#6 Human Piñatas

How the Trump administration dehumanizes all of us

Fascism always starts by instilling fear of “the enemy.” In the case of the U.S. fascist nation of 2025, the enemy of the moment is immigrants. That will change soon. It will be expanded. It will be self-defeating, eventually. Fear as a tool can only achieve so much before it eats itself.

The individual pictured above is named Richard Duarte Garcia. He immigrated to the United States legally, and then found himself renditioned to CECOT, the torture/kill concentration camp in El Salvador. Whatever your worldview, Richard is a human being. Even if he was a murderer or rapist or both, he deserves due process that he did not receive. He also deserves to be treated as human.

From Dissent in Bloom:

Last week, Richard Duarte Rodríguez walked out of El Salvador’s CECOT prison alive. That should not have been possible.

CECOT is not designed for release. It is a maximum-security facility built to bury people, not rehabilitate them. The Salvadoran government has made that clear, bragging that no one leaves unless it is in a body bag.

He was one of 250 Venezuelan men freed as part of a political deal. Richard survived. He walked out of one of the most brutal prisons in the the world after being disappeared there by the United States government.

He reported that inside CECOT, they were treated like terrorists. Guards beat them. They shot them with rubber bullets to punish them for trying to escape. Richard still has the marks on his back.

Other inmates said they were threatened with shotguns. They were hit with pepper bullets and tear gas as forms of punishment. They were forced to drink bathwater because there was no clean water. When they were injured, they were told to lie to the physicians and say they fell off a bunk. If they told the truth, they were beaten worse.

This is what the U.S. government paid for.

I cannot abide a government that disappears and then tortures and murders human beings without any kind of checks and balances. Of course, the longer I live, the more I realize that the United States of America, my adopted nation, has been doing this since its birth. Our country was founded on chattel slavery. It has a centuries old history of interference in the affairs of other nations. Do a little research on what the good old USA has done in South America over the last century. Hawaii. The Philippines. Haiti. Puerto Rico. The list is a long one.

One night in mid-May, some of the Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States to a prison in El Salvador tried to break the locks on their cells with metal rails from their beds. It was a futile gesture of rebellion; no one thought they could escape. Still, punishment was swift. For six consecutive days, the inmates were subjected to lengthy beatings, three inmates told me. On the last day, male guards brought in their female colleagues, who struck the naked prisoners as the male guards recorded videos on their phones and laughed. The female guards would count to 20 as they administered the beatings, and if the prisoners complained or cried out, they would start again.

Tito Martínez, one of the inmates, recalled that a prison nurse was watching. “Hit the piñata,” she cheered.

When the government of El Salvador opened the prison complex known as CECOT in 2023, the country’s security minister said the inmates would only be able to get out “inside a coffin.” This promise has largely been kept. The Salvadoran human-rights organization Cristosal has documented cases of prisoners being transported out of the jail for urgent medical care, but these inmates died soon after, before anyone could ask them what it was like inside the prison.

This is not how things should be. The United States, at least aspirationally, is supposed to be a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Instead, it is sliding into darkness while its citizens numbly go through their daily routines.

I dissent. People are not piñatas, and I will not be silent while this fascist regime continues to murder people in the name of kakistocracy. Eat the rich and murder a billionaire if you get the chance.

If some of us do not get due process, then none of us do. Do as I say and not as I do isn’t going to fly. We haven’t forgotten you, Luigi.