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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34135 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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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.

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