Police

Crime Mitigation in El-Salvador – Does It Work?

On the 1st of June 2019, Nayib Bukele was nominated President of El Salvador. Before that he was an adman, which explains how he has been so successful in branding himself as the “world’s coolest dictator”. Bukele has remade El Salvador, in the sense that he has incarcerated over 81.000 people which led to a drop in homicides, and, in turn, has led to ensure a nation being the world capital for murder into a country safer than Canada. Citizens can move freely in former gang-controlled areas for the first time in decades. Seemingly, Bukele has managed to make fear, extortion, violence, and murder a thing of the past. How has he managed to do so?

As mentioned previously, he has managed to imprison over 81.000 people, managing to do so by defying constitutional, political, and legal constraints. For example, he has suspended key civil liberties like the due process, and, more importantly, the police now can make arrests without warrants, including the arrest of minors. Furthermore, he allows mass trials, leading to 1 in every 57 Salvadorans now being incarcerated. Managing to incarcerate this number of people has been partly done by firing top judges from the Supreme Court of El Salvador, and filling the courts with loyalists, ensuring him to dodge constitutional prohibition without any issues. 

Moreover, he has intimidated everyone who is opposed to him, including defence attorneys, journalists, and NGO’s. In other words, all of El Salvador’s institutions are under Bukele’s power, showcasing authoritarianism being used. Populists have praised the way Bukele has handled the crime rates, however, 61% of Salvadorans state that they fear negative consequences if they publicly express their opinions. Moreover, human-rights groups such as Amnesty International have accused the government of torture, forced disappearances, death in custody, targeting poor and marginalised communities, amongst others. Amnesty International has stated that the state of emergency has led to the undermining of the (a) rights to defence, (b) the presumption of innocence, (c) effective judicial remedy, and (d) access to an independent judge. They state that “thousands of people are being detained without the legal requirements being met – there was no administrative or judicial arrest warrant and the person was not apprehended in flagrante delicto – purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele’s government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalisation and that have historically been abandoned by the state” (Amnesty International, 2022). Essentially, thousands of people are being criminalised because they live in poverty, rather than them having committed crimes. You can read more about how the detainees get treated here.

Finally, there is no guarantee that the next generation won’t relapse into a cycle of violence, as there are no guarantees of long-term stability. For example, more than 40.000 children are without one or both parents. Financially, El Salvador is not doing great either, being $30 million in depth. Showcasing the need for help from the IMF, however, as Bukele and his government do not want to give out their spendings, presumably because of fraudulent behaviour, this has not occurred and could lead El Salvador into bigger poverty than it currently knows. 

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