In the 1970s, popular leftist movements arose in El Salvador to challenge the traditional stranglehold that oligarchs and military dictators held over the country. To prevent El Salvador from going the way of revolutionary Nicaragua and Cuba, in late 1979, a US-backed civil-military junta seized power, determined to crush the nascent insurgency. Over the next year alone, using weapons and training provided by Washington, the junta and right-wing death squads “disappeared,” tortured, or murdered thousands of activists and dissidents including campesino leaders, intellectuals, church officials (most famously Archbishop Óscar Romero), and trade unionists.

To protest this growing repression, the left-wing labor federation FENASTRAS (National Federation of Salvadoran Workers’ Unions) called a general strike in August 1980. The militant union STECEL (Union of Electrical Workers of the Rio Lempa Power Plant) managed to shut down all electricity to San Salvador and other parts of the country for twenty-four hours, causing a nationwide blackout.

“We came ready for this moment, and we will demonstrate to the world that this genocidal government will not destroy the workers’ struggle,” declared Héctor Recinos, leader of STECEL and also the general secretary of FENASTRAS.

The junta responded by immediately arresting STECEL’s entire executive board and dissolving the union by decree. Accused of “acts of terrorism” but never formally charged, tried, or given legal counsel, Recinos and the other STECEL leaders were tortured for seventy days at the National Guard headquarters before being thrown into Mariona prison. Located in a secluded area outside San Salvador, Mariona held hundreds of political prisoners who had not been afforded due process and who lived in constant fear of being taken out of their cells at night and summarily executed in the surrounding woods.

Over the next few years, Recinos and nine other STECEL leaders languished inside Mariona. Some of their fellow unionists were released, only to be murdered by death squads. Their family members were targeted as well. On the two-year anniversary of the general strike that led to his detention, Recinos’s wife and thirteen-year-old daughter were abducted from their home by a dozen armed men in civilian clothes. They were never seen nor heard from again, and the government did not investigate.

Just when they feared the world had forgotten them, in June 1983, the STECEL unionists were visited by a delegation of US labor leaders who had traveled to El Salvador and were granted access to the prison.

The delegation was organized by the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC), a union coalition formed in 1981 to oppose US-backed repression in Central America. The visitors included Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) secretary-treasurer Jack Sheinkman, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) secretary-treasurer Bill Lucy, UAW Region 9A director Ted Barrett, National Education Association officials Sam Pizzigati and John DeMars, and ACTWU organizer Dave Dyson, the driving force behind the National Labor Committee (NLC).

Janet Shenk, a researcher and author with the progressive education and advocacy organization North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), was the delegation’s guide and translator, and arranged the visit to the prison.

“Getting into Mariona wasn’t that hard. The US embassy wrote to the prison officials requesting they grant us permission to enter,” Shenk recalls. “Public relations was really important to both the embassy and to the Salvadoran government, because aid to El Salvador was so controversial. We didn’t get turned down a lot.”

Dyson remembers feeling disbelief as he and the other US labor representatives entered the prison, were searched, then entered into a large courtyard where hundreds of detainees were congregating, as they were allowed to do during the daytime before being locked in their cells at night.

“Here, in the midst of civil war, with bodies ending up in the streets daily, we were going to waltz into the most notorious prison in El Salvador and wander around looking for people to interview,” he explains. “We went around and asked, ‘Where are the STECEL brothers?’”

They eventually found Recinos and the others inside a cell, spoke with them via Shenk’s translation, and wrote down their whole story.

“The prisoners in Mariona were so grateful just for the idea that the American trade union movement would care about them and their fate,” Shenk says.

Upon returning to the United States, the NLC and its affiliated unions launched a campaign demanding the STECEL leaders be released. They printed tens of thousands of brochures about the case and distributed them to rank-and-file union members, instructing them to send a flood of letters and telegrams to the office of José Napoleón Duarte, El Salvador’s US-backed president, as well as to Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and ambassador to El Salvador. As the campaign grew over the next year, it attracted the interest of journalists, congressional Democrats, and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, with the latter visiting the STECEL detainees in Mariona.

Thanking the US labor movement in a letter penned from his prison cell, Recinos wrote, “Your dedicated, committed efforts against social injustice helps to lessen the sadness of our people, and it fills us with pride and strength to know that there are brothers who are aware of our degrading situation.”

By early October 1984, the New York Times reported that because of the NLC’s campaign, the STECEL case had “become an issue in relations between the United States and El Salvador.” Responding to congressional pressure, Reagan called on Duarte to ensure that the jailed unionists would have adequate legal representation and that their case would go to trial.

Apparently tired of all the attention this was generating, on October 8, Duarte made a surprise announcement that the ten STECEL leaders would be freed. He offered no explanation or apology for their four-year imprisonment. But with death squads publicly promising to kill the unionists the moment they walked out of Mariona, Recinos and the others requested exile with their families. They accepted an offer of asylum from the Netherlands.

The STECEL group was set to be released in the early morning hours of October 15 and driven to the San Salvador airport by the Red Cross, where they would meet with their relatives before flying out of the country. The NLC was justifiably concerned that the unionists or their family members might be gunned down before ever making it onto the plane, so Dyson, Shenk, and UAW international affairs director Don Stillman accompanied them at the airport “so we could mingle with them and provide some minimal disincentive to a death squad attack,” Stillman writes.

After arriving unscathed at the airport, Recinos and the other STECEL leaders reunited with their relatives, hugging and celebrating. For a few tense hours, Dyson, Shenk, and Stillman stayed with the group as they waited to board their plane while surrounded by soldiers giving dirty looks and playing with the safety switches on their assault rifles. Eventually, the Salvadoran unionists and their families safely boarded a plane to Guatemala City, then traveled onward to Amsterdam without incident.

With solidarity from the NLC, Recinos and countless other Salvadoran trade unionists continued organizing and fighting for justice and workers’ rights in El Salvador for many years to come, pushing the country in a more democratic direction. But since Bukele suspended constitutional rights in 2022 ostensibly to crack down on gangs, over 85,000 people (1.4 percent of the population) have been indefinitely detained, many under the same flimsy pretenses used to abduct and deport Abrego García. Though CECOT has rightly earned international infamy in recent years, Mariona prison is also still in operation (and now known as “La Esperanza”), jailing Salvadorans without due process and subjecting them to torture as it did during the civil war forty years ago.

Although the relationship between the United States and Salvadoran governments today has some similarities to that of the 1980s, there are also differences. While Reagan and Duarte seemed to be embarrassed when their crimes against humanity were made known to the public, Trump and Bukele openly revel in their own cruelty. Even as Sen. Van Hollen was denied access to CECOT last week, right-wing politicians from the United States have been repeatedly welcomed into the prison to record themselves proudly standing in front of locked cells jam-packed with dehumanized detainees.

Like it did in the 1980s, the US labor movement today has a crucial role to play in mobilizing the working class to demand that governments respect the rights of fellow union members like Abrego García and others caught in the gears of the deportation machine and systems of mass incarceration. In the same way unions fight the arbitrary dictates of bosses through just cause protections, which ensure that workers are not disciplined or terminated at the mere whim of an employer, they fight repressive, anti-worker regimes by championing the democratic principle of due process and standing alongside those unjustly targeted and persecuted.