El Salvador, a country which has reduced its murder rate by an astonishing 90% under Nayib Bukele, is criticized by those who argue that civil rights cannot be suspended and that criminals also need to have their rights respected.
The Economist, always a reliable bellwether of approved liberal opinion, indicates that El Salvador’s president is not to be trusted. A quick glance at a chronology of the publication concerning the premier of the Central American country says ‘this guy is no bueno’, despite the number of murders falling from over 2,000 in 2019 to just 154 in 2023. But that achievement is only possible because “Nayib Bukele is wrecking democracy in El Salvador”, the Economist says.
Other publications agree. The New York Times recently acknowledged the “drop in crime in El Salvador is stunning” but warned there was a “dark side”.
“Walking the streets of the capital, San Salvador, in the days before the election, we saw firsthand how families with children have returned to parks. People can now cross formerly impassable gang-controlled borders between neighborhoods. The city center, which for years was largely empty by sunset, is now lively late into the night,” the reporter says, but adds that the state of emergency introduced by Bukele “suspended basic civil liberties, security forces have locked up roughly 75,000 people.”
However, as Bukele’s popularity with the people of El Salvador was based on turning the country from a gangland murder zone to one of the safest places in the Western hemisphere, the warning that he might be stealing democracy seemed to have little to no effect on his popularity at home, or indeed on his reputation amongst his peer nations.
There was always something suspicious about Nayib Bukele according to much of the Western press. But most readers of same know nothing about El Salvador, and are guided by pieces like The Irish Times forecast of his pending election victory in this year’s election with the headline “The ‘cult’ of Bukele: El Salvador’s millennial strongman heads for second term”.
The opening paragraph proclaims: “Bitcoin is legal tender; roughly one in 45 adults is in jail; and the former nightclub manager turned president stormed congress with the military less than a year after taking office.”
The truth about Bukele is far more interesting than this. In 2015, El Salvadore was the most dangerous country in the world with a homicide rate of 107 per 100,000, and Nayib Bukele was narrowly elected as Mayor of San Salvador for the leftist FMLN party.
The country’s president came from the same party and he had allegedly paid the notoriously violent gang who basically ran the country, MS13, a quarter million dollars to stuff ballots in the election the previous year to gain a narrow victory. So Bukele was not hanging with the most ethical people then, but events would suggest that his success was in spite of the political avenues available to him, not because of them. Bukele seems to have flown under the radar.
Two years later, after implementing a significant clean up of San Salvadore he was evicted from the FMLN for criticizing its leader. This was when he formed his own party Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas).
Bukele’s election for president in 2019 reads like a tale of political intrigue. Not because of how he persuaded the voters to vote for him, but because of how he evaded the various plots of the establishment to prevent him running. As IM1776.com’s Benjamin Bradock reported, this plot involved him switching parties twice and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal banning one party in a midnight meeting, only to learn after an announcement of his candidacy disqualification that Bukele had switched parties again in secret the previous evening, thus foiling the council’s plot.
The incident where he “stormed congress” was stage managed, extraordinary, and – he argues – legal in order to pass crime measures to tackle violent crime. Human Rights Watch, however, called the event “an exhibition of brute force”. Bukele used dramatic public relations stunts, whipping a swelling public sentiment into massive street mobilization, and used it as a staging point for declaring he would oust his opponents through the legitimate means of elections. I
A year later, Bukele achieved his victory at the ballot box and could implement his policies with the full support of the legislature. The gangs reacted with a day of violence on March 26th 2022 murdering random civilians indiscriminately. It wasn’t a turf war, it was just indiscriminate violence with an aim to unleash terror and chaos. It was then that Bukele declared a state of emergency. And while his fight against MS13 was met with opposition from human rights NGOs around the world, it is clearly supported by the people of El Salvador.
US Senator, Tom Cotton, who visited the country this year reported that prior to the crackdown “more than 100,000 gang members and associates roamed the streets of a nation of fewer than six-and-a-half million people.”
“For years, they waged war with each other and the government, turning neighborhoods and cities into ungovernable battlefields. They would impress pre-teen boys into their gangs or demand pre-teen girls provide sexual favors—or they would kill the whole family and still take the boy or girl,” he said.
“As a result, El Salvador has long been one of the most dangerous nations on earth. Indeed, it was so dangerous that many of my Democratic colleagues have argued that those fleeing the country should automatically be eligible for asylum. In late March 2022, the nation reached its breaking point when gang members committed 87 murders in a single weekend—killings more people in three days than were killed in the entirety of the previous month. Tragically, March 26, 2022, marked the deadliest day in El Salvador since the end of that nation’s civil war thirty years before.”
“Finally, the people had had enough. President Bukele requested the declaration of a state of emergency and the National Assembly agreed. The government surged troops throughout the country, overwhelming the gangs and arresting and imprisoning its members. One active gang member told reporters that “there were too many soldiers everywhere all at once.” According to recent estimates, the Bukele government has imprisoned more than 75,000 gang members and killed hundreds more.”
Bukele’s uncompromising approach on violent crime may have led to the suspension of civil rights of criminals and the general population, but his supporters argue that it has worked. The murder rate fell from 36 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 2.4 per 100,000 last year, an astonishing and enviable decline of more than 90%.
This year 1.85 homicides per 100,000 people are projected to take place. That would make El Salvador the safest country on the entire America continent.
El Salvador is now a place you can run a small business without fearing for your life. You can enjoy a walk in the poorest urban neighborhood or in the countryside without fear of disappearing. People do, and are quite happy they can – with rocketing approval rates for the President.
Citizens don’t seem very worried about the human rights of people who would normally cut them to pieces if they don’t pay the maras tax – a protection payment demanded of the gangs – or wander into the wrong turf.
One supporter told Al Jazeera this year that a downtown plaza in San Salvador “used to be deserted because of how dangerous it used to be, but now thousands of people come to enjoy life”.
“I’ve walked through the dangerous communities, and until those NGOs walk through those streets, they won’t understand that this isn’t what they’re calling human rights violations.”
He emphasised that life had improved since Bukele took office in 2019. “The government is finally valuing human life. Bukele is saving the lives of Salvadorans.”
While critics argue that civil liberties suspensions inevitably mean that innocent people will also suffer, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that zero tolerance of general mayhem and street thuggery has some positive effect. Even the harshest critics of what is flagged as a temporary suspension of civil rights admit that the drop in murder rates in El Salvador is impressive.
But murder ain’t everything say some. The Economist, in a May 8th article, advise a different approach for Latin American governments: “They need to accept that as long as illicit markets exist, so will gangs. (Legalising the production and consumption of cocaine would be the single biggest way to curb violence in the region, but it is not about to happen.)”
It seems that the progressive message is that the world is full of criminal sadists and that this can’t be stopped.
In the world of lefist social constructivist theory, street thugs will only stop being a threat to everyone else when they are properly understood and given a few more services. That is literally the theory. If you are skeptical you need look no further than the progressive example of German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, and the explanation she gave when a Syrian migrant beat a 22 year old German to death. It was because of “unsuccessful social integration” she said.
The West is awash with stories just like this, but I digress.
One can argue that leaving a country in the control of gangs is a form of anarcho-terrorism perpetrated by the doctrinaire bureaucratic left on the law-abiding poor. Judges and academic theorists are rarely stabbed by “mentally disturbed” migrants, or dissected and left in public places around the town as a sort of warning to not be slow to pay the maras taxes to the local street hood.
In El Salvadore, anarcho-terrorism also literally has a demonic element to it. The violent and sadistic members of the MS13 gangs and their anarcho ilk are members of satanic cults just for good measure. Part of their extremne violence is to terrorise the population into terror and submission but also they frequently ritualistically murder people as an offer to satan in exchange for protection from the law and their violent gang rivals.
Admirers of Bukele say he is radical but not rash. He identifies a crisis and motivates masses to mobilise. He is a faith machine. He understands something that the progressives with all their nihilism can’t: that men are lead by symbols and faith.
This explains why he takes visual choreographed countermeasures against the gangs, their symbols, and their loyalties. For instance he ordered the destruction of the tombstones of gang members that proclaimed their gang membership. Transgressing sacred boundaries, this sounds unsettling to many ears, but Bukele describes this action as rooting out a cancer of gang culture that has become entwined in society. It’s clear he understands the aesthetic and mimetic power behind these symbols.
Why did we destroy the tombstones on the graves of gang members? pic.twitter.com/DUHUFKACK8
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 3, 2023
But perhaps the thing that explains Bukele’s immense popularity is not his attack on the dysfunction of El Salvadoran society, but the alternative vision he offers. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, he explained that El Salvador could only grow to be a prosperous and peaceful country after its gangs had been beaten. Taking back the country from the gangs is the step that gives freedom to the people to prosper, and now he says he has to build the program to build the country culturally and economically.
Outside of his radical anti-crime project Bukele creates a feel good optimism in his public infrastructure projects. Whether it is the building of state of the art libraries or the restoration of classical buildings he seems to be making a statement that “the aesthetic of beauty is the aesthetic of truth.” This is the countering vision to the old corrupt and violent El Salvador.
It remains to be seen whether Bukele can implement the full stages of his plan to turn around the culture of El Salvador. Will he have a legacy? Will he get to implement the full extent of his plan? If his legacy is only a successful war with the gangs and does not include a transformation of the country’s culture, in time will it just revert to where it was? What about all those men imprisoned in that massive detention facility? Is there a path for them to renounce their gang membership and become integrated into a peaceful sustainable and lawful society? If there is not, there is little hope for a lasting legacy.
He stated at the beginning of his war with the gangs that Phase II was to create opportunity for the youth of the country, a different path than the gangs. To work on the creation of a social fabric that included construction of schools and sports centers, expansion of educational opportunities and vocational training, and so on.
Whether to follow that vision or not? The people of El Salvador will have to make this decision and build the fabric of the society they want.
Bukele understands this and this is why his rhetoric and public undertakings are so focused on aspiration. People need to have a vision that points upwards. Bukele talks about order, but he also talks about the intangible; the spiritual; the cultural. Things that inspire a nation to confidence in itself; in its own story.
Why did we destroy the tombstones on the graves of gang members? pic.twitter.com/DUHUFKACK8
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 3, 2023
With this short visual scene Bukele seems to stating that beauty has its utility because it inspires and offers a counter-vision to the degradation of corruption. That it should be uplifting and accounted for (monetarily) seems to be the dual objective. He says that he aims for public spending in El Salvador to be well scrutinised and well spent, though there may be some work to do in that regard. Bukele argues: “there is enough money when no one steals”
At time of writing, the El Salvadorian government has extended the existing nationwide state of emergency until at least August 8 – meaning that arrests can be carried out without warrants, and that defendants have limited rights to defense and may be held in preventive detention for up to 15 days, while some gatherings are curtailed.
It is vital that civil liberties be restored, though the government says that will happen when the war on the sadistic and violent gangs that held El Salvador in the grip of terror has been won. For the country’s citizens, who kept Bukele in power with a landslide, peace and freedom from fear seem to be a priority at this point in time.