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What are your thoughts on El Salvador's crackdown on gangs?

El Salvador crackdown breaks the gangs – at huge cost to human rights

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/20/bukele-el-salvador-gangs-crackdown

War on gangs by populist leader Nayib Bukele has produced extraordinary change, but ‘the cure could be as harmful as the disease’

El Salvador crackdown breaks the gangs – at huge cost to human rights

So Mr. Bitcoin President of El Salvador has deployed a massive wave of incarcerating violent gang members to combat endemic violence in the country, but also at the cost of civil liberties and also not addressing the root causes of the gang violence in the first place.

Of course, El Salvador has been among the most violent countries in the world in terms of murder rates and violent crimes so something had to be done, but I'm not convinced that this crackdown will do anything but kick the can down the road.

Thoughts? Also, apologies for the Guardian link it was the first summary to come up when I searched it :ohnoes:

12 comments

mittens

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It's hard to say if it's even effective but my bets are on that it being the opposite. How you say? Well for one we're trusting their own 0 homicides figures to make assumptions about effectiveness. And second, it's well known that Bukele's government has been discretely liberating big MS-13 capos who quickly hide on other latinamerican countries which has all the markings of a pact between gang leaders and the government. In essence, government heads have become the defacto capos and are doing gang shit, the police is now part of the maras muscle and the arbitrary arrests prove it. The rest of the prison stuff is just for show. Even if this was not true, jails are known hotpots of potential criminality. It's where new gangs like CJNG were formed, so it's just delaying an inevitable problem. From wherever you look, it's a temporary band-aid.

bbnh69420

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It’s not good (shocker). Everyone agrees that El Salvador has a terrible gang culture, that the Maras and others are not good for a society, but you’ll never solve the problem with a bitcoin-based favela sweep, rounding up anyone with tattoos

The_Dawn

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Any response to any crime wave that isnt "feed, house, and medically treat everyone for free and give them good jobs" is like. Pretty explicitly fascist lol. Any "violent crackdown on thugs" is just training for any interal communist/insurrectionary threat.

HauntedBySpectacle

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Pretty explicitly fascist

what do you make of this? i think that's hyperbolic

RNAi

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Was it coupled with "feed, house, and medically treat everyone for free and give them good jobs"?

It's Deng so probably not,

HauntedBySpectacle

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i just don't think it's fascist even if it's not the ideal solution

The_Dawn

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In 1979, urban unemployed workers within the People's Republic of China has reached 20 million, the highest number of unemployed since the founding of People's Republic of China. In Beijing alone, unemployment amounted to some 400,000 accounting for 8.6% of the city's total population. On average one person was unemployed for every 2.7 urban residents. The maximum number of unemployed persons in Tianjin was 380,000, accounting for 11.7% of the city's total population. The unemployed also included the sent down youth forced to retreat into the mountains and the countryside during the cultural revolution, accounting for the newly increased urban idle population.

But I'm sure it rules that they tortured and killed a bunch of ppl

HauntedBySpectacle

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I said it was unideal but not fascist, not that it "rules". I agree with you that fighting poverty is the best solution to crime, I just dislike the label fascist being used for a concept so broad it's happened in basically every society including socialist ones. Also I sent NATOpedia because it's a short overview and easily readable, maybe take its specifics with a grain of salt.

Frogmanfromlake

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As someone who lives on the border of El Salvador, it's a very mixed bag. MS-13 has been an issue for as long as I can remember. I've had childhood friends join up with them and I was even involved as a teenager beating the shit out of some of their targets for intimidation. The people of El Salvador aren't all RAH RAH with IMF policies. Just imagine if you knew friends and family that were killed by gangs, if you had a gun pressed against your head on more than one occasion, if you had sisters or friends who were raped out in the open and nobody could stop it from fear of retaliation.

That's the reality for a lot of people out there, among many things. They see no end in sight as their valuables get stolen or family members killed. So they turn to the solution that seems to stop it quickly. El Salvador has done some things to address the economic issues but not enough. Will this crackdown work? It's a toss up. Nicaragua had a crackdown and it seemed to work, but El Salvador isn't run nearly as competently.

bbnh69420

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What economic measures has Bukele undertaken outside of the bitcoin stuff? I know he’s more confrontational re: US and IMF, but does that language translate into policy?

Frogmanfromlake

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He did some stuff during Covid that I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was more than we did in Guatemala by far. There were some small improvements on social security if I'm remembering correctly. Unfortunately, his spat with the US is more about his ego than anything else. He's a populist that initially started out with a left-wing party before they kicked him out for being a neolib. The economic measures were small and were almost completely abandoned after he went on his Bitcoin crusade.

Shinji_Ikari

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Its like taking asprin for cancer.

Sure if you have cancer, a couple asprin for pain might help, but it's not treating it.

Reversed, you might still need some asprin even if you're treating the cancer.

But at the end of the day

Just imagine if you knew friends and family that were killed by gangs, if you had a gun pressed against your head on more than one occasion, if you had sisters or friends who were raped out in the open and nobody could stop it from fear of retaliation.

Yeah, some people should be given the wall for non-political reasons. This site will sometimes over-correct to violent justice for the Capitalists but baby gloves for everyone else. Some people are just as cruel as the Capitalist, but with a non state-approved method of building and expressing power. I wouldn't feel good with living next to basically ex-bandits if they were "rehabilitated". Same with a cop with a long rap sheet of abuses. What is the difference between a cop enforcing state violence for a pittance pay, and a gang member enforcing gang violence for a pittance pay.