Are Trump’s Deportations to El Salvador Just the Beginning?

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: The United States deports hundreds of migrants to El Salvador, Mexicans react to the discovery of a mass grave, and Honduras mourns a music icon.

Deportation Dilemma

Several Latin American leaders are cooperating with U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for large-scale deportations from the United States—but none more enthusiastically than Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

Bukele offered last month to house deportees from the United States in a maximum security prison in El Salvador. Over the weekend, the Trump administration flew more than 200 Venezuelan migrants to the country, despite a judge’s order to block the expulsions.

Bukele posted videos of the migrants arriving in El Salvador and mocked the U.S. judge, posting on X: “Oopsie… Too late.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted the message.

A White House spokesperson said the United States is paying El Salvador’s government around $6 million for taking the deportees. Bukele said they will stay in Salvadoran prison for at least a year, with an option to extend.

Bukele and the White House border czar both claimed without proof that 238 of the deportees were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. That allegation is contested by several families of the detained, who did not have a chance to defend themselves in court.

In a judicial filing, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official acknowledged that “many” of the deportees did not have criminal records in the United States. An attorney for one of the deportees said he was a professional soccer player with no criminal record who was legally admitted to the United States to seek asylum.

For his part, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the deportations “evoked the darkest episodes in human history.” Venezuela’s opposition leaders, María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, issued a statement that criticized Tren de Aragua and called for Venezuelans to enjoy “the full protection of the law.”

Broadly speaking, however, the episode has not caused widespread uproar in Latin America.

Other governments in the region are preparing to receive deportees, too—whether their own nationals or people from third countries. Trump’s deportation infrastructure in the hemisphere ranges “from hotels in the Panamanian jungle to airstrips in Honduras,” journalist Jonathan M. Katz wrote in Foreign Policy this week.

Theoretically, Latin American countries could refuse to accept deportees from the United States. But Trump holds other cards. In January, the region watched as Colombia tried to reject a military deportation flight and was quickly hit by a 25 percent U.S. tariff order. Bogotá later backed down.

“Migration is at the top of [Trump’s] agenda … [and] people in the region are aware of that,” said Roman Gressier, an editor for El Faro English based in Guatemala City. “They’re picking their battles and trying to align them with their own domestic priorities.”

The limited outrage at potentially wrongful detentions has another explanation: In some parts of Latin America, fatigue with insecurity has led to public acceptance of campaigns that sweep up people accused of organized crime.

El Salvador is a poster child for this approach. The country has the world’s highest incarceration rate, and Bukele is Latin America’s most popular president. But many of those jailed are not gang members, but the “poor, surviving on the margins of the economy,” Noah Bullock, the executive director of the human rights organization Cristosal, wrote in Foreign Policy on Thursday.

Since last year, Honduras has adopted a state of emergency modeled on that of Bukele, prompting human rights watchdogs to warn of due process violations. After protests in Peru denounced the killing of a famous singer on Sunday, President Dina Boluarte’s first move was to declare a state of emergency, suspending certain constitutional rights.

Though mass incarceration may be growing in popularity in Latin America, history suggests that it is often a short-term fix to crime problems. Many gangs grew within prison systems, including MS-13. It is active in El Salvador and the United States, and some of its leaders are jailed in both countries.

Last weekend, following a request from Bukele, Washington sent some MS-13 members back to El Salvador, along with the deported migrants.

The Week Ahead

Sunday, March 23: Ecuador holds a televised presidential debate.

Monday, March 24, to Saturday, March 29: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visits Japan and Vietnam.

What We’re Following

Mass grave found in Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has pledged new government efforts to address forced disappearances in Mexico after a grassroots human rights group discovered a mass grave in the western state of Jalisco.

Local authorities inspected the gravesite located on a ranch last September and found weapons and bone fragments there but stopped short of a full investigation. The civil society group Searching Warriors of Jalisco visited the site this month and posted photos of shoes, backpacks, and human remains on social media, causing national uproar.

People who identified themselves as survivors told members of Searching Warriors and local media that the site was used for forced recruitment into an armed group: Responding to false job offers, people boarded buses that took them to the ranch, where they were told they would enter training or die.

Searching Warriors leader Indira Navarro appealed to authorities for help investigating the case. This week, Sheinbaum signed a decree to strengthen a national search committee and pledged to send a bill to Congress that would strengthen government data-sharing on missing persons.

Some of these measures were previously undertaken by a committee disbanded under Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Human rights activists met their revival with cautious optimism.

Argentina’s anti-Milei protests. While some Argentines have demonstrated against President Javier Milei’s spending cuts for months, he has so far maintained significant popular support. Pollster AtlasIntel measured Milei’s approval at 47.4 percent in February, while CB Consultora pegged it at 46 percent in early March.

But last week, disapproval of Milei appeared to broaden when soccer fans from two major club teams, Boca Juniors and River Plate, joined pensioners in an anti-Milei march in Buenos Aires. Police repression of the protests drew broad public reproach; one reporter was hit in the head with a can of tear gas.

Milei’s support in Congress remains strong enough that the lower house backed a presidential decree to authorize a new deal with the International Monetary Fund in a 129-108 vote on Wednesday. Lawmakers were giving Milei the benefit of the doubt: The decree did not include details on the content of the deal.

A banner with a photo of Honduran singer Aurelio Martínez is seen during his wake in La Ceiba, Honduras, on March 19.Esau Ocampo/AFP via Getty Images

Garifuna music icon. Hondurans are mourning musician and former lawmaker Aurelio Martínez, who was on board a small plane that crashed in the country on Monday. Martínez was a musical standard-bearer for the Garifuna, an ethnic group descended from enslaved Africans and Indigenous Arawak people on the island of St. Vincent.

British colonists deported the Garifuna in the 18th century, and they settled in neighboring countries. Consistent with Garifuna tradition, Martínez’s singing and songwriting told of everyday life in Central America and the Caribbean.

Garifuna was elected Honduras’s first Black congressman in 2005. But after a fellow musician suddenly died in 2008, he returned to the arts, traveling to Senegal to study the connection between West African and Garifuna rhythms and recording part of his second album, Laru Beya, there.

In 2015, Martínez played an NPR Tiny Desk Concert in Washington. He pointed out to the audience that Garifuna culture was declared by UNESCO to be intangible heritage “for humanity,” adding, “so this is your music.”

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In Focus: The Green Finance Drawing Board

Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaks at an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington on Oct. 22, 2024.Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The United States’ turn away from international climate finance under Trump is reverberating in Latin America and the Caribbean, leading some countries to rethink their green transition plans.

Before Trump took office, Colombia was working to secure U.S. financing for projects in a green economic transformation portfolio that was informally modeled after deals known as Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs. Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam previously received funding from consortiums of rich countries through JETPs.

But the Trump administration has officially withdrawn its backing for JETPs, and Colombia has turned to other countries to be lead partners, though no funding deal has been announced yet. Last November, then-Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said that if Washington would not back the plan, Bogotá would look “north, south, east, and west” for other alternatives, including to China.

Furthermore, Muhamad, who is no longer in government, told Bloomberg in recent days that Colombia would not pursue new debt-for-nature swap deals. While some in climate finance have celebrated the arrangements—recently made in Belize and Ecuador—Muhamad said such deals presented to Bogotá have been “very small” and “haven’t been worth the risk.”

The country wants to avoid “sending a signal to the markets that we are not able to pay our debt,” Muhamad said.

Still, one country in the region showed forward momentum on climate last week. Barbados announced a new plan to reach its economywide net-zero target by 2035 and described several funding sources that it says could pay for the shift. Chief among them are mechanisms often provided by public and multilateral banks to make it less risky for private funders to invest in climate transformation efforts.

Barbados is seeking a total of $10 billion from a variety of funding sources, an ambitious target.