Three Uncomfortable Truths About Bukele's Crackdown On Gangs

It's Effective. It's Popular. It's Brutal.

In 2017, when El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele was mayor of his capital, San Salvador, I interviewed him for Time Magazine and he talked about how peace and love was the way to defeat the street gangs who had soaked his homeland in blood.

“We’re trying to challenge the gangs, not by repression, but by competing. We are competing for getting the young people to our side,” said Bukele who was then thirty-five. “We are not talking about sociopaths here. We are talking about social issues.”

To show his commitment to social work, he posed in the goalmouth of a newly renovated football pitch (soccer in ‘Merican) and saved penalty shots from a line of barrio kids while we filmed. When we sat down for the interview, he instructed the photographer as to which side to take his picture. A skilled publicist, Bukele had recently cultivated his trim-beard and backward baseball-cap look.

Finishing, Bukele bizarrely walked away with the photographer’s wallet, which the photographer had (a bit clumsily!) left on a table. When we told the secretary, the wallet was sent back to us intact. I’ll put it down to an accident. But it’s a funny anecdote I like to tell, the mayor nicking my photographer’s wallet.

Fast forward to 2023 and Bukele is no laughing matter. He’s become the most famous president in El Salvador’s history for his offensive against gangs in which he’s incarcerated north of 70,000 people, or 1 percent of the entire population, in a little over a year. (That’s the equivalent of rounding up over three million Americans).

Along with those already behind bars, the Central American nation now has the highest ratio of prisoners in the world, way above heavily-carceral countries like Cuba, China and indeed the United States. The crackdown is broadcast in photos such as that above of inmates with shaved heads in boxer shorts rammed together in chains. These pictures didn’t come out because a photographer snuck in but because the government wanted to show the treatment (another mark of Bukele as a publicist).

Along with the mass internment, murders have plummeted, opinion polls put Bukele at 90 percent approval and politicians across Latin America eye his success. Yet the offensive goes squarely against what rights groups and many international organizations have preached - the need to protect human rights in the fight against crime. English language newspapers condemn him, such as in this latest editorial in the Financial Times warning of the “the siren call of the strongman.” The Biden White House was initially cold to Bukele and sanctioned his officials, although a recent Washington meeting with his foreign minister shows it could be warming.

I was last in El Salvador in December, and seeing the mammoth lines of families outside the jails and the construction of a colossal new “terrorism confinement center,” it’s clear something historic is at play. Here I lay out three hard truths I see about Bukele’s offensive.

There can be a natural tendency when analyzing such visceral events to react with judgement (or horror) first and then look for facts to back that up. Some critics rightly point out the offensive is brutal and so go on to argue it isn’t effective. Some Bukele fans show that people support him because the gang violence was so devastating and then argue that torture isn’t happening. The reality I see is that the offensive can be both brutal and popular; both merciless and yet still be highly effective. The world is how it is not how we feel it should be.

It’s effective

Bukele is a curious character for a Latin American strongman. His grandparents were Palestinians from Bethlehem (Christians among a Muslim people) yet his father was born in El Salvador and converted to Islam (a Muslim in a Christian country). He went to an expensive private school and worked in marketing yet became a mayor with the former guerrillas of the leftist FMLN. He was finally kicked out the party for offenses including calling another member a witch and throwing an apple at her. He won the presidency in 2019 and created his own party, New Ideas, which has the symbol of an N like his first name (marketing again) and won a landslide in the midterms of 2021.

El Salvador’s two biggest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, were born on the streets of Los Angeles and filled their ranks with refugees from Salvador’s bloody civil war in the eighties. When peace came in 1992, hardened gangbangers were deported to a shattered country where they recruited a force of war orphans and veterans. The maras, as they became collectively known, spread to every barrio and village, shaking down every shop, bus or taxi and leaving a copious trail of corpses.

When Bukele swore in as president, he didn’t initially declare war on the gangs but was alleged to make a truce with them (and almost certainly did as is well documented by media outlet El Faro). The deal revived a 2012-era pact in which gang bosses in prison were given benefits and they ordered their crews on the corners to dial down the murders. Yet Bukele brokered the truce with plausible deniability and at the same time he beefed up the military and police presence.

I saw this phase of Bukele on a trip in early 2021. In the infamous La Campanera slum, Barrio 18 members blatantly hung out in front of a shop on the main street close to a military checkpoint. A leader of market vendors meanwhile told me that extortion had only intensified. “They don’t kill publicly because their business is intact,” he said.

The truce finally broke down in March 2022 when the maras went on a murder spree and dropped 87 corpses in three days. It’s unclear what caused the rupture. But I suspect Bukele had a master plan to first pact with the gangs then move against them. He reacted to the murders by declaring a State of Emergency, suspending civil liberties and unleashing the army to do a mass round up. A year and half later, the State of Emergency is still going.

Initially, the offensive looked like it could be a repeat of other efforts known as mano dura, or hard hand, in which troops shot up and arrested maras for a stint but their structures survived. As has been the case across Latin America, gangsters can simply hide when the soldiers are on the street and come back out when they move on.

Yet as months progressed, Bukele’s offensive proved different. The troops went systematically from block to block and sustained their operations arresting more and more suspects. Anyone with gang affiliation, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with a suspicious tattoo, was banged up. Gang members went underground, then fled the country.

When I visited at the end of 2022, it was clear the gangs had been pulverized in a way not seen since their emergence three decades earlier. For years, they had overly controlled barrios, demanding identification of those entering and enforcing payments and norms. Now they had almost completely disappeared. Extortion had plummeted. In February, El Faro, an outlet highly critical of Bukele, conceded the maras were shattered. “Bukele has managed to undermine the gangs’ territorial presence and control, their main source of financing —extortion— and their internal structure,” it reported.

Homicides in El Salvador had reached a peak in 2015 with a 102 murders per 100,000 making it the most murderous country on the continent. They gradually went down for reasons including the gang truce. Then with the crackdown in 2022, they fell to 7.8 per 100,000, the lowest in modern records. This year they have gone down by another two thirds. If that holds, El Salvador could finish 2023 with a murder rate akin to much of Europe.

It’s popular

Bukele’s approval rating is not only high because of an improvement in numbers and perceptions of crime. People in El Salvador live with real tangible benefits from the devastation of the gangs.

The maras policed their turfs and stopped residents of neigborhoods controlled by their rivals coming in with threats of a beating or even death. This meant people were unable to see relatives and were constantly fearing for their safety. A marked difference can be seen with people hanging out on the street into the night, eating, drinking, getting a moonlit haircut.

Back in the Campanera barrio, Francisca Alas, 65, tells me how much it’s improved. “Now we can go outside when we like. Our family can come and visit us. No president has cared about us here before.”

Like many, Alas suffered from gang violence. Her son, a factory worker, refused to pay an extortion quota and so maras smashed his face in with rocks. When she tried to block them, one hacked her down with a machete and she still bears the scar.

Such stories abound. A woman describes to me how she was raped for being in the wrong territory (more on this to come). In the Mejicanos barrio, residents remember how maras burned a bus killing fourteen passengers. Thousands of refugees who fled to the United States have testified in courts to being threatened, shot and maimed by maras. I’ve met many on their journey through Mexico and seen their wounds: bullet scars on the knees of a construction worker; shots that crippled a young mother.

Extortion destroyed the salary of workers and vendors already struggling to get by. “I’m just working to pay them,” was a phrase I heard repeated.

I wondered how these gangbangers, often young and armed with machetes and pistols and rifles, could keep a whole country down, how the people or the state wouldn’t rise to throw them off. Now it has. But at a price.

It’s brutal

Maras are both victims and victimizers. I’ve interviewed dozens over the years, such as those above on the outskirts of San Salvador, and they are often from poor and broken homes fighting to survive. Still, if they commit murder then most would agree they have to go to jail. Yet many caught up in the offensive are only on the periphery of the gang world or may not be in it at all.

The mothers and fathers, wives and sisters, waiting outside the prisons told me painful stories. A month after the crackdown began, soldiers went to the home of Javiera Maricela, 37, in a farming village and said they wanted to talk to her twenty year old son, assuring he would be processed and returned. He disappeared into the system. I found her outside the large Mariona prison taking rice, cornflakes and soap but not even sure he was there as they were not allowed phone calls.

I found a prisoner who was in Mariona but managed to get his charges dropped and was released. He describes how he was crammed into a cell with 162 inmates and the stink of faeces, had his ribs broken by guards, and frequently heard the screams of prisoners being tortured. During his month in jail, he says, he saw five corpses being carted out. Human rights defenders claim more than 170 people have died in custody during the State of Emergency, from beatings, strangulation, malnutrition and disease.

The tens of thousands of detainees are often held over or convicted in mass hearings on scant evidence. An anti-gang law approved during the State of Emergency means the accused can be given up to 30 years for being in a gang, with gang leaders getting up to 60-year sentences. Inaugarating his massive “terrorism prison,” for 40,000 inmates, Bukele declared, “This will be their new home, where they will live for decades, mixed up, unable to harm the population.”

Samuel Ramírez, a former government official who founded the Victims of the Regime Movement, is certain many innocent people are behind bars. “The families have proof but the regime doesn’t care. Bukele is very Machiavellian,” he says. “What he is doing is illegal. He has broken the rule of law.”

The government is taking advantage of the crackdown to imprison political opponents on trumped-up charges, Ramírez says, including members of the FMLN that Bukele was expelled from. Journalists have complained of severe government harassment and the media outlet El Faro moved its offices to Costa Rica.

In the center of San Salvador, I talked to a group of street vendors who were being evicted from their patch to clean up the area. A woman told me that normally they would have protested but she was too terrified. When you really see the Leviathan of state power in action, you don’t mess with it.

So is it worth the trade off? Would you sacrifice the liberty and lives of some for the security and lives of others? It’s a dark choice that I would prefer never to make.

Time will tell if Bukele’s success will last. It’s expensive to incarcerate 1.7 percent of the population, especially in a poor country. He could go bust. Or the gangs could come back with heavier weapons. Or the clampdown could spark a guerilla uprising. Or is the gang era of El Salvador finally over? And will, as some have speculated, Bukele even expand his territory to “save” the people of neighboring Honduras and Guatemala? He is one to watch.

Either way there are lessons to learn. And one is that violent organized crime is real and brutal and a huge concern for people, not just a question of perception and narratives. And unless we can find real solutions to reduce it that respect human rights and due process then more Bukeles will emerge building more mega prisons and locking up more people in chains for decades without light.

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2023