El Salvador and the Bukele Anti-Crime Experiment: Is it Working?
Introduction: San Salvador 2016
I first came to El Salvador in 2016. At that time, the country was one of the most violent in the world with one of the highest global homicide rates, and I hoped to learn why.[1] Although I had conducted research on drug trafficking and violence in Mexico for the last fifteen years, I did not know what to expect when I got to San Salvador. The plane arrived from Houston at about midnight. There were few people around and little activity. On the plane, well-intentioned Salvadoran passengers had warned me to be careful because the city was dangerous and out of control. My taxi driver was uncertain of the address, which added to the mystery. After cruising cautiously through mostly empty streets, the taxi pulled up to my Airbnb in a middle-class neighborhood. The house, like all others around, was heavily fortified with bars, some razor wire, wrought iron railings and locks on various gates and doors.
With this paranoid beginning, I began to explore San Salvador, a tremendously, overpopulated, poor, dirty urban sprawl that made Ciudad Juárez seem upscale by comparison. The plaza, cathedral and public square of San Salvador were small but much as you would find throughout Latin America, although the number of heavily armed guards in front of banks, larger businesses and even fast food-joints was intimidating. I met a local woman, and we walked to a café to talk. After we had walked a few blocks, she blurted out, “Did you see those guys following you?” to which I replied that I had not. I later learned that the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs controlled almost every inch of the downtown area. There they extorted thousands of market vendors, street sellers, taxi and bus drivers, and shop owners. In fact, the gangs forced about 70% of the businesses in the entire country to pay “renta,” a weekly or monthly quota.[2] They also captured any young man they saw in the central area who might be a member of the “contrarios”—many of these men were never seen again. They were murdered for simply being in the wrong place or seeming suspicious since the entire downtown area was divided block by block between the two gangs in a pattern like that of parts of Beirut. One elderly taxi driver told me he was forced to pay a 50-dollar monthly extortion fee or be killed. That fee represented about twenty percent of his monthly earnings.
Another driver told me he had had to pay five dollars every week to one gang and five to the other since he had the misfortune of having his taxi stand right on the borderline between the two rival gangs who divided up the territory. The taxi driver complained that he was simply trying to support his family of immigrant children in the United States, as well as his two children with his current family in El Salvador. He had to work every day to put food on the table yet regularly he had to pay a quota to the gangs or be killed. Moreover, he never knew who the gang members were exactly or what their affiliation was because people constantly came to him, saying they represented the gang and that he must pay up. Sometimes it was an old woman, other times children, it could be anybody, but they would knock on the window of his taxi and say your payment is due.
Back in the poor neighborhood where he lived, several of his neighbors were part of a gang. He knew them and they knew him well. He would be respectful, but they began to knock on his door in the middle of the night and demand rides all over the city. He did it at first to avoid trouble, but eventually he couldn’t get any sleep, and it was ruining his life. He told the gang members that he would only do it occasionally, and only if they did not carry drugs or weapons in the car because he did not want to be drawn into problems with the law. In El Salvador, anyone who is considered a gang collaborator, or someone who simply associates with gang members or hangs out on the corner with two or three others, may be suspected of gang affiliation and imprisoned indefinitely.[3] From other average Salvadorans I heard story after disturbing story of extortion, robbery, or violent gang attacks. According to one study, almost all the municipalities in the country were gang-infested until Bukele took office.[4] A comprehensive New York Times article (“Killers on a Shoestring”) on the subject described a country overrun by “mafias of the poor” who managed a “criminal subsistence economy.”[5]
The rest of my 2016 trip to El Salvador varied little from this discouraging panorama. I did ask one taxi driver to take me into a gang-controlled slum southwest of downtown and I explored another riverside shantytown on foot, but in each case, I had to quickly exit when groups of young men reacted in a hostile manner or headed my way.
In December 2024, I returned to El Salvador to try to gauge the effects of President Nayib Bukele’s experiment, in which he locked up most of the gang members in the country or anyone perceived to be a gang member or one of their supporters or associates. When I landed at the airport again in 2024 again it was around midnight due to flight delays in Houston. Yet the atmosphere was totally different from my arrival in 2016. This time large Salvadoran family groups, laughing and carrying on, greeted their ex-pat relatives with enthusiasm. The airport and area around it had been modernized and there were Christmas lights, decorations, and large billboards. The highway to the capital was now much better paved, well-lit, and lined with advertisements for new tourist attractions such as Surf City, a trendy surfing beach. The apprehension and tension I felt on my previous visit was gone, and there was much talk of Bukele’s success.
Nayib Bukele, A Salvadoran Messiah?
Although now famous, Nayib Bukele, a charismatic and photogenic leader, went from relative obscurity to become one of the youngest presidents in the world in 2019 at just 37 years of age. As a child of Palestinian immigrants, and both a businessman and a former member of the leftist FMLN party, Bukele has consistently broken the mold of traditional Salvadoran politics, whether by adopting the Bitcoin as legal tender or engaging in large scale urban redevelopment in San Salvador. His most notorious move, however, was the 2019 implementation of the Territorial Control Plan by sending soldiers and police into poor neighborhoods to arrest suspected gang members, and eventually their mass incarceration. This process had begun under previous governments, but President Bukele’s “regime of exception” has turned this into an iron law. As a result, more than one percent of the country’s population is now in prison. This policy, according to the government but also most outside observers, transformed El Salvador into the safest country in the Western hemisphere with a near negligible homicide rate.[6] The impact of these policies will be discussed at greater length below.
The Bukele Experiment: El Salvador Today and in the Future
“One must be ready to defend the country against its enemies, even at the expense of our own brothers, and though it’s unnecessary to say so, even at the expense of our mother. This might seem like an exaggeration, but the western world is in danger, and we know that the worst danger to the western world is what they call ‘The people.’”[7]
Manlio Argueta
Argueta, a great Salvadoran writer, wrote these words from the perspective of “the authorities,” in his lyrical novel about the suffering of the peasantry at the hands of the government during the Salvadoran civil war (1980s and 1990s). Argueta’s tragic fiction conjures up a world of extreme top-down injustice, in which there is never peace, but endless fighting and horror with little hope of change. This, in fact, has been the history of El Salvador beginning with the massacre of the approximately 30,000 striking indigenous peasants in 1932, the military dictatorship of the mid-20th century, the civil conflict of the 1980s and 1990s which killed at least 75,000 people and displaced more than a million, the post-war eruption of gang violence, and a series of oscillating truces and hardline line policies of the aughts and second decade of the post-Millenium period culminating in the sweeping imprisonment of gangsters and others under president Nayib Bukele.[8] In Bukele’s El Salvador, as in Argueta’s literary creation, elements of “the people” are viewed as the enemy and must be eradicated.
In his classic studies of state politics, Robert Thompson argued that governments could successfully combat insurgencies through hardline policies if the policies had a clear political aim and that the government followed its own policies.[9] Hardline or extreme policies such as Bukele’s, according to Thompson, are possible under such circumstances.
Unfortunately, governments in Latin America of varying ideologies have had little success in combating the spread of criminal violence in the neoliberal post-millennium period. Most notably in Mexico, neither the PRI, PAN, or Morena governments have been able to stifle or control the widespread bloodshed and suffering caused by cartels. In 2006, President Calderón sent the military to cartel-controlled regions, but this only increased the violence and produced the chaos and insecurity which we now call the “Mexican drug war.”[10] Eventually, the left-wing Morena party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power, but his ill-conceived policy of “hugs, not bullets” merely created a laissez-faire situation of new normal violence at extremely high levels (30,000 homicides per year, 100,000 “disappeared” people).[11] Likewise, in Colombia, former guerrilla and left-wing President Gustavo Petro’s “Total Peace” plan seems but a failed utopia as peace talks are suspended or go nowhere and high levels of criminal and political violence continue.[12] These and other failed anti-crime policies throughout Latin America raise the question of whether there is anything short of a Bukele “mano dura” policy that could contain or quell widespread criminal violence. One might even naïvely suggest, as most Salvadorans strongly affirm, that the Bukele policy is the only answer.
But let’s look more closely at the profound effects of Bukele on the ground. We know that El Salvador is now said to be extremely safe with homicide levels equal to or lower than those of the United States, and certainly better than most if not all other Latin American countries. Yet this lock-em up policy has come at a huge cost in terms of human and civil rights. Since Bukele took office in 2019, he has imprisoned, by his own account, approximately 80,000 members of the MS-13 and Barrio 18. This includes gang members, unaffiliated criminals, and those merely perceived to be criminals. In 2022, he also built a remarkable modern prison compound, the CECOT (Terrorist Confinement Center), to house 22,000 heavily tattooed, hardcore, gang members.[13]
Bukele’s police and soldiers have gone from neighborhood to neighborhood to crush any presence of gang members, to arrest without evidence any young male or in some cases, females, thought to be gang members, or who sport gang-oriented tattoos gang or who simply live in gang-dominated neighborhoods and associate or socialize with gang members. Some people are even thrown in prison based on anonymous phone calls. As a result, most of the gang members in the country are now incarcerated, although Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, a legal aid agency associated with the FMLN, claims that there are at least 30,000 innocents locked up for life (Bukele claims to have released 8,000 innocents). The prisons themselves, little more than human cattle pens, are experiments in brutality and sadism, lurid images and videos of which are perhaps reminiscent of Soviet Gulags or Nazi death camps.[14]
The results of the Bukele method were rapid, thorough, and effective. Overnight El Salvador, by any reckoning, is now a country where the majority no longer live in fear. So how do the people of El Salvador feel about these policies in general?
One of my most passionate informants was a short-haired young UBER driver who began to tell me a bit about the San Marcos neighborhood as we drove by it. I said, “Is that the neighborhood where the Salvador military has taken over and is searching for the few remaining gang members who have escaped capture?” “Yes,” he replied and it’s a good policy.” In fact, he said he had firsthand experience with these issues. He was in the military and fought the gangs and eventually became a guard at the legendary “Zacatraz” (real name: Zacatecoluca) prison that holds some of the most vicious criminals in the country. He claimed that throwing them in prison is the only way to deal with these people whose entire lives are devoted to crime: “They don’t work, the only thing they think about is how to commit crimes and then hide out and their creativity and imagination are boundless.”
I asked him how long the Bukele policy could last and if the peace and non-violence in the country at large could be preserved, and he said only if the regime stayed in power. The driver added that, if necessary, Bukele’s wife (Gabriela Roberta Rodríguez de Bukele) could become president if he is no longer eligible, and that she shares his policies. His vice president (Félix Ulloa) is also astute and could carry them on as well, he said. Otherwise, the country would return to its violent and chaotic state. Indeed, the entire time I was in the country, nearly everyone I spoke to enthusiastically embraced the new security policy and proudly repeated the mantra that El Salvador is now completely safe and booming economically since the incarceration of the gang members that were ruining the country. There are almost no murders now because the policy works, they exclaimed. The new security and freedom were the main topics of conversation, and even critics of the policy I spoke with admitted that violence and crime had declined dramatically. The taxi driver left me at my brightly lit Spanish-run hotel in the early morning, but at that time there were still revelers partying in the streets and nearby bars. The old fear of being out at night in San Salvador had evaporated, as the driver made sure I noticed.
Others I spoke to have more complex takes on the new El Salvador. One critic of the Bukele policy, who nonetheless accepted its efficacy as crime-fighting measure, was a 67-year-old man who scratched out a living doing errands in the downtown area. He applauded Bukele but said that his efforts to remove criminals from the downtown area and simultaneously remodel it had been bad for the thousands of small merchants, ambulatory vendors, street stalls, and taxi drivers like himself, that were displaced by “urban renewal” and gang cleansing. In the past, the rundown, crowded historical center, and its jampacked streets and ramshackle market and informal economy had bustled with life, but made the transit of vehicles extremely slow and cramped. The dilapidated state of downtown San Salvador produced a kind preservation by poverty of the old buildings and public squares. Since Bukele took office much of the architecture and old plazas were replaced by a state-of-the art Chinese-built library and squeaky-clean new parks and plazas. Today, the taxi driver said, the streets are better paved and less cluttered since the removal of street vendors. However, the traffic is even worse now, in his opinion, because of the closing of various streets, compressing cars into fewer streets and lanes. Thus, he felt, the gang cleansing and beautification policy has had a negative economic impact on the thousands of displaced people who eked out a living in the downtown area for decades.
A more critical, but still measured, perspective came from a middle-aged man built like a boxer who worked at a stand adjacent to the recently remodeled historical downtown. After some minor conversation he quickly began to tell me about the impact of the Bukele policy on his own life and the misfortune of being erroneously detained three times by the police and interrogated for hours at the police station for his alleged associations with gang members. The man’s detentions occurred at the beginning of the regime of exception, which he described as the most dangerous period for civilians because the police had quotas to fill each day. They had to arrest a certain number of people, innocent or guilty, daily. This resulted in many innocent victims being thrown in prison for years or even life. The man said the situation has improved quite a bit since that time, but he is still wary of these encounters with police because they have all the power, and he has very little. Although he pleaded his case successfully, the man was badly shaken by the experience which also took up many hours and did not allow him to make a living. He also mentioned that he has friends and acquaintances who were imprisoned unjustly and then died in prison or fell into a depression or lost their livelihoods or spouses. Yet even he acknowledged that his and others’ lives were safer since Bukele rolled out the regime of exception.
Another man, a devout Protestant evangelical, said because of Bukele’s strict policies, especially at the beginning, it seemed like “it was a crime to be young” because young men, by definition, were viewed as potential gang members by the police and harassed or jailed. He noted that a former MS-13 gang member who was a member of his church was taken to prison since he still had gang tattoos even though the man had completely left gang life behind more than ten years ago. This is a shame, the religious man said, but Bukele has allowed us to live again. Finally, an intellectual I met who had been an Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) militant as a youth and even worked for an FMLN sponsored social service agency said he now backed Bukele because members had murdered his nephew and so he felt the gangs had to be destroyed even if that meant imprisoning anyone with gang tattoos or who had ever participated in gang life in any way. This appeared to be the dominant sentiment in modern San Salvador, as reflected in Bukele’s high approval ratings.[15]
Is this really the only way to quell crime in Latin America?
So, the question becomes, do the ends justify the means? Is the Bukele way the only way to stop crime in the Americas? Or couldn’t crime, gangs, and cartels be controlled and minimized without suspending due process and civil rights, and dragging thousands of innocents to jail? What would such a policy look like and how would it be carried out? Is it necessary to brutalize those considered guilty and lock them up in the most horrid conditions which are in fact a form of torture and extreme cruelty? Can these policies be sustained indefinitely?
These are important questions, and they cannot be avoided even if there is no panacea. We must accept the fact that the vast majority of Salvador live better now than they did before at least in terms of public safety, and that most accept the unfortunate consequences of these authoritarian policies because of the relative safety it has produced. This is not false consciousness. This is in fact how most Salvadorans, rich, middle class, and poor, feel about the situation, although, of course, the families of those unjustly imprisoned, human rights activists, and many members of opposition parties abhor these policies.
Given what has happened in El Salvador, how does it compare to Thompson’s suggestions about how to fight insurgencies within a democratic framework? First, regarding the political aim of his policies, Bukele is transparent about his intention to imprison gang members and abolish the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs to restore law and order within the Salvadoran polity. In fact, he may already have essentially accomplished that, although critics would say that Bukele’s martial law policy is illegal. Second, his policies are indeed extreme, in particular the mass granting of long sentences and incarceration in sub-human prisons. Third, unfortunately, Bukele’s regime of exception has trampled on human rights, arbitrarily detained thousands with little or no proof, and suspended the right to a defense by the detained. Here, we won’t even dwell on how Bukele has manipulated or violated Salvadoran law to stay on for second presidential term (2024-2029). In essence, Bukele has taken away the legal rights of the imprisoned and Bukele has centralized power to an extent that he rules by fiat and creates the laws, often in an autocratic manner. He may even bend or break the rules to run for a third term of office (2029-2034) or become president for life. Moreover, it seems unlikely that any presidential candidate could beat Bukele or his chosen candidate in future elections unless they agree to continue the mass incarceration policy. Critics argue that the El Salvadoran government should undertake a rigorous review of existing prisoners (a truth commission of sorts) and immediately release those unjustly incarcerated. One might hope that Bukele would declare victory, suspend the regime of exception, and establish more just rules about detention and imprisonment. Given the current political climate in the country, this is very unlikely to happen and one per cent of the population will continue to rot in prison.
What are the lessons of the Bukele experiment? I do not have a simple answer, but I would like to suggest the following: Bukele’s overwhelming success, along with Trump’s reelection in the United States, should be a wake-up call to liberals and progressives to take crime more seriously and develop real policies to promote public security. The alternative is the continuing rise of populist demagogues like Bukele, Bolsonaro, Trump and others who have developed a proven formula for how to rile up the masses, pull them to their side, and use this backing to enact severe policies. When the results are so remarkably impactful as occurred in El Salvador, the message is clear: figure out a better way to prevent the takeover of cities or parts of them by gangs, cartels, homeless people, drug addicts, or common criminals or prepare to lose at the ballot box.[16] Even if the Bukele approach could perhaps only be possible in a small country like El Salvador and in any case is undesirable on humanitarian grounds, we must try to understand its significance. Maybe it is time to rethink deeply held assumptions about what constitutes democracy, and what democracy can and cannot do.
In the case of academics, a similar message is necessary. When I first began studying crime in Mexico about twenty years ago, I was disturbed to find that the dominant paradigm in political and legal anthropology was to analyze “criminalizing discourses.”[17] Undergirding this perspective were romantic notions that “the people,” the “natives,” are always right. Criminals per se do not exist but rather states and governments create them. This kind of noble savagery is all too common in the history of anthropology and some other strands of the social sciences. Likewise, a naive, blind faith in groups like the Sandinistas, the FMLN, Morena, Colombia Humana, and others are a dead end and prevent us from facing the facts of major criminal outbreaks and insurgencies. Until liberal and leftist politicians and academics recalibrate to cope with the real threat of crime to democracy, they will be outmaneuvered by the likes of Bukele and his draconian, but stunningly successful, anti-crime policies.[18]
Endnotes
[1] Sofía Martínez, “Life Under Gang Rule in El Salvador.” International Crisis Group. 26 November 2018, https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/central-america/el-salvador/life-under-gang-rule-el-salvador.
[2] Óscar Martínez, Efren Lemus, Carlos Martínez, and Deborah Sontag, “Killers on a Shoestring. Inside the Gangs of El Salvador.” New York Times. 21 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/world/americas/el-salvador-drugs-gang-ms-13.html.
[3] Op. cit., Sofía Martínez at Note 1, Ibid.
[4] Op cit., Óscar Martínez, et al. at Note 2, Op. cit., Sofía Martínez at Note 1.
[5] Op cit.. Óscar Martínez, et al. at Note 2, Op. cit., Sofía Martínez at Note 1.
[6] Jeremy Giles, “The Problem With El Salvador’s Crime Numbers.” Foreign Policy. 8 August 2024. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/.
[7] Manlio Argueta, One Day of Life. New York: Vintage, 1983.
[8] Steven Dudley, MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang. Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020.
[9] Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1966.
[10] Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone: . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
[11] Op. cit., Dudley at Note 8; Op. cit., Campbell at Note 10.
[12] “Total Peace,” Wikipedia. 20 October 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Total_Peace&oldid=1252218248.
[13] Op. cit., Giles at Note 6.
[14] Numerous video documentaries about the CECOT are now available on YouTube. See for example: “Worst of the Worst”: Go inside El Salvador’s Fortress Prison for Gang Members (CNN, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Oz14D5sz0.
[15] Op. cit., Giles at Note 6.
[16] An important distinction here is that Bukele and Bolsonaro live in countries that have struggled with violent crime, whereas Trump has invented a narrative of US cities being overrun by migrant criminals and drug addicts, even though US crime rates are falling. However, the US homeless population and fentanyl-related deaths have expanded dramatically, which allows Trump’s alarmist rhetoric and proposed policies to gain traction.
[17] For trends in the anthropological study of crime, see Philip Parnell and Stephanie Kane, Eds., Crime’s Power: Anthropologists and the Ethnography of Crime. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
[18] This essay is not meant to be a definitive academic study of crime but attempts to raise key issues concerning El Salvador’s treatment of its gang problem.
