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Notes -
“What makes a country a country?” is one of the primary questions of political science. The usual glib answer is “Other countries recognize them as one”. This of course leads to “What makes other countries recognize them?”. There are a few short answers for this, and some disagreement, but one of those short answers is pretty indisputable. Aside from claiming to be a country in the first place, the government seeking that recognition must maintain a monopoly on the use of organized violence within its claimed borders. Military invasion and conquering of a country is the direct material refutation of this sort of claim, but its not just a foreign army that can despoil your violence monopoly. There comes a point as this violence monopoly slips that the polity effectively ceases to be. Somalian recent history has a good example of this. I don’t know how bad things are in El Salvador and I don’t trust US media to report honestly, but there comes a point where a government either has to take steps like this (or even more brutal) or pack it up and flee to Miami with as much as they can steal on the way out. This latter option has been historically pretty popular. This government, in this moment, is choosing the former. It still wants to be a country. Even the most authoritarian states are still countries: they have an intact violence monopoly, you can negotiate with their gov’t as a unit and expect it to at least have the state capacity to follow through on its agreements if it chooses to do so. A gang of the most Western educated, culturally sensitive, US foreign policy compliant, says-all-the-right-things, paragons of democratic virtue living saints who don’t have an effective monopoly on violence is not a country at all.
Are there some innocent people in these prisons in El Salvador? Almost certainly, and that really sucks for them. OTOH they’re lucky the current gov’t there even bothers to use prisons at all. Locking them all in buildings that are then lit on fire has been a historically attractive option for countries that found themselves in similar situations in the past. AFAIK no one has uncovered any mass graves yet. This approach seems balanced given the easily available alternatives.
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