El Salvador’s “successful” model is beginning to be viewed favorably in other countries. Experts indicate, however, that repression without a plan that attacks the underlying problems is an unhelpful strategy.
In May 2022, the United Nations delivered its usual report on homicides in the world. The result? Nine of the ten countries with the highest number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants are in the Americas, and four of them are in Central America: El Salvador, Belize, Honduras and Guatemala. This, which in itself is nothing new, since it is a phenomenon that has been repeated for years, shows that the policies adopted to combat this evil have not achieved results.
The problem is that ideas such as reimposing the death penalty, militarizing public security and expanding prisons have resurfaced, resulting in indiscriminate repression and contempt for human rights. To varying degrees, some of that has already begun to happen. In Guatemala, for example, President Alejandro Giammattei has been in favor of capital punishment. And in Honduras, President Xiomara Castro imposed a state of emergency on December 6.
“These measures, more than authoritarian per se, are rather populist, and are adopted to attack a problem that has never really been addressed at its root”, Honduran political analyst Leonardo Pineda tells DW. In the expert’s opinion, the state of exception that he prevails in his country is “First of all nominal and essentially exists in the media. Because, if you go to the communities, these states of exception do not exist and have not worked. We have the serious problem of extortion of carriers that, instead of decreasing, has increased”graphics.
Clean the house, dirty the rest
When talking about combating crime, eyes tend to go to El Salvador, where the president Nayib Bukele he has made a strong hand his battle horse, with juicy returns in the polls. Ingrid Wehr, representative for Central America of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation (linked to the Greens party), tells DW that there are some clear dangers in this: “One is the remilitarization of politics and a dismantling of the fragile institutions of the rule of law in the region”.
Wehr recalls that El Salvador has been in a state of emergency for 11 months, that since the end of March 2022 60 thousand people have been imprisoned, and that 2 percent of the country’s population is in prison. “The heavy-handed policy is one of the factors that explains the high popularity of the Salvadoran president. More than 90 percent of the Salvadoran population approves of the government’s security policies”, with only a critical minority, he points out.
This high popularity, however, is a central element that explains why the model is exported. “As far as is known, the measures in El Salvador are working,” acknowledges Honduran political analyst Pineda. “But they work in El Salvador, and I am going to be emphatic about that,” he adds, because others pay the costs by receiving the migration of criminals. “They are cleaning El Salvador, but the garbage reaches the neighbors”says the expert, who assures that leaders of the Salvadoran gangs have been detected in Guatemala and Mexico.
the high price
There is one point on which the experts agree: the high price paid for authoritarian measures to combat a complex phenomenon such as crime. “They pass over human rights and democracy,” warns Pineda. And citing the specific case of El Salvador and the construction of a gigantic prison for gang membersWehr points out that “what is worrying is that the strategy of mass incarceration comes with massive violations of human rights, including arrests of innocents and minors, and is complemented by a strategy of co-optation of justice institutions and surveillance of the critical civil society.
For Wehr, the realities of countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador “are different, but the common factor they have is the growing popularity of the iron hand. Endemic violence is a central problem for the population, and fighting it increases popularity. So Bukele wants to run for re-election as president of El Salvador, even though the Constitution does not allow it. Alejandro Giammattei is betting on using the issue to win votes for his co-religionists in Guatemala. And Xiomara Castro tries to copy the model to find a solution to the serious problem of extortion by gangs in the public transport sector”.
The German expert also sees in common, in these Central American countries, the “lack of serious reflection on the sustainability of these policies, the high expenses, the militarization and the fact that criminal structures can be reborn if structural factors are not combated , that is, poverty, unemployment and inequality”.
“In Honduras, force as a response to violence is not something new,” recalls Pineda. “We have been talking about this since the years of Tiburcio Carías Andino,” he explains, referring to the politician who led the country’s destinies between 1933 and 1949, first constitutionally and then under a dictatorship. “In his mandate, thieves were mutilated, their hands were cut off, and those who committed crimes were shot.” In light of the results, apparently the measure was not so good. Almost 80 years later, we are still talking about the same thing.