What's actually happening in El Salvador? By Matthew Yglesias

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What's actually happening in El Salvador?

Matthew Yglesias

18 - 22 minutes

Here’s an interesting thought experiment: What if the leader of an infamously violent and crime-ridden country was able to massively improve public safety by violating liberal norms regarding human rights and the rule of law?

It’s such an interesting thought experiment that two recent articles have asked essentially that question about El Salvador. One by Natalie Kitroeff in the New York Times asks “El Salvador Decimated Its Ruthless Gangs. But at What Cost?” Another, by Zack Beauchamp in Vox, is headlined “Meet the MAGA movement’s new favorite autocrat.”

It should be said that this conversation seems to be downstream of an article by Salvadoran journalists Carlos Martínez, Efren Lemus, and Óscar Martínez, who wrote on February 3 in El Faro that the stranglehold MS-13 and Barrio 18 once held over the country has been broken. The El Faro piece is important for two reasons. One is that the journalists are claiming that President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has essentially worked. The other is that El Faro is a well-regarded Bukele-skeptical outlet, so the reporting is credible.

But I think the American press is skipping past the basic claims here a little too fast in their effort to get to the thought experiment. As recently as a few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the strategy of getting tough with mass arrests had already been tried and failed in Central America. So if you’d suggested that Bukele could break the gangs with mass arrests, a reasonable person may have wondered how that would turn out any better than former president Francisco Flores’ failed Mano Dura policies from the mid-aughts.

And it would have been a good question! Certainly that’s the question I would have asked. And given the apparent success of Mano Dura 2.0, it would be very interesting to know why Bukele’s policies seem to be working.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly why. I do think, though, that I can provide some context that’s missing from a lot of these articles.

Mostly I want to reframe the question, because I honestly think the thought experiment is a little silly. If people believe the only alternative to living under the rule of vicious street gangs is to accept a somewhat autocratic government, they are going to take the mildly autocratic government. It’s not just that some things are more primal than a craving for democracy, it’s that democracy is genuinely worthless if the gangs rather than the government control day-to-day life for most people. The point of democracy is that it’s good to have a voice in the government you live under. The point of liberalism is that it’s good to have basic rights. Both of those things more or less presuppose a functioning state that can at least approximate a monopoly on the use of force.

Otherwise, it’s not just that you can’t eat a Polity V score — you also can’t wave it in the face of the local gang leader when he comes to tax your business or conscript your teenage son.

If you accuse Bukele of power grabs or undermining democracy, I’m sure he’ll say he’s doing what’s necessary to crush the gangs. But if the anti-Bukele articles in the American press also say that what he’s doing is necessary to crush the gangs, then his opponents don’t have a leg to stand on.

It’s of course hardly unheard of for a politician to do things that are bad and also things that are good. George W. Bush and Donald Trump were both awful presidents, but PEPFAR and Operation Warp Speed were both very good. For your own amusement, you can try to do the moral math calculus of “number of lives saved by Bush-era HIV/AIDS policy versus lives lost due to bad wars,” but the point is that Bush’s contribution to global public health were not caused by his decision to invade Iraq. He did good things, and he did bad things. Adolf Hitler organized a very successful and unconventional monetary policy and fiscal stimulus to pull his country out of the Great Depression. This made the Nazi regime look really good both at home and to an extent abroad, but the correct takeaway wasn’t “Nazis are good,” it was that democracies should also use stimulative fiscal and monetary policy to avoid mass unemployment.

If other countries want to copy what’s going right in El Salvador, we need a fairly granular understanding of what’s going on.

And this is important because extremely high levels of violent crime are a fairly common problem in the Western Hemisphere. The United States, famously, has way more murders than our rich country peers in Europe and Asia. But we’re much safer than Honduras, Jamaica, Trinidad, Brazil, Mexico, or Colombia. Lots of people are rightly going to be interested in the idea of a successful gang crackdown, and the Bukele coverage notes with alarm that other leaders in the region are now talking about copying him. So what exactly would they be copying?

During my very first summer in D.C., I lived in Columbia Heights, which at that time was experiencing a raging war between rival Central American gangs.

That was my introduction to MS-13 and its competitors, which at the time was not a big national news story. But the very existence of the gang is a testament to some of the paradoxical impacts of anti-gang policies. Although MS-13 came to D.C. via Salvadoran immigration, the gang actually originated in California, only becoming powerful in the ‘90s when American policymakers decided to get tough by deporting criminals from our prison system into the much weaker state infrastructure of El Salvador. Things deteriorated there until July 2003 when President Flores decided to implement La Mano Dura (or “iron hand,” which called for mass arrests of gang members via joint police/military operations) just as the offshoot Salvadoran gangs were beefing in my neighborhood.

As you can tell from the fact that we are still talking about this 20 years later, Flores’ approach was not a big success.

    Maintaining order in the prisons was challenging, so prison administrators segregated prisoners by gang affiliation.

    By bringing geographically dispersed gang members together and then separating them by affiliation, they created stronger central leadership structures out of what had previously been loose agglomerations of crews.

    The haphazard and indiscriminate nature of the mass arrests eroded the legitimacy of the security services. 

And the Salvadoran prisons themselves became refuges for gang leaders. A 2005 L.A. Times story noted that “prisons in El Salvador have become nerve centers, authorities say, where deported leaders from Los Angeles communicate with gang cliques across the United States.”

    MS-13 members have been isolated at Ciudad Barrios and another prison to avoid bloodshed with rivals. But this has created opportunities for deported Los Angeles leaders to turn the gang into a more potent criminal organization, authorities say. Ciudad Barrios is where investigators allege they intercepted letters ordering gang members to murder rivals.

    “It’s like a college for MS-13,” said the FBI’s Swecker, who is working with the Salvadorans on a range of investigations.

It’s worth noting that Flores’ policies were initially very popular — the logic of “let’s crack down on gangs” is very compelling. But that’s exactly why Bukele’s apparent success is interesting. The idea that you should get tough and throw lots of people in jail is so compelling that lots of people have tried it, and it turns out to be harder to pull off than it sounds. Americans are probably most familiar with former Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s effort to crush drug cartels in Mexico. This produced some very real gains in terms of major drug traffickers being killed or incarcerated. But it also generated an escalation of violence as gangs fought back against the state. Worst of all, Calderón brought the military to bear against the cartels to get around the ineffective and often corrupt local police, but this just ended up enmeshing important elements of the military in the corruption.

There’s a kind of “assume a can opener” quality to the idea that you’re going to establish effective state control over society by using a competent, disciplined, and honest security force to arrest all the bad guys — where did this force come from? And to the extent that your Get Tough policies involve more discretion, fewer rules, fewer checks and balances, and more tolerance of irregular violence, you’re opening yourself up to a much wider scope for corruption.

I had read enough about the failures of earlier waves of Mano Dura in various Latin American countries that when reports of Bukele’s success first started coming in, my assumption was that the real reason for the crime decline was the side deals he’d cut with gang leaders.

But Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez, a Salvadoran-born Harvard Ph.D. student, persuasively argued last month that instead, Bukele used the deal-making to outwit the gangs. He did cut deals with gang leaders and those deals did reduce violence. But the deals were also highly imperfect, so the country went through several rounds in which violence would spike, Bukele would crack down, and a new deal would be struck to relax the crackdown and end the violence. This meant that when the most recent crackdown started, the gang leaders felt they’d seen this story before and (unlike in Mexico under Calderón) didn’t really fight back. They assumed it was just another round in the tit-for-tat cycle. But this time, Bukele didn’t back down and strike a new deal to ease off.

That’s genuinely a clever iteration that improved on the prior models of Salvadoran governance. I’m not sure it’s viable for others to copy it since it’s hard to fool people a second time with the same move. But it explains some of the success here.

Meléndez-Sánchez also says that by striking deals that were very favorable specifically to the gang leaders, Bukele created a sense among the rank-and-file that they were being sold out:

    The pact also shaped the gangs’ response to Bukele’s crackdown by driving a wedge between gang leaders and their rank-and-file members. Gang leaders almost always reaped the lion’s share of the pact’s benefits: better prison conditions, protection from extradition, and in some cases even the promise of early release from prison. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file members had to shoulder the bulk of the pact’s costs: They were prevented from using violence to do business or settle scores, and they faced repression from the government whenever violence did break out. The result was a growing divide between leaders and foot soldiers: “Supposedly, the ranflas [national leaders] looked after the wellbeing of their soldiers,” a gang member told El Faro. “Not anymore. … These crazy guys negotiated after their own interests.” 

I think this all builds into a portrait of Bukele as a pretty smart, clever guy.

That’s certainly not his brand in the United States, where he attracted an early fandom of cryptocurrency boosters and thus the disdain of America’s class of (correctly) crypto-skeptical intellectuals. But even if you think crypto is dumb, I think it’s hard to deny that hopping on the crypto hype train was good for Bukele and potentially promising for El Salvador. He recognized that this was a good way to put himself on the map and maybe draw some investment capital to what was not otherwise a super-attractive country.

By the same token, while I don’t think the slick, highly-viral video Bukele released of his new mega-prison is very informative, it was unquestionably good marketing. But it does raise the question of what exactly is going on. Three years ago Bukele launched an initial round of successful prison-image propaganda that wasn’t actually backed up by very much.

I highly recommend political scientist David Skarbek’s book about American prison gangs (or you can just listen to him on Russ Roberts’ podcast) in which he talks about how the gangs really took off when the number of prisoners started increasing rapidly, breaking down old norms of governance.

One of the interesting points he makes is that prison gangs are often able to “tax” street gangs precisely because their key people are already in prison. If you’re a member of a gang out on the street, you know the odds that you will be in prison at some point are really high. And you also know that there isn’t much law and order inside the four walls of the prison — it’s really in your best interests to stay on the good side of the prison gang while you’re on the outside, in case you end up on the inside soon. So you can have a situation where even though the gang leaders are prevented from directly committing crimes, they’re still in charge, and if anything they’re gaining more power due to huge sweeps and arrests. And of course when you’re arresting tons of people and sending them into gang-controlled prisons, inevitably some of the people in the police or the military or other important state agencies have a cousin or a nephew who’s on the inside and in need of protection, which generates another angle for corruption.

These kinds of problems are, if not totally solvable, at least manageable. But they’re not very easy.

If they were easy, they’d be solved. But the practical reality is that fiscal resources are always tight and spending money on improving the physical security of incarcerated people is a pretty tough sell. Yet unless you have well-managed prisons, they can become vectors for gang activity — exactly why the mid-aughts Mano Dura episode is usually seen as a failure. The Bukele administration is, I would say, thus far not exactly explaining what the plan is, instead just putting out new videos about their shiny new prison:

    The government announced the mass inmate transfer with a slickly produced video posted on social media. It showed prisoners forced to run barefoot and handcuffed down stairways and over bare ground, clad only in regulation white shorts. They were then forced to sit with their legs locked in closely clumped groups in cells.

    Gustavo Villatoro, the government’s minister for justice and peace, said the suspected gang members would never return to the streets, even though about 57,000 of those arrested are still awaiting formal charges or a trial.

    “They are never going to return to the communities, the neighborhoods, the barrios, the cities of our beloved El Salvador,” Villatoro said.

From a political perspective, Bukele clearly wants to be condemned for being too mean to the gang members, at which point he can say actually it’s good to be mean to gang members. But is the idea that gang members will receive life sentences with no trials and this system will just be implemented without dishonesty or corruption? That seems extremely unlikely.

Meanwhile, as the Manhattan Institute’s Daniel Di Martino writes in National Review, the democracy case against Bukele is really pretty cut-and-dry. El Salvador’s constitution has strict term limits, and he used a wave of popularity and a legislative majority to pack the courts and launch an illegal re-election bid:

    Even as Bukele garnered libertarian fans around the world with his pro-cryptocurrency policies, he began centralizing power around himself. In 2021, without much international outcry, his party’s legislators removedand replaced one-third of the supreme court’s constitutional chamber, whose jurisdiction is interpreting constitutional matters. Shortly thereafter, Bukele said he would run for reelection, even though El Salvador’s constitution clearly states that presidential candidates cannot be “anyone who has occupied the office of President of the Republic for over six months, consecutive or not, during the immediately preceding period or the preceding six months before the new presidential term.” But Bukele’s handpicked supreme-court justices ignored the plain meaning of these words to allow their preferred candidate to stay in power, perhaps without any limit.

That’s bad. And I think it would probably be better for international observers of the situation to focus more clearly on the procedural and constitutional issues in play rather than giving in to what’s essentially Bukele’s own narrative about his tough-on-crime policies. If you have good policies that are working and that people like, that’s great, and you can help campaign for your party as an ex-president the way Barack Obama does. Cheating the constitutional rules is a totally different thing.

I will note here that the broader western hemisphere norm of presidential political systems and term limits for chief executives has a very poor track record. The best solution to El Salvador’s somewhat imperiled democracy is the same as the best solution for the United States of America — proportional representation and a parliamentary regime.

But there’s a very clear critique of Bukele’s tendency to edge toward personalized dictatorship that is entirely separate from the dispute over criminal justice policy.

Less separate is the fact that the gang crackdown has been undertaken under the aegis of a repeatedly extended state of emergency. That’s fine — violence in El Salvador really was an emergency. But if you want to take a victory lap and say you solved the problem, then that raises the question of when the emergency will end. Again, this is actually a common issue in presidential systems. Joe Biden repeatedly sought to extend the Covid-19 state of emergency even after the whole country had clearly dropped out of emergency mode, largely because it was a way of helping Medicaid beneficiaries. That ended on April 11 because of pressure from congressional Republicans, which just goes to show that inter-branch tussling isn’t necessarily the end of democracy. But presidential political systems have a way of blurring the lines between boring policy disputes (Republicans wanted a stingier approach to health care, Biden wanted to help families in need) and constitutional ones.

This, though, is exactly why the term of office issue is so telling. Bukele has a Vice President and a whole cabinet and a successful political party that has legislative majorities; he doesn’t need to personally stay in office to continue his policies.

And by the same token, if El Salvador has policy lessons for Mexico or other Central American states, those don’t require successful leaders to violate their own countries’ term limit laws. What the world needs is more clarity and focus on the specific constitutional issue, plus more inquiry into what exactly is working in El Salvador. The manipulation of the gang truces seems clever and perhaps even offers real lessons. But short video clips don’t tell us anything about the honesty and integrity of the security forces or the prison administration. There are a lot of questions about how sustainable any of this is, and the world could really use less hype and counter-hype and more inquiry into the details.