The United States is grappling with the most profound constitutional crisis since the civil war. At stake is the most basic of all legal principles—that of habeas corpus, which prohibits the government from simply disappearing those it doesn’t like. At stake, too, is the ability of the courts to step in when the executive branch breaks the law and violates the Constitution. What has come to the fore in this ongoing saga this week is the question of whether America is a country ruled by law or simply by raw power.

A month ago, a federal judge, James Boasberg, issued an emergency order pausing the deportations of a group of hundreds of Venezuelan and Salvadoran men to the supermax CECOT prison in El Salvador, and ordering any flights already en route to El Salvador with these men to return to the United States. The Trump administration flouted his orders and instead launched a propaganda campaign seeking to have the judge impeached. Hours later, the world was treated to ghastly video imagery of the shackled men dragged into CECOT, where their heads were forcibly shaven before they were dumped into massive holding cells in which they were crowded up one against the other like cattle in a factory farm. These men are now subject to involuntary hard labor in a brutal prison system in which at least 363 inmates have died in recent years.

Then it emerged that one of the men removed from the country, father of three Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, had a 2019 court order in his immigration file expressly prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador, because he had demonstrated a credible fear for his life should he be returned. The Trump administration admitted that he had only been deported because of an “administrative error,” and a horrified Judge Paula Xinis ordered officials to extricate Garcia from CECOT and return him to his family in Maryland. The Trump administration brazenly disregarded her ruling. And not only did the administration not make any efforts to secure his return, it also fired the Justice Department lawyer who Trump felt didn’t argue the case zealously enough in court.

Last week, the US Supreme Court unanimously ordered Trump’s people to “facilitate” Garcia’s return and asked Xinis to detail what such a facilitation would look like. The Trump administration showed no signs of complying with the US Supreme Court. And this week, Trump not only announced that he was not able to bring Garcia back to the US, but he also claimed—entirely falsely—that the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in favor of his administration’s position.

It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of this moment. The full might of the US state is now arrayed behind the idea that the government has the right to grab people it deems foreign enemies off the street, and without even a semblance of due process can deport them to an overseas concentration camp. It is claiming it has the right to ignore the courts trying to uphold the rule of law. And it is claiming that so long as it cloaks its agenda in the language of “national security” or “foreign policy priorities,” it can act entirely outside of the Constitution.

Make no mistake, this is every bit as lethal in its implications for the survival of the country’s democracy as was Hitler’s February 28, 1933, Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State. What is going on here fits the description of “fascism” to a T.

That Trump’s plan involves co-opting other countries in the hemisphere to do its dirty work of disappearing people is reminiscent of a particularly ominous chapter in the region’s history.

In November 1975, military and intelligence agency representatives from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay met in Santiago to formally launch Operation Condor. Each of the countries was led by a ruthless military dictatorship, and had implemented, with CIA connivance, the dark arts of torture, extra-judicial killing, and disappearances. Now, the juntas were looking to pool their resources across the continent.

The premise was gruesome: Essentially, the dictatorships would share information on dissidents, on “terrorists,” on opponents of each other’s regimes; and then, if requested, would disappear their allies’ domestic enemies. A wanted Argentinean seeking refuge in Pinochet’s Chile, say, could, at Argentina’s request, be picked up by the Chilean police or military and then disposed of in one of countless vicious manners. These included, but were not limited, to rapes followed by execution, dropping victims into the ocean from helicopters, and dispatching victims with bullets to the back of the head.

So successful was this pooling of retribution that Operation Condor was subsequently joined by the dictatorships of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Experts who have studied the archives in Latin America and in the United States believe that at least 763 murders can be directly linked to the intelligence and bloodletting practices of Operation Condor, with many thousands more dissidents killed by their own governments during the 1970s and 1980s.

Operation Condor is one of the most shameful episodes of the Cold War. Yet today its basic premise is being resurrected in broad daylight by the United States and El Salvador.

A few years back, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, its population at the mercy of seemingly all-powerful gangs. Per 100,000 residents, the country’s homicide rate was more than 11 times that of the US. Out of this bloody chaos, a right-wing populist politician, Nayib Bukele, emerged with a plan to take back the streets and to use emergency powers to destroy the gangs and to incarcerate tens of thousands of people. When he was elected president in 2019, he set about implementing this plan, presiding over construction of the enormous CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) super-max prison, and sweeping up huge numbers of people in dragnet actions against gang-controlled territories.

Bukele’s strategy worked. Crime rates plummeted; residents were able to retake control of their neighborhoods; and the power of the gangs and cartels waned. El Salvador now has one of the lowest murder rates on the continent. Last year, Bukele was reelected by a landslide.

There was, of course, a downside: Human rights groups allege wholesale abuse by the police, the army, and the security forces. Thousands of those held in CECOT have never been convicted of crimes and yet remain trapped in the facility. And conditions inside are among the harshest on Earth.

For Trump, all of this is a plus. When Bukele offered—for a small fee—to incarcerate in CECOT non–US citizen alleged gang members who were facing deportation from the US under Trump’s new zero-tolerance regime, the MAGA cult leader jumped at the chance. When Bukele said he would even be willing to imprison US citizens in his concentration camp, Trump expressed utter joy at the prospect, despite the blatant illegality of the idea.

And then this week, Trump hosted the El Salvadorean leader in the White House to broadcast to the world their disturbing partnership, based on El Salvador’s willingness to disappear US enemies into its black hole of a supermax prison.

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I didn’t think it was possible that there could be a worse televised meeting than that between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump and JD Vance attempted a mob beat-down of their victim. I was wrong.

During their lovefest, Bukele said he wouldn’t return Garcia to the US, because doing so would be akin to smuggling a terrorist into his ally to the north. Trump and his team said that was fine, and that they wouldn’t request his return to the US. Picking up on Bukele’s language, the attorney general and others in Trump’s fascist inner circle quickly declared that Garcia—who has been convicted of no crimes in the US—was a “terrorist” and they implied that those who spoke out on his behalf were domestic enemies.

Chillingly, during the tête-à-tête, Trump said he would love to deport “homegrowns” to CECOT as well (meaning incarcerated US citizens). And, surprise surprise, the very next day, Bukele announced that he was doubling the size of his bespoke concentration camp.

The facility can already house 40,000 people; Bukele’s plan would expand it to 80,000. That expansion would make CECOT a larger concentration camp than Dachau, the first camp established by the Nazis, which, when US forces liberated it in April 1945, held roughly 60,000 desperately malnourished and brutalized inmates.

Anyone who witnessed the disgusting interplay between Trump and Bukele can see exactly where this is heading. Trump wants his concentration camp; Bukele wants to be Trump’s favorite dictator. Trump wants to continue disappearing people to instill terror in the American population; Bukele wants to be the midwife to this terror. The Condors, it seems, have taken to the skies of the Americas once more.