https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...74f4b6-2adc-11ee-a948-a5b8a9b62d84_story.html
How about putting more than 1% of your population in prison?
That’s how El Salvador is going about fighting crime. In May of last year, 71,000 Salvadorans were held behind bars, according to the US State Department, up from 39,600 in 2018.
President Nayib Bukele, the mastermind of El Salvador’s mass incarceration policy, doesn’t think he has anything to be ashamed of. Last year, he notes proudly, El Salvador’s homicide rate fell to 7.8 per 100,000 Salvadorans, the second lowest in Central America, after Nicaragua. In 2018, the year before Bukele came into office, the rate was just above 52. In 2015 it topped 100, at the time the highest in the world.
If some human rights have been trampled along the way toward social peace — if innocent Salvadorans have been swept up and incarcerated; and the incarcerated occasionally mistreated to the point of death — it’s a reasonable price to squash a festering gang problem that had put the streets off limits for most Salvadorans.
And here lies a problem: Not only are Salvadorans loving it. Politicians and policymakers from neighboring Honduras to faraway Argentina have been impressed by the Bukele regime’s iron fist, tempted by the political payoff that similar tactics might yield in their own increasingly crime-ridden societies.
The strategy doesn’t work for long in a democracy, though, given its glaring conflict with the notion of justice, accountability and civil rights. It is well suited to politicians aiming to perpetuate themselves in power, like Bukele, who is defying his country’s constitution to run for re-election. But over time it becomes apparent that abuses are not a bug but a feature; excess force is deployed to spread fear. Suspended civil rights are often not recovered.
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