source: Taylor & Francis online
In February 2023, Daniel Ortega’s government stripped 222 political prisoners of their Nicaraguan citizenship and forcibly exiled them to the United States. The televised moment of detainees arriving to the United States in a chartered plane became a tableau of submission, demonstrating the state’s absolute control over belonging and exile. Scenes like this are not just displays of discipline; they are the grammar of contemporary authoritarian populism. Across Central America, leaders like Ortega and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele use bodies—disciplined, disappeared, displayed—as instruments of control. The resurgence of authoritarian-populism in Central America is not an aberration but a reactivation of unresolved legacies in which United States influence is deeply embedded.
In the last century, Central America endured decades of revolution and civil wars, where dictators crushed dissent with impunity. Today, history echoes across the region as autocratic figures like Ortega and Bukele consolidate power through similar repressive tactics. To manage dissent, the state increasingly disappears human rights defenders, environmentalists, feminists, and journalists—by way of exile, imprisonment, or death.
Nicaragua and El Salvador, neighbors with distinct political trajectories, offer compelling comparative cases for identifying the new authoritarian-populist playbook. While much attention has been given to how these leaders manipulate legal frameworks and restructure institutions, less has been paid to how they use bodies as political instruments. Ortega and Bukele stage and control bodies—be it their own, those of prisoners, masked “voluntary police,” or orchestrated crowds—to perform legitimacy, instill discipline, and normalize their regimes. These choreographies of power are not isolated phenomena; they are part of a hemispheric resurgence of authoritarian aesthetics that echo the colonial and imperial past. The body becomes both the instrument and archive of domination, recalling how colonial regimes used visibility, punishment, and spectacle to assert control. Today, these practices return in new guises—digital, populist, and securitized—revealing how the “boomerangs of empire” strike back within the very democracies once promised as its antidote. In this sense, Central America again serves as a laboratory of governance, where experiments in repression and consent are tested before traveling outward, shaping global forms of authoritarian populism.
Peace and Pacts
The 1990s were the supposed era of free and fair elections. After decades of civil conflict and U.S.backed military regimes, peace accords were meant to usher in democratic transitions in countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. But those reforms often replaced one set of elites with another. Even though people could go to the polls and cast ballots for new opposition parties that emerged, democratic deepening remained superficial. International donors emphasized procedural reforms like election monitoring and security-sector restructuring, rather than redistributing power or transforming political culture. Stability, as Washington defined it, took priority over structural change.
As a result, political cultures were marked by apathy and distrust of institutions. Each in their own way, Ortega and Bukele capitalized on this disillusionment. Rising insecurity and institutional weakness created fertile ground for militarized governance and populist appeals. In Nicaragua, Ortega—once a pillar of the revolution—invoked national security to consolidate power, paradoxically branding the country “the safest in Central America.” In El Salvador, Bukele vowed to dismantle the deeply entrenched political elite of which he was once a part, and to address gang violence and corruption with an iron fist. In both cases, the supposed defense of public safety becomes the pretext for repression. Across the region, leaders weaponize inequality and fears of crime to erode liberal norms, leaving democratic institutions intact in form but hollow in function.
Both leaders exemplify authoritarian-populist leadership, a blend of personalist, coercive rule sustained by popular consent. Stuart Hall describes authoritarian populism as “an exceptional form of the capitalist state–which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent.”
Ortega and Bukele exemplify this form of leadership. Elected through formal channels, they swiftly subordinated the judiciary and legislature, expanding executive power beyond constitutional bounds. They found receptive terrain in desperate populations willing to allow any measures, constitutional or not, if they appeared to alleviate their problems. Claiming to protect an aggrieved majority, they deprive perceived enemies of civil liberties and political agency. Their success reveals how appeals to the popular will can hollow out democracy from within. This logic extends beyond Central America: from Trump’s attacks on “normal politics” in the United States to the global rise of punitive populisms, today’s strongmen rely on the same authoritarian grammar—one that transforms legality into loyalty and repression into spectacle.
When institutional legitimacy is fragile, power must be made visible and visceral, staged on and through bodies. Through the strategic use of mass rallies, militarized policing, and public displays of imprisonment, these leaders choreograph belonging and punishment. Loyal crowds in matching T-shirts or shirtless prisoners in a maximum-security prison convey order, loyalty, and domination. At the same time, dissident or unruly bodies—journalists, feminists, Indigenous leaders, LGBTQ activists—are disappeared, exiled, or silenced by state forces. Bodily control becomes a political technology, transforming insecurity into consent and reinforcing gendered and racialized hierarchies under the guise of national unity.
A Leader’s Reinvention
Daniel Ortega’s return to power in 2007 marked the culmination of a long political reinvention. After leading the Sandinista revolution and serving as president during the 1980s, Ortega lost the 1990 election amid war fatigue and international pressure. For 16 years, he remained in the opposition, rebuilding his political influence through electoral alliances and deals with former adversaries. By the early 2000s, Ortega softened his revolutionary image—trading guerrilla fatigues for shirts and jeans, embracing conservative social values (including opposition to abortion), and recasting himself as a unifier committed to stability and peace. This shift was most evident in his 2006 campaign, when he ran as the candidate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) alongside Jaime Morales Carazo, a former leader of the U.S.-backed Contra forces. This ticket was strategic and designed to signal peace and reconciliation. Ortega no longer embraced his militant “gallo ennavajado” persona and instead adopted a version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” for his campaign song.
Once elected, Ortega began dismantling the fragile democratic gains of the postwar period. He centralized executive power, co-opted institutions, and in 2009 removed constitutional term limits through a reform approved by his own court appointees. This consolidation of power was gradual but systematic, cloaked in the language of popular sovereignty and national security. Over time, his government criminalized dissent, shut down thousands of NGOs and independent media outlets, and stripped universities and the Catholic Church of autonomy. Student leaders, feminists, and journalists have been exiled or imprisoned under vague “foreign agent” laws that cast activism as treason. Like other authoritarian populists, Ortega combined appeals to the marginalized with coercive state control, preserving the outward rituals of electoral democracy while silencing dissent.
Nayib Bukele’s ascent in El Salvador echoes and departs from Ortega’s. Both capitalized on deep public disillusionment with postwar institutions and the failures of traditional parties. Like Ortega, Bukele rebranded by drawing on digital media, youth culture, and a sleek, modern personalist style. Expelled from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2017, he bypassed the traditional two-party system and ran under the right-leaning Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) party, winning in 2019 with 54 percent of the vote. His campaign fused millennial aesthetics with authoritarian undertones: he livestreamed rallies on TikTok, tweeted memes mocking rivals, and branded himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” — an ironic moniker he later embraced as part of his political persona. Bukele wore baseball caps backward at official events, took selfies during speeches at the United Nations, and replaced institutional logos with his own image and slogans. These digital performances projected accessibility and modernity while eroding the boundaries between state, spectacle, and self-promotion, translating populist intimacy into a form of control. Once in office, Bukele moved quickly, stacking the judiciary with loyalists, deploying the military to intimidate legislators, and authorizing mass arrests. These actions transformed popular frustration into an authoritarian-populist mandate, elevating his image as protector and punisher.
Despite generational and stylistic differences, Bukele and Ortega converge in their use of authoritarian-populist strategies: cultivating direct identification with “the people,” positioning themselves as the rightful guardians of the nation, criminalizing dissent, and hollowing out democratic institutions while maintaining a facade of electoral legitimacy. Similar tactics have surfaced elsewhere across the region. Beyond Central America, leaders like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina deploy anti-elite populist rhetoric and digital spectacle to justify attacks on civil institutions. These variations reveal a shared regional repertoire—what we might call an authoritarian-populist template—whose success depends on local histories of insecurity, inequality, and disenchantment with democracy.
Loyalty and Spectacle
Autocracies push for conformity and compliance. When institutions are hollowed out, the body becomes the stage of power. Bodies become props that mask institutional cracks and manifest public consent. Controlling how bodies appear in public is a way to control the story of legitimacy.
Since his return, Ortega has used revolutionary pageantry to appeal to his base and display power. At the 46th anniversary commemoration of the Sandinista Revolution, on July 19, 2025, the Ortega-Murillo regime staged a meticulously choreographed display of mass participation. Under the floodlights of Managua’s Plaza de la Revolución, tens of thousands of attendees, organized in color-coordinated blocks, formed a living tableau visible both to the assembled dignitaries and to cameras broadcasting the event nationwide. Overhead, the glowing “trees of life,” a signature aesthetic of the Murillo era, framed the scene with their garish luminescence, reinforcing the regime’s symbolic vocabulary of unity, permanence, and divine sanction. These metal structures are part of a public arts installation in Managua that began in 2013. There are around 170 of these trees or “chayopalos”—named after Rosario “Chayo” Murillo, Ortega’s wife and co-president—each costing between $20,000 and $25,000.
Such gatherings are carefully staged performances of loyalty. The visual message is unmistakable: the regime is not merely commemorating history, it is asserting itself as the rightful inheritor and protector of this revolutionary legacy, conflating the Sandinista project with the endurance of Ortega’s personal rule. The sheer scale of the human arrangement suggests inevitability, stability, and overwhelming consensus, even as it conceals dissent, repression, and exclusion of political opposition from public space.
Much of the dissent that the Ortega-Murillo regime seeks to conceal through such spectacles had been developing since Ortega’s return, culminating in the 2018 protests against proposed reforms to the Social Security and Pension system. Although Ortega revoked the reforms, protests raged across the country for several months, with different sectors of society calling for Ortega’s resignation. Protestors were violently repressed by anti-riot police and turbas, or small “shock” groups that initially donned Sandinista Youth t-shirts but later switched to ski masks and plainclothes. Nicaraguans across the country tore down the chayopalos in acts of resistance and set up tranques or road blockades, paralyzing transit on key highways and creating hubs of protection for students at several universities in Managua. The total number of protestors killed by state forces remains contested but is estimated at around 300. Hundreds of others were taken as political prisoners, held in clandestine prisons with no contact with their families. Today, some 73 remain imprisoned, while others who have been released have been stripped of their citizenship and forced into exile. To quell civil society, the Nicaraguan National Assembly approved the “Foreign Agents” law in 2020, which requires entities to register as “foreign agents” with the Interior Ministry if they “directly or indirectly” receive funding from abroad. Those who fail to register face cancellation of their official registration and confiscation of property. Soon after, in March 2022, the Assembly adopted the “General Law for the Regulation and Control of Non-Profit Organizations,” which enables the Interior Ministry and the National Assembly to cancel the legal registration of groups deemed to be promoting campaigns intended to destabilize the country.
With the passage of Law 1114 in 2022, the regime stripped universities of their autonomy by centralizing control over the finances, administration, and curricula of academic institutions, effectively undermining academic freedom and independent thought. These last two measures in particular resemble the Trump administration’s use of legal mechanisms to repress civil society through its “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” memorandum, which cites the Foreign Agents Registration Act and includes numerous attacks on institutions of higher education that have engaged in the Palestine solidarity movement.
In the historical context of Central America, authoritarian regimes have long used mass rallies to consolidate power. Under the Somoza regime, staged military parades turned citizens into instruments of loyalty and discipline, while dissenters were visibly marginalized. Ortega’s spectacle extends the tradition into the 21st century. Now amplified through social media and state-controlled broadcasts, the event transforms history into weaponized memory, mobilized to justify the present and foreclose alternative political futures. The anniversary commemoration converts the collective body into a stage prop for authoritarian populism, where the choreography of the crowd is as important as the speeches from the podium.
Another clear example of Ortega’s use of bodily spectacle is the public staging of Nicaragua’s masked “voluntary police.” In a photograph distributed by state-aligned media El 19 Digital in January 2025, rows of men and women stand in identical white t-shirts and black balaclavas, their bodies arranged with military precision. The anonymity created by the masks erases individual identity, transforming each person into an interchangeable unit of state force. This bodily uniformity projects two parallel messages: to loyalists, a vision of disciplined order ready to defend “the people” from alleged threats; to opponents, a silent warning of omnipresent faceless enforcement.
This voluntary force operates as an extension of the regime’s surveillance apparatus, blurring the boundary between state control and everyday social life. The sense that “you are being watched at all times” generates a climate of self-censorship and performative loyalty, where ordinary citizens internalize the regime’s gaze. What makes this dynamic especially powerful is its voluntariness: participation in surveillance becomes a means of signaling allegiance, securing safety, or even gaining small privileges. The neighbor, the coworker, or the shopkeeper becomes both enforcer and potential informant, embedding the logic of authoritarianism into the most mundane social interactions. In this way, the regime’s power is not only top-down but also diffused through social networks that reproduce vigilance and conformity from below.
Such displays are not simply security measures; they are choreographed performances designed to communicate legitimacy and control. In postwar Central America, the demobilization of militias and the establishment of civilian police were meant to signify a democratic break from the militarized authoritarianism of previous decades. By mobilizing “voluntary police,” Ortega deliberately blurs the line between civilian law enforcement and paramilitary force, evoking a visual grammar of the death squads and irregular armed groups of the past. The spectacle relies on the body as a political instrument: disciplined in posture, stripped of individuality, and loyal to the leader rather than to law.
In Ortega’s authoritarian-populist playbook, the visible massing of these anonymous bodies serves as a substitute for institutional legitimacy. Their very presence is propaganda, offering the appearance of public order while simultaneously normalizing the suspension of legal norms.
Discipline and Spectacle
While certain bodies can amass in public spaces, those deemed “others” are removed from the body politic. Authoritarian-populists divide society into “the people” and internal enemies. Those deemed on the outside are subject to “warranted” violence, experiencing a level of unprotection and un-citizenship.
In El Salvador, Bukele has employed a parallel visual strategy through the staged display of mass incarceration. State-released images from the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) mega-prison depict hundreds of shirtless, tattooed men, shackled and crouched in tightly packed rows. Their bodies are stripped of individuality and reduced to a collective symbol of criminality, becoming a singular mass. The imagery enacts overwhelming punitive power where individuals are transformed into anonymous components of a security machine. Like Ortega’s masked “voluntary police,” these prisoners are arranged with choreographic precision, producing a spectacle designed for mass circulation on social media and by news outlets. The intended message is twofold: to supporters, the images promise a decisive, uncompromising victory over gangs; to critics, they signal the regime’s willingness to bypass due process and legal norms in the name of public security.
The visual grammar of these displays—bare skin, shaved heads, submissive posture, homogeneity—renders the prisoners not as individuals with rights but as an undifferentiated threat neutralized by state force. This framing erases the legal complexities of arrest, trial, and sentencing, replacing due process with a singular image of control. As with Ortega’s voluntary police, the body is weaponized as a political tool: either disciplined and loyal, or subdued and dehumanized. In both cases, the regime’s authority is performed through massed human forms that collapse law enforcement into a visual performance of sovereignty.
Bukele’s prison imagery and Ortega’s revolutionary pageantry and masked militias draw from a shared regional repertoire of authoritarian spectacle, rooted in Central America’s history of militarized governance and public punishment. During the Salvadoran civil war, captured guerrillas were publicly displayed as a warning to communities, while in Guatemala, Indigenous populations were systematically targeted and punished in counterinsurgency campaigns, marking them as politically and morally suspect. These techniques of targeting and counterinsurgency, in some cases honed and disseminated by the U.S. government, were used to justify unspeakable acts of violence. Such historical practices laid the groundwork for contemporary strategies that continue to make the body a site of moral and political policing, now adopted to the digital age. These images do not simply record state power; they construct it, turning the body into both the medium and message of authoritarian-populist rule.
Central America on the Frontlines (Again)
Central America has long served as a laboratory where the United States developed and tested strategies of control during the counterinsurgency era. Today it observes and learns from contemporary leaders like Ortega and Bukele, who deploy these tactics domestically. In some ways, Washington wrote the playbook, and the Trump administration now reads it at home.
Ortega mobilizes loyal citizens to perform revolutionary continuity; Bukele mobilizes prisoners to dramatize iron-fist governance. In both cases, the massed body—disciplined in celebration or submission—becomes proof of legitimacy. While mass politics is not new to Latin America, today it is amplified through digital circulation. High-resolution drone shots and carefully edited state media packages transform these events into viral symbols, transcending their local audiences to assert a global image of power. This visual politics resonates northward: Trump praised Bukele at the U.N. assembly on September 23rd for keeping U.S. deportees in “terrorist prisons,” in a for-profit authoritarian exchange. In this sense, Bukele and Ortega’s spectacles are not only about controlling bodies in space, but also about controlling the visual memory of political order itself.
These practices reveal how strategies of control and violence that were perfected during colonial and neocolonial eras return in modern forms of authoritarian-populist rule—what we might call the “boomerangs of empire.” Bukele and Ortega adopt and adapt these historical techniques: Bukele’s highly choreographed prison inspections and Ortega’s revolutionary pageantry and masked militias turn bodies into instruments of political theater, signaling loyalty while visibly punishing dissent. In this way, the state not only performs power but also reactivates patterns of authoritarian governance rooted in imperial and fascist logics, making the body both medium and message in a continuing cycle of repression.
Today, Ortega and Bukele exploit fear, inequality, and disillusionment to justify their rule, staging bodies—whether imprisoned, disappeared, or paraded in support—as instruments of control. These assaults target not only individuals but collective memory, justice, and the right to dissent. The image of Ortega’s masked “voluntary police” standing in silent formation finds its U.S. counterpart in the masked ICE agents conducting raids; both spectacles in which anonymity shields the enforcer and intimidates the public. This resemblance is not coincidental. The circulation of these tactics points to a longer imperial feedback loop—a boomerang—in which the technologies of policing, surveillance, and spectacle first honed in the colonial and Cold War “laboratories” of Latin America return to shape domestic governance in the United States. U.S.-trained Central American security forces, counterinsurgency doctrines, and carceral models developed through decades of intervention now rebound northward, informing the militarized border and the American police state. Rather than merely borrowing populist tactics from the region, U.S. enforcement agencies participate in a shared authoritarian repertoire that Latin America helped prototype under empire. The result is a transnational choreography of control through which the violence of empire returns home, cloaked in the language of law and order.
As authoritarian populism spreads globally, Central America again stands at the frontline. The cases of Nicaragua and El Salvador remind us that democratic erosion often begins with normalizing bodily control and celebrating strongmen who promise safety at the expense of rights. Recognizing the imperial roots of these performances helps us see their echoes elsewhere—from Trumpist rallies to the militarized policing of protest in U.S. streets—and to resist them across the hemisphere.
