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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Just be tough and Nayib Bukele

In a recent article and highlights post, Scott Alexander argued against the narrative that being tougher on a difficult social problem like homelessness was an effective way to solve them, suggesting that the "tough" argument relied on a simplistic view of the problem and failed to address the intricacies that were necessary to actually make a tough approach work.

In responses on the post and in discussion here, some toughness proponents argued that a sufficiently tough approach, i.e. abandoning due process and many civil liberties, could overcome the different barriers to solving homelessness, but western societies are simply unable to proceed with such a radical policy.

One of the strongest points of evidence in favour of "radical toughness" is El Salvador. Under Nayib Bukele, the country has drastically reversed decades of gang violence and murder by pursuing an extremely harsh approach to imprisonment, placing around 2% of the population in jail in an attempt to crush the gangs. The results speak for themselves, with El Salvador now having a lower murder rate than Canada and Bukele becoming one of the most popular politicians in the world. Despite accusations of authoritarian behaviour, there is little doubt that Bukele would sweep any open and honest election.

An article in the American Affairs Journal casts doubt on one of the tenets of the Bukele approach: that mass imprisonment has not had nearly as dramatic effect as simple negotiation with gangs for reductions in violence. As such, Latin American nations which have tried to emulate Bukele have not been able to replicate the success, suggesting that "just be radically tough" might not be the panacea that Western proponents hope for.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/the-bukele-model-and-the-future-of-el-salvador/

The success of Bukele:

Not long ago, El Salva­dor was consid­ered to be one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, on par with war-ravaged Syria and Somalia. Today, El Salvador’s homicide rate rivals the likes of Canada following the success of a still ongoing state of exception that has locked up close to seventy-five thou­sand people, or about 2 percent of the country’s population. Unsurprisingly, Bukele has drawn admirers from throughout the Americas, par­ticularly—though not exclusively—on the political right.

Initial attempts to rein in violence through tough on crime approaches:

Consecutive right-wing governments in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala tried and retried mano dura (or “iron fist”) policies in order to combat the gangs: declaring states of exception, deploying military anti-gang squads, and engaging in mass arrests—to no avail. In El Salva­dor, the conservative National Republican Alliance (arena) saw homi­cides soar over the course of four consecutive presidential administrations between 1989 and 2009. In 2004, president Antonio Saca (2004–9) echoed Honduras’s Ricardo Ma­duro (2002–6) by introducing a “Super Mano Dura” plan following the failure of ordinary mano dura policies

Bukele's secret weapon:

Upon taking the presidency, the FMLN tried its hand at controlling gang violence by other means...national and municipal officials of the FMLN began negotiating with leaders of MS-13 and Barrio 18 in prison. Imprisoned gang members would receive special privileges and benefits from the government; in exchange, the gangs would agree to limit violence among themselves and against the state.

It would take time—and significant setbacks—before this approach yielded results. Between 2011 and 2014, homicides dropped from 70 to 40 per 100,000, before skyrocketing to over 100 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015. During this time, it was claimed that one of the most effective administrators of gang-state relations was the thirty-three-year-old Bukele...Bukele achieved a successful revitalization of San Salvador’s city center as mayor by tailoring and ultimately perfecting his negotiating skills with the gangs.

Issues with long-term success:

The decline in violence seen during the government of Mauricio Funes between 2011 and 2014 was quickly undone when homicides surged past their previous peak in 2015. This was no accident. According to various independent investigations, the 2015 spike resulted from disagreements between authorities and the gangs regarding specific privileges for imprisoned gang leaders

The main argument of the article:

The great irony of the president’s celebrat­ed iron fist is that it is at best responsible for around 10 percent of the reduction in homicides since 2015. By the start of 2022, prior to the state of exception, homicides had already fallen to their lowest point in twenty-five years. A master at branding, the president’s famed displays of inmates, crouched, stripped naked, and organized in single-file lines are very clearly meant to signal to the population that its leader is tough on criminals. Naturally, they also serve to mask the less flattering possi­bility that the president is routinely cutting deals with the very same convicts. Rather than a simple victory of tough-on-crime paradigms, Bukele’s early success was more likely attributable to a skilled synthesis of both iron fist policies and conditional, negotiated agreements with criminal actors

Why did El Salvador's tough on crime policies succeed?

What explains Bukele’s success, and why is it that El Salvador’s state of exception has succeeded where so many others have failed? Contrary to the platitudes of many progressives and criminal justice advocates, the simple if also superficial answer is that incarceration is a crucial remedy for violent crime. More specifically, the elusive key to the success of tough-on-crime policies—including against white-collar crime and cor­ruption—is whether or not they reduce impunity. The problem with previous iron fist policies in Latin America is that they failed to address the underlying weakness of the justice system in states like El Salvador

The attempts of other nations:

As of this writing, neighboring Honduras as well as a crisis-stricken Ecuador have attempted to replicate El Salvador’s success through their own states of exception. Notably, the left-wing administration of Xio­mara Castro (in power since 2022) initiated a state of exception in November 2022, which remains in place. Yet while Honduras’s homi­cide rate declined to a thirty-year low in 2023, the results of the state of exception have been comparatively underwhelming, with the coun­try’s impunity rate remaining virtually unchanged.

In Ecuador, the January 8 escape of Los Choneros gang leader Alias Fito from prison plunged the Andean nation into a state of narco-terror akin to that of neighboring Colombia during the 1980s. In response, the newly inaugurated Daniel Noboa declared a still-ongoing state of excep­tion that has likewise taken pointers from Bukele’s example in El Salvador. Here, it’s worth recalling that Noboa’s predecessor, Guillermo Lasso (2021–23), decreed multiple sixty-day states of exception that regrettably failed to halt Ecuador’s rapid transformation into the most dangerous country in the Americas. Thus far, homicides have declined 30 percent according to government figures. Yet it remains uncertain whether any security gains will evaporate following the abrogation of respective emergencies in all three countries

On the weakness of the gangs:

There is, moreover, evidence that the country’s gangs have been weakened but not outright defeated by the state. A report from the Salvadoran National Police leaked in 2023 showed that only eighty-three gang rifles were seized by police in 2023, compared to 242 in 2022. Indeed, the number was far higher prior to the state of exception, with 321 seizures in 2020 and 508 in 2019—suggesting that MS-13 and Barrio 18 are actively hiding their arsenals.48 Reporting from El Faro has likewise documented credible evidence that the administration is still negotiating with gang leaders.

Conclusion:

Until then, the most likely path forward for the Bukele regime is a continuation of the status quo: that is, the routine renewal of a euphemistically permanent state of exception. It bears repeating, as both Geoff Shullenburger and the Salvadoran novelist Horácio Castellanos Moya have noted, that Bukele’s popularity and subsequent realignment of the Salvadoran state “enabled the defeat of the gangs, not the other way around.”53 The relative instruments available to democratic as op­posed to autocratic regimes in Latin America speak to comparative strengths and costs of each mode of governance. Bukele’s recent victory has offered him an overwhelming mandate—one which has effectively consolidated one-party rule over El Salvador. It remains to be seen exactly how long the Bukele model might last or whether it stands to outlive Bukele himself.

The article also delves into the wider successes and failures of Bukele for the economy, but I assume the approaches to criminality will be most interesting to readers here.

The main reason Bukele succeeded in a way that other states in the region will find difficult to replicate is that El Salvador’s gangs - while extremely violent and brutal - were also amateur operations, very poorly armed and trained compared to the behemoths in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere that can field extremely well-trained fighting forces with large amounts of heavy weaponry.

If a Mexican President tried the Bukele approach they’d find themselves either assassinated or forced from power after a series of extreme internal security failures very very quickly. The military situation is just completely different.

That said, for Western countries, states or municipalities facing spikes in violent crime the Bukele approach is absolutely correct and would work. The more violent people you lock up, the less violent crime you have. It is that simple, and domestic police in the civilized world are typically good enough at preventing powerful paramilitary criminal cartels from forming, they just suck at dealing with low level violence and public disorder because of bail reform, short sentences and so on.

That said, for Western countries, states or municipalities facing spikes in violent crime the Bukele approach is absolutely correct and would work.

My understanding is that a key component of the Bukele approach was that the Salvadorean gangs used tattoos as a mark of gang membership, so "lock up everyone with a gang tattoo" put a lot of gang members behind bars with not many false positives. Locking up everyone in London whose tattoo makes them look like a street thug would leave you without enough free men to guard the prisons.

In London the police literally have comprehensive databases of almost every youth involved in any kind of gang or crime. They even had a pre-crime kind of system tied to this called the Gang Violence Matrix which they only scrapped this year after it was decided it was prejudicial. They could absolutely do this.

It’s also true that El Salvador’s security forces were infiltrated with a vigilante group that executed collaborators with the gangs, allowing bukele fewer problems with security forces siding against him.

This is contrary to Mexico, where the army loses pitched battles to the cartels often enough to worry about and defections or collaboration are a key source of cartel recruitment, training, and equipment.

Yes. The foundation of Los Zetas. Mexican special forces. Trained with American and Israeli special forces. Given good equipment. Then deserted to join a cartel, taking their gear with them. Then formed their own really really mean cartel.

Only the US military could really destroy the cartels and it would be a ridiculously expensive and time consuming operation that would cost a lot of US lives with insurgent tactics, would lead to hugely increased mass migration, would damage Mexico’s economy and would drive zero long term benefits to either Mexico or the US because the state capacity problem would remain.

James K. Polk didn't go far enough.

Scott's criticism, that toughness alone can't solve the problem without an actual actionable plan, is both true and uninteresting because it doesn't engage with the critiques of the current establishment and just says a truism. It's an important truism because many people do actually just have no real alternative to the status quo, especially true when discussing critiques of capitalism that amount to basically "capitalism hasn't brought about utopia yet".

However being more tough becomes a more interesting critique when you believe that the problem we have with handling the homeless that I'd call hyper-empathy. if hypo-empathy is not being able to take another's perspective, usually implied because of lack of care or interest, and empathy is having a good understanding of another's perspective and needs hyper-empathy is the mirror of hypo-empathy where you are charitable and caring beyond reason. Hyper-empathy might be characterized by letting a bad actor brutalize you and your family because it would be mean to interfere and maybe they have a good reason to do so, maybe you've contributed to a general environment and they're the product of blah blah blah.

If you think the problem with our treatment of the homeless population[1] is hyper-empathy by the NGOs that basically run all homeless programs then being tougher makes sense. We need to either axe this hyper-empathetic orgs or staff them with people who are willing to be tough. Scott says the reason we can't solve the homeless problem is a lack of state capacity. Well what actually is state capacity and why don't we have it? What's actually stopping us from doing the things he scoffs at like building asylums and throwing people into them? I think part of the equation is a general lack of will or "toughness" among the people making decisions on this topic. The money is there, a desire for a solution is there. I'm an outside observer, I can't go into a step by step explanation for how to build asylums and set up laws so that we can populate them, that's an incredible burden, but I do know that the people that we entrusted billions of dollars and many years to have utterly failed to deliver improvements and they all seem to be manically hyper-empathetic so toughness might be just what is needed.

1 - by homeless population I mean the people in tents long term that make no effort to reintegrate back into society rather than people who live in their car for a little while or even temporarily rough it while trying to reintegrate for whom we do have good services and tools that I advocate for even being quite generous with.

Read it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the 'Bukele only succeeded by cutting deals with gang leaders' has been a rising argument of the last year, but also mostly a cope argument from his political opposition which writes to the Anglophone audience and tries to undercut Bukele claims to success.

There's a couple significant weaknesses in the article, both on its own front and on it's meta-context.

On its own it has some significant gaps which indicats it's being written for a foreign audience rather than local analysis, one of which is the total lack of acknowledgement of geography and demographic dispersion when comparing El Salvador versus its regional neighbors, and what that means in general.

Central American countries are geographically small relative to their larger neighborhood giants, but in terms of state control of the interiors they are even smaller, with extremely limited government ability to exert control / contest usage of significant parts of the territories. You can't even meaningfully drive from western Honduras to eastern, which is why eastern Honduras has a reputation for being where drug smugglers fly or sail to en-route to the US. The amount of territory to retreat to, and the dispersal of small-but-present human terrain, means that gangs outside of the capital have plenty of space to hide / influence / establish themselves in when the government isn't asserting itself, particularly via leveraging political rivalries / alternative power centers outside of a ruling party's maximal influence.

El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador. The country is the size of New Jersey, and the overwhelming majority of the population is within the capital region. If you get kicked out of San Salvador, there is no alternative power center to hide in the shadows of, and the government doesn't have the sort of federational subdivisions that limit jurisdiction and reach in the same way a larger country does. As a result, anti-gang successes in the capital are far more effective for nation-wide effectiveness than in other countries.

This is absolutely an argument against the Bukele model in other countries- but rather than leave that as a point that what can work in one location may not work in another, the argument has to be flipped to insinuate that what doesn't work in other places thus must not be working in El Salvador, and thus undercut the legitimacy of the Bukele administration. It's not enough for something Bukele did to be unsuitable for elsewhere- it must be a mark against Bukele.

This is similar to the reversal of argument used to insinuate that a decrease in gang weapons seized in 2023 compared to 2022 indicates a failure rather than success, first by framing it as a failure to meet a higher standard of success (gangs weakened, but not outright defeated). Gangs actively hiding their arsenals is a good indicator, it implies they (a) feel the need to, and (b) indicates they previously didn't feel a need to- but this is framed in a way to undercut rather than support the administration which led to this effect. Even the repeated returning to 'but he talks with gangs' doesn't acknowledge what would be also relevant facts to the regional audience: that everyone has to in some form, and that his alternatives were widely considered to be worse. Bukele's anti-crime bonifides and ability to go against the normal democratic insittutions was in no small part possible because many of those institutions were considered to be corrupt and even complicit with the pre-Bukele gang activity levels.

This isn't the only place where the article transitions from a commentary on crime or nominally informative analysis to more audience-shaping agendas. It is, for example, absolutely true that Bukele expanded the Supreme Court, which the article notes... but what's also true, and not noted, is that the Court issue came about in the context when the opposition tried to stonewall and prevent globally- and regionally-normal COVID-19 policies. Rather than recognize Bukele's (actually-is!) concering actions in the context of a domestic political back-and-forth, it is presented as baseless beyond what it implies in isolation for authoritarianism. It is also absolutely true that Bukele is open to Chinese investment... but what's also true, and not noted, is that Bukele is open to anyone's investment. Chinese investment is not a domestically or regionally controversial prospect, but Bukele's failure to go beyond even what the opposition or close American allies would do is presented as a moral/strategic vice.

And this is without the various tangents and allusions to things that matter of an implicitly-American audience, but are bizar if the audience is expected to be more aware of a Central American perspective. The crypto-jabs, the Xinjiang province analogy, or the pejorative references to relations with other regional actors considered bad by the American audience- these are American preoccupations, not local concerns.

None of this is indicative of particular insights of the local situation as opposed to relying heavily on anglophone source biases... which is unsurprising. The article's author is a Florida-based contributor to American foreign policy media. He is writing to his anglophone audience, but especially one dominated by a particular subset of state department / international academics of a generally left-persuasion, and what a lot of that audience wants is narrative justification to undercut Bukele.

Thanks for your insight, I did suspect that this article would be presenting just one side of the argument

I can also recommend Matt Lakeman’s excellent post on Bukele and El Salvador for those wanting a deep dive into the issue.

His entire substack is amazing! Very recommended

I'd like to thank you for recommending it to all, and double-endorse it. This is one of those rare amateur-historian passion-works that is well worth the read, and shouldn't be looked down upon for not coming in prestige media. An excellent piece, well aware of its own limitations, and doing it's best to do quite well.

Without implying where I agree or disagree with it, I can sincerely recommend it for doing a good-faith attempt to present multiple angles and elements that often go unnoticed.

I like Scott, but Matt Lakeman makes Scott Alexander look like Peter Zeihan! Or something. Pick whoever you think is funniest for the third name.

I take it from this that Peter Zeihan isn't particularly well thought of around here?

idk. pick whoever you want for the third person, like I said

I can't speak for the denizens of this forum, but /pol/ offers this collage of clickbait YouTube thumbnails suggesting that Zeihan's forecasting of the imminent collapse of China has been highly inaccurate.

Jim Theis

Thank you so much! This is great!

Very welcome! Matt Lakeman's whole blog is amazing; if ever I have an hour to kill (e.g., a train journey) I'll just load up one of his posts and come away knowing so much more about a new country.

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