This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number Ninety-Six.

Recently, Erin Burnett, on her CNN show “Out Front,” had a two-part report which positively gushed in appreciation of the iron-fisted, basically fascist rule of Nayib Bukele, who has been the head of government in El Salvador since 2019.

With Bukele, El Salvador has gone from being “the murder capital of the world” to becoming the country with the highest rate of mass incarceration in the world—even surpassing the United States as a mass incarcerator. Bukele has remained in office in violation of the country’s Constitution and has exercised extraordinary repressive powers, which would be strongly denounced by the likes of Burnett if it were Vladimir Putin, instead of Nayib Bukele, doing this. But, instead of being condemned, Bukele is wildly praised, and his essentially fascist rule is promoted as a “model” by many, not only in El Salvador but in other countries as well—including within the ruling class of this country.

An article in the New York Times, on Sunday, September 1 of this year (2024), by Megan K. Stack (“In El Salvador, Peace With a Side of Fear”) also speaks of Bukele’s popularity, although this article by Stack criticizes some of the methods Bukele has used in his “anti-gang” crusade.

Stack notes that Bukele’s “campaign against crime” does not even pretend to uphold basic rights or adhere to due process of law. She points out that Bukele “has rounded up some 81,000 prisoners to be held incommunicado”—and that “Thousands of children as young as 12 are among the detained, and some of them have been tortured.” She refers to the director of a human rights organization in El Salvador, whose research estimates that about one third of the people detained in this way are actually innocent!

But, again, Stack’s article goes at some length into how Bukele is widely and wildly popular, for now at least, because the suppression of the gangs has allowed people to go out into the streets and generally go through life without the constant fear of terror from the gangs. (At the same time, Stack refers to reports that Bukele has actually made deals with leaders of the gangs, while ruthlessly cracking down on the basic members.)

There is some very important, very negative, history to learn from here. In the period after World War 1 (which ended in 1918) Italian fascist Benito Mussolini was popular among significant sections of people in that country because his iron-fisted rule brought some “order” out of the chaos that resulted from that World War. Similarly, the rule of the German Nazi fascists headed by Adolf Hitler was, for some time, popular among significant sections of the people in that country because, under the rule of these Nazis, the German economy recovered from a devastating crisis that followed Germany’s defeat in World War 1; and Hitler and the Nazis made Germany a feared military power, which achieved major victories at the beginning of World War 2 (which started in 1939). But the rule of Mussolini—and, on an even more massive and terrible scale, that of Hitler—involved horrific atrocity (and it ultimately led to disaster for the people in those countries).

Returning to the situation in El Salvador today, with the essentially fascist rule of Nayib Bukele, and looking at the larger and more fundamental picture: What an indictment of the capitalist-imperialist system—and, above all, the U.S.—which has dominated and devastated El Salvador for generations! It is this system, and this U.S. domination, that created the conditions which led to the growth of gangs and their widespread terror in El Salvador, in the context of continuing poverty among masses of people there. It is this system—and the domination and devastation perpetrated by the U.S. above all—which has imposed on the tormented people of El Salvador the terrible “choice” between relentless gang terror and the extremely repressive fascist rule of Bukele.

Back in this country itself (the good ole USA), besides its responsibility for the terrible conditions and awful “choices” imposed on the people of El Salvador, there is a section of the ruling class, as represented by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which openly expresses admiration for Bukele, and celebrates his fascist crackdown. As reported by Stack, the Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz traveled to El Salvador to learn from Bukele’s trample-on-rights fascist crackdown, and Gaetz argued that this should be a model for dealing with cities like Chicago, in the U.S. itself.

Along the same lines, in a recent campaign speech, Donald Trump continued his insistence that police should be even more brutal—specifically, he said, police should be unleashed to carry out a “very rough one hour,” as the solution to crime in this country (and, of course, that “one hour” would not just be one hour, in reality, but an ongoing reign of terror).

In the U.S. itself, as well as in El Salvador—indeed everywhere—the choice must not be reduced to either random gang violence and crime, or the “orderly terror” of the police and other institutions violently enforcing the rule of this oppressive system. As an abundance of awful experience has shown, “wars” waged by the ruling class within this country, in the name of targeting crime and criminals, will involve a reign of terror against masses of oppressed people overall, in particular the youth—and, after all, it is the youth especially among the masses of oppressed people whose choices are severely restricted, by the operation and enforcement of this system, which is fundamentally responsible for the fact that large numbers of these youth are driven to crime.

As I emphasized in message number 94, for Black people—and this is true for the masses of people overall—in cities like Chicago, and other major concentrations of oppressed people, their fundamental interests, and the way out of all the madness, does not lie with fascism—or with any form of this system which has, for so long, oppressed and terrorized Black people, and others, in the most unspeakable ways.

The answer is to break through and break out of the terrible trap that this system has set for masses of oppressed people, including those driven to desperation and desperate acts. As clearly stated in my message number 93, the answer is to become revolutionary emancipators—to join the Revcom Corps for the Emancipation of Humanity, working to bring about the emancipating revolutionary solution to all this madness.

This is all the more profoundly true, and urgently important, in this time we are living in now, when the divisions within the country—and particularly among the powers-that-be—mean that they cannot rule over the people as a unified ruling class in the way they have been able to do for so long; and the possibility to wrench an actual revolution out of this intense situation—to overthrow and sweep away this whole system, and bring something much better into being—is real, and must be actively seized.

This “something much better” is given full expression in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have written. That Constitution provides the foundation, and the basic principles and practical guidelines, for a system that will provide for the safety and security of the people, while at the same time protecting and safeguarding their basic rights, instead of robbing them of those rights in the name of “safety and security.” The document We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System speaks to the fundamental changes that this radically new system, based on this new Constitution, will bring about—in the economy, the political system and other key dimensions of life for the masses of people—including this:

A Whole New Dimension of Freedom and Rights of the People

As set forth in this Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, the people in this new society will not only be allowed but encouraged and enabled to fully speak their minds politically, to express themselves freely through artistic and other means, to dissent and protest with constitutional and institutionalized protection of their right to do so. They will be provided with the means for doing this, because this is an important part of creating an atmosphere where people can “breathe” and feel at ease, and where they will be inspired to join with others in grappling with what will, and what will not, contribute to the emancipating transformation of society and the world as a whole.

(“We Need/We Demand,” as well as the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, is available at revcom.us.)

It is this emancipating system that is worth devoting your life to fighting for—in opposition to the reign of terror of fascism, and the overall horrors of this system of capitalism-imperialism in whatever form it imposes its rule over people.