To make the point more vivid, the Telegraph helpfully ran an article about what ordeals the Soham child murderer might face in the El Salvadorean megaprison CECOT, where prisoners are “allegedly beaten, sexually abused, fed rotten food, and leave with missing teeth”. (The last part, at least, is fake news — prisoners rarely ever leave CECOT at all, except in a box.) It’s all a far cry from Huntley’s reported current schedule of “DVDs, chess games, and frequent trips to the gym”.

With the UK judicial system now looking partisan and/or arbitrary to many, taking a leaf out of the Trumpian playbook might seem a natural move for fellow populist Farage. Earlier this year, the US President’s officials sent 238 Venezuelans accused of gang membership to CECOT; they have since been repatriated to their home country, and have spoken of the experience as “hell” and “like a horror movie”. During a summit with El Salvadorean leader Nayib Bukele in April, Trump talked of his intention to send “homegrown criminals” to the foreign megaprison too. But transferred from the symbolic realm of mirror-shaded American thug machismo to that of bumbling, half-cut British prevarication, there is surely something fantastical about the idea of our ever actually emulating the US scheme in practice.

The Americans have ICE, which sounds like a superhero franchise; we have the Home Office, which sounds like an expense declared on a tax return. They have Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, filming her videos standing in front of tattooed men in cages; we have Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, sending viewers to sleep with long answers about her one-in-one-out scheme on TikTok. And of course — for the moment anyway — we also have the European Court of Human Rights. But anyway, the optics of outsourcing criminal punishment to foreign chaps seems a bit weird for an arch-Brexiteer like Farage — weren’t we supposed to be taking back control?

Still, whether or not Huntley eventually finds himself enrolled on the world’s most brutal Spanish language immersion course, it is clear that attitudes are changing. The British Right is increasingly happy to play up the idea of criminal justice as both retribution and deterrent, and not as the attempted rehabilitation of social unfortunates, as many progressives would prefer to frame it. And it seems that the general public approves. One recent poll has 67% of respondents “strongly” or “somewhat” supporting chemical castration for serious sex offenders. Other polls suggest there is significant backing for reintroducing the death penalty for specific crimes. Stuck in cheek-turning mode for decades, we now seem to be heading towards an explicitly eye-swapping phase.

Partly, this expresses a simple desire to get some order back into a chaotic situation. On Tuesday, Dame Anne Owers’ independent review into prison capacity was published, identifying a raft of Tory planning failures that eventually led to last year’s government decision to release thousands of offenders early, including some with convictions for violence. At least one of those released went on to immediately reoffend. It was also reported on Tuesday that, faced with the prospect of a massive Palestine Action protest this Saturday, the Ministry of Justice has launched its “capacity gold command” emergency protocol to deal with an influx of dangerous placard-wielding Quakers and Anglican priests into a prison system already 97.5% full.

While Reform voters might not care much about the fate of pro-Palestinian protesters, they certainly care about that of Lucy Connolly, still in jail for an inflammatory tweet while delivery drivers who sexually assaulted a child have received exactly the same sentence. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” was a familiar playground chant in my childhood. It may not be true, strictly speaking, but the implied common-sense message about policing priorities now seems entirely lost on both Left and Right.

But the increased enthusiasm for harsh measures is perhaps also a reaction to the inability of some naïve politicians to see the law as having any deterrent function at all. This myopia was apparent in two recent parliamentary decisions: to decriminalize abortion for mothers up until birth, and to make doctor-assisted suicide legal. In both cases, the thought that the existing law, with criminal penalties attached, might be deterring people from abusive, coercive, or dangerous decision-making was ignored by supporters of the changes in question. Instead, we were exhorted to think mainly of those poor, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves killing a viable baby in the womb or offing an aging parent, and who are then undeservedly tormented by the prospect they might be put away.

Still, noticing that a law has a deterrent function, among other useful things it does, is one thing. Inventing highly theatrical punishments, only or mainly to act as sources of deterrence is another. In response to Trump’s CECOT initiatives, there have been lots of progressive-badged pieces ruefully lamenting that for this President, the “cruelty is the point”. But while this analysis fits with the usual depiction of Trump as cartoon villain, in fact it gets things exactly backwards.

Suggested reading

The case for the death penalty

By Peter Hitchens

The biggest problem with CECOT-style ventures for those of genuinely liberal sensibilities is not that cruelty is being pursued by politicians as an end in itself. Rather, it is that cruelty is being used quite calmly and deliberately as a means, calculated to send a wider message as its main object. The performative infliction of painful, humiliating punishments on particular individuals is done for the supposed wider good: to intimidate onlookers into avoiding behavior harmful to the perceived social order. (And the people who have spent the last few years making denunciations and signing open letters really ought to know this stuff.)

Though they are often thought to go together, this utilitarian attitude doesn’t sit very well with the classical goal of retributive justice, which is tightly focused upon the wrongdoer and attempts to calibrate his punishment to exactly fit his crime. In the retributive paradigm, improving effects upon onlookers are treated as welcome by-products, not the main event.

But equally, punishment viewed mainly as a deterrence strategy doesn’t fit with the liberal attitude to personhood. Pantomime displays of punishment pour encourager les autres dehumanize their targets and are meant to, turning them into edifying symbols for the masses. As with the ranks of shaven-headed prisoners in El Salvador, the visually humiliated figure becomes replaceable with any other warm body that would have done the same off-putting job. Steeped in the inheritances of 19th-century liberalism as we are, this is unpalatable even when applied to manifest wrong ‘uns — though reflecting on the likes of Huntley helps with the qualms.

And as Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish, there is another aspect of a deterrence strategy that unnerves modern minds: namely, the naked display of state power. Rather than public acts of violence carried out on behalf of a single strongman ruler, the 19th-century liberal mindset came to prefer judicial power to be distributed across many separate institutions and mechanisms. It also liked punishment to happen behind closed doors. This radical change — from hangings, burnings, beheadings, scaldings, skinnings, drawings, and quarterings, carried out in full view of the crowd, to more bloodless acts meted out behind prison walls — had two consequences, according to Foucault, and each of them seem highly pertinent to the present situation.

The first is that punishment, once hidden from the public gaze, left “the domain of more or less everyday perception” and entered “that of abstract consciousness”. In other words: most of us, liberated from any concrete knowledge about what goes on in the prison system, are free to imagine whatever we want about it, whether that involves outrageously cushy set ups or horribly brutal regimes.

And second: once displays had been abolished, what was officially supposed to discourage crime and to instill confidence in the general public was no longer “the horrifying spectacle of public punishment” but rather the “certainty of being punished”. And since these days there is in fact no certainty of being punished — except perhaps for placards or tweeting — it is not surprising that the system is on the verge of losing public confidence, nor that political opportunists are going for the Danny Dyer pantomime option instead.

In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

More from this author

The progressive case for Trump’s deportations

By Juan David Rojas

Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement center. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularization of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

Suggested reading

The future belongs to Right-wing progressives

By Mary Harrington

Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorizing migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-center parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognize that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

And in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele. Most recently, we can see this in the adulatory response from the online Right to Bukele’s offer of 5,000 free visas to “highly skilled scientists, engineers, doctors, artists, and philosophers”.

These visas, accompanied by tax breaks and help-with-moving costs, aim to tempt the cream of what the modern world likes to call “human capital” to make their homes in El Salvador. But if you build it, will they come? In recent years, El Salvador has made headlines for adopting an approach to law and order that, while effective, is viewed with alarm by Western liberals as encroaching unacceptably on human rights. Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country. Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

And yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room, Bukele’s offer to the people of El Salvador seems as energetically futurist as it does authoritarian on public safety. As Geoff Schullenberger recently reported, this is part of his appeal to Salvadorean voters: a sense of going somewhere, of there being a future to feel hopeful about.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety, let alone any current mainstream Tory. It has as yet no party-political or institutional representation in Britain, and is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And it’s not hard to see the appeal of Bukele as a poster-boy for such movements: while China is arguably a far larger and more successful instance of high-tech authoritarianism, it’s both (by Western standards) off-puttingly collectivist, and also a little too powerful for comfort. By contrast, El Salvador offers a worked example of what it might look like to roll out Right-wing progressivism in a previously dysfunctional polity: a project that both has underdog appeal, and also poses no direct material threat to American geopolitical interests.

For Anglophone Rightists, then, El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model. It’s a far cry from the kind of can’t-we-all-just-get-along liberalism that characterises our current crop of hapless Tories. As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

But Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership. As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity. Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

It’s clear in Bukele’s visa announcement that he sees global mobility in these terms, as desirable only at small scale and for elites. El Salvador’s population is smaller than that of London; these 5,000 visas represent, he declares, “less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including voting rights, poses no issue”. Though he doesn’t elaborate on what kind of “issue” large-scale immigration might “pose”, we might perhaps point to the undertone of ethnic lobbying that increasingly characterises politics in very “diverse” parts of the UK, as minority voting blocs grow large enough to sway the political process.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites. It’s a far cry from 20th-century conservatism, which until relatively recently assumed a measure of cultural continuity between national elites and the masses. Instead, Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

More from this author

Why we demand Kate's sacrifice

By Mary Harrington

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet. At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask. Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion. The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likelihood of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

Of course, this depends on elite incomers wanting to settle in your country. And it remains to be seen whether this will be the case for El Salvador. But however this initiative goes, Bukele’s second term will be the point where both Salvadoreans and international watchers get to evaluate his progressive experiment. And those future-oriented Right-wingers currently plotting in the shadows in other countries will doubtless learn from it.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics. And after a few years of the Starmy Army, who knows where Britain will be? Perhaps we’ll be tired of progress. But I think it more likely that we’ll be tired of egalitarianism, and eager for some progress — any progress — towards a future that feels more hopeful.

The idea of setting up an “independent” nation has always been attractive to libertarians, even though a half-century of attempts to establish tax-free idylls have produced no tangible results beyond angering locals and wasting the pocket change of billionaires like Peter Thiel. Partly in response to this, the more artistic tradition of “micronations” has been overtaken by a particular trend of Bitcoin-fuelled ultra-libertarianism, which implies less a release from state repression than a form of anarcho-capitalism. This vision has more in common with Dubai’s brand of free-market authoritarianism — a vision of ultra-rich luxury and labour exploitation — than any true utopian ideal.

Vit Jedlička, a ruddy-cheeked, stout-chested libertarian ideologue and self-styled President of Liberland, is as emphatic as he is energetic. “We are not a micronation, but a nation of 700,000 people, with embassies in 80 nations, and relations with countries like Haiti, Somaliland, and Malawi. We’re serious about getting Liberland set up as a country.” Never one to undersell his project, Jedlička clearly has tremendous fun barrelling around the world promoting Liberland. Nominally based out of this scrap of marshland the size of Gibraltar, but largely operating online, it’s a Web-3 nation: businesses unfettered from regulation, a skeleton state providing only basic protections, and “citizens” issued with voting credits based on the amount of voluntary tax paid.

Never mind that none of those would-be citizens actually live in Liberland — instead there is a handful of activists moored downstream on a houseboat, under the close supervision of the Croatian police. Never mind that its diplomacy is rather more limited than Jedlička suggests, with the citizens of Malawi recently ridiculing their government for getting involved with a nation that is never likely to exist. The President is always ready with a litany of soon-to-be realised projects and promises, hinting at deals and meetings with billionaires and politicians. The crash in the crypto market is a blip; a Liberland houseboat has been torched, but there will be an insurance payout. Every potential threat is recast as proof his project will succeed.

We first meet in a half-finished holiday camp Jedlička has purchased on the Serbian side of the river. And there is a clear tension between this “eco-village” (a “diaspora” site where Liberland’s first “settlers” will train in survival and negotiation skills) and his Serbian supporters’ frustration at the lack of a clear business plan. But, even if its “ambassadors” are paid lobbyists or random Bitcoin enthusiasts, Liberland does have more political reach than other libertarian micronations. This is partly a product of Jedlička’s gregarious personality, which has kept the project alive since it began in 2015. Due to an arcane, post-Yugoslavian boundary dispute, neither Serbia nor Croatia prefer to lay claim to the 7km²  of territory, leaving it — Jedlička says — “terra nullia” for the taking. (The Croatian authorities disagree, tolerating the Liberlanders’ presence on their territory, but denying them access to the contested patch of land.)

More from this author

Is Serbia a pro-Putin outpost?

By Matt Broomfield

But this reach is also thanks to the political moment into which Jedlička announced his project. The conservative Czech politician found a natural home in the heady world of Web-3 technologies, securing capital backing (through cryptocurrency investments) and the means to place Liberland’s constitution on the blockchain in perpetuity. He generated a growing, global interest in his ultra-libertarian vision — resulting in collaborations with big-name architects, the Polkadot cryptocurrency development fund, and a host of global Bitcoin fans, including the Liberian (not Liberlandian) Consul General to Dubai, currently living on a barge just outside the UAE in imitation of Liberland’s ideals.

For Jedlička, these international supporters “understand the economic potential of a truly free zone in the European Union… they like the vision, and want to watch”. He presents it as “combining aspects of the most successful states to date”, bringing together Singapore-style meritocracy, the town-hall democracy of early America, and the low-tax environment of European microstates such as Monaco or Liechtenstein.

In practice, such a system would face immediate issues. As we ride rickety bikes along the course of the Danube, Jedlička says he prefers the “right to set up a lemonade stand in the street over the right to cycle down it naked”, suggesting that the freedom to practice business should trump personal liberties. Yet this approach opens the door to all manner of abuses, since those individuals or businesses able to spend the most money will also be able to determine law and policy, by securing the most voting credits. Already, in Serbia’s Liberland-linked tourist village, a promised wage of €600 a month has proved insufficient to retain the skilled workers needed to complete the camp, leaving it half-finished. The “non-aggression principle” proposed to prevent direct physical harm between Liberland citizens offers no protection of basic rights. There is no health or social care, workplace protections or minimum wage. To the Liberland activists, “welfare state” is a dirty word.

Other liberties would also come under threat. The project has been troubled from the outset by the question of whether free movement of peoples would be allowed, with Liberlanders congregated in the Serbian eco-village mocking the emailed residency applications of confused Middle Easterners who mistake the country for a real polity. While Jedlička generally presents an optimistic, modernising political model, Serbian supporters who drove up from Belgrade to visit their President describe themselves as proud “conspiracy theorists”. And this isn’t libertarian trolling: they cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Ku Klux Klan associate Albert Pike in arguing that the world faces an imminent race war orchestrated by the same Jewish New World Order they allege was behind the Holocaust. Given no-one actually lives in Liberland, Jedlička is free to place his trust in a notional citizens’ veto to prevent abuses of rights. But it remains unclear how a clash between libertarian ideals of free movement and the survivalist, white-nationalist inclinations of many its followers would be avoided.

Jedlička is able to evade these issues through a mixture of blind confidence and the fact that his project exists only on paper — or on blockchain. A fully-fledged Liberland would resemble real-world microstates, in that it would rely on either the continued “mining” of cryptocurrencies or on accommodating international capital as a tax haven. Quoting a sympathetic, Belgrade-based think tank, Jedlička suggests a tax haven on the Danube would bring a GDP boost to neighbouring states.

But other libertarian projects have failed following local opposition: the 1972 “Republic of Minerva”, an attempt to establish a microstate on reclaimed land in the ocean near Tonga, came a cropper when locals decided not to allow rich Westerners to enjoy a tax-free oasis at the expense of their fishing rights. More recently, a “seasteading” project which aimed to establish a floating utopia near Tahiti, initially backed by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, met a similar fate, collapsing following angry protests from locals opposing a “megalomaniacal” project with no clear benefit to the local economy.

Recent attempts to establish crypto-friendly communities of expats in Puerto Rico and Central America have also foundered. Notoriously, El Salvador has witnessed a protracted effort by its president, Nayib Bukele, to force locals into using Bitcoin, while attracting the Western crypto elites to free-market resorts intended to serve as Bitcoin playgrounds. The attempted pivot to virtual currency has been met with indifference and protest. Following the recent crypto crash, the nation came close to defaulting on its sovereign debt. Bukele’s Bitcoin roll-out has also gone “hand in hand” with the introduction of a “police state” characterised by widespread arrests, detentions and torture, including the arbitrary arrest of those opposed to the government’s bitcoin policy. Liberland’s nominal finance minister Navid Saberin, a Luxembourger businessman, admits he personally visited El Salvador and found “no-one had anything good to say” about the Bitcoin pivot. Yet he also remains wholly optimistic that Bitcoin will bounce back, restoring his fortunes and justifying Bukele’s efforts.

Jedlička worries that finance journalists dismiss Liberland’s political programme as too utopian. In reality, the opposite is true. If realised, his “vision” would result in a dystopian combination: reliance on foreign capital which creates little benefit for local communities, undergirded by authoritarian excesses in defence of those elite financial interests. The Liberland proposal is not a challenge to the current economic order. It is its fullest expression, stripped of all protections, checks and balances.

Suggested reading

Workers have lost faith in money

By John Rapley

But this vision has its appeal. In the surrounding states, crony capitalism beholden to EU investment has brought few benefits to ordinary people. Liberland’s President is a genuine and infectious believer in personal sovereignty, and it’s little wonder frustrated young people are attracted by his dynamic, untrammelled version of capitalism, as they are by the get-rich-quick crypto promise. And though Jedlička is keen to distance himself from more playful, performance-based micronations, the political model has also been used to register protest against authoritarianism and homogenisation. Protest projects such as Germany’s Free Republic of Wendland or New Zealand’s Independent State of Aramoana stood up against the profit-driven destruction of local communities and environments, with the latter successfully resisting the state-backed imposition of an aluminium smelter. In nearby Slovenia, the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) used provocative appropriations of state insignia to critique state authoritarianism.

Though dismissed by Jedlička, this spirit of protest is inherent to both the micronation concept and the libertarian movement. There is room for a more productive critique of an admittedly exploitative global financial system rigged to benefit certain states, which also recognises the limitations of crypto and the role that tax havens and free-market ideology play within that system. For now, though, we have only Jedlička’s vision of Dubai-on-the-Danube, and its handful of loyal followers.

Bitcoin Beach, with its old shacks and gleaming new hotels, is home to an eclectic mix from El Salvador, the United States and beyond. Its residents include investors and fishermen, YouTubers and surfers, former beauty queens and former mercenaries. It is more than just a beach club; it is a symbolic landmark of an 18-month-old experiment to promote the cryptocurrency in El Salvador, whose economy is otherwise driven by farming, sweatshops and migrant remittances.

Salvador’s Bitcoin project is championed by globe-trotting entrepreneurs, known as “Bitcoiners”, but is also a key policy of President Nayib Bukele, a 41-year-old former marketing executive who has revolutionised politics for San Salvador’s six million inhabitants. Bukele is most famous for his crackdown on gangs, having suspended civil liberties and incarcerated 1% of the population. But while he has taken an authoritarian approach on crime, in Bitcoin he has embraced a flagship of many libertarians — the controversial blockchain system for digital payment transactions created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin crept onto the world stage in 2008 and gradually rose in value, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars by the late 2010s. Amid various downturns and scandals (most recently the collapse of the FTX exchange), many dismiss the currency, but it still attracts investment and hardened Bitcoiners insist it will eventually replace physical cash. In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to declare Bitcoin a legal currency, alongside its use of the US dollar. All Salvadorans received the equivalent of $30 if they signed up to the state-approved “Chivo Wallet”, while Bukele spent $100 million from Salvador’s state coffers on the crypto, shortly before it crashed, immediately diminishing this investment to $66 million. Despite this, Bukele announced “volcano bonds” to raise money for a tax-free Bitcoin City near the Conchagua volcano on the Gulf of Fonseca. At the 2021 Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference in El Salvador, Bukele was introduced with a giant screen displaying an avatar of him in his trademark hipster beard as a flying saucer beamed him down to earth.

For all the fanfare, it’s hard to figure out the mechanics of Bukele’s scheme, such as how Bitcoin City will pay for garbage collection with no tax. It is also unclear what the incentives are, with critics claiming it is really designed to attract money launderers. Like the currency itself, the experiment seems to mean different things to different people, have varying applications (some useful, some shams) and is as much about the image as the product. In short, Bitcoin El Salvador is as cryptic as the virtual money itself.

More from this author

Inside El Salvador's brutal gang crackdown

By Ioan Grillo

Likewise, it’s hard to classify exactly what Bitcoin Beach is. It is not an official district (and is not on Google Maps) but is part of an area called El Zonte. The Californian surfer, businessman and evangelical Christian Michael Peterson is credited with devising the concept in 2019, helping inspire Bukele to launch the currency nationally. Peterson had been visiting El Zonte for over a decade and conducted charity work through a non-profit called Missionsake. The Bitcoin Beach website describes itself as a Salvadoran initiative that Missionsake supports, and the beach as “a sustainable Bitcoin Economic ecosystem… where the majority of people do not have access to bank accounts”. However, while almost all businesses in the area accept the crypto, it’s unclear how many of their transactions use it; one vendor tells me it’s only a tiny amount and he uses those sales for savings.

The project headquarters can be found at Hope House, a white building emblazoned with an orange Bitcoin logo. There, I meet Jorge Valenzuela, a 33-year-old “coordinator” from Zonte. Valenzuela says Bitcoin Beach is registered as an educational and social project which has taught local youths to get a foot in the financial system. But he concedes there are other goals, too. “We can do transactions in Bitcoin and it works. But beyond this there is tourism, economy, new jobs, opportunities, many journalists coming here to see what is going on,” he says. “We have changed the country now. The country of pupusas. The country of waves. The country of Bitcoin. The country of good people. Now nobody is remembering a bad country.”

As successful Bitcoiners have shown, crypto can be promoted not just as a currency or investment but as a lifestyle choice, involving living by the beach, working remotely, and rejecting government interference. Down the road in a gated community, I meet some of those attracted to this newfound libertarian side of Salvador. Nicki and James are a pair of Bitcoiners who moved from New Zealand in early 2022. James was an early adopter of Bitcoin from an entrepreneurial family; Nicki worked in finance. They met during the pandemic as New Zealand’s lockdown restrictions were getting increasingly harsh, especially for the unvaccinated. “They made a two-tier society. You couldn’t go to a café. You couldn’t get your hair cut. You couldn’t do all those things,” Nicki says.

Suggested reading

There's nothing woke about crypto

By Mary Harrington

Then, in November 2021, El Salvador became one of the first countries in the world to remove all Covid travel restrictions. Nicki and James sold up, said goodbye to their families and began a new life by the Pacific, as well as a new YouTube show. Like the few hundred foreign Bitcoiners in the country, they do a mixture of remote work and social media in addition to investing in crypto. As well as saving Bitcoin, they also spend it at the local stores, using apps that can facilitate rapid transactions. “It’s really important for us to utilise it in both ways,” says Nicki. “Eventually, it would be really great to see the fiat system go.” James sees their decision as political: “We literally moved our monetary choices and our time spent to another currency system in another country,” he says. “That’s a really strong vote in our mind.”

The most famous Bitcoiners in the area are Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert, formerly co-hosts of a financial news show on Russia Today. They are considered advisers to Bukele on Bitcoin, a badge that Keiser proudly announces on his Twitter handle to his half a million followers. Their podcast “Orange Pill” applauds Bukele, and discusses Bitcoin in terms laced with near-religious zealotry. “There is always a counterforce for everything in the universe, and Bitcoin is the counterforce to all this: that money-printing; those warmongers; those plunderers,” Herbert said in a recent episode. “Bitcoin cannot be stopped.”

One area where Bitcoin could certainly take off is with remittances, the money migrants send home from their work abroad, mostly in the US. In 2021, migrants wired $7.5 billion to El Salvador, representing more than a quarter of its entire GDP. They often send it in small amounts to their families, and pay high fees using transfer services such as Western Union. Bitcoin, with its blockchain technology, could massively reduce these.

More from this author

Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial

By Ioan Grillo

In the more deprived areas of the capital San Salvador, however, residents seem less enthusiastic. Flogging bananas on a stall in the Margaritas slum, Yamileth Gonzalez, 40, says she received her initial $30 with the Chivo Wallet but hasn’t used it since. “It’s fiddly. A hassle. I prefer cash,” she says, although she is a firm Bukele supporter. Meanwhile, less than 2% of remittances used crypto. The migrants sweating in fields and restaurants seem to lack the patience and trust to turn their earnings into Bitcoin. This isn’t too surprising: many cryptocurrency ATMs in the country appear to be broken. Standing on a street corner in San Salvador, I watch a line of people try to use one, only to walk away empty-handed.

Yet a few streets away, there are signs of El Salvador’s Bitcoin revolution taking shape. Outside Chivo Pets, a government pet hospital that charges in Bitcoin, a trail of dog owners bursts out of the waiting room and onto the street. Here, customers who pay in Bitcoin are charged massively reduced fees — just a few dollars for hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. One queuing dog-owner, Veronica Serrano, tells me she is not a supporter of Bukele but thinks that launching Bitcoin was a popular policy, despite people not using it much. “People like the idea of Bitcoin because it seems modern and futuristic. It seems like we are going forward,” she says.

This strikes me as a key motivation for Bukele, a marketing executive who is very tuned in to the image of his policies. In terms of its PR value, for Bukele, the country’s broken crypto ATMs are a sideshow. As long as places like Bitcoin Beach and Chivo Pets continue to succeed and dominate the headlines, there will always be a victory for him to sell.

This situation has radically changed since March, however, when President Nayib Bukele launched an unprecedented and brutal crackdown on gangs, involving mass imprisonment. “It’s a huge improvement,” Alas tells me, explaining that the maras on her block have disappeared. “Now we can go outside when we like. Our family can come and visit us. No president has cared about us here before.”

Alas’s comments reflect the widespread support for the anti-gang offensive and for Bukele: a December survey found 87.8% of voters approved of him, making him the most popular president on the continent, perhaps even the world. Such popularity contrasts sharply with the harsh rebuke of Bukele’s crackdown by human rights groups, journalists and members of the US Congress.

This gang offensive, though, is ruthless and violates human rights. Following a record 62 murders in a day, Bukele beseeched his legislative assembly to pass a State of Emergency on March 27, and ordered heavily-armed military units to move into the barrios — the poor neighbourhoods where most people live. “No terrorist involved in the wave of violence against the Salvadoran people will go unpunished,” Public Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro posted on Twitter, a favoured communication tool of the government. “We will take them off the street and put them behind bars.”

Since then, more than 60,000 people have been imprisoned — 1% of the entire population — adding to another 40,000 already in jail. It’s a mass incarceration comparable with some of the harshest regimes and wars in history — the equivalent of locking up more than three million in the United States in under a year.

Outside the Mariona prison, in the northern outskirts of the capital San Salvador, hundreds of family members are gathered, mostly mothers and wives, waiting to pass on packages of rice, cornflakes, soap and even prison uniforms to their loved ones. Javiera Maricela, 37, describes how police and soldiers called on her house in a farming village in April and took away her 20-year-old son, saying he would be processed and returned. She has had no contact with him since and does not know if he is still in that prison, let alone alive.

“The lack of information is torturous,” Maricela says. Like most of the detainees, her son is charged with a crime called “agrupaciones ilícitas”, roughly translated as “gang affiliation”, although it applies to those who help gangs as well as actual members. It carries a maximum sentence of 30 years, or 45 years for gang leaders.

Through a contact, I meet a prisoner who succeeded in getting his charges dropped and being released from Mariona. He describes how he was crammed into a cell with 162 inmates and the stink of faeces, had his ribs broken by guards, and frequently heard the screams of prisoners being tortured. During his month in jail, he says, he saw five corpses being carted out. Human rights groups have documented 90 deaths in prisons since the emergency was declared, although many believe the real number is much higher.

“Many of those captured are innocent,” says Samuel García, a former government official who has founded the Victims of the Regime Movement. “The families have proof but the regime doesn’t care. Bukele is very Machiavellian… What he is doing is illegal. He has broken the rule of law.”

More from this author

Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

By Ioan Grillo

Despite this, the crackdown remains popular and has certainly had an immense impact on reducing crime. For decades, the two main gangs, the MS-13 and Barrio 18, brazenly controlled barrios, towns and villages across El Salvador. New members committed murders as part of their initiation and continued to kill to elevate their status in their “clique”, or gang chapter. And it was not only other gangsters who were gunned down. Civilians could be murdered for simply walking on the wrong street. I recently spoke to one woman who was gang-raped when she travelled from a Barrio 18 neighbourhood where she lived to visit her mother in MS-13 turf. In the worst atrocity, in 2010, maras torched and shot up a bus killing 17 people.

I have interviewed dozens of gang members in visits over the years; you could often find them openly hanging out in the centre of neighbourhoods. But since the state of emergency, their presence has been greatly reduced: Maras are largely in prison, have fled, or are underground. The number of murders, as a result, has plummeted. Last year, El Salvador’s government reported that there were 496 homicides — a murder rate of about 8 per 100,000, which is lower than the United States for the first time on record. Back in 2015, El Salvador suffered 105 murders per 100,000, making it the most homicidal country on the planet.

“It’s like if you have a patient with cancer, the doctor has to use chemotherapy,” says Tito Elias Ponce, who works in a government agency for barrio outreach. “These criminals are like a cancer for El Salvador.” When I meet Ponce, he is working with youths painting up walls of a slum. As well as wielding the stick, Bukele offers the carrot of rehabilitating poor areas, building football pitches and community centres.

Nearby, I spot a 23-year-old soldier from the motorised infantry who has pulled over at a stand to buy pupusas, a popular Salvadoran food. The soldier claims that the troops are welcomed in the barrios and he denies that innocent people are being carted off. “Some of them may not be full gang members but they are involved in some way,” he says. “We have found messages on their phone or something. Of course, the mothers will protest. For a mother, her son is always an angel.” This claim that no innocent people are swept up seems dubious considering the sheer scale of the arrests. Detainees are stood before judges in mass closed hearings, so it is unclear how convincing the evidence is. Meanwhile, citizens are urged to inform on gang members, which could encourage people to finger anyone they have a beef with.

Suggested reading

This was not Brazil's January 6

By Alex Hochuli

One reason the crackdown is so popular is that Salvadorans are fed up with gang extortion. Unlike Mexican and Colombian gangsters, maras are not big players in drug trafficking but make their money shaking down everyone from bus drivers to grocery store owners. The emergency has reduced extortion, according to reports, but lingering shakedowns remain a part of daily life. I meet a taxi driver whose base used to pay both the main gangs, but now only pays one, whose member actually drives a taxi there. “I am paying these criminals half the amount I used to,” he says “But at least that means I have more money in my pocket.”

The second reason so many Salvadorans support the offensive is more deep-rooted, a consequence of them living most of their lives in warlike conditions. Between 1980 and 1992, a civil war between a series of Right-wing US-backed governments and a Left-wing guerrilla movement tore the country apart. Young refugees largely fled to Los Angeles, where they formed gangs to protect themselves in violent inner-city neighbourhoods. And when they were deported, they turned to crime in their shattered homeland and found plenty of willing recruits among the war orphans and scarred veterans. El Salvador’s new rulers promised peace, democracy and respect for human rights. But the country was drowned in the blood of gang warfare.

Bukele, the son of a wealthy businessman of Palestinian descent, first joined the party of the former guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. I interviewed him in 2017 when he was mayor of San Salvador and he spoke of rehabilitating the barrios and rescuing young men from a life of crime. He won the presidency on a populist platform, railing against the corrupt elites, and formed his own party to smash the power of the old guard in the midterms.

By 2021, Bukele had halved the homicide count, but he is accused of doing this by reviving a truce with the gangs. According to reports by the independent news outlet El Faro, the truce gave gang leaders better treatment in prisons and allowed the gangs to carry on with their shakedowns while they dialled down the murder rate. It was only after this truce broke down with a spree of killings that Bukele launched his State of Emergency. Bukele denies this pact, though many Salvadorans I spoke to don’t care much if it is true; they simply want less violence.

Suggested reading

Meet Mexico's cartel influencers

By David Matthews

Yet it remains to be seen if the drop in murders now secured by the State of Emergency will hold in the long run. The gangs may be in hiding now but they could regroup, and perhaps turn to guerrilla tactics. It is also tough and expensive to keep almost 2% of the population behind bars. To achieve this, Bukele is constructing a new mega prison, baptised the “Centre for Confinement of Terrorism”, which he claims will hold 40,000 inmates.

Meanwhile, the external criticism looks unlikely to make Bukele shift course. US Congressman James McGovern called the crackdown “draconian”, while Amnesty International warned of “a human rights crisis”. Elsewhere, the US Treasury has sanctioned several officials close to Bukele on corruption allegations, freezing their bank accounts and banning them from entering the States. But there is not much more leeway for Washington to pressure Bukele. Sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have not stopped human rights abuses there. What’s more, the idea of a return to a more interventionist US foreign policy in Latin America inspires wrath on both the Left and Right these days.

On the flip side, other Latin American governments are taking note of Bukele’s approach. Over the border in Honduras, President Ximora Castro, the country’s first female leader, has launched her own partial state of emergency to fight gangs. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has largely abandoned his call for “hugs not bullets” to bolster the army.

Outside a San Salvador church, I watch a dozen mothers light candles and pray for their loved ones behind bars. They share stories, their faces full of torment from not knowing whether their sons will ever return. I wonder if support for this mass incarceration shows a tyranny of the majority, and these are the victims. Or if the benefits could outweigh the injustices. Or if one evil has simply been replaced by another evil. But the truth is, Bukele has only arisen because of a failure to deal with an immense problem of organised crime that is a central issue for most people here. And unless liberal governments in Latin America can find a better solution that works in practice, not just rhetoric, we will surely encounter more authoritarian populists and more mega prisons in the years to come.