From ‘murder capital of the world’ to the US’S offshore gulag

President Nayib Bukele achieved his ‘miracle’ defeat of El Salvador’s gangs by suspending rights and the rule of law, and industrial-scale incarceration.

For four decades​ El Salvador was known for death squads and civil war, and then for gang violence. But now, under Nayib Bukele, the gangs that carved up the country have been routed. (The president, in office since 2019, was reelected for five years in 2024 with nearly 85% of the vote.) The members of the two main pandillas (gangs) – Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18 (split into two factions, the Revolucionarios and Sureños) – have been imprisoned or have scattered. In the mid-2010s the level of violence in El Salvador was at times comparable with Iraq and Syria; by 2024 the murder rate had dropped by 98%. The blunt tool responsible for this transformation was the imprisonment of three out of every hundred adult men. By this method, Bukele said last year, ‘we turned the world’s murder capital into the safest country in the Western hemisphere.’

Relieving the country of its reputation for lawlessness, and gaining for it the title of the world’s highest per capita prison population, meant dispensing with the rule of law. Under the state of exception declared by Bukele in 2022, constitutional rights were suspended. Those arrested didn’t have to be taken before a judge or even given a reason for their arrest. Bukele didn’t stop there. Political opponents have been jailed or driven into exile and Bukele has embraced his extemporary powers. Calling himself the ‘coolest dictator in the world’, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized that monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s expanded prison system as an offshore gulag for deported migrants has made him a darling of the American right.

Bukele isn’t an outsider. His rise follows a familiar pattern: a privileged member of the ruling class opportunistically breaks with it and poses as an (…)

Full article: 2 159 words.

(1) See Benjamin Fernandez, ‘No body, no crime’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, June 2023.