This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.
We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade.
Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace
Transcript
Nayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he's an unusual leader for the country in that he's young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I'm recording this—and in that he's incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019.
He's also unusual, though, for his policies.
He has, for instance, made the crypto-asset Bitcoin legal tender in the country, buying up a bunch of them using government funds, developing a crypto wallet for citizens to use for storing and paying for things with their own digital assets, and he even announced the construction of what he called a bitcoin city, which would be built at the base of a volcano and would use geothermal energy to mine bitcoin, which basically means powering a bunch of powerful computers using the energy produced by the geothermal activity in that region.
That gamble hasn't turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC's recent decision to allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs to everyday investors in the US—but he bought into the asset when the prices were high and lost a lot of the government's money on the gamble; it was estimated in late 2023 that El Salvador has lost something like 37% of the money it invested in this way, equivalent to around $45 million; though that's based on external estimates as the country doesn't provide transparent figures on this matter, so it could be more or less than that.
Bukele has also caused a stir with his freewheeling approach to politics, which some local and international organizations have labeled authoritarian, as he's shown no compunction about trampling democratic norms in order to get things he wants done, done, and that has included sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to pressure them into approving a loan necessary to militarize the National Civil Police force, he and his party booted the Supreme Court's justices and the country's attorney general in an act that has been described as an autogolpe, or self-coup, a move by which the president takes full authoritarian control of his country while in power, he instigated widespread arrests and allowed all sorts of police abuses during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and he and his party have been accused of all manners of corruption—though the attorney general who was investigating twenty such instances of corruption was fired, as I mentioned, so there's no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that's led to a shift in the country's corruption perception index ranking, dropping it to 116 out of 180 ranked countries in 2022, with a score of 33 out of 100, higher being better on that latter figure; for comparison, that puts it on equal footing, according to this index's metrics, with Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Zambia.
All of which is to say, after taking control of El Salvador, Bukele has rapidly reinforced his position, grabbing more of the reins of power for himself and firing or disempowering anyone who might be in the position to challenge the increasingly absolute power he wields.
Despite all this, as I mentioned, though, he is incredibly popular, and the primary reason for this popularity seems to be that he has aggressively gone after gangs, and that has apparently dropped the homicide rate in the country precipitously, from around 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015 down to just 17.6 per 100,000 in 2021; and the government has said it fell still further, down to half that 2021 that number, in 2022.
So while there's reason to question the accuracy of some of these numbers, because of the nature of the government providing them, the reality on the ground for many El Salvadorans is apparently different enough, in terms of safety and security and fear, that everyone more or less just tolerates the rapid rise of a 40-something dictator because he's a dictator who is killing or jailing the bad guys who, until he came into power, functioned as a second, even more corrupt and violent government-scale power in the country.
This crackdown has come with its own downsides, if you care about human rights anyway, as there are abundant allegations that Bukele's government is using this war against the gangs as an excuse to scoop up political rivals and other folks who might challenge his position, as well—basically, some of the killed and imprisoned people aren't actually gang members, but because of the scale of the operation, this is overshadowed by all the actual gang members who are also arrested.
This effort has rapidly earned El Salvador the distinction of having one of the largest prisons in the world, which holds about 40,000 prisoners; a necessary investment because, as of early January 2024, more than 75,000 people who have been accused of having gang connections have been arrested as part of this effort, and as of 2023, El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world, arresting people three-times as fast as the also notoriously arrest-happy United States.
What I'd like to talk about today is a recent series of happenings in Ecuador, and why some analysts are wondering if this might point at a spread of Bukele's approach to dealing with gangs—with all its associated pros and cons.
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In November of 2023, Ecuadorians elected a 36-year-old president named Daniel Naboa who ran on a promise to reform the country's prisons, which have in recent years become vital to the country's gang-run drug trade.
In 2016 the government of Colombia signed a peace deal with the FARC, a guerrilla group that was at fighting odds with the government for more than 50 years, and that led to a period of relative stability in Colombia, but led to the opposite in Ecuador, which until that moment had been fairly peaceful, most of the gang stuff happening in neighboring Colombia.
But the FARC entering a state of peace and the consequent end of their de facto monopoly on cocaine trafficking from Colombia into Ecuador, where a lot of the drug is shipped around the world from Ecuadorian ports, caused a flare-up in violence as local, previously connected but relatively small groups, rose up to fill the power-vacuum.
So Mexican and Colombian cartels and the Albanian mafia and other local gangs that were tied to various aspects of the FARC-led cocaine network in the region were all suddenly scrambling to grab what they could grab, and Ecuador's road infrastructure, its use of the US dollar as its official currency, and its lack of visa requirements for foreign nationals made it a highly desirable location for building out assets for producing and shipping drugs, especially cocaine, globally.
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a drop in oil prices, oil being Ecuador's main legal export, amplified this rush, as a slew of now job-less and prospect-less young people were funneled into various gangs, these gangs being the only real economic opportunities in town, and over the past few years this has created a state of near-constant inter-gang warfare, which in turn sparked a series of prison massacres in 2020 carried out by competing gangs.
In the wake of those massacres, gangs more or less took over about a fourth of the country's prisons, using them as bases of operation for their drug- and inter-gang-warfare related efforts.
The country's president from 2007 through 2017 did a pretty good job of keeping gang activity in Ecuador to a minimum by basically allowing gangs to become cultural institutions and leaving them alone, so long as they stopped with all the violence. But this hands-off policy was part of why the government was unprepared when things went sideways beginning in 2016 and even more so in 2020.
Ecuador's social safety net fell apart in the wake of that peaceful coexistence period, as well, and organized crime was able to accumulate more wealth and influence than the government in many regards, because of how lucrative the drug trade was becoming, which allowed it to fill in some of the blanks left by those diminished safety nets and the government's new austerity policies.
This also allowed them to insinuate themselves throughout the government, grabbing control of some of the country's mega prisons, but also a whole lot of military-grade weaponry and people in positions of power throughout the justice system.
Entire regional governments have been captured by local gang leaders, a whole generation of youths has been incorporated into their ranks, and though the previous president, before Naboa, seemed to understand the growing issue with gangs in the country, he was unable to do much to fight them and his meager efforts in that direction were defeated before they could be implemented: possibly, allegedly at least, because some members of his inner-circle were co-opted by the Albanian mafia and other local gangs.
So Naboa coming into power was both a big deal and not a big deal: big in that he seems keen to do something about these gangs and their violence from the get-go, but less big in that other politicians have tried and failed to do the same, and there's a good chance his efforts will fail just as completely as those that came before.
Then, in the wake of Naboa's formal ascension into office, during which he reiterated his vow to respond to the threat of these gangs with violence is necessary, and following several months of political assassinations, the blowing up of bridges and the killing and kidnapping of prison guards and police officers, on January 7, 2024 a drug lord nicknamed Fito who leads the Los Choneros gang escaped from prison, ostensibly because of Naboa's intended prison reforms, and the fact that until this point he'd been sort of running his gang from the prison where he was technically detained.
A series of riots shook-up prisons across the country, a bunch of guards were taken hostage and a bunch of other inmates escaped, as well. Some more bombs went off, too, creating a general sense of carnage across Ecuador.
President Naboa announced that the country was now in a state of internal armed conflict, sent the military into the streets and the prisons to search for Fito and to reestablish order, and 22 gangs were officially classified as terrorist organizations.
A few days later, on January 9, a group of masked, gun-wielding men attacked a local TV station and broadcast, live, their taking the station staff hostage, telling viewers that they were doing so because the government was trying to mess with the mafias.
The government announced they arrested 13 suspects in that TV station attack, and that they freed those and other hostages that were taken across the country, but the big outcome of that attack and that general carnage that surrounded it is that Naboa announced a state of emergency and a declaration of war on the gangs operating in the country.
This state of emergency is scheduled to last for 60 days, and grants the government additional, temporary powers meant to help them combat heavily armed and well-connected gangs.
But there's some concern that this temporary suspension of some people's rights and the ability to go hard and brutal against these gangs, bringing the full force of the country's police and military to bear against them, might end up being less of a temporary thing and more of an initial justification for a new status quo in which the government wields more, and more absolute power so they can do difficult things, but at the expense of human rights in the country.
And folks worry about this because something similar was done, and seems to have worked really well, by some measures at least, in El Salvador.
Officials from across the political spectrum, far-left to far-right and everything in between, from Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, and Chile have publicly expressed admiration for the model that's working, for some value of "working," in El Salvador, at times suggesting or outright saying they would like or intend to replicate the so-called "Bukele Plan" in their own countries.
The sense here, amongst some analysts who know the region and the players well, is that the popularity Bukele enjoys is desirable for politicians, and so far it's the only proven way to deal with gangs that are this powerful: you have to grab all the power, do away with human rights, and basically just go completely sociopathic against them, giving everyone the sense that the government is the biggest and most violent beast around, not the gangs, and anyone who steps out against the government will be killed or imprisoned for doing so.
This sort of approach, of course, often leads to what's sometimes euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," and in this case what's sometimes called "hustle-bro populism" serves as a foot in the door toward outright dictatorial, if very popular rule.
And there's no shortage of concern from the international community, in particular, but also political opposition within these countries, that the presence of strongman leaders, no matter how popular they are, will degrade the rule of law and democratic norms in these countries, which in turn often leads to corruption, more violence—justified by gesturing at the common enemy of the people, in this case, at this moment, the gangs—and that then goes on to justify all sorts of other abuses, as well.
The big issue here, though, is that most of the other attempts to control this gang problem in South and Central America—which in this part of the world is fueled by the drug trade, and thus, secondarily, by wealthier countries—those attempts haven't worked.
And this approach, though flawed in many ways, does seem to work.
And people living in El Salvador, thus far at least, seem to be willing to suffer those negative consequences if it will make their day to day lives less dangerous and violence-prone.
What we're seeing in this relative success of what we might think of as an illiberal democratic model in Central America, then, isn't the traditional issue of a populism-powered, corrupt politician grabbing control, because not having a powerful and popular dictator who's willing to use violence in this way in control would seem to be, in some ways at least, worse.
And that would seem to represent a failure of the many alternatives that have been tried and proposed, and the entities—including the world's many liberal democracies—that continue to support them.
There's a chance these not-uncommon variables and outcomes spark a wave of Bukele lookalikes through Latin America, then, though it's also possible that Bukele's own antics will catch up with him, and he, like many authoritarians throughout history, will crumble under his own weight and ambition before his movement can expand and really take off.
It may also be that this model isn't replicable, is an El Salvador-specific thing, or that politicians like Naboa will figure out a way to make use the concept on a temporary basis, serving as a more traditional version of the dictator, taking on more power in order to put the whammy on the gangs, but then beneficently stepping aside, handing that power back in order to reassert the primacy of democracy; it's not a common outcome, but it's possible.
There's no way to know which way things will go yet, but we'll probably have a better sense in a few months, when this state of emergency in Ecuador is set to lapse, and other leaders throughout the region will have had the chance to assess the benefits of a shorter-term play, and will thus have a more complete sense of how to structure their platform and pitch for the many elections being held throughout the region in 2024.
Show Notes
https://www.cfr.org/blog/surge-crime-and-violence-has-ecuador-reeling
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/ecuadors-crisis-a-long-road-ahead/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarceration-rates-by-country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/7/could-el-salvadors-gang-crackdown-spread-across-latin-america
https://archive.ph/49KLp
https://www.democratic-erosion.com/2022/10/14/el-salvador-is-objectively-becoming-safer-but-at-what-cost-to-democracy/
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/nayib-bukeles-growing-list-of-latin-american-admirers/
https://archive.ph/S78X5
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/10/ecuadors-narco-gang-violence-a-timeline-of-the-recent-crisis
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/14/ecuador-prison-staff-held-hostage-by-inmates-all-freed
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ecuador-cracks-down-prisons-restore-order-after-hostage-crisis-2024-01-14/
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-02/two-years-of-bitcoin-in-bukeles-el-salvador-an-opaque-experiment-with-a-little-used-currency.html
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022
Ecuador State of Emergency