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Well he’s a Salvadoran citizen so presumably they can do what they want with their own citizens….
Yep.
I still remain a bit confused as to why the onus remains on the U.S. to seek his release.
Even if a U.S. Judge asserts jurisdiction and El Salvador chooses to humor this, a non-U.S. citizen being held by a non-U.S. country is not something we'd expect U.S. Judges to devote resources towards without some strong U.S. interests at stake.
The actual basis on and circumstances under which he was arrested and removed might bear scrutiny, but let us say that the Judge does determine he was wrongfully removed. Seems like the remedy is to release him and he can find his own way from there.
If a foreign national is being held in an El Salvadoran prison, then their home country ought to be the one they're contacting to seek release.
The emotional component becomes clearer to me when I flip the script. Imagining some random U.S. citizen sneaks into, I dunno, Italy. They catch him but a judge rules he can't be removed for the time being, and he marries an Italian lady and has some young kids in the meantime, but never goes through the naturalization process.
Then the next Italian Prime Minister comes in and actively starts deporting migrants, but not necessarily to their home countries. If the U.S. Citizen ends up in an Albanian prison, do we actually expect him to cry to the Italian government to bring him back? Does anyone really feel like a U.S. citizen is entitled to activate the Italian Justice system to come to his rescue?
OR more absurdly if Italy ships him to the U.S. and has the U.S. agrees to hold him in prison, do we really, REALLY think he's going to succeed by asking Italian courts to intervene, rather than taking it up directly with the U.S. government to get himself released and, lets say, his wife and kids brought over here?
The weight of the argument in favor of bringing Abrego Garcia back seems to be
If we discard those arguments, if Garcia is released, only "LEGAL" positions (not really moral ones) that make sense are that he could try to return to the U.S. on his own dime and through legal channels, or he can return 'home' and bring his wife and kids with him to reunite the family.
The comparable scenario would be if Italy was paying the US government for use of US prisons and sent an American citizen who had illegally immigrated to Italy, due to a procedural fuckup, and Italy's judiciary told the executive they were procedually required to request his return. If it's an intra-Italian government procedural dispute and the US government is acting as an agent of Italy, rather than imprisoning the American of its own prerogative, what then?
Setting the side the question of how this fiasco, itself, affected his safety in El Salvador, I don't see a procedural problem with returning him to the USA, for the purposes of the "Article III" District Court investigating ICE compliance with court orders, followed by ICE having its "Administrative" immigration court reassess Garcia's original claim of threats to him in El Salvador and, if they no longer applied, re-deporting him. Bringing him back, so that ICE could follow the correct process to re-deport him would be embarrassing to ICE, but it's their fuckup, so...
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Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
We're clear on that?
Because it feels relevant to the case. "Apologies to the guy who we mistakenly paid for Stalin to put in a Siberian gulag, our bad. However, being from the Baltics, he should really be seeking redress from the legitimate Soviet government for any wrongful imprisonment and torture, not from us" is… kind of a non-starter?
Like, I get the US Gov can't really acknowledge this point on an official, diplomatic level. Nobody wants to go to war with fucking El Salvador. "Third World prisons are horrible torture-gulags and the POTUS is still expected to shake the President's hand on camera when we need a trade deal signed" is a fact of life. But when it comes to ordinary truth-seeking citizens like ourselves discussing the ethics of the case, we should really drop the pretense that Garcia has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting genuine due process from Bukele's government. It's either help from the U.S. or he never sees his kids again. Let's be realistic.
No.
Not right. Partisan hyperbole squared, even, due to how much of the American media that carries that tune gets it in turn from Bukele's own political opposition. That political opposition in turn has its own partisan interests in characterizing their defeat as illegitimate, in hopes that a sympathetic US administration will overthrow the popularly elected leader to their partisan benefit.
There are people in this thread saying that they approve of the fact that it's a torture prison, that we should make American prisons more torturous, and even that getting a death sentence in the US is probably preferable to being sent to the Salvadoran prison. "The Salvadoran prison is awful" does not seem to be a claim exclusive to a left-wing media bubble.
To put the question another way - I mean - are you confident about your chances of seeing daylight again if you were thrown in jail by the Bukele government on vague, spurious suspicion of being connected to a gang in some way? I'm not sure there's enough money in the world to make me chance it.
Ah, but that wasn't your original claim now, was it? Nor was it even the only claim.
And thus we watch the retreat from the bailey to the motte.
Is there a reason to believe vague and spurious suspicions are relevant metaphors for this case? After all, the claim of being a gang member comes from the deportee, which was both the grounds of his non-deportation order but also non-asylum.
Yes it was. My original claim which you disputed was "Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole". "The Salvadoran prison is awful" is a shorter way of restating the same thing: "awful" is short for "a human-rights-violating hellhole" and anyone who runs human-rights-violating hellholes is, ipso facto, a dictator.
…?? Source, please? I thought everyone here agreed that the claim that Garcia was a gang member originated with an anonymous informant for US law enforcement in 2019.
Alas, you do not get to redefine what words meant to get around your different, less pejorative, and more defensible choice of words when challenged.
I did not intend "awful" to be less pejorative than the long version, and I'm happy to defend the long version in the exact same terms. I am confident the three posters I linked above would agree with "hell-hole" or "torture-prison" just as much as with "awful".
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If that's the position, careful about admitting that a human-rights-violating hellhole run by a dictator strongman can actually fix a country's crime problem with minimal side impacts.
And of course, the U.S. will negotiate the release of its citizens from Russia itself while Russia is public enemy numero uno, the Soviet example falls kind of flat.
And of course of course, the U.S. had its own secret impenetrable dictator prison for foreign nationals in Gitmo, so we should be showing just as much objection there, no?
Do you genuinely believe the self-declared "World's Coolest Dictator" enforcing a 3-years-and-counting "State of Exception" to defendants' rights (6 or 7 years after the homicide rate had begun its rapid decline) had "minimal side impacts?"
Yes.
I keep poking around for any indication that there's real repression of opposing parties or resistance to his regime from actually aggrieved groups. I come up empty. Happy to read firsthand accounts of abuse, but I really want to know if the country is doing 'better' or not in the aggregate.
The Wikipedia page for his most recent election doesn't even suggest that he had to fudge numbers to win overwhelmingly. There were active protests against him that didn't get arrested or repressed. No political opponents were arrested.
I don't know what 'side effects' you're suggesting came downstream of the crackdown, ESPECIALLY with regard to the average citizen's daily experience in the country.
And as stated, the U.S. has its own black spot in Gitmo, and the left has virtually stopped even mentioning these days.
I would accuse them of very, VERY selective criticism on this point.
On a purely practical basis, if your choices are between a 'tyrannical' gang that kills 4000+ people per year, or a 'tyrannical' president who imprisons the guys who were doing the killing, even if it sweeps up some folks who probably don't deserve it, what is the OBVIOUS choice for the citizen who has been terrorized by the former for years?
"oh no El Presidente might abuse all this power he's being handed, better to let the completely unaccountable and aggressively violent gang continue operating than risk a dictator!"
Am I suggesting that there's no in-between options? Nah.
I am suggesting that liberals have failed to present such a workable option and it is not surprising that the El Salvadorans have been delighted to have the gang problem solved.
What about this guy? Perhaps not directly related to the election... but perhaps had a chilling effect.
Some travelogues that may interest you:
Matt Lakeman's Notes on El Salvador
Snowden Todd's Sojourn
A video travelogue by an ethnonationalist or enthonationalist-sympathist (I don't care enough to figure out his precise views) who's even more adventurous than Lakeman (the website is a somewhat reliable proxy for youtube - if none of the backends are working, when you try it, there's a link to the youtube url, below the video)
My impression is that "the man on the street" considers "mano dura" to be a net improvement, but not an unalloyed good. What side impacts are major or minor is a matter of opinion, of course, so I don't care to quibble about the appropriate threshold.
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The initial sweep may be justifiable with "desperate times deserve desperate measures". But once the immediate murder-emergency is over, he should be trying to separate out anyone who just got caught up in it; of course he is not, saying anyone he put in CECOT stays there for life. And he certainly shouldn't be imprisoning someone who was supposedly in a gang in the US on the say-so of some US confidential informant; that can't be justified by the emergency.
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The side-impact is that you have torture-prisons. Torture-prisons are bad. We shouldn't have them because they are unacceptable in and of themselves to anyone with a conscience; not because they wouldn't work, or because they would have unacceptable second-order effects. As with most things in life, there is a classic British comedy sketch about this.
(Although as side-effects on non-criminals go, people who lived under Soviet regimes tend to agree that living with the gnawing fear that you might get thrown in the torture-prison yourself if an apparatchik thinks you gave them a funny look is a pretty heavy toll on any innocent citizen's everyday well-being.)
In any case this isn't meant to be an argument that we absolutely must free Garcia. Just that the oft-repeated "he should be petitioning the Bukele government, not America" thing is delusional at best and bad-faith at worst. If it's not America's responsibility to save some possibly-innocent Salvadoran from being tortured in El Salvador, fine. "There are plenty of other Salvadorans being tortured right now, Garcia should never have been allowed on US soil, once he's been sent back his fate will be the same as any other Salvadoran's and if we don't intervene to save the others we have no reason to intervene to save him; que sera sera" is a coherent position. But let's not pretend he has some other way out. Pleading for American help and hoping the US will bite is the only thing anyone in his situation can do, whether or not he's actually entitled to it.
The previous problem was having literally thousands of people murdered on a yearly basis.
Having literally thousands of people murdered is bad.
And probably worse than torture-prisons, since the people doing the murdering had even less accountability.
Convince me that moving from "unnaccountable warlords murdering innocents" to "warlords and their subordinates [and probably some innocents] getting tortured in a hellish prision" is actually NOT an improvement in pure utilitarian terms.
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