video. “But, this time, we are also helping our allies.”