Between Order and Rights: Exploring the Controversies Surrounding El Salvador’s Crime Crackdown
President Buckle tours mega prison. Photo courtesy of Casa Presidencial , El Salvador via Wiki Commons.
Only 5 years ago El Salvador’s homicide rate per 100,000 people was a staggering 63.22, the highest in the world. In 2022 this had fallen to just 7.2. While most countries are suffering with rising crime rates and overloaded systems of criminal justice, how has El Salvador achieved such astonishing results in such a short time period? To understand this, we must look to El Salvador’s struggles with gang crime and President Nayib Bukele’s controversial legislation which allowed for a large-scale crackdown on gangs.
As part of a “state of emergency”, Bukele’s legislation allows for the use of mass trials of alleged members of El Salvador’s notorious street gangs. As a result of this around 70,000 El Salvadorians have been imprisoned, the majority of whom are young men from poor, rural areas, bringing the rate of incarceration to an unprecedented 2% of the total population. The use of mass trials and treatment of prisoners have sparked outrage amongst the international community - however, the move has also made Bukele extremely popular amongst the general population.
There are several worrying things about Bukele’s approach to making his country safer which have been called out by the international community. Firstly, allowing prosecutors to simultaneously try up to 900 people at a time risks depriving defendants of their right to due process and a fair and speedy trial. A spokesman for Humanitarian Legal Aid stated that detainees are often caught up in a lengthy legal process for simply “living in a place stigmatised by gangs, despite not necessarily being gang members”. With no chance to individually defend themselves, it’s presumed many innocent people are therefore imprisoned unjustly.
In addition, the government recently unveiled a new ‘mega prison’ to house the influx of new prisoners and ease the pressures on the already overwhelmed prison system. Human rights groups have described conditions in this prison as resembling a concentration camp where dangerous inmates are packed together, sleeping on metal cabins without mattresses and sharing just 2 toilets between 75 people. Investigations have also found that the prisoners are treated inhumanely, tortured and in some cases even murdered. However, this is hard to confirm as information about prisoners is almost impossible to come by, even for their families.
In sum, prisoners are arrested en masse for even the slightest suspicion of belonging to a gang, not given access to a fair trial, and then kept indefinitely in overcrowded prisons under less than exemplary conditions. How can the suspension of human rights in such a way be justified?
Perhaps we could say that suspending certain rights to ensure the safety and security of the rest of the population is a fair trade-off. This argument can be even more convincing in the case of developing countries, whose economies are negatively impacted by high levels of gang crime. Thus, it can be said that implementing an aggressive strategy to diminish crime in a short period of time can have positive social and economic consequences in the long term.
Bukele is also wildly popular amongst voters. A poll conducted last February showed an overwhelming 95% approval rating for his re-election. The majority of El Salvadorians support the state of emergency and the temporary suspension of individual rights so that the government can swiftly and effectively eliminate a problem that plagued the country for years. Yet can public support be enough to justify the suspension of civil rights and liberties? After all, given the history of humanity it seems reasonable to suggest that popular opinion is not always the correct, good or moral answer to a problem. Furthermore, it seems prudent to consider that these opinion polls aren’t likely to be free from the government’s influence with President Bukele even jokingly describing himself as the “world’s coolest dictator”.
Given that many of El Salvador’s neighbours have taken notice of Bukele’s wildly successful approach to crime and plan to implement similar policies, it’s important that we discuss the impact of this policy not only on El Salvadorians, but also whether it sets a certain precedent for other countries. It should be noted that a nation should absolutely have sovereignty over its own policy and how it approaches domestic problems. However, there exists a line which should not be crossed and the wider international community, which has vowed to protect a set of individual rights of people all over the world, should not turn a blind eye when these rights are infringed as such - even if you could argue that it’s for the common good.