This is Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION—number 131.

Earlier this year, as Donald Trump’s fascist regime was defying a court order by sending hundreds of immigrants to a torture-chamber prison in El Salvador, Trump hosted the fascist dictator of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in the White House. Trump and other fascists have praised Bukele’s police state methods as a “model” for dealing with gangs and crime. (Also of note: As part of his fascist rule, Bukele has remained in office in violation of limits set by El Salvador’s Constitution—indeed a “model” for Trump!)

Bukele’s “solution” to gangs and crime is to occupy the streets of El Salvador with military forces, and to round up and imprison everyone Bukele’s regime accuses of being a gang member, with no due process.

Yes, the streets in El Salvador appear to be “safer”—so long as you don’t oppose what the Bukele regime is doing or somehow get on Bukele’s “bad side.”

A reign of terror by gangs in El Salvador has been replaced by a reign of terror by the government and its armed forces. As pointed out in a New York Times article (November 1, 2024), Bukele “has rounded up some 81,000 prisoners to be held incommunicado”—and “Thousands of children as young as 12 are among the detained, and some of them have been tortured.” This article also refers to an estimate that about one third of the people detained in this way are actually innocent! And, again, there is no real opportunity for those rounded up to contest what is being done to them.

This is a “model” for how the Trump fascist regime claims it is going to deal with crime and “clean up cities.” Already, even before Trump, the U.S. has been a “model” of mass incarceration—with huge numbers of Black and Latino men, and growing numbers of women, imprisoned. And there is the constant police terror and outright murder of Black people, as well as Latinos and Native Americans. The police in this country kill more than a thousand people a year—and, as I pointed out in my previous message (number 130): Since 1960, the number of Black people killed by police is greater than the thousands who were lynched during the whole time of open segregation and Ku Klux Klan terror after the Civil War.

What disgusting hypocrisy when blatantly racist fascists—like Trump and his maniac “hit man” Stephen Miller—claim that those of us who oppose their brutal crackdowns and military occupations in cities are the actual “racists,” because we supposedly don’t care about Black people being terrorized by crime! As I wrote in my 2020 article “Anything but the Truth”: “All of a sudden, the most overt racists [like Trump and Stephen Miller] are pretending to be concerned about Black people killing each other!” 

In reality, the fundamental cause of “Black-on-Black” crime is this system of capitalism-imperialism—it is this system confining masses of Black people in conditions of deprivation, degradation and hopelessness, and continually pumping at them the “dog eat dog” mentality that fuels this cut-throat system of exploitation and oppression, from top to bottom. Again from “Anything but the Truth”:

That Black people, who are already so viciously oppressed and suffering so terribly, are killing each other in such great numbers is something that should make any decent person heartsick—and it should drive them to seek the way to put an end to this by getting to the deeper causes of this and moving to change all that. If those people who are constantly citing statistics about “Black-on-Black crime” really wanted to do something meaningful about the fact that Black people, and especially the youth, are killing each other in tragically high numbers, they would join with those of us who are working to win these youth to the revolution that can bring down this system which is the fundamental cause of this, and bring into being a system which would uproot the conditions and transform the ways of thinking that give rise to this.

But the overt racists and “Black conservatives” are not really interested in putting an end to all that. Whatever pretensions they put up—whether more obvious or more devious—they are working to fortify this system of capitalism-imperialism which has white supremacy built into it and can only function by keeping Black people oppressed and terrorized.

Using the military to back up the police in viciously repressing the people already brutally preyed upon by this system can only bring more horror, on top of horror. Whether in El Salvador, or in this country itself, any system that presents the “choice” as between rampant crime, or a police state in the name of “fighting crime,” is a system that has no right to exist. In another 2020 article at revcom.us, I spelled out this fundamental truth: “Racial Oppression Can Be Ended, But Not Under This System.”

We need a fundamentally different system—and a revolution to bring about that fundamentally different system, as set forth in the revcom Declaration, We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System, which I spoke to more fully in my message number 129.

In immediate terms, everyone who is outraged by this Trump fascist regime and the accelerating juggernaut of horrors it is rapidly moving to enforce, needs to take up the historic Call to action, initiated by Refuse Fascism.org and open to all, which begins: “The time has come for... THE FALL of the TRUMP FASCIST REGIME, Beginning November 5, 2025, Washington DC.”

The Call from Refuse Fascism continues: “Fascism is not a looming threat. It is upon us now. Humanity’s only hope is for the decent people of this country to rise in our millions. We must drive the Trump Fascist Regime from power. Beginning November 5, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, flood DC in nonviolent protest.”

This Call from Refuse Fascism needs to be taken up, distributed far and wide, and boldly acted on by growing numbers of people, in keeping with the urgent necessity it is powerfully speaking to.

As for us, the revcoms, while devoting continuing and determined efforts to uniting all who can be united, coming from many different political perspectives, in taking up this Call to drive out the Trump fascist regime, we will at the same time be actively working to involve growing numbers of people in seriously digging into the question of what has given rise to this fascism, and to win growing numbers of people to come to the understanding that it is this system of capitalism-imperialism that is the fundamental source of this, and so many other outrages and atrocities—including the genocide being carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people, with the full backing of the U.S.—and that only the radical emancipating revolution represented by the new communism can bring an end to these horrors and bring into being a truly emancipating society and ultimately a world where human beings can truly thrive together and give full expression to their humanity.