Fo real, if you aren't paying attention to this than you aren't tracking the future of authoritarian popularism.
Imagine Trump with an 80% approval rating, this might be our future, maybe the ecological despotism.
Also, maybe you didn't know that 400k people minimum died in Ethiopia during a war last year, mostly by starvation but no one really covered it.
Scott Alexander also covered the story in the April links roundup.
- Richard Hanania presents evidence that it’s not just a “deal with the gangs”, it’s a real crackdown that should be embarrassing to other countries that choose not to do this.
Matt Yglesias (subscription only, sorry) is against Hanania’s implicit conclusion - he argues it’s not as simple as “leaders should have the bright idea of being tough on crime” because previous Latin American leaders (including a previous El Salvador leader) tried crackdowns and they didn’t work, maybe because the security force was bribeable and not up to the task. He thinks crackdowns mostly fail, but through some combination of skill and luck Bukele has managed to make this one go much better than expected.
Cremieux responds, saying that the reason Bukele’s crackdown worked when previous crackdowns didn’t is that Bukele cracked down harder. Also he didn’t give up partway through.
Richard Hanania covered some of the tradeoffs between due process for young men with tattoos and a murder rate of 51 per 100,000.
The Invisible Graveyard of Crime
- In a first world country where crime is manageable, maybe you can tolerate such blatant mockery of the larger society. Are you really going to arrest a guy for a tattoo? What about freedom of expression? If you have evidence that he’s committed a crime, carefully gather the evidence and then go to a judge and get a warrant. Vox complains that there aren’t enough public defenders in El Salvador to advocate on behalf of all the accused criminals. Should a country therefore let gangs roam free until it sets up a few more law schools and finds enough money in the budget to hire the new graduates? How many young people with energy and ambition are going to try to become lawyers in a crime-infested El Salvador rather than simply do whatever it takes to get to the United States? Does being a public defender for MS-13 seem like a more fulfilling and less stressful life? More attorneys also means you need a more professional police force since lawyers will catch more mistakes the cops made, so add that to the list of things you need to do before you’re allowed to have a functional society. The point here is that much of what sounds like reasonable advice in a first world nation is simply unrealistic in a country in the position of El Salvador.
Followup:
The Midwit Meme and the Denial of Tradeoffs
Mentioned at Marginal Revolution.
Not sure what was happening in El Salvador over the last many years, but the graph makes it look like whatever has happened since 2019 is a simple continuation of whatever started when murder peaked at >100/100k, as the rate of decline doesn't accelerate after Bukele's presidency began. This doesn't discredit all the points made in the piece, but it definitely begs for a deeper exploration.
In the followup post, he discussed the objection that the decline in homicides had already begun before Bukele arrived in 2019, and the following years just continued the trend.
He argues that data farther back show that the rate declined from 100+ in the years following the end of the civil war in 1992, then fluctuated between 50-75 (i.e. Baltimore to New Orleans level) between 1995 and 2011, or perhaps as low as 40 (Milwaukee) in the early 2000s. So the peak in 2015 was unusually high and getting back down to 50-75 could be seen as a regression to the mean.
But getting down to 7.8 requires a better explanation than a simple continuing trend. The crackdown is brutal and I find it plausible that it has reduced violence outside the prisons.
Interesting. I think the risk you run when doing something like this is that you end up like the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge. To hold power you need a constantly moving target, and the underlings quickly learn that they just need to point out the marks lest someone point them out. I guess maybe El Salvador is an exception insofar as the tattoos seem to mark the gang members pretty easily, but that's a problem that will solve itself in 5 years as the new gang members adapt. Hard to give up power once it's taken, but on the other hand, the situation there was clearly unsustainable.
The broad lessons of history, from Babylon to Singapore, is that the population will accept nearly anything for stability. A crackdown will be forgiven if it brings stability to the survivors; this is what permits fascism to flourish. Once you have stability, though, you have to make things better. The minute you make things worse you're in serious danger of losing control.
Singaporeans view their city as a paradise of order and harmony. Westerners tend to view it as a dystopia. Yet those with an itch for stability are drawn to it - I know a lady who moved there because it made it impossible for her to fall off the wagon. I know a guy who moved there because the leopards would never rip his face off.
It sure sounds like it’s working as intended. The government is clearly establishing that it has a monopoly on violence and it will crush all competition. Any country without a long history of stable government is best going that route. 3rd world democracies just leads to a power vacuum and strong men and 3 letter agencies move in.
Both The Divide and Confessions of an Economic Hitman exhaustively document the fact that destabilization, power vacuums and strongmen are the preferred, carefully -cultivated environments of the modern world. Wallerstein and Anderson go one further and say "whattaya mean, 'modern'?"
One advantage of modernity is that the faster your communications and commerce networks operate, the less inequality you can afford between the dominant and the dominated. One disadvantage of modernity is that the more stable your inequality, the harder it is to overthrow.
There is much to be said for not getting the news, the by-definition anomalous events of the recent past, and using that time to learn what goes on in the regular world.
But it's also nice to be able to talk about the latest "new" so I've been letting a bot filter out the less significant stories:
If you figure it out let me know. There is shit happening all over that isn’t being reported on in the states . I’ve given up on news mainstream is teribad and a lot of non mainstream is wacko. There are almost no sources I trust, just a few reporters I still have any faith in.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-64770716.amp kinda explains how they have gathered up tens of thousands of gang members and imprisoned them with little due process. Thousands of innocent people, and people who aren't liked by authorities, have been swept up as well.
The president, Nayib Bukele, who is the author of this clampdown has had an over 80% popularity rating for the last four years. He controls the legislature and fired and reappointed his own supremacy court. This isn't a Russian 80%, it's a real 80.
Last guy we saw wield the iron fist in Latin America like this was probably Fujimori in Peru. He hollowed out all the civil society organizations and unified the government behind him. Mo checks and balances, just like Nayib. Modern Peru is a hot mess, it's almost as interesting a story as El Salvador. I think Peru is on six governments and two impeachments in the last two years. I think a great deal of the dysfunction there can be laid at Fujimoris feet.
Ukraine and Ethiopia are pretty interesting right now but Latin America is heating up and it doesn't get a lot of notice.
Sounds similar to the Duterte model in the Philippines. Some talking heads lately have been questioning the State department’s insistence on democratic reforms in exchange for aid. The thinking basically goes that the Cold War is back with a vengeance, so we’d be naive not to cozy up to dictators like we used to with regularity so long as they were against the USSR.
In the end, we all want the same thing, which is safety and prosperity for our families, so it’s pretty easy to see why these gang busters in Latin America have so much appeal.
The Duterte comparison is apt. Both Duterte and Bukele are populist demagogues whose rule is tied more closely to public appearance than governmental association. Both have been scornful of legal procedure and have championed vigilante violence. It's not like El Salvador (or the Philippines) descended into chaos just recently and it's not like we didn't train death squads in both countries. El Salvador is probably at a thousand or so extrajudicial murders so far;; the Philippines under Duterte probably murdered around 30k.
The talking heads are dumb. The State Department always insists on democratic reforms while funding and harboring the CIA's worst tendencies. We prrrrrobbbbbably? don't have anything of the scope and scandal of Operation Condor but the odds are good that the 2023 map looks pretty much the same as the 2010 map .
I don't know how to justify it but I feel like Duterte intentions were less sincere. He saw the drug crackdown as a good path to power and a great way to get rid of trouble makers.
Bukele definitely gets off on the adoration but I think he saw a problem he wanted to solve and went for it.
I could be wrong.
El Salvador had lost it's monopoly on violence. Before the crackdown Bukele had done a few cycles of treaty and and violent rebellion with the three different gang factions. I think he realizes he couldn't get ahead without decisive action.
I think Duterte is more of an opportunist. Drug users and dealers were an attractive victim for his populism.
I think it's a "young despot" vs. "old despot" situation - Duterte grew up under the Marshall Plan, Bukele grew up under the New World Order. Duterte grew up playing stickball, Bukele grew up playing video games. Bukele strikes me as an off-brand MBS - he grew up on the path to power and flashed a few "reform" gang signs in order to differentiate himself from the rest of the cronies.
Anyone who thinks "fuck yeah Bitcoin" is an economic policy isn't playing the game as if they mean it.
- I think Duterte is more of an opportunist. Drug users and dealers were an attractive victim for his populism.
...yet MS-13 isn't?
Sarah Chayes makes the point in Thieves of State that through the long lens of history, democratic/communist/totalitarian/libertarian objectively matters less than the level of corruption in government, and that the underlying theme in all scholarly advice to rulers mostly boils down to "don't be corrupt."
Lukashenko rose to power by promising to crack down on corruption. So did Trump ("drain the swamp"). So did Duterte, so did Modi, so did AMLO. I think the thing that distinguishes Mexico is that crime has been rampant for decades - I have a friend whose ex-husband was ransomed twice and she was literally following Vincente Fox around with a mic and headphones for a living. Where Mexican anti-corruption is likely to influence things is in the complicity of law enforcement - Iguala is a tragedy, Iguala committed by cops is a scandal.