Latin America Admires Bukele’s Crime Crackdown. But Not All Criminal Conundrums Are Created Equal.
There have been points over the last couple of decades when El Salvador’s street gang problem seemed insurmountable.
Homicides raged, earning the Central American nation the ignoble title of the hemisphere’s “murder capital.” The extortion rackets that ravaged communities seemed ubiquitous, resistance futile. Entire city transportation networks were brought to their knees by a criminalized brotherhood that took no prisoners with its brutal violence, rigid culture and transnational spread.
And yet, El Salvador’s mercurial president and self-declared “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele seems to have cracked one of Latin America’s perennial problems: insecurity related to gangs and organized crime. Well, at least on the surface.
OK, so he had to incarcerate nearly 2% of his country’s population —more than 77,000 alleged gang members. But that has been a price the leader has happily paid to bring his country’s once-uncontrollable homicide rate to heel. The human costs are also heinous, and largely the root of widespread local and international criticism.
And yet, the move has proved hugely popular with most of the country’s nearly 7 million residents, tired of living under the tyranny of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 street gangs (widely referred to as the MS-13) for decades. Bukele’s strategy is the latest example of a hardline approach to crime in the region, a line to which Latin America is no stranger historically despite evidence that it rarely works.
But something about the particular flavor of Bukele’s approach is proving especially attractive to other leaders in his region, from his neighbors in Central America all the way south to Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina. His moves seem simple to emulate, exemplified by the construction of a mega prison, the application of a state of exception, territorial control and mass arrests. Gaining control of the legislative and judiciary branches while clamping down on the press was also a means to an end, echoing measures governments throughout the region have used before.
Honduras has implemented a similar “state of exception” in response to insecurity and extortion, as did Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa following a January criminal uprising that made headlines worldwide. Noboa has also followed Bukele’s example, promising two new penitentiaries within 200 days at the end of 2023. Officials in Peru are also considering creating more prisons.
Last year, some electoral hopefuls in Colombia showed unbridled admiration for the Salvadoran president’s authoritarian tactics. But Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro is less impressed. A former guerrilla and the country’s first left-wing president, Petro had it out with Bukele on X over his country’s security policy. He has referred to Bukele’s demonstration of gang members in prisons as a “concentration camp.”
Individual Diagnosis Needed
But not all crime, nor criminals, are created equal. Take Ecuador, which exploded into drug-fueled violence in January after more than a decade of buildup, and Costa Rica, whose homicides rose by more than 40% last year amid growing drug addiction. Leaders in both countries are confronting unprecedented levels of crime and violence but would benefit from making a solid diagnosis of what is causing their own particular ills. These countries think that adding prisons and implementing authoritarian measures such as militarization and mass arrests while suspending basic civil rights might be the answer. But are Bukele’s measures really the cure to their unique diseases? Criminal, geographical and other dynamics suggest not.
Mass arrests have been a pillar of Bukele’s crime crackdown in El Salvador, where 1.7% of the population is now behind bars. For the Central American country, that’s nearly 80,000 people. But the combined population inside Ecuador’s 36 prisons is just 30,804, less than 0.2% of its population, analysts at human rights think tank Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) point out. “If a crackdown were to match El Salvador’s 1.6% incarceration rate, Ecuador’s prison population would rise more than ninefold, to 288,000,” write Adam Isacson and John Walsh. “That would be the equivalent of locking up the entire population of a mid-sized Ecuadorian city like Manta.”
Costa Rica currently has a prison population of less than 16,000. Argentina, which like Ecuador dwarfs El Salvador, already has a grossly overcrowded prison system like much of the rest of the region. Countries would struggle to play catch up with El Salvador’s impressive detention rate and to create the new facilities that would help it do so.
Smaller countries the size of Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala might not find it hard to parrot Bukele’s “territorial control” plan, which aimed to take control of the prisons and gang-controlled areas, prevent crime and militarize the streets. But the same cannot be said of more populated countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil. There’s simply too much ground to cover.
Ragtag Street Gangs Versus Transnational Criminal Organizations
Then, there’s the nature of the actors at play. El Salvador’s two main gangs began life in the US as an ideological brotherhood that became criminalized. When they were effectively deported and exported to El Salvador, the gangs found fertile flesh for metastasis in the tiny country recovering from a brutal civil war. The gangs grew to run extortion rackets, street-level drug markets and other criminal markets on a local level.
Although El Salvador’s criminal landscape might be at least partly comparable to the fight that neighboring Honduras and Guatemala are confronting (both of which are also home to branches of different Mara factions), different criminal organizations operate in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Argentina and Colombia. While the Mara Salvatrucha street gang has a presence across Central America as well as Mexico and the US, it is too much of a ragtag organization to run criminal schemes across borders.
“While the gang has a presence in two continents and at least a half-dozen nations, the gang is a small, part-time role player in international criminal schemes,” writes Steven Dudley, explaining why the Mara Salvatrucha cannot be considered a transnational criminal organization (TCO).
That moniker fits the better-known Colombian and Mexican criminal organizations and traffickers. These global, criminal organizations are better funded, better connected and operate on a superior level to the gangs that Bukele was facing down. And it is these groups, working with local criminal players and gangs, that other Latin American governments are tackling. Undoubtedly, they’re a more formidable challenge than street gangs.
Ecuador’s spike in violence is largely tied to its growth as a major base for criminal organizations moving product to the US and Europe, an industry largely shepherded by Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Colombia’s criminal organizations and guerrilla armies, which have evolved, are also much better equipped than the street gangs and funded by the international cocaine business they have managed for some five decades. Despite the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) best efforts, major mafias in Honduras and Guatemala continue to work as transportation networks for both the Mexican and Colombian cartels, corrupting the government up to the highest levels.
Both the US and many leaders across Latin America have pursued the so-called kingpin strategy, which targets the high- and mid-range leaders of drug-trafficking organizations. This has resulted in the fragmentation of these major criminal organizations, which have shifted to work more like franchises or criminal brands rather than corporations. This is nowhere more evident than in Mexico, where violence has imploded since the US-funded organized crime crackdown launched by then-president Felipe Calderón in 2006. Even though Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has taken his foot off the gas with his “hugs, not bullets” approach, atrocious violence in Mexico related to organized crime continues to be a major threat to public security.
This fragmentation factor ultimately makes criminal groups even more difficult for governments to pursue and dismantle. And as they break into smaller cells with regional and local characteristics, changes in leadership and allegiances further aggravate violence between criminal armies.
Trafficking Routes
Geography also feeds into why the right approach in El Salvador might not suit other countries in the region. El Salvador simply is not a major stop on drug smuggling routes for the international trafficking business, which to some extent spares it the indignities visited upon Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico. Since these are all drug producers and/or major transit hubs for product headed to lucrative US and European markets, their governments are more prone to well-funded criminal interference and corruption by the major cartels with superior armies and firepower. With that said, Bukele’s government is far from innocent when it comes to negotiating with the Mara, and corruption is a perennial problem across the region. But it tends to be local — not international — business and interests driving those alleged dealings.
There simply are some eggs that Bukele, and perhaps other regional leaders, are prepared to break as a consequence of making this omelet. After all, Latin American countries have been doing so for decades through opaque justice systems, arrests and detentions, contempt for human rights and abandoning a democratic system in favor of presidential will when it comes to tackling crime.
“On the pretext of punishing gangs, the Salvadoran authorities are committing widespread and flagrant violations of human rights and criminalizing people living in poverty,” wrote Amnesty International’s Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas nearly two years ago before Bukele’s crackdown reached its current levels.
“Instead of offering an effective response to the dramatic violence caused by gangs and the historic public security challenges facing the country, they are subjecting the Salvadoran people to a tragedy.” Sadly, no nation in Latin America is a stranger to that.
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