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).
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?