Demonstrations break out in Bologna after Moroccan man dies while being restrained by police


Protesters and police clashed in Bologna, Italy on Monday after Moroccan-born entrepreneur Abderrahim Fakir died while being forcibly restrained by police. Widely shared footage of Fakir's death show police holding the 42-year-old face-down on the ground, where he repeatedly calls for help before falling still.


Issued on: 21/07/2026 
By: FRANCE 24
Video by:  Seema GUPTA

Cover image: Protesters clash with riot police during a protest following the death of Abderrahim Fakir in Bologna, Italy, July 20, 2026. © Michele Lapini, Reuters
04:36



Italian police clashed with demonstrators in the northern city ​of Bologna on Monday, ANSA news agency reported, during a protest over the death of a Moroccan man who died while being forcibly restrained by police during an attempted arrest.

Abderrahim Fakir, a Moroccan-born entrepreneur who ran a small removals and cleaning ​business, died ‌on Sunday after police were called to deal with a man ⁠behaving aggressively and damaging a vehicle, Italian media said.

Footage of the incident filmed by a resident and widely shared online prompted ‌hundreds of people to protest. Images posted on social media showed demonstrators holding up slogans such as "Justice and truth for Fakir!" and "State murderers".

A protester holds a placard reading in Italian "State murderers" above a crowd during a protest following the death of Abderrahim Fakir in Bologna, Italy, July 20, 2026. © Michele Lapini, Reuters

According to ANSA, some threw a firecracker near ⁠police buildings in the city. Police reacted by firing tear gas and water cannons.

ANSA also reported that a group of demonstrators sat down in a square holding a photograph ​of Fakir, describing the action as a gesture of nonviolent protest.

"The chants of 'police murderers' and 'the whole world hates you,' shouted during a demonstration ​in Bologna ... are disgraceful," said Tommaso Foti, the European affairs minister in ‌the government of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The video showed Fakir lying face down on the ground while two officers restrained him.

Fakir – who reportedly suffered from heart issues and asthma – repeatedly calls out "aiuto, aiuto, basta" ("help, help, that's enough") as the officers sit on him and ambulance workers look on.

After he stops moving, the police bind his ankles together.

Only after a moment or two do they and the ambulance workers check his vital signs, the video shows.

A protester holds a flare in front of a banner reading in Italian "Justice for Fakir" during a protest following the death of Abderrahim Fakir in Bologna, Italy, July 20, 2026. © Michele Lapini, Reuters

'Killed in cold blood'

The incident drew varied responses from across the political spectrum, with opposition politicians demanding accountability and the governing coalition ​defending the officers involved.

Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident.

Interior Minister Matteo ​Piantedosi said he had "full confidence" the inquiry would establish the ​facts and clarify what happened.

Bologna police said they would give bodycam footage from the officers who intervened to the investigators.

According to media ​reports, officers called emergency services after arriving in the northeastern neighbourhood of Pilastro shortly after noon, when temperatures exceeded 35°C.

Police tried to calm Fakir before using pepper spray and holding him down while trying to handcuff him after he reacted aggressively, according to media ⁠reports.

"They killed my brother in cold blood, I want justice," Fakir's sister, Khadija, told reporters as hundreds of people in ⁠Pilastro took to ​the streets on Sunday, with some demonstrators chanting slogans against the police.

Yossra Fakir, niece of Abderrahim Fakir, reads a statement during a protest following his death in Bologna, Italy, July 20, 2026. © Michele Lapini, Reuters

Lawyer Barbara Spinelli told the ANSA news agency that she had met Fakir last year, when he applied to renew his permit to stay.

He was "a very kind, well educated, respectful person" who was in Italy legally, but who worried about being expelled.

"I told him: 'We are in Italy, a democratic country. Here the police respect the rules'," she said.

"I don't know how I will ever again manage to tell someone they don't need to be afraid", she added.

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)

Italy: Protests over death of immigrant in police custody

Elizabeth Schumacher

DW with local media

21/07/2026 

Demonstrators are demanding answers over the death of 42-year-old Abderrahim Fakir. Local authorities have urged calm while the investigation is underway.

'Truth and justice for Fakir,' reads one of the protest banners

Image: Nicola Marfisi/AGF/ZUMA/picture alliance


A day after police and protestors clashed in the northern Italian city of Bologna, local authorities on Tuesday urged residents to remain calm and await the results of an official investigation into the death of Abderrahim Fakir.

"They killed my brother in cold blood, I want justice," Fakir's sister Khadija told reporters following his death in the city's Pilastro neighborhood on Sunday.
What do we know about the death of Abderrahim Fakir?

According to Italian media, Fakir came to Italy from Morocco as a child with his family, and they settled in Bologna. He ran a cleaning business and was a legal permanent resident of Italy. He was in Pilastro visiting friends, family members reported.

Bologna Police have said that they were called to the neighborhood on Sunday morning, responding to a call about a man causing damage to a vehicle.

Officers said that it was some 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) when they arrived, and that they tried to subdue Fakir with pepper spray before holding him down and handcuffing him when he continued to be aggressive.

In a video widely circulated online, Fakir can be seen repeatedly calling for help and struggling to breathe before he stops moving. His family told Italian media that he had a history of asthma and heart problems, that he was married and not known to have any previous run-ins with authorities.

Protests in central Bologna

On Monday, a demonstration was held in Bologna's famous Piazza del Nettuno. Italian news agency ANSA reported that some protestors chanted anti-police slogans and one threw a firecracker, but that demonstrators were largely peaceful.

ANSA added police responded with tear gas and water cannons.

Italy's two main police unions have accused activists of using social media to conduct online witch hunts against police based on incomplete footage of the event and said that dozens of officers were injured in clashes with protestors.

Local authorities have urged calm, saying a thorough inquiry is being carried out. Bologna Police have said they plan to release the bodycam footage in full to investigators.

Bologna health authorities have said they are also launching an investigation into how long it took to arrive on the scene.

Police released smoke canisters to disperse protestors

Image: Michele Lapini/REUTERS

How have lawmakers responded?

Mayor Matteo Lepore of the center-left Democratic Party (PD) also urged residents to await the full picture, but said you could tell that "something clearly went wrong."

"You cannot die like this," he said, appearing alongside some of Fakir's loved ones. At the same time he expressed his confidence in the rule of law in the city and that the truth would be borne out.

He thanked a niece of Fakir for calling for "respect, truth, and justice, not revenge."

Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has also called for the full truth to come to light, but accused online agitators of fomenting "hatred against the police."

Edited by: Rana Taha

Elizabeth Schumacher Elizabeth Schumacher reports on gender equity, immigration, poverty and education in Germany.

Thousands of Italian military and police personnel march in Rome over pay and pensions

SHOCK TROOPS OF THE GENERAL STRIKE

Copyright Sindacato nazionale finanzieri

By Fortunato Pinto

Published on 19/07/2026 - EURONEWS

Thousands of members of the security and defence forces demonstrated on Saturday, urging the government to tackle the economic crisis and guarantee greater protection for workers engaged in defending the State.

Around 6,000 members of Italy's armed forces and security services marched through Rome on Saturday, demanding higher pay, better pensions and stronger workplace protections.

The demonstration brought together representatives of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Carabinieri and Guardia di Finanza in the first joint protest organised by the country's main defence and security unions.

The rally came just days after the government renewed the collective agreement covering around 430,000 military and security personnel. The deal includes a gross monthly pay rise of €188 and a one-off back payment of €2,448, as well as a commitment to open talks on pension reform.

Several unions, including Sinafi, the New Carabinieri Union (NSC), Usami Aeronautica, Itamil and Silmm, refused to sign the agreement, arguing that it does not go far enough to address pay and retirement concerns. They organised Saturday's protest to press the government for further measures.

Marching under the slogan, "Every day we serve Italy. Today we demand respect", protesters carried banners through the streets of Rome.

In a statement issued ahead of the rally, the unions outlined four main demands: reform of the supplementary pension system and an end to plans to raise the retirement age to 65, stronger legal protections for security personnel, pay increases that keep pace with the rising cost of living, and greater investment in recruitment, training and modernising the profession.

The protest concluded with a conference on the future of Italy's security, defence and emergency services, attended by representatives of several unions, including the New Carabinieri Union (NSC), which refused to sign the new pay agreement.

“The reasons why we did not sign this agreement and rejected it are simple: what we were supposed to receive from an economic point of view has not been delivered," said NSC secretary-general Massimiliano Zetti.

"Because inside those uniforms working for the state, under the state’s emblem, there are not silhouettes, there are families, there are people, women and men who work. It is only right that they should be paid fairly. Security has a cost."

Law enforcement protests in Europe

Although rare, protests by members of the armed forces and law enforcement have taken place in several EU countries in recent years.

In Italy, police unions organised demonstrations in 2023 to demand more funding for pay rises, salary increases in line with inflation and additional recruitment to tackle staff shortages.

In France, police unions staged strikes and pickets in early 2024, calling for bonuses and guarantees on shifts and leave ahead of the Paris Olympics, which required a major security operation.

In Spain, the Jusapol union repeatedly protested in 2024, demanding pay parity for National Police and Guardia Civil officers with regional police forces such as Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra. Some police unions had also opposed the government's Catalan amnesty law in late 2023.

Belgian police unions also organised protests in 2022 and 2023, including "white strikes", roadblocks and a temporary refusal to issue fines for minor offences, with some demonstrations disrupting access to Brussels Airport.

No Country on Earth Fully Respects Workers’ Rights, and it’s Getting Worse

IWW.ORG

Pete Dolack

 July 17, 2026

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Class warfare continues to be waged incessantly. And that war’s offensives continue to be more intense. In just the past year, the world’s working people have seen more attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly, more attacks on civil liberties, more arrests and imprisonments, more refusals to engage in collective bargaining with unions and more technology used to monitor, discipline and silence workers.

None of this is new, but it is getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has issued its 2026 Global Rights Index report, and as has been the case in past years, the annual report makes for grim reading. Once again, no country on Earth fully protects workers’ rights.

In past years, there were only nine countries that met the qualifications for the best category, “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” That was the case for the 2023 and 2022 reports. This year? Only eight countries were found to be merely “sporadic violations of rights.” Those countries are Austria, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Uruguay, with Uruguay newly promoted to this level from a year ago.

Before we dip into the details, the larger picture is alarming. And the advanced capitalist countries, you won’t be surprised to know, are no exceptions. “In Europe and the Americas, workers’ rights are suffering an alarming decline. Both regions registered their worst average country rating since the Index began in 2014, and the increasing influence of the far right is putting workers and unions at risk in countries such as Argentina and France – two out of four countries to be downgraded in 2026,” the ITUC said in its report. Nor are the reasons behind these developments a mystery. “This year’s results reinforce the ITUC’s view that we are witnessing a global erosion of democratic principles – a ‘billionaire coup against democracy’ – funded by the rich and delivered by far-right and authoritarian leaders,” the report said. “As a snapshot of the violations of workers’ rights, the 2026 Index exposes a pattern that the powerful would rather keep hidden: the systematic weakening of democracy through attacks on workers, unions and collective bargaining. From repression of strikes to the erosion of legal protections and the criminalisation of unions, these are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to silence dissent and entrench inequality.”

Fully half of the world’s national governments launched attacks on the rights to free speech and assembly, and half also arrested or detained workers, the highest total yet. Workers in three-quarters of the world’s countries had their right to union organizing impeded, also a record high, and 80 percent of countries restricted the right to collectively bargain. Worse still, 87 percent of countries violated the right to strike.

For the past decade, the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a union, that violate the right to collective bargaining, that violate the right to strike, that arbitrarily arrest and detain trade union members, and that deny or constrain freedom of speech and assembly have all risen.

The global rise of hard right governments has gone hand-in-hand with the deterioration of workers’ rights. Argentina, where President Javier Milei has carried out his promise to impose the harshest variety of austerity that he can get away with, achieved the unprecedented “accomplishment” of falling in the ratings for two consecutive years. Argentina is now classified in the ITUC survey as a 5 rating, the worst category, representing the worst offenders where workers “have effectively no access to rights.” The ITUC lists Argentina as one of the world’s ten worst. “Milei has led a staunchly anti-union agenda since coming to power in 2023, undermining basic workers’ rights, civil liberties and union activity,” the Confederation reports. “Workers and unionists face systematic abuse and the shrinking of civic space. … Union offices, including the headquarters of the glassworkers’ union, were infiltrated and vandalised.” High union officials have fled the country after a police roundup. “Employers in Argentina engage in union busting and exploitative practices with impunity,” the report concludes.

In France, which also saw its rating decline, there is a “sustained deterioration of workers’ rights, an increasingly hostile political atmosphere, and incrementally regressive government policy since nationwide protests against pension reform deeply shook the political landscape in 2023.” Furthermore, in an atmosphere of the government attempting to impose regressive labor policies, “more than 1,000 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) activists have fallen foul of state and employer crackdowns and a spate of violent attacks by far-right groups.”

And what of the two countries that love to claim their defense of democracy is unwavering and endlessly point fingers at other countries? The United Kingdom was rated as a “regular violator of rights,” a ranking of 3, the middle of the five categories. That was actually an improvement from a year earlier, with the ITUC crediting the outgoing Starmer administration for “repeal[ing] excessive restrictions to industrial action introduced in the previous Conservative government’s 2016 Trade Union Act.” And the United States? Once again given a rating of 4, the category for countries that have “systematic violations of rights,” the second worst ranking.

“In 2025, Trump stripped collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers across more than 30 agencies — perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history,” the report said. “The move, reserved in the past for emergencies, was portrayed by the Republican administration as being in the interest of national security. It means entire departments, such as the Departments of State and Justice, and even the Food and Drug Administration, are excluded from this basic right.” The ITUC also cited Trump leaving the federal labor arbitration body, the National Labor Relations Board, without a quorum so that no cases brought by unions can be heard, as well as imposing an intimidating environment for immigrant workers, the excessive force used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and arbitrary arrests of union leaders. “The harm caused by these militarised enforcement practices extends well beyond these high-profile cases, as hundreds of other workers and trade unionists have been arrested and deported or detained in life-threatening conditions without charges or due process,” the report said.

The Global Rights Index ranks the world’s countries from 1 to 5, with 1 the best category, denoting “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” Those are the aforementioned eight countries.

Rating 2 countries are those with “repeated violations of rights,” defined as where “Certain rights have come under repeated attacks by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.” Countries with this rating include Australia, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain.

Rating 3 countries are those with “regular violations of rights,” defined as where “Governments and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failing to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights” due to legal deficiencies “which make frequent violations possible.” Countries with this rating include Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Mexico, South Africa and Switzerland.

Rating 4 countries are those with “systematic violations of rights,” defined as where “The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers, putting fundamental rights under threat.” Countries with this rating include Brazil, Greece, Israel, Peru, the United States and Vietnam.

Rating 5 countries are those with “no guarantees of rights,” defined as where “workers have effectively no access to these rights [spelled out in legislation] and are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.” Countries with this rating include Argentina, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. In addition, there are countries with a 5+ rating, those with “No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law.” The dozen countries listed here include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen.

The ITUC determines its ratings by checking adherence to a list of 97 standards derived from International Labour Organization conventions. Those 97 standards pertain to civil liberties, the right to establish or join unions, trade union activities, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike. As a self-described confederation of national trade union centers, it says it represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and has 340 national affiliates.

Outside the scope of the International Trade Union Confederation’s report is the ability of workers to even have a job. Unemployment statistics notoriously greatly understate the number of people out of work and ignore altogether those with part-time work who need a full-time job. Even those lesser known statistics, such as the U-6 in the United States and R8 in Canada, that reveal higher numbers because of a more expansive definition of counting unemployment than the standard measures, undercount. One estimate of the true rate of un- and under-employment is 24.3 percent, calculated by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. The International Labour Organization estimates that 2.1 billion workers are employed informally, far fewer than those with regular work. The ILO notes that “Informality is typically associated with lower job quality due to limited access to social protection, rights at work, workplace safety and job security.” And all this at a time when the gigantic sums of money shoveled into the pockets of billionaires and other capitalists is so high that there is not enough outlet for investment or other productive use, and instead the money is shoveled into financial speculation — the volume of trading in currency (foreign exchange), stocks, bonds and their derivatives exceeds the size of the global economy in 10 business days.

As we yet again have cause to note, class warfare is intensifying and remains decisively one-sided. For how long?

Pete Dolack has been an activist with several groups, most recently Trade Justice New York Metro. He writes the Systemic Disorder blog and is the author of the books What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy and It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment.

Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in the Americas

Michael K. Smith

 July 17, 2026
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Gloriosa victoria, mural by Diego Rivera

“They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . .

– Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre

“Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel.”

–Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs

There might never even have been an Israel without arms shipments from the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in 1939 during the British Mandate over Palestine. Nine years after that helping hand was extended, the Haganah, with assistance from the Irgun and Lehi, erased Palestine from the map, building the state of Israel literally on top of where Palestine had been while recruiting Nazis from Europe to help the fledgling Jewish state build up enough weapons. Not long after that, Israel took charge of assisting bloody repression in Latin America.

Israel actually trained the army of Castillo Armas that overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954, later shoring up repression across the entire Southern Cone by providing the same training and arms to the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. It also financed Colombian paramilitaries and developed the tactics and weapons used in Mexico’s “Dirty War,” which included forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, carried out against student protesters, political dissidents and campesinos.

The Central America connection was established early on. Israel started sending automatic weapons, tanks, and military planes to the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua in the 1950s, later increasing its support when the dictatorship faced an ultimately successful popular revolution in the 1970s. Israel was Nicaragua’s sole source of arms after Jimmy Carter belatedly cut off military aid to Somoza in 1978, who killed tens of thousands of people in his last two years in power, ultimately using Israeli planes to bomb Managua in a final paroxysm of futile violence. After the Sandinista revolution took power, Israel acted as a conduit to arm and train cocaine-trafficking mercenaries (the Contras) attacking schools, farming cooperatives, and medical clinics throughout Nicaragua in an attempt to destroy the popular achievements of the revolution.

By far the bloodiest Israeli policy in the region was directed against Guatemala from the 1970s to the 1990s, when indigenous Mayans rose up against European-descended oligarchs defended by a brutal Mestizo Army. Tel Aviv’s arms, intelligence, advisors, surveillance technology, and torture tactics helped kill two hundred thousand people and displace a million more in what the Catholic Church and Guatemalan courts determined to be genocide. Guatemalan army officers credited Israel with turning the tide against the popular uprising via mass extermination in the countryside and counter-insurgency techniques that wiped out guerrilla networks in the cities.

Such repression was by then a well-established Israeli policy in the region. In 1972, Tel Aviv had put itself at the service of the Salvadorean army, secret police, and death squads, and the following year El Salvador became the first country to receive a major shipment of Israeli military aircraft. From 1975 to 1979, the last years before El Salvador erupted in civil war, Israel provided 83% of Salvadorean military imports, and agreements between the two states continued throughout the war years, including deals for napalm, armaments, and military technology and training.

The scorched earth campaigns that Israel repeatedly relied on were deliberately focused on destroying Central America’s resources and crops in order to deprive popular guerrilla movements of the means to sustain themselves, thus forcing displaced populations into small, controlled spaces, which were easily subjected to targeted repression.

Civilian slaughters were a key feature of these efforts, and they occurred with mind-numbing regularity throughout the Cold War, the more famous among them being the Rio Sumpul massacre, where hundreds of civilians were mutilated and killed trapped between the Salvadorean and Honduran armies, Operation Scorched Earth (El Salvador), during which bodies were partially dissolved in acid and then dumped in a river, and the El Mozote massacre of 1981, when nearly one thousand Salvadoreans were variously shot, raped, beheaded, and burned alive in Church. There were also assassinations of priests and liberation theologians like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Ignacio Ellacuria, the former ordered by Israel-trained Roberto D’Aubuisson and the latter one of six Jesuit priests murdered by the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion along with their housekeeper in 1989.

These were not episodes of merely gratuitous violence, but rational repression that successfully crushed the threat of popular democracy posed by labor organizers, peasant associations, cooperatives, unions, and church-based Bible study groups “infected” by liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor, along with others working to improve the lives of ordinary people. A negotiated end to the Salvadorean civil war was finally signed in 1992, but the underlying class conflict remained unresolved, with land and other crucial resources concentrated in the hands of a microscopic minority, which is what produced the civil war in the first place.

Almost three decades of severe gang violence then ensued, after which Nayib Bukele was elected president promising to solve the nation’s crime problem. Descended from Christian Palestinians on his father’s side, Bukele believes the problem in Gaza is Hamas, not Israel, and is part of a group that makes up one percent of the Salvadorean population. Many members of this group fought on revolutionary fronts during the civil war, such as Schafik Handal, one of the general commanders of the FMLN guerrilla forces. In fact, Bukele’s own family collaborated with the FMLN after it became a political party, managing its communications for years through the family’s marketing firms, opening the way for Mauricio Funes to win the presidency in 2009. The FMLN later recruited Nayib for a political career, and he became mayor of San Salvador in 2012, and president seven years later.

Having crafted an anti-Marxist, anti-establishment, “cool” dictator image for himself, Bukele today upholds the legacy of the military dictatorship the FMLN fought against, relying on Washington’s counsel and Israel’s weapons. “To achieve good results in the war against gangs, it has been necessary to equip our institution. Today we are handing over 800 Arad rifles to Armed Forces units,” said Bukele’s Defense Minister René Merino in 2022, during a $1.2 million re-armament effort involving Israeli equipment. As a direct result of Bukele’s policies, one out of forty Salvadorean adults is now in jail, the highest incarceration rate in the world, many held at CECOT, a massively over-crowded mega-prison notorious for beating and starving prisoners who have have been granted no rights, no trial, and no visitors.

CECOT actually fits the definition of a concentration camp more than a jail, as prisoners are locked up there not for individual offenses they have been proven to have committed, but because they allegedly fit certain characteristics associated with gang membership. They are dissidents, the abysmally poor, and now even Venezuelans abducted from U.S. soil and trafficked to El Salvador.

In this incarceration model El Salvador receives $20,000 for each prisoner, a highly lucrative arrangement with prospects for limitless growth, since the ultimate target is not crime per se, but anyone who fails to comply with the aims and practices of the Bukele dictatorship. According to internal Salvadorean intelligence documents, 36% of those Bukele has jailed have no prior criminal history. Data from the National Civil Police originally claimed there were 58,270 gang members outstanding, but as of the end of March 2026, 91,000 gang arrests had been made. Meanwhile, Bukele’s “state of exception” suspending constitutional guarantees continues into its fifth year on the pretext of needing to arrest even more.

The lawless Bukele model has won the admiration of aspiring dictators throughout Latin America, which finds itself in the midst of an accelerating campaign to replace constitutional crime fighting with institutionalized state violence. In Chile, the Pinochet-aligned Jose Antonio Kast ran for president on a promise to suspend constitutional guarantees. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa is replicating the state of permanent emergency and moving ahead with plans to construct Bukele-inspired mega-prisons. In Costa Rica and Paraguay, preventive detention and harsh criminal penalties are increasingly entrenched. In Argentina, Javier Milei openly champions fascist Israel while his “zero tolerance” crime policy includes ritual public display of prisoners in degrading conditions. Niceties like the presumption of innocence are reserved for white collar cases.

At the other end of the spectrum are vast Latin American protest movements that know from bitter experience that some of the fiercest partisans of “never again” are actually committed to a policy of “over and over again” at their expense, having perfected extermination in Palestine and then exported it throughout Latin America.

It can’t be long before Bukele’s dungeons include dissidents trafficked from the U.S. for acting on the conviction that “we are all Palestinians.”

Sources.

Salvadorean Defense Minister Rene Merino quoted by Sasi Alejandre, “Palestine and The Global State of Exception,” (Spanish), https://www.naiz.eus/es

“The Dangerous Expansion of Bukele-ism,” La Jornada (Spanish), March 29, 2026

Isabel Rikkers and Noeli Brigden, “Christian Zionism in Bukele’s El Salvador,” NACLA, October 9, 2024

“Israel’s Role in the Guatemalan Genocide,” Middle East Monitor, October 5, 2015

“Israel’s Bloodstained Legacy in Latin America,” Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, March 24, 2025

“Israel’s Latin American Trail of Terror,” Al Jazeera, June 5, 2003

On Israel’s recruitment of Nazis to build up its base of weapons, see Trita Parsi interview on Breaking Points, “Israel’s Puppet Plan: Recruited ‘Terrorist’ To Run Iran,” July 14, 2026

Michael K. Smith is the author of  The Madness of King George, and Portraits of Empire