Will Neighbors Follow El Salvador’s Anti-Gang Strategy?
For more than eight months, El Salvador has been waging a war against its powerful gangs, jailing more than 58,000 suspects and deploying thousands of soldiers to gang strongholds to weed out members.
The government’s latest crackdown was catalyzed by a deadly outbreak of violence in March that killed at least 62 people, following the apparent breakdown of a secretive government-gang truce. Authorities responded by declaring a 30-day state of emergency, under which certain constitutional rights were suspended and police could freely carry out arbitrary arrests.
Those emergency measures are still in effect now, allowing the government to expand its powers and get tough on crime at the worrying price of crumbling civil liberties—and other nations are paying close attention.
“It’s really a short fix. It’s a Band-Aid,” said María Fernanda Bozmoski, an expert at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, who noted that the government’s measures fail to address the causes of gang violence. “The wound is just getting bigger and bigger, and it’s going to be harder to cure in the long term.”
In the short run, the government’s harsh measures appear to have improved public safety and reduced homicide rates, making them widely popular. It has also been a boon to President Nayib Bukele’s approval score, with ratings hovering around 80 percent, the New York Times reported.
This has proven to be attractive to other leaders. This week, neighboring Honduras began a partial state of emergency in a bid to stamp out the gangs. So did Jamaica, with Prime Minister Andrew Holness insisting that the country has “to use all the powers at our disposal.”
“In the case of Honduras, I think that [Honduran President Xiomara Castro] is taking a page out of Bukele’s book,” Bozmoski said, adding: “It’s not crazy to think that part of the surge in violence in Honduras has been due to the repressive measures from El Salvador.”
In El Salvador, months under the government’s state of emergency have resulted in extensive human rights abuses, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch and the Central American rights group Cristosal. In the 89-page-long report, they drew on interviews with over 1,100 people to detail cases of torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and other violations.
“There are serious reasons to question the long-term effectiveness of President Bukele’s security measures,” the report said. “Iron-fist strategies attempted by prior governments have proven to be ineffective and have at times led to more violence.”