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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1949 thread views

Transnational Thursday for January 18, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Ecuador

In the wake of the escape of a major cartel leader, accompanied by violent prison uprisings and a staff of newscasters being taken hostage on live TV, President Daniel Noboa has declared war on the cartels. A state of emergency has been stretched across the country and more than 1000 alleged gang members have been arrested. The cartels have responded in kind; a prosecutor investigating them was just assassinated right before i posted this even. Noboa has been not subtle at all that he’s hoping to copy El Salvador’s Bukele, so this is Bukele watchers’ opportunity to see what this looks like in a different country (assuming Noboa himself isn’t crooked, which is a big if).

My guess is: substantially different. Ecuador is much bigger than El Salvador, both geographically and in terms of population, and the bad guys don’t all tattoo their gang membership right on their face. More to the point, MS-13’s brutality I think causes people to overestimate their capacity. In reality, they’re basically a highly murderous but relatively small time, impoverished extortion racket. They go up to a civilian or store or whatever and demand protection money. Fighting a transnational cartel is a completely different thing. The gangs in Ecuador are vastly better financed and armed, and we have only to look at Colombia to get a quick comparison of what it looks like trying to fight that with every variety of tough on crime policy there is. On the other hand, the cartels are very recently established in Ecuador, so maybe they don’t have the same kind of systematic, built up entrenchment of the criminal world.

Yeah, I mean the clue is in the numbers. 1000 members is nothing, Bukele jailed 4% of the male population, that would be 350,000 people in Ecuador.

Bukele actually adopted a variant of the classic crime solving strategy, which is just capturing the majority of violent and antisocial young men. The problem for him is that the traditional solution (execution or exile) isn’t viable for El Salvador, so he has to keep them locked up indefinitely.

Colombia has seen some substantial successes against cartel violence over the years, if not against cartel activity itself. And that’s all Noboa needs, Ecuador is fine as a drugs transit hub, they just want the violence turned down. Amusingly, the Netherlands has faced a (much milder) version of the same issue in recent years, what with the murder of Wiersum and other high profile Mocro mafia drama.

Unfortunately the only demographic even capable of controlling, policing and neutralizing violent young men is other violent young men. In a more or less ideal society, most of them will be social instead of antisocial violent young men, of course, but that presupposes a society that successfully integrates and indoctrinates them i.e. a patriarchy, which these stagnant, violent, modern, post-patriarchal Latin American societies aren't. In fact, many of them may be antisocial themselves; this isn't much of an issue if the political leadership recruits them as its future goons one way or another. To what extent are these governments are capable of this long-term, I wonder.

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