How about putting more than 1 percent of your population in prison?
That is how El Salvador is going about fighting crime. In May last year, 71,000 Salvadorans were held behind bars, according to the US State Department, up from 39,600 in 2018.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the mastermind of El Salvador’s mass incarceration policy, does not think he has anything to be ashamed of. Last year, he said proudly, El Salvador’s homicide rate fell to 7.8 per 100,000 Salvadorans, the second-lowest in Central America, after Nicaragua. In 2018, the year before Bukele came into office, the rate was just above 52. In 2015 it topped 100, at the time the highest in the world.
If some human rights have been trampled along the way toward social peace — if innocent Salvadorans have been swept up and incarcerated, and the incarcerated are occasionally mistreated to the point of death — it is a reasonable price to squash a festering gang problem that had put the streets off limits for most Salvadorans.
And here lies a problem: Not only are Salvadorans loving it, politicians and policymakers from Honduras to Argentina have been impressed by the Bukele regime’s iron fist, tempted by the political payoff that similar tactics might yield in their own increasingly crime-ridden societies.
“Lack of security is a generalized problem; one of the main preoccupations of electorates in all of Latin America,” said Tamara Taraciuk at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington DC. “What Bukele is offering is winning the discussion about how to address organized crime.”
In a region where the political establishment has lost all legitimacy, where political polarization has plowed fertile ground for populist entrepreneurs, strong-arm tactics against crime could propel authoritarians to power, undermining already fragile democratic institutions. As an editorial piece about Bukele’s strategy in the Central American media outlet El Faro put it: “No Gangs, But No More Democracy.”
Central America, which has long suffered some of the hemisphere’s highest crime rates, is encouraging repressive tactics by the authorities. The army is regularly deployed to enforce public security in the northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, despite constitutional limits on the use of the armed forces.
While the roughshod tactics are more popular on the right of the political spectrum, left-leaning governments are also tempted by their popular draw. They face no opposition. As Taraciuk said, “we need another proposition on the other side of the table.”
Mimicking Bukele’s tactics, the leftish government of President Xiomara Castro in Honduras last December decreed states of emergency limiting constitutional rights and giving the security forces extra leeway in 162 neighborhoods, mostly in the capital Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. While the measure was meant to be temporary, it has been renewed and expanded since then. Castro is now planning to build a prison colony off its Caribbean coast, to house all the gang leaders it is hoping to nab.
Further south, a surge of violent crime fueled by drug trafficking over the last two years in Ecuador has driven public security to the top of the political agenda. Jan Topic, one of the most notorious candidates in the general elections coming up in August, is known as “Ecuador’s Bukele,” and touts his past in the French Foreign Legion as proof of his ability to address the violence.
Crime is also playing a prominent role in the runup to elections in Argentina. Even in Chile, where crime remains relatively subdued, public security has become top of mind, propelled in part by the wrongheaded perception that Venezuelan immigrants are bringing crime with them. In April Congress passed a new public security law that would make it easier for the police to use force. And leading Chilean thinkers have started to worry about the potential emergence of a Bukele-like figure.
Mexico offers a bit of a contrast: Drug trafficking has kept swathes of the country in a state of fear, but there seems to be little appetite for hardline tactics. The paradox might not hold, though.
Falko Ernst of the International Crisis Group says that the failed military campaign against the drug cartels waged by the government of Felipe Calderon more than a decade ago might have tarred the hardline brand. Moreover, despite President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s offer of “hugs, not bullets” to criminal groups, the military is deeply involved in policing the country.
Crime might be harder to tame in Mexico, with a population of 130 million and 170 criminal groups enmeshed across society and the political system, than in tiny El Salvador. Yet the possibility of a hardline strongman always lurks in the shadows. “A figure that calls for a hard crackdown could pop out of nowhere,” Ernst said. “It’s interesting that it hasn’t happened so far.”
From the Philippines of Philipine President Rodrigo Duterte to Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, the iron fist has proven its political appeal. In Latin America, electoral majorities everywhere from Alberto Fujimori’s Peru in the 1990s to present-day El Salvador have been convinced that the punished are deserving of punishment, that there is no such thing as the illegitimate use of state violence, that abuses are exceptions to be ignored.
The strategy does not work for long in a democracy, though, given its glaring conflict with the notion of justice, accountability and civil rights. It is well suited to politicians aiming to perpetuate themselves in power, like Bukele, who is defying his country’s constitution to run for re-election, but over time it becomes apparent that abuses are not a bug, but a feature; excess force is deployed to spread fear. Suspended civil rights are often not recovered.
However, it is up to democrats to propose alternative solutions. “Those of us who are interested in a democratic response to the problem are losing the battle for the narrative,” Taraciuk said.
The democratic counterproposal must uphold standards of justice, transparency and accountability. It cannot rely on suspending citizens’ civil rights. Above all, for it to take root, it must succeed at reducing crime.
Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise and The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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