Authoritarianism – obedience to authority at the expense of freedom – is as bad as it sounds, and it is gaining ground in the Americas. It is a temptation leaders struggle to resist, if not embrace. At the same time, too many citizens of the Americas are willing to relinquish their freedoms in exchange for what the authoritarians are offering. El Salvador is this article’s case in point.
For decades, personal security has been an enormous problem in El Salvador. With the end of the civil war, the country was optimistic that violence they had known was behind them. Those hopes were dashed as the post-conflict period dealt with the reintegration of soldiers from both sides of the conflict, combined with deportees from the US who had been educated in the ways of LA street gangs. Those gangs, most importantly MS-13 and Barrio 18, began in Los Angeles where young Salvadoran migrants whose parents had sought shelter in LA during the war, organized to protect themselves from local LA gangs. As those youth were arrested and deported back to El Salvador, they brought the gangs with them and changed El Salvador.
Over the next two decades El Salvador was plagued by violence and extortion, most of it gang and organized crime related. For years the country had one of the highest murder rates in the world. The government tried varied strategies to bring the homicide rate down, negotiating with the gangs, programs for at-risk-youth and often the most popular – mano dura. The mano dura approach jailed gang members and others caught up in broad sweeps. The post-implementation analysis of this approach was that jail became a finishing school for criminals, making the problem even more complex.
Fed up with the constant violence and the extortion that reached down to the smallest of businesses, Salvadorans elected President Nayib Bukele. Under his watch the country has become demonstrably safer. The homicide rate, which was 106 people per 100,000 in 2015, plummeted to 7.8 in 2022.
He accomplished this feat by implementing drastic measures. He declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to the streets. He suspended the right to counsel and the right to a fair trial. He built the largest prison in Latin America and jailed 70,000 people in 16 months. Two percent of the population is now in jail. That is more than twice the percentage of those jailed in the United States, a record anyone should want to beat.
To provide a semblance of due process, the Congress recently passed a law that will allow hundreds of those jailed to be tried simultaneously – up to 900 people at once. There is no doubt that innocent people have been caught up in the sweeps to arrest gang members. But with hundreds tried at a time, the odds of the innocent being freed are not good.
The government seems to have decided that the problem with past attempts at mano dura was that criminals eventually got out of prison. So, they are constructing a system where the accused don’t return to the community.
The tactics employed to control violence have obliterated individual rights, but they have received widespread support. President Bukele declared the state of emergency, but the Congress has approved its implementation, and the people support the policies. Bukele has an enviable approval rating, coming in lately at between 80-90 percent.
It is a failure of democratic governance when people are willingly to trade their rights in exchange for feeling safe. In a democracy people should be able to have both personal security and freedoms.
Remember, authoritarians can be elected. They can also use the democratic process to take away freedoms and dismantle democracy. Bukele has successfully changed the constitution to allow himself to run for president again. With his approval rating, he is a shoo-in. Salvadorans should be careful what they wish for.
* Joy Olson is the former Executive Director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a research and advocacy organization working to advance human rights. Twitter: @JoyLeeOlson
