I hope we can take their word for it, and they weren't abusing this power, because Amnesty International says they just threw huge numbers in prison without any due process[1]:
> The majority of the detentions carried out under the state of emergency were arbitrary because they violated due process guarantees through absence of clear judicial orders, prolongation of administrative detentions, lack of precise information from authorities to detainees’ families regarding their whereabouts, and concealment of the identity of the judges processing detainees.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it's necessarily awesome when the government just 'disappears' people and I hope that doesn't happen here.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/central-america...
Salvador could stay being one of the countries with the highest murder and rape, and kinda respecting human rights by following the presumption of innocence VS could put 2% of the population in jail to raise the quality of life for the remaining 98%?
I even heard someone say that Bukele proposed that any country that want Salvador to respect human rights for those arrested could just take the prisoners as refugees. (No source on that).
Which bring me back to the trolley problem, would you want your own country to take those ~75.000 people as refugee and consider them all as innocent?
In general, systems with this attitude (that rights are conditional on the goodness of the subject) wind up with a criminal at the top putting people they disagree with in jail.
That said, those effects manifest in the long run. In the short run, choosing autocratic simplicity is rational. It’s just that it explains why some systems yo-yo between corrupt autocracy and weak populism with islands of stability in between—getting liberal democracy to work takes patience and skill.
They’re just harder to build and maintain: “get a better strong guy to strongarm the last strong guy who went rotten” makes more instinctive sense than “swallow the bitter medicine of compromise and spread power around.”
I’d go further: they have. But that requires both investment into those resources and patience. (Consider all the comments on even HN whenever wrongdoing is exposed confidently predicting there will be no consequences. Then, when they’re charged, that they won’t be arrested. Then that they won’t be convicted. Then that sentencing will be light. Then that it will get overturned on appeal. Now imagine the entire country thinks like that—there is no patience for due process.)
It’s more difficult for a poor country to transition to liberal democracy than benign autocracy. The only ones I can think of did so under occupation or in the wake of a traumatic dictator and/or civil war (see: Uruguay, India, and going way back, the United Kingdom).
Is it not functionally similar? Santos was defense minister during the Colombian False Positives scandals which was arguably much more evil than anything Bukele has done [0].
Can't make heads or tails of this, honestly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22False_positives%22_scandal The extrajudicial murder of innocent young men, conducted in order to boost body count OKRs for promotions and yearly bonuses.
EDIT: the purpose of this comment is not to be pro-Bukele, but to encourage critical examination of the _framing and wording_ English-language publications use when discussing Latin American politics. As a Venezuelan, I am especially wary of authoritarians and you do not have to convince me about the slippery slope of judicial abuses of power.
No. Negotiating a peace treaty in which the gangs disarm in exchange for political participation versus paying them to be quiet for the moment are fundamentally different.
It’s analogous to the U.S. strategies in Germany and Japan, on one hand, and in Afghanistan, on the other hand.
Disappearing means no paper trail.
These are mass arrests. Also problematic. But closer to a martial strategy than a civil one. But when you’re the murder capital of the world, maybe that’s merited.
Politicians are specifically elected for this. Otherwise, you just put bureaucrats; because what difference would it make?
> lack of precise information from authorities to detainees’ families regarding their whereabouts,
Because the gangs will bust them out
> and concealment of the identity of the judges processing detainees.
Because the gangs will kill the judges
Sadly, same goes for a huge part of the mainstream media that becomes an echo chamber for them (Guardian, NYT for example that used to be reference of truth but lost that status).
Don't take my word for it, please take the time to read opposite views and try to honestly make your own opinion.
Amnesty International isn't editorializing and this isn't a remotely controversial claim: the roundups happened via emergency powers which, by design, denied due process. It's not a secret, El Salvador wasn't trying to hide this.
If by “enthusiastically” you mean “reluctantly”, then yes.
The end result is a lot of good people’s lives are inconvenienced for the sake of protecting the rights of these bastards.
Flip the script, strip them of rights and throw them in a prison with no mercy, and the world suddenly becomes a more pleasant place for the good people, and nothing of value is lost. I won’t shed a tear for El Salvadoran criminals.
The problem, especially in Latin America, is there's a long history of guys taking power, "doing whatever needs to be done to get the bad guys," and then...never giving up power. Usually killing lots of people who might get in their way. Often with full support of backers in the US government.
But surely this time it's different!
To be fair, criminals in El Salvador weren’t getting off on legal technicalities. They were never seeing a court due to police corruption. Bukele had to be extreme because he had to sidestep the police-justice system. That leaves federal police and the military, coarse tools.
I never understood how some parts of US just allow that. I live in a country where we have very poor property protection laws, and police still gets routinely called for underage kids stealing chocolates, actually comes, and a whole procedure is done, including parents, a judge, etc.
Influenced by movies, I always assumed that a shopkeeper in US would just do the cowboy thing (I know i'm exaggerating a bit) and take out the gun and make the thief put the stuff back, or worse. Watching videos of whole gangs of people just coming inside a store, filling their baskets/carts and leaving while noone does anything seemed so surreal. In a rich country, you'd expect property to be protected, but it doesn't seem so. Even in some of the poorest countries in the world, something like this wouldn't happen, because even random people in the street would go out of their way to stop (and beat) a thief, and the police wouldn't be arresting a passerby for tripping an escaping thief or tackling them to the ground, but would focus on the thief.
I mean sure... allowing people to steal offsets the "social security" from the government to retailers, but the safety issue remains.
Most jurisdictions have 'shopkeeper's privilege' and stopping a shoplifter is 100% OK. I think most large businesses don't expect or even allow hourly employees to assume the risk of stopping shoplifters because, to insurers, that math doesn't math. If an employee is required to chase and restrain a shoplifter, there's a good chance they'll get injured, become exposed to the money incinerator that is the US health care system, etc. Maybe the supposed shoplifter didn't actually steal anything, but the employee thought they did and injured them while restraining them. So you could have an injured employee and an innocent injured shopper. Now you're paying multiple six figures for health care claims over a $20 steak that wasn't stolen.
Which parts of Amnesty International's statement are inaccurate and why ?
You know because we want to form our own opinion.
Because that doesn't seem to be the case given we've seen much of the world become developed over the last 50 years. And almost all have a functioning judicial system.
"Do your own research" is a pretty thin rebuttal to "here's a source by a well regarded NGO".
And if you are saying Amnesty International is feeding propaganda through the mainstream media, that's also going to need some credible sources. They are generally considered a fairly highly factual organization.
You just liked when it was saying before.
* There's no justification for ethnic or ideologic cleansings of any type, period. No, making tourists happy is not a good reason for state terrorism (nothing is).
* Bukele is untrustworthy. See "liquid ideology" on [1], just for a start.
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I totally believe that El Salvador lacks the necessary state capacity to try so many people rapidly.
My idea: To release innocent people faster, let friends/family members/etc. post a bond. Prisoners are tried in order from highest to lowest bond value. The bond is returned to the family if the prisoner is found innocent. If they're found guilty, the bond goes to the Salvadorean healthcare system or something like that.
Due process just means... process that is due. But (for better or for worse, depending on how you view this) it could totally be the case that nothing was due in the particular situation, at least legally. Since people look at this from a USA angle, here's the US constitution:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
Notice that in the scenario described, a right such as habeas corpus simply isn't due. You can't be violating due process if there was no process due.
Notice this isn't pedantry; national security has always been something states have at least partially prioritized over individual rights. I make no judgment of the morals of the situation, but I thought it was worth pointing out that rights aren't as absolute (legally, anyway) as people think they are.
[1] https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/
Very true that it's necessary to keep in mind that even with texts that present themselves as well-researched, there could be plenty of angles omitted that may drastically change the conclusion. Still, I won't hesitate recommending it over random <200 character comments.
Since the typical “Western” view of El Salvador, AFAIK, is/was murderous shithole and not much else, I don’t know how that slant(?) could have tilted this piece.
This is martial law, an internal military occupation with dictatorial control. An act of desperation welcomed only because El Salvador was previously, for decades, a bit of a failed state undergoing something tantamount to a low-grade civil war.
Martial law in the developing world doesn't have a history of going very well for very long. It's a brittle situation.
* Do I want to support authoritarianism?
* Will I be arrested if I do a bad thing?
Also, I was surprised to see the prison incarceration rates, but yeah, El Salvador is absolutely the highest, by a country mile.
The top 5 are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and the USA.
Are you suggesting you should not be arrested if you do something bad? I think that's how it works everywhere.
El Salvador has over twice as many per capita as Cuba. USA has the most in absolute numbers, but China is not far behind.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/715019/homicide-rates-in...
They recently (<2 years ago) arrested basically every criminal in the country and have the highest incarceration rate in the world by far. It’s a bit controversial internationally but the El Salvadorian people love it.
All I can say is visit now while it’s a well kept secret. I’ve never felt safer in a Latin American country. it’s beautiful, cheap and authentic. It feels like a country on the rise. While driving there it felt like everything was under construction (in a good way)