In 1995, El Salvador had an intentional homicide rate of 139 per 100,000, the highest in the world and one of the highest rates recorded in modern history.

Like all educated middle-class Americans, my core understanding of urban crime comes from The Wire, so for comparison, when the show took place, the homicide rate in Baltimore was in the high 30s and low 40s. The national US homicide rate peaked in 1980 at 10.2. The 2023 rate was about 5.5, which is very high for a wealthy Western country. Using data from the last few years, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are all between 0.5-1.1. Japan and Singapore are at about 0.1-0.2.

While the murder rate in El Salvador fell quickly after 1995, it remained the highest on average in the world across much of the following years, ranging between 40 and 107 from 2002 to 2018, typically beating out other highly murderous countries like Jamaica, Honduras, Belize, South Africa, the Bahamas, Brazil, Saint Lucia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. As far as I can tell, the only country to match El Salvador’s murder rate in modern times was Colombia in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the height of the drug war against Pablo Escobar.

But in 2023, El Salvador’s official murder rate dropped to 2.4 per 100,000, putting it in the league of Lithuania, Montenegro, and Canada. The rates of El Salvador’s neighbors, Guatemala and Honduras, remain 5-10X higher. Not far away, Jamaica holds the top spot in the world at about 50.

El Salvador’s seemingly miraculous turnaround has been largely attributed to the efforts of President Nayib Bukele, who first took office in 2019 and launched possibly the most successful anti-crime crackdown in modern history. The country has been under quasi-martial law since 2022 and about 1.7% of the population is in prison.

I traveled through El Salvador for nine days, stopping in San Salvador (the capital), Santa Ana, La Palma, and along the Ruta de Flores. I wanted to see for myself how much the country had changed, whether it really was safer, and to hear what Salvadorans thought of Bukele. Like Notes on the Ivory Coast, most of this essay is devoted to my research based on readings and talking to locals, but I’ll also write a bit about my travel experiences at the end.

My major sources:

Insight Crime has done a lot of great work on Latin America’s gangs and law enforcement policies. I read everything I could on its website, most importantly “El Salvador’s (Perpetual) State of Emergency: How Bukele’s Government Overpowered Gangs” from December 2023. Though Insight acknowledges the results of Bukele’s anti-crime efforts, it tends to be critical of Bukele in general.

Some of my sources on pre-Bukele Salvadoran law enforcement strategies include Mo Hume’s “Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs”, Robert Muggah and John de Boer’s “Mano Dura: the war on gangs,” and Sonja Wolf’s “Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador.”

Maria Micaela Sviatschi’s “Spreading Gangs: Exporting US Criminal Capital to El Salvador” is the best explainer of the commonly held thesis that the American deportation of Salvadoran criminal immigrants inadvertently caused El Salvador’s gang problems.

William Wheeler’s “State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence” is a 3+ hour audiobook that gives a vivid description of the rise of El Salvador’s gangs. Similarly, I read Douglas Farah and Kathryn Babineau’s “The Evolution of MS 13 in El Salvador and Honduras.” They came out in 2020 and 2017 respectively, before the Bukele crackdown. This Congressional Research Services report from 2007 is also interesting, along with “Killers on a Shoestring Budget: Inside the Gangs of El Salvador.”

I watched two interviews of Bukele: American Society/Council of the Americas in 2019 and Tucker Carlson in 2022. A key source on Bukele’s background is the New Yorker’s “The Rise of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s Authoritarian President.”

Other important sources include this primer on Bukele’s Territorial Control Plan and this fact sheet on the Alliance for Prosperity. Other lesser sources are linked within.

Overview

Population (2021) – 6.3 million

Population growth rate (2021) – 0.3%

Size – 8,124 square miles (a little smaller than New Jersey, a little larger than Slovenia)

GDP (nominal, 2021) – $35.3 billion (more than Cyprus)

GDP growth rate (2022) – 2.6%

GDP per capita (2023) – $5,557

GDP per capita PPP (2023) – $11,717

Inflation rate range (2018-2023) – -1%-7.5% (Note – El Salvador uses the US Dollar)

Biggest export – Shirts and sweaters

Median age (2023) – 27

Life expectancy (2020) – 71

Founded – 1824

Religion (2017) – 84% Christian (45% Catholic), 15% no religion

Corruption Perceptions Index ranking (2022) – #116

Heritage Index of Economic Freedom ranking – #114

Rise of the Gangs

What would eventually become the nations of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Costa Rica broke away from Spain in 1821, then immediately volunteered to join the Mexican Empire (Panama got independence at the same time but joined Colombia), and then they seceded from Mexico two years later as the Federal Republic of Central America. In 1841, the federation broke apart into its five constituent pieces mostly because the land area was too large, the geography too rough (with lots of mountains, jungles, and deserts), the people too divided, the government too weak, and everyone was too poor to make a grand military unification campaign worth the effort.

After a brief civil war, the five states had a fairly similar and tumultuous history. They remained impoverished despite some meager economic investments from the US and Europe which drove agricultural production in bananas, coffee, sugar, indigo, and cocoa. Extreme economic inequality was prevalent, with a few powerful landowning families lording over a mass of peasants. Industry was meager-to-non-existent. The governments lurched between corrupt democracies and corrupt authoritarian dictatorships, usually with the backing of the local Catholic Church. Uprisings, civil wars, and border tussles were common throughout the next 100+ years, though at least not on the scale of the massive civil wars chronically breaking out to the north in Mexico. The one eventual exception to the chaos was Costa Rica, which became a peaceful and fairly prosperous democracy after some impressive statecraft in the 1940s.

El Salvador’s government was marginally more stable than the others throughout this time due to the presence of a particularly strong oligarchy of wealthy families that shared power through the political system by alternating pre-ordained presidents through various forms of election rigging. Chronic peasant opposition and unrest became more intense in the 20^th century as leftist ideologies took hold in the countryside. In 1931, the sham-democratic government was overthrown by the military which led a series of brutal crackdowns against leftist rural rebellions, with casualties reaching into the tens of thousands in single years. Leftist guerrillas fighting right-wing death squads became the norm. The dominance of the oligarchs remained in the background as various military governments reigned for almost the next 40 years.

By the late 1970s, the military regime appeared to be on its last leg. The leftist opposition was increasingly well-organized (with financing from Cuba and the USSR) and was beginning to sway the Salvadoran masses against the blatantly corrupt military dictators.  In 1977, the military had to lean on a comical level of fraud to win the national election, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans flooding the streets to protest for democracy. The military killed hundreds in their efforts to disperse the mobs and the country was pushed another step closer to a breaking point. There was increasingly little faith on both the right and left for a peaceful resolution.

In 1979, a different faction of the military, with significant oligarch support, overthrew the government in a coup and did away with the pretense of elections. The new government attempted a moderate path by maintaining military dominance but attempting some leftist land reforms. Fearing a complete government collapse and the rise of communism in its backyard, the United States embraced the new military regime and sent ample economic and military aid. But internally, the government struggled to maintain control of the country, and resorted to harsh measures that, yet again, led to the deployment of death squads and the murders of at least dozens of Salvadorans. Rightly or wrongly, US support was widely perceived as the primary reason the government managed to stay in power.

A popular resistance leader emerged: Archbishop Oscar Romero. Though Catholic (which traditionally aligned with the conservative governments in the region), Romero opposed the military regimes. Leftists tried to claim him as their own, but Romero maintained that he was just an old school Christian who wanted to help the poor and not see protestors get slaughtered in the streets by death squads. He led mass protests through San Salvador and wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter asking the US to cease support for the government.

On March 24, 1980, Romero was shot and killed by a sniper while leading a march of tens of thousands of supporters delivering a sermon. It’s not clear whether the government ordered the killing, or an aggressive right-wing faction took the initiative on its own, or if it was a Thomas Becket situation, but regardless, most people blamed the state. Romero’s funeral turned out hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans but tragically turned into another blood bath as multiple bombs went off and dozens were killed between the explosions and trampling.

This is considered to be the catalyst for the El Salvador Civil War. Leftist forces organized into the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), and with support from the Soviet Union and Cuba, they attempted a widespread armed uprising in the countryside to overthrow the government. The military government got even more support from the US, and bulked up both its official army and paramilitary death squads to put down the rebellion. Fighting lasted 11 or 12 years depending on when you want to date the start, and inflicted something like 80,000 dead (between military and civilian casualties) and more than half a million displaced.

It was a classic insurgency – the military controlled the cities and bases, the rebels had the countryside. Both sides hit each other wherever they could, with activity often resembling terrorist attacks more than military engagements. Civilians were commonly targeted for supporting one side or the other, and entire villages were massacred.

More than one million Salvadorans fled the country throughout the war (1980 population = 4.5 million). About half went to neighboring nations, though they were not particularly stable at the time. The rest went to the United States; from 1980 to 1990, the Salvadoran population in the US rose from 94,000 to 465,000. Immigrants tend to settle wherever their past countrymen settled, so most Salvadorans ended up in Los Angeles.

Gangs of LA

At the time, Salvadorans weren’t granted refugee status, so nearly all who fled to the US came as illegal immigrants through Mexico and had to eke out a living on the edge of the economy. They weren’t the poorest Salvadorans, who usually couldn’t afford to escape, let alone to the United States; rather they were the middle-to-lower-middle class of El Salvador, but that still made them very poor by American standards. They mostly settled in the impoverished suburbs of Los Angeles, where hundreds of thousands of other Salvadoran and Central American immigrants (both legal and illegal) were already living. They quickly got jobs where they could, nearly all in low-wage labor and retail. Very few spoke English, but with family support and hard work, they could get by.

Arguably, the transition was even tougher on the children of these refugees. Many were grade schoolers or teenagers that were suddenly ripped from their homes and taken to a new, strange place to live. Others were born shortly after their mothers arrived and grew up in this environment. As with all refugee communities, women and children were far more prevalent than men, who were more likely to be involved in the fighting back home and targeted by violence. So the Los Angeles Salvadoran community was awash with single mothers, and even when the fathers were around, both parents usually had to work to financially support the family.

Between that family dynamic and concerns over deportation preventing many of these children from going to school, tens of thousands of Salvadoran children found themselves with lots of free time in one of the more unsavory parts of the United States. Up to that point, Los Angeles was never quite Baltimore or St. Louis or Detroit with its gang violence, but it was pretty bad. Like everywhere else, LA gangs were largely oriented around a mixture of race, ethnicity, and geography. The black gangs were dominated by the Bloods and Crips, whose biggest rivals were Mexican gangs loosely affiliated with the Mexican Mafia (which consists mostly of Mexican-Americans), and there were also some Asian (mostly Korean) gangs thrown in. These groups battled each other for control of territory, mostly to distribute drugs shipped in from abroad, but also for extortion, petty criminality, and honor.

These organizations didn’t look too kindly upon the newly arriving Salvadorans who were seen as poor and backwards even by Mexican and Central American gang members. Since neighborhoods tended to be racially segregated and the Salvadorans tended to live near other Hispanics, the Mexican gangs in particular harassed the Salvadorans. Dealing with extortion and arbitrary violence became normal for the refugees.

One of the gangs under the Mexican Mafia was the 18^th Street Gang, AKA Mara 18, or Barrio 18, or B-18, which was known for being highly progressive in regard to its membership. Unlike nearly every other gang at the time, B-18 allowed pretty much any Hispanic to join: Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Hispanic Americans, and even Salvadorans. In every other possible way, B-18 was not progressive at all, and was known for conspicuous brutality and a predilection for murdering both enemies and those within its own ranks at the slightest provocation. But lots of bullied Salvadoran children and teenagers were grateful to receive some sort of protection from other gangs, so they joined existing B-18 chapters or formed their own, and the Salvadoran gang presence began to take hold.

The most notorious Salvadoran gang has a murkier origin story. In the early 1980s, many Salvadoran middle and high schoolers adapted somewhat to American culture. They used their ample unsupervised time to smoke pot and rock out to heavy metal music. They grew their hair long, wore metal jewelry, and got tattoos illegally. After years of harassment from the Mexican gangs and B-18, some of these young men created their own gang: Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13. It was initially born to protect these young Salvadorans but quickly evolved to challenge the other gangs for territorial control in Salvadoran neighborhoods.

If you Google around, you’ll find a dozen different explanations for the name alone. Mara Salvatrucha might mean “long live El Salvador” or “watch out for Salvadorans” or “street smart Salvadoran gang” or it might be a reference to Salvadoran leftist guerrilla fighters or a particular street in El Salvador or the 13^th letter in the alphabet, etc. There is far more consensus on the initial culture of MS-13, which adapted heavy metal aesthetics to gang warfare. MS-13 became associated with devil worship, which was a hot culture war issue at the time given the Satanic panic and the devout Catholicism of Latin Americans. Members would get tattoos of devil’s horns, 666, and other Satanic iconography.

More substantially, MS-13 became known for its trademark weapon: the machete. In much of Latin America, the machete was and still is a fairly innocuous agricultural tool, though it is sometimes repurposed as a sidearm by guerrilla fighters. As far as I can tell, MS-13 is responsible for creating the image of the machete as a brutal weapon in the United States (ex. Machete). Early on, MS-13 consisted of a bunch of flat-broke teenagers who usually couldn’t get their hands on guns even in gun-ridden LA. Fists, knives, and baseball bats work fine, but the machete was not only a highly effective and commonly owned melee weapon, but also terrifying. If a rival gang member’s body was found on the street with gigantic incisions in his head, everyone in the neighborhood knew who killed him.

Between blasphemous tattoos, rumors of demented Satan worship, and the very real acts of macheting people to death, MS-13 began to earn street cred in LA. They were considered particularly ferocious, quick to violence and murder, but also small-time. Even compared to the other gangs, MS-13 was a disorganized rabble consisting almost entirely of young, disaffected, uneducated, impoverished youth.

New MS-13 members were initiated or “beat in” by other gang members by being mercilessly assaulted for 13 seconds (B-18 proudly beat their new members for 18 seconds). Individual gang cells arose spontaneously or with some support from existing members in new neighborhoods. Leaders of each local gang would collect all the money made by their group and distribute it among their gang underlings, but there was little coordination between the cells.  It was more like a club rather than a hierarchical organization. Likewise, when MS-13 members weren’t macheting their rivals, they weren’t doing a whole lot else. They didn’t have the connections to tap into the drug game, nor the logistics for extortion, so what little money they made came from petty crime: burglaries, robberies, muggings, etc.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, MS-13 began to develop what Sviatschi and criminologists call “criminal capital.” The education of MS-13 began on the streets just by interacting with (ie. usually fighting) other gangs. But most of this education happened in prisons where the older MS-13 members inevitably ended up. Behind bars, they parlayed with the most experienced and hardened members of other gangs, including plenty of individuals who could be considered part of gang middle-management. These MS-13 member students were usually still fairly young and early in their criminal careers and therefore could get shorter sentences, and when they were released from prison, they brought their newfound wisdom home to share.

Thus, throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, MS-13 began to transform into more of a traditional street gang, particularly starting in 1990 when Ernesto Deras, an ex-special forces Salvadoran soldier with American training, took over the gang. A hierarchical structure was formed where individual gangs served under regional leaders who served under the top leaders. Money was kicked up and information and support was sent down. To generate income, petty criminality was subordinated for the consistent extortion of local businesses (ie. “pay my gang $500 per month or we’ll kill your whole family”). The heavy metal and Stanic iconography were somewhat sublimated, though tattooing continued to be the norm, with the quantities of tattoos emerging as a symbol of devotion to the gang, and therefore prestige. MS-13 still didn’t have too much involvement in drug trafficking, but it began extorting local dealers operating within their territory.

Another bit of murky gang lore is the origin of the war between MS-13 and B-18. The two were initially allies due to their Salvadoran link, but at some point in the late 1980s, the alliance broke down (possibly over a girl) and became one of the most legendary rivalries in gang history. The two gangs have been in a state of open warfare against each other for almost the entirety of the last 24+ years. A significant portion (most?) of the murders perpetrated by MS-13 and B-18 both in the US and El Salvador were and continue to be gang-on-gang violence over territory and honor.

It’s worth reiterating that even after MS-13 began accumulating criminal capital, the vast majority of its membership consisted of literal children, or at least young adults. Individuals generally became affiliated with gangs when they were in middle school or younger when they would serve as look-outs and messengers. With a few years of service, they would be formally inducted into the gang around early high school age, or younger (research on MS-13’s operations in El Salvador in the 2010s found that 60% of members joined before age 15). The later high school or college age members were virtually all veterans or leaders, and rarely stayed out of prison for long.

This youthful energy of MS-13 and similar gangs can partially explain their brutality, but also their attraction. These kids overwhelmingly came from broken homes, were ripped away from their homeland, were subject to abuse from rival gangs, and had (understandably) absentee parents. Gangs stepped in to fulfill the traditional roles of community and family. New members were told that any member would do anything for any other member, that they now had a place to live, money to spend, and a horde of defenders for any physical confrontation. Internal gang rules enforced pro-social norms such as prohibitions on heavy drinking/drugs or stealing girlfriends. Gang membership wasn’t just a job, it was a way of life, and a supposedly comforting one at that.

Gone Home

In 1992, the El Salvador Civil War came to an end. As far as these sorts of brutal civil wars in impoverished countries go, the United Nations-mediated truce between the rightist military government and the leftist FMLN rebels was fairly parsimonious. Most of the Salvadoran military was disbanded and new constitutional restrictions were put on their activity. The rebels laid down their arms and the FMLN reformed as a legitimate political party. An entirely new civilian police force was erected to be composed of a balance of former rightist and leftist soldiers. Elections had started in 1989 and were held again in 1994, this time between the FMLN and ARENA, an initially militant right wing party that had emerged during the civil war but had somewhat reformed into a bigger tent conservative faction. ARENA won in 1994, and despite plenty of grumbling about alleged election rigging, the FMLN settled into a peaceful opposition party role in a presidential democracy.

The war was over but El Salvador was still in ruins. The vast majority of the population lived in abject poverty. Enormous efforts would need to be funded by international aid to rebuild villages and housing blocks. High birth rates had grown the native population to 5.5 million, but over a million Salvadorans remained outside the country. Though international support gave some optimism both at home and abroad, there were open questions as to how well the Salvadoran society could reabsorb tens of thousands of former soldiers into civilian work and possibly hundreds of thousands of returning immigrants, or whether El Salvador even should.

Ultimately, the latter question wasn’t really up to El Salvador. In 1996, the Republican Congress under President Bill Clinton passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). American crime had just peaked in the early 1990s and anti-immigrant sentiment was flaring up, so bipartisan support arose for a new set of rules designed to combat both with harsher laws and more deportations, particularly of immigrants with criminal records.

Thus, from 1998 to 2014, the United States deported 300,000 immigrants to Central America, tens of thousands of whom had criminal records. El Salvador was particularly impacted:

Sviatschi’s thesis, which is commonly echoed by news articles, is that these deportations are the root of El Salvador’s and most of Central America’s ongoing gang and criminality problem.

The argument goes that prior to the deportations, El Salvador had a meager organized crime presence consisting of very localized street gangs committing petty theft. There was also an international narco cartel presence in Central America, but they kept a very low profile while covertly moving product from South America to the US. The deportations then injected tens of thousands of citizens with criminal records, most of whom were gang-affiliated, into El Salvador. These Salvadorans not only brought their culture and criminal capital to El Salvador, but rapidly expanded the ranks of the gangs by recruiting from a population that was left impoverished and scarred by violence after over a decade of civil war. MS-13 and B-18 eventually became so powerful that they resembled parallel states within El Salvador, and their wanton violence is the root cause of the country’s notorious homicide rate.

Wheeler’s report tells this story in more granular detail. Lots of the deportees were dumped at the San Salvador airport with no financial, logistical, or moral support, and so naturally drifted back to their hometowns, usually located in the particularly impoverished outskirts of major cities. Many of these deportees hadn’t been back to El Salvador since they were young children, and had to seek out distant family members who might give them a place to stay. With no education and no job prospects, re-joining or re-forming the American gangs in El Salvador was often the logical choice.

Wheeler described one deportee and former gang member who within days of arriving in El Salvador was accosted by a group of young teenagers identifying themselves as MS-13 and threatening to kill him for being a member of B-18. The deportee then contacted some of his comrades back in the US who verified his membership with MS-13. The teenagers then apologized, admitted that they had never formally signed on with MS-13, and asked the gang member to beat them into membership. Other sources say that the gangs eventually stationed personnel in the airports to keep an eye out for any conspicuously tattooed people stepping off flights from America.

A key factor in the proliferation of the gangs was the power vacuum in El Salvador. Even by the mid-2000s, the new civilian police force was still getting on its feet, and on its best days, it had nowhere near the funding, logistics, or technology of the LAPD to suppress gang activity. Likewise, with the military slashing its personnel and the leftist rebels retiring, El Salvador was awash with unemployed ex-soldiers and cheap weaponry. The civilian police force absorbed some of this, but many well-armed individuals found gang work palatable. Finally, unlike Mexico, Colombia, and later Peru and Ecuador, the giant narco cartels had yet to make serious inroads in Central America so there was no serious local gang competition. The meager street gangs of San Salvador, Santa Ana, and San Miguel were easily beaten and then absorbed by the better organized American gangs.

By 2003, there were 25,000 gang members across all of Central America. That year, the criminal deportations from the US really started to ramp up. By 2004, estimates of gang membership in El Salvador alone were between 6,000 and 30,000. In 2016, arguably at the peak of their power, there were an estimated 60,000-70,000 gang members and maybe half a million collaborators, constituting 8% of the entire population. The gangs operated in 94% of municipalities, extorted 70% of businesses, and between the extortion, violence, and general instability promulgated by their presence, the gangs cost the Salvadoran economy an estimated $4 billion annually, constituting about 15% of GDP. In 2014, its most violent year, El Salvador suffered almost 4,000 murders.

Gangs of El Salvador

After the deportations, the activity of MS-13 and B-18 became more varied and widespread in El Salvador than back in the United States. This seems to be due to both the weakness of law enforcement in El Salvador compared to the US, and the lack of competition from stronger gangs (ie. the black and Hispanic gangs of LA).

Yet the core of gang operations remained the same: extortion. Local chapters of MS-13 and B-18 took control of geographic areas and established protection rackets. Store owners were told that they needed to pay a daily, weekly, or monthly tax to the local gang or face violence against themselves and/or their families. A Salvadoran I talked to told me about how he set up a hostel in a small coastal city, and within days of opening, he was visited by a group of MS-13 members who demanded $250 per month. When the hostel owner initially refused, he was calmly informed that his entire family would be slaughtered imminently. He complied.

Where the gangs in El Salvador and the US diverged is the extent of their control over territory. Wheeler described how many gangs became de facto governments. Gang territories were marked by omnipresent graffiti, usually huge murals of the numbers “13” or “18.” Gangs often set up checkpoints over their neighborhoods and forced anyone going in or out to pay a fee. All businesses within their territory, from branches of multi-national companies down to market stalls on the side of the road selling pupusas were forced to pay the gangs for “protection.” In 2016, the owner of a large bus company estimated that he paid the gangs $500,000 over the course of 19 years, but at the same time, daily extortion payments of $1 were not unheard of.

Since calling the police for any reason at all became a capital offense against the gangs, the gangs themselves would often step into judicial roles and solve what should have been legal disputes. Sometimes these local gang leaders (who were nearly always teenagers) were surprisingly benevolent and fair in their judgements, and took an especially active role in crushing criminal incursions from non-gang members. But more often, these self-appointed dukes were arbitrary, cruel, and took what they wanted from whomever they wanted. A particular issue of concern was when a gang member decided to romantically/sexually pursue a local woman; “no” isn’t really a viable answer when the pursuer has the monopoly of violence on his side.

(Incidentally, women could join MS-13 or B-18. They could choose to be “beaten in” like everyone else, or opt for a literal gang bang, though the latter option carried a stigma as the relatively easy path.)

On the other hand, a Salvadoran mirror to American gang activity was that the leadership seemingly always ended up in jail. This is one of the most baffling elements of gang life to me as an oblivious outsider. Pablo Escobar may have been gunned down by the police but at least he got to live a billionaire lifestyle for almost a decade. In contrast, seemingly all top members of both MS-13 and B-18 end up incarcerated. This was the case even back in the 2000s when the Salvadoran government had completely lost control of the gang situation. No matter how wily the criminal, no matter how total his control over territory, the guys at the top of the hierarchy always ended up in a cell or dead.

Despite chronically imprisoned leadership, the “criminal capital” of MS-13 and B-18 only improved after coming to El Salvador, likely due to a lack of law enforcement opposition and the influx of military veterans. Both MS-13 and B-18 developed official record-keeping, accounting, and hierarchical organization structures. Eventually, while continuing the never-ending war with each other, both gangs established diplomatic relationships with international narco gangs in Mexico and South America, through which they gained new valuable monetary sources by serving as muscle for the narcos when they shipped product through Central America. This proved to be so lucrative that the Honduran branch of MS-13 (which seems to operate quite independently) eventually stopped doing extortions entirely and now subsists on narco dollars.

What do the gangs do with all their money? Of course, they pay their personnel, though the vast majority of members make peanuts. Most money seems to go toward criminal operational administration – bribes, legal fees, and generally trying to keep personnel alive and out of prison. As late as 2018, only one in 20 convictions of gang members resulted in jail time due to a combination of bribery and threats from the gangs. Prior to the 2022 crackdown, MS-13 was said to be burrowing moles into the police and even sending some of its smarter members to law school. Around this time, the gangs were also rapidly expanding their legitimate business assets with purchases of legal Salvadoran companies.

A lot of the money went to the war. This is crucial to understanding why El Salvador has historically been, pardon my French, such a shit hole, and why harsh anti-gang measures have been so welcomed. MS-13 and B-18 weren’t just quasi-government entities in El Salvador, they were quasi-government entities at war that have turned much of El Salvador into a battlefield over the last 20 years.

Some substantial portion of the killing was based on actual realpolitik objectives. Local MS-13 and B-18 gang chapters would target each other to take over territory and the protection rackets within it. Once conquered, the gangs would paint over the giant “13”’s or “18”’s, eliminate conspirators, and take root as the new overlords.

But more often, the gang-on-gang violence was a lot less strategic. Gang members would try to kill each other opportunistically, or because an individual member wandered into the wrong neighborhood, or simply as a way for an individual gang member to boost his street cred. Supposedly, at some point, the memberships of MS-13 and B-18 were so oversaturated that the gangs began to initiate tougher induction rituals, including the requirement that new members kill someone, usually a member of the rival gang.

Gang members killing each other is one thing, but killing civilians is another thing entirely. I wish I could find a numerical breakdown, but my sense is that the gangs killed innocents at least as often as each other. Non-gang members could be killed for refusing to pay extortion fees, for disrespect, or by bad luck for being caught in the crossfire of some sort of dispute.

If the root-cause of the gang war is now pretty much lost to history, then why was so much blood been spilled between MS-13 and B-18 over 20+ years? Why did these gangs terrorize an entire country, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands and an annual double-digit percentage drag on GDP? What was it all for?

A knee-jerk response to these questions is money, and that’s almost entirely wrong. There was shockingly little money at stake in the Salvadoran gang wars.

Fighting for Scraps

In 2016, Salvadoran newspaper El Faro and the New York Times got access to documents from the government of El Salvador that estimated the annual revenue of the El Salvador branch of MS-13 to be… $31.2 million.

Which, divided among its estimated 40,000 members, was $65 per person/per month, or $15 per person/per week. Which was half the minimum wage for an agricultural day-laborer in El Salvador.

But the vast majority of Salvadoran gang members don’t even make $15 per week, at least not from gang payments. Most members basically work for no salary at all, or at best, they get occasional parties or petty cash. I guess you could say that their payments from the gangs are purely in the form of intangible protection, respect, and honor. They survive by parlaying their gang status into small side-hustles, like maintaining their own off-the-books extortion rackets, either on top of the official rackets, or on otherwise untouched businesses.

So maybe the rank-and-file mass members don’t make money from the gang life, but at least the leaders must be unfathomably rich. Right?

Probably not. There is a strong norm within the gangs prohibiting the leaders from getting too wealthy. At best, they use their positions to escape poverty for the middle class and maybe buy a few toys. The same report looked at the results of a successful government raid that captured numerous high-ranking MS-13 members and their assets. These included $34,500 in cash, 22 used cars (valued at $8,000 each), and three small businesses (a bar, a roadside restaurant, and a vegetable stand). One of the highest-ranking members of MS-13 “leased a squat concrete house with a corrugated roof in a neighborhood where rents rarely reach $400. He owned an old Honda Civic and a Nissan van.”

The overall impression of MS-13 from the report is that it is a remarkably petty, small-time operation compared to its outsized reputation. For instance:

“Over a decade ago, the police confiscated an account ledger from José Luis Mendoza Figueroa, a founder of MS-13, that contained no evidence of any drug business. Instead it showed weekly receipts that averaged $14 from the 19 “cliques” — the smallest gang units — he controlled, and trivial outlays for bullets ($8), taxis ($25), Christmas dinners, liquor and “$50 for the homeboys in prison.”

A couple of years ago, federal agents seized a similar ledger from the treasurer of the Park View Locos clique of the MS-13 in Usulután in southeast El Salvador. A log of one day’s expenses showed $30 for a cellphone chip, $10 for “mujer chief” (the chief’s wife or woman), $35 for “another woman” and $10 for food, with $29 listed as the balance.”

This is one of my biggest takeaways from learning about El Salvador. Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru have narco gangs. These organizations are based around the production and sale of extremely valuable commodities, and thus the narco gangs can reach annual revenues on the scale of Fortune 500 companies. This financing translates into firepower and influence that enables them to not only resist their governments, but even eclipse them at times. As of writing this, Ecuador is in a state of near-civil war as it battles its own drug gangs.

El Salvador’s MS-13 and B-18 are not in the same league. Their bread-and-butter is extorting poor people in an impoverished country. Their expertise is localized brutality rather than transnational business. The narco gangs would annihilate the Salvadoran gangs in any fair fight.

But all this raises the question…

Why Are Salvadoran Gangs so Dangerous?

If Salvadoran gangs have shockingly little money, why are they so dangerous?

Over the last 20 years, MS-13 and B-18 have made El Salvador probably the most dangerous country on earth that isn’t an insane totalitarian hell hole or in an actual war. MS-13 is basically a household name in the US now, partially due to their association with illegal immigrants promoted by President Trump and other Republicans. In contrast, Americans rarely hear anything anymore about the Colombian or Peruvian drug cartels even though their annual earnings are at least 10X more than El Salvador’s gangs. We hear a lot about Mexican Cartels, but usually not specific organizations, and despite their best efforts, Mexico is actually doing quite well these days. The Italian Mafia and Japanese Yakuza may be legendary and both still exist, but are a pale shadow of their former selves.

So what’s special about Salvadoran gangs? How were they able to thoroughly destroy a nation and gain international notoriety on such a paltry budget?

(WARNING – PURE SPECULATION AHEAD)

I think what makes El Salvador’s gangs so dangerous is their weakness. Their low earnings and lack of organization perversely make them more dangerous to civilians and other gangs than the far better financed and organized international drug cartels.

Imagine that all organized criminal groups exist on a spectrum between devotion to commerce and honor. Gangs on the far end of one side of the spectrum operate exactly like a business that just so happens to service an illicit market; they don’t engage in violence except as a measure of last resort to protect profits. Gangs on the extreme opposite side of the spectrum barely or don’t care about money at all; they are focused on respect, both for the gang as a whole and the individuals within them.

For example, at the height of the Colombian drug trade, the nation was dominated by two cartels based out of the cities of Medellin and Cali. Famously, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel was more respect-oriented than the “Gentleman of Cali.” Both organizations were monstrous and killed thousands of people, but Cali was said to run like a Fortune 500 Company, tried to keep a low profile, and heavily invested in legal businesses to legitimize their operations. In contrast, Escobar ended up running his business into the ground precisely because he brought far too much attention to himself with self-aggrandizing stunts like running for Parliament, organizing a heist of the Supreme Court, conducting terrorist bombing campaigns targeted at civilians, and presenting himself as a Robin Hood-esque man of the people.

Even with their professionalization processes in the early 1990s and the development of “criminal capital” in the US, MS-13 and B-18 have always been far on the honor side of the spectrum. This is not only evidenced by their origins and meager earnings, but also explains a lot of their… tactically sub-optimal behavior. It explains why the leaders of the gangs all end up in jail (instead of mansions like Escobar and the Cali Cartel leaders), why the vast majority of gang members tattoo their entire bodies even though it makes them obvious targets for law enforcement, why the gangs have been able to take tremendous control over El Salvador’s streets but little control over its government, and why so many children and young adults are lured into organizations that seemingly destine them for death or prison for extraordinarily little monetary reward.

And the honor-orientation explains the sky-high murder rates. Murders, gang wars, civilian casualties, dead police, and all the attention they bring are not good for business. They may be necessary for illicit business, but the wisest gangs figure out that bloodshed is a cost that must be carefully justified. This reality has not stopped MS-13 and B-18 from murdering each other for 20 years and trapping thousands of innocent civilians in the crossfire.

In other words, by my estimation, it is precisely because Salvadoran gangs are relatively poor, disorganized, and unambitious that they are so dangerous. Both the gangs as a whole and individual members have less to lose from fighting. Even their economic activity (extortion) is relatively unaffected by violence, and may even be made more lucrative by violence as it inspires fear and compliance. In contrast, the more commerce-oriented narco gangs that dominate South America and Mexico have enormously complex logistic operations to maintain and war is nearly always a pure cost.

Caveat – Non-Gang Criminality

I think there’s an underexplored or maybe misunderstood aspect of crime in El Salvador. When media outlets, pundits, and researchers talk about crime in El Salvador, it is typically considered synonymous with gang activity. The standard story of Salvadoran crime is that lots of Salvadorans fled the country during the civil war (1980-1992), the young refugees joined gangs and developed criminal capital in the United States, then they were deported back to El Salvador where they formed the powerful gangs that terrorized the country for the last 20 years.

But look at these two graphs. First, the Salvadoran murder rate per 100,000 citizens:

Second, here’s deportations from the US to El Salvador:

Notice that El Salvador’s murder rate peaked before the influx of Salvadoran criminal deportees. The US started to increase deportations in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and then really started to ramp up deportations in 2003; but throughout that 1996-2003, the murder rate plummeted from 139 to a low of 47 in 2002. This means that El Salvador’s crime rate went down as more criminals came to the country.

In other words, El Salvador’s worst crime years came from non-gang affiliated Salvadorans. I have tried to look into this but have found absolutely no explanations for who was doing all this killing in the late 1990s. My best guess is that there were a lot of reprisals and general lawlessness in the aftermath of the civil war that ended in 1992, but again, I haven’t actually seen any documentation of this.

Looking at the post-2003 era, there also doesn’t seem to be much correlation between the number of gang members in El Salvador and the murder rate. Gang member estimates are hard to find, but the peak was likely either in 2015 or 2018 for reasons I’ll elaborate upon in the coming section. Yet the murder rate was generally parabolic until a peak in 2015 and then went into a fairly fast decline thereafter. Granted, the murder rate during this entire era was significantly impacted by the government’s law enforcement strategies (which barely existed prior to the Mano Dura policy of 2003), so maybe any correlation (or lack thereof) between the murder rate and the gang membership during this era is meaningless.

However, there is evidence that though the gangs commit an outsized proportion of criminal behavior, non-gang criminality is still a major factor in El Salvador. For instance, in 2005, the Salvadoran government stated that 50% of murders were committed by non-gang members. Another report from the National Civil Police from around the same time estimated that 60% of criminal activity came from the gangs.

Obviously this doesn’t lessen the horrors of the gangs in any way. But I think it’s important not to frame the Salvadoran crime problem as “a bunch of sociopaths were deported from US prisons and began terrorizing the helpless, innocent Salvadoran people.” El Salvador had been an extremely violent country for a good century before the gangs arrived. It had a history of military dictatorship, right wing death squads, left wing guerrillas, and civil wars. The gangs somewhat monopolized the background violence, and may have even deterred it, but El Salvador’s criminality is not limited to MS-13 and B-18.

Combatting the Gangs

The government of El Salvador slowly got back on its feet after the civil war. The reconciliation between the right and left wing went fairly well and elections were peaceful and sufficiently free and fair. The right wing ARENA party won the presidency in 1994 and again in 1999, with each president constitutionally limited to a single 5 year term.

But in the early 2000s, the conservative stranglehold was slipping. Crime was considered to be spiraling out of control as the gangs solidified their dominance over El Salvador and much of Central America. Here’s a Washington Post article from the time that starts off with: “The head of a young girl, hacked off with an ax, was found in a burlap bag in October in this industrial port on the Caribbean. The bag also contained a note to President Ricardo Maduro from Mara 18, an ultra-violent street gang, saying that the killing was “in memory” of a gangster who had been killed by police.”

It didn’t help that El Salvador’s conservative administrations were seen as subservient to the US government, which after arming the death squads of the predecessor administrations, was now dumping thousands of hardened criminals into the country. President Fransisco Flores Perez saw the writing on the wall and feared the FMLN would finally take power after he left office. He decided that bold action needed to be taken against the gangs to salvage an ARENA victory in the upcoming 2004 election.

In July 2003, President Flores announced “Mano Dura” (“Firm Hand”) on the radio. The government ordered its new civilian police force, with some military assistance, to flood into the worst neighborhoods of El Salvador and arrest anyone they suspected of gang activity under a new set of laws permitting far greater police powers. This sounds extraordinarily dangerous and difficult, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. The vast majority of gang members were covered in tattoos, often with explicit gang symbols (like devil horns or a big “18”). The government forces simply overwhelmed the gangs by appearing quickly and with far more firepower, much of which was financed by the US taxpayer.

The result was the arrest of 20,000 suspected gang members across the country in a matter of months. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t even much bloodshed in the process. Murders and violent crime rates plummeted. Neighboring Honduras and Guatemala were so impressed that they quickly instituted their own Mano Dura policies, albeit less harsh ones. President Flores declared victory over the gangs and his ARENA party would go on to win the next presidential election in 2004.

But El Salvador’s apparent triumph over the gangs had a few problems.

First, by this point in the early 2000s, the US deportations were only beginning to ramp up and the gangs weren’t yet that powerful. Some estimates of the total gang population in El Salvador at that time were as low as 6,000… which is a lot lower than the 20,000 arrested. A 2004 estimate cited by Hume is 10,000-39,000. That’s substantially more, but clearly a lot of innocent people were swept up in the chaos, maybe even mostly innocent people.

Second, there were widespread reports of human rights abuses. Individual policemen were essentially given judicial power, which whether by error or malice, explains why the police may have overshot their arrests so dramatically. Often the police made arrests based on tips, so lots of people were settling disputes and grudges by sending their annoying neighbors to prison.

Third, some analysts (like Wheeler) have argued that Mano Dura inadvertently strengthened the gangs in the long run by testing their coordination ability. Up until 2003, the gangs were starting to build up as MS-13 and B-18 members trickled back to El Salvador from the US and recruited locally in El Salvador, but absent strong law enforcement or external rivals, there was little organizational pressure to increase operational efficiency. Mano Dura shocked the gangs and prompted management reforms. If Mano Dura had crushed the gangs entirely, the reforms would have been futile, but…

Fourth, and most importantly, 85-95% of the suspected gang members arrested during the crackdown were released within six months. The constitution of El Salvador is very Western and protects the standard rights of due process. The Salvadoran Supreme Court ended up striking down most of Mano Dura and virtually all of those rounded up were let back onto the streets.

I’ve read different interpretations of why this occurred. Right wingers (including someone I spoke to in El Salvador) say that the ARENA-led government was opportunistically stabbed in the back by the FMLN, which held much of the legislature and courts, to undermine ARENA’s surging poll numbers in the upcoming elections. Left wingers say that the courts followed their constitutional duty.

Regardless, the general consensus I’ve gotten from media and economic sources (as well as Wheeler) is that Mano Dura was mostly bullshit to begin with. It was all flash and no substance. The crackdowns were too brief, not thorough enough, and did nothing to alleviate the fundamental causes of gang activity (ie. poverty, disenfranchisement, inequality, etc.). It was designed to look good in newspapers and create a very visible impact for voters, but ARENA never expected the laws to pass the courts, and could blame the inevitable shutdown of Mano Dura on the FMLN.

That may well be an accurate assessment of ARENA’s motives, but I think the negative historical consensus on Mano Dura is too harsh. As far as I can tell, the strategic elements of 2003’s Mano Dura weren’t that different from Bukele’s extraordinarily successful gang crackdown in 2022. As I’ll get into later, the main differences were that Bukele had far more widespread support from the other branches of the government and the Salvadoran people, better management of the imprisoned suspects, and hit even harder with police and military forces. But the principles of the policies were the same – arrest everyone in sight who might be gang-related and figure out the details later.

In 2004, ARENA’s Antonio Saca was elected president. Mano Dura had given the party the bump it needed to defeat the FMLN, but as the Mano Dura policies were struck down, ARENA found itself back where it started. El Salvador’s economy was still terrible, the gangs were back to terrorizing people (the World Bank’s figures actually have the murder rate increasing by 16% from 2003 to 2004, other sources say there was a slight decrease), and the US continued to ramp up deportations.

Perhaps worst of all from an electoral perspective, ARENA was rightly seen as incredibly corrupt. Former President Flores would later be charged with embezzling $10-15 million worth of aid sent to the Salvadoran government from Taiwan to help earthquake victims, and he would die in 2016 while under house arrest. His successor, President Saca, was described: “the brazen manner in which [President] Saca and his people are widely perceived to have used their positions for personal enrichment went beyond the pale.” He would go on to set the Salvadoran corruption high score by embezzling and misappropriating about $300 million; he’s been sitting in Salvadoran prison since 2018.

With the 2009 presidential election coming up, ARENA again feared its time was up, so it tried the Mano Dura gambit once more. It needed an even bigger and better crackdown on crime to prove that the party could clean up El Salvador. So in 2006, the government launched… Super Mano Dura, or “Super Firm Hand.”

I can’t find a ton of information on this second crackdown, but it seemed to be slower and more measured. Rather than blitzkrieg the streets with thousands of police, the government slowly implemented tougher laws to increase sentencing and criminalize lower tier criminal behavior, while beefing up the standing police force. Lesser forms of many of these laws were briefly in place during the first Mano Dura but had been struck down. The “broken window theory” most associated with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani may have been an influence.

Unfortunately for ARENA, the magic didn’t work again despite a modest drop in the murder rate. For the first time in the post-civil war era, the ex-guerrilla FMLN took power under President Mauricio Funes, a former journalist who had interviewed leftist rebels during the civil war but had never joined their cause. Funes initially focused on poverty-relief efforts but there wasn’t much an impoverished state of an impoverished country could do about that. Inevitably, he had to confront the gangs, which had not only maintained their power, but considerably grown in strength over the course of the previous regime.

But the Funes regime didn’t want to go back to Mano Dura. The FMLN had spent half a decade criticizing the tough-on-crime policies as brutal, authoritarian, misguided, and as a band-aid solution that ignored the more fundamental causes of crime in El Salvador. According to Wolf writing back in 2011, the new regime initially began scaling back Super Mano Dura to focus on systemic reforms, but then stopped as the media and public pushed for faster anti-crime results. But if the regime couldn’t fight the gangs directly, what could it do?

On March 11, 2012, the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro alleged that the Funes regime had begun to negotiate a truce between MS-13, B-18, and the government in an effort to reduce the crime rate. The government would treat imprisoned gang members better and pursue less aggressive enforcement strategies on the streets if the gangs would agree to lessen the rate at which they murdered each other and innocent people. On March 12, the following day, El Salvador had only two murders, the lowest level in a single day in over three years.

The full extent of the negotiations between the regime and the gangs wouldn’t be known until later. For a time, the government and the Catholic Church collaborated to make it seem like the latter was actually handling the process and the former wasn’t involved at all. Then the government admitted it was at least being kept in the loop, and then eventually admitted full responsibility, though it continued to conceal the precise terms of the negotiations.

The eventually acknowledged official concessions made by the government within legal parameters were first to give better prison conditions (transference to lower security prisons, permitting more family visits, etc.) to the many incarcerated gang members, particularly the leaders of MS-13 and B-18. Later on, the frequency and intensity of raids targeting gangs in the streets were reduced, though not eliminated. “Safe zones” were established in particular neighborhoods and around schools where the gangs promised to limit their activity. Most ambitiously, and in line with the FMLN’s ideological bend, the regime announced a $20 million subsidy plan to assist gang members in finding legitimate employment, with which the gang leaders promised to assist, or at least not interfere.

The Funes regime initially faced backlash, but with a media blitz and a marked reduction in violence, public opinion started to turn in mid-2012. According to the World Bank’s numbers, the homicide rate dropped from 71 per 100,000 in 2011 to 42 in 2012 and 41 in 2013. The previous low ever recorded was 47 back in 2002. After years of trying to crush the gangs, a softer touch appeared to be working.

But as with the Mano Duras, the gang truce’s success seems more illusory in hindsight.

First, it fell apart fairly quickly. After a massive anti-gang government raid in mid-2012, murders began to rise again; the gangs blamed the government for infringing on the truce while the government blamed the gangs for excessive reprisals. Homicides continued to climb in the second half of 2012, and the truce appeared to completely break down in some neighborhoods, though it wasn’t clear if that was due to the orders from gang leadership or if individual sub-gangs were operating outside of orders. By mid-2013, rumors were circulating that the gangs considered the truce dead, but were biding their time to accumulate more weapons for a coming offensive against the government and each other. As violence resurged in late 2013, the truce was universally considered over.

Second, while the truce reduced homicides temporarily, it may have actually just pushed them into the future as pent-up aggression resulted in more violence and reprisals later on. From a homicide rate of 41 in 2013, it rose to 63 in 2014 and 107 in 2015, the highest level since 1997.

Third, Wheeler and others have argued that the stats were juked, maybe by the government, but likely more so by the gangs. As part of the negotiations, the gangs agreed to reduce the murder rate, but the gang leadership may have just ordered their underlings to hide the murders better as opposed to leaving the bodies in the streets like normal. If this is true, then the supposed spike in homicides after 2013 may have just been the result of uncovering corpses created during the truce.

Fourth, the legitimacy of the FMLN and the Salvadoran government as a whole was massively damaged as the full extent of the truce negotiations was revealed. The government didn’t just give the imprisoned gang leadership bigger cells and more family access, they gave them whatever material goods and services they wanted, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, and, worst of all, likely tens of millions of dollars. Negotiating with criminals (arguably terrorists) is already a tough pill to swallow, but straight-up bribery made the government look weak and desperate. President Funes and some of his top lieutenants would later be prosecuted for both perpetrating corruption as part of the truce and for receiving the benefits of corruption outside of the truce. Funes is currently living in exile in Nicaragua while a 14 year prison sentence awaits him back in El Salvador.

Fifth, part of the government’s concessions to the imprisoned gang leaders was to give them cell phones for personal use and to order/coordinate the truce with non-imprisoned lieutenants. This had the inadvertent effect of massively improving the top-down organizational capabilities of MS-13 and B-18. The gang leadership was already communicating with its non-incarcerated underlings, but at least the process of sneaking out messages was slow and cumbersome. With cell phones in hand, the leadership became far more dynamic and apparently managed both the implementation and breakdown of the truce more skillfully than they should have.

Like the Mano Duras, the gang truce of 2014-2016 has been considered a failure by historical consensus. Its benefits were decent, but short-lived and possibly entirely fake, and they came at the cost of humiliating an already weak government while emboldening and probably strengthening the street gangs that already seemed to be on the path to taking over the entire country.

But as with the Mano Duras, I’m slightly more sympathetic than the historical consensus. The Salvadoran government was contending with an enormous, complicated, intractable crime problem with roots in culture, economics, civil war, and so many other domains. The hardline conservative crackdowns didn’t seem to have worked, so the left needed an alternative. I assume the more idealistic elements of the FMLN would have liked to implement more far-reaching welfare and social reforms to rebuild El Salvador’s broken society from the ground-up, but that wasn’t practical. So trying to slowly calm the gangs rather than fight them may have been a viable strategy.

Remember: the gangs were not an invading force. Their members were Salvadoran citizens, and most were literal children with bad upbringings. If there is a way to reintegrate such people into society, it should be tried, and if that meant giving some imprisoned psychopaths prostitutes and money, so what? In the grand scheme of things, that price seems worth saving tens of thousands of lives and revitalizing El Salvador. Unfortunately, the truce just didn’t work.

Fortunately for the FMLN, the full extent of the truce’s failure wasn’t known until after the 2014 presidential election. The Salvadoran people narrowly elected Funes’s Vice President, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a 70-year-old ex-commander of the leftist guerillas. The former warrior proceeded to be boring and useless, resulting in “little to show for his tenure.”

I guess in his defense, Cerén took office at the absolute worst time, right when the truce was falling apart. At first, he tried to restart negotiations with the gangs, but the situation was too far gone. His first full year in office saw the homicide rate spike to 107 and the streets ran with blood. The Cerén regime responded with a military-led crackdown, but it lacked the scope, surprise, and support of the earlier Mano Duras, and the gangs were far stronger and more organized in their opposition. The Cerén regime revoked the prison conditions granted to the gang leadership previously, which did hinder gang operations, but lieutenants on the streets were too entrenched for the military to make any serious headway in taking back de facto territorial control.

Like his predecessors, Cerén is regarded as a corrupt, weak failure as a president. There are lots of Western news articles from the time describing El Salvador as a war zone. And yet, the murder rate declined during his regime, and by quite a bit at that – from the peak of 107 in 2015 to an all-time low of 38 when he left office in 2019. The initial decline could have been from a return to baseline after the post-truce crime spike, but then the murder rate continued on a fairly steep downward trend despite the lack of any novel or impressive policy changes from the government. Crime was still extremely high throughout Cerén’s tenure but was trending sharply in the right direction.

I haven’t seen much analysis of why the murder rate declined so much during this time period, but a possible cause was the Alliance for Prosperity (AFP), a massive aid program initiated by the United States in 2014 to give $750 million annually to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (combined) to reduce crime, fight corruption, and stimulate economic growth. The slightly less than altruistic motive behind the AFP was to make these countries more stable and prosperous so all their citizens would stop sneaking into America, but regardless, it seemed to work, at least on paper. Honduras and Guatemala both saw similar declines in the crime rate, though not as dramatically as in El Salvador.

The New York Times has a bunch of really good articles (ex. this) from 2018 and 2019 describing the impact of AFP: “The United States is involved in almost every layer of El Salvador’s efforts to cauterize the near-constant gang violence. It is equipping and training an elite anti-gang unit of Salvadoran police and building new prosecutors’ offices. Judges take classes at American facilities, and F.B.I. agents work alongside Salvadoran police officers.”

Two details that most stuck out to me – as late as 2018, El Salvador had a single forensics lab to cover the roughly 4,000 annual murders. And, as mentioned – only one in 20 prosecutions of gang members ended in conviction due to threats from gangs towards witnesses, judges, juries, etc.

These articles don’t paint a good picture of El Salvador’s progress, but the numbers tell a different story. Until I see a better explanation for the decline in the violence of the gangs, it seems like the AFP did quite a good job of enhancing El Salvador’s law enforcement capacity and capability.

The AFP’s success in fighting corruption is more suspect, especially when President Cerén followed the by-then well-established tradition of Salvadoran presidents stealing lots of money. In 2021, he and a bunch of other formal officials were convicted for operating a kickback scheme that looted $351 million from the state during President Funes’s regime, when Cerén was vice president. If I’m reading this correctly, Cerén’s cut from the entire scheme was… $530,000. Though everyone thinks he stole a ton of money while he was president too, likely some AFP money at that.

For those keeping track, that means from the end of the civil war in 1992 to 2019, El Salvador had five presidents, the last four of whom were later convicted of corruption, though only one saw prison time. It would be one thing if the corrupt assholes running their country were doing a good job (like FHB), but the Mano Duras seemed to have failed, the truce had both failed and been disgraceful for a sovereign state, and no one in government seemed to have any better ideas on how to fight the gangs than to listen to the gringos. It was safe to say that the Salvadoran people had lost faith in their leadership.

The Rise of The Coolest Dictator in the World

El Salvador’s current president, Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, is easily one of the most interesting political leaders on earth.

The first person I’d compare him to is Alberto Fujimori. Both Bukele and Fujimori are non-Hispanic men from wealthy immigrant families who worked their way up the political hierarchies of Latin American states with undeniable skill and then led their countries as low-tier dictators, and despite the complaints of many critics, generally did a good job and were popular.

But maybe the better comparison for Bukele is Julius Caesar. He’s not quite the dashing, dynamic, militaristic embodiment of Caesar like Napoleon was, but Bukele’s parallels are undeniable, at least between the early reigns of both men. Bukele rose from relative obscurity to take over an ostensibly democratic, but really oligarchic country with much fanfare and popular support. He’s widely reviled by the elites, but now that he’s in power, they dare not oppose him openly because he has the love of the mob. He uses force to destroy his worst enemies, but is generally magnanimous and opts for friendship when he can. He is almost single-handedly reshaping the government with his will, and perhaps the rest of society with it. These efforts are constantly derided by small “d” democrats, and yet his personal support only continues to grow with the vast majority of his subjects.

But I think the single greatest similarity between Bukele and Caesar is their luck. Back in Roman times, luck was considered an innate attribute of individuals, like charisma. Caesar was phenomenally competent in many aspects of his life, but he paired this with an almost supernatural level of luck in war, politics, and governance that he was able to maximally exploit (until he wasn’t).

That’s exactly how I feel about Bukele after learning about him. He is really smart, he’s highly intuitive, he has a great sense of what to do and when as a politician, but he has ultimately been so incredibly successful because he has married this competence with so often being in the right place at the right time.

Bukele was born in San Salvador in 1981, right at the start of the Salvadoran Civil War. He comes from a well-off Palestinian Arab family that is historically Christian. Bukele’s many siblings and cousins have played small parts in his rise to power, but his father is definitely the most interesting relative. Despite his Christian background, Armando Bukele Kattán is an Islamic imam who has established four mosques in El Salvador. He’s also a prolific entrepreneur and businessman who opened El Salvador’s first McDonalds. He’s also a polygamist with six wives and 11 children, of which Nayib Bukele is the fifth.

Bukele, who self-identifies as a vague non-denominational Christian, seems to have a sense of humor about his Islamic family: “Popular enough to be elected president of his high-school class, he captioned his yearbook photograph ‘Class terrorist.’”

Bukele dropped out of law school at Central American University and started managing a nightclub, and at some other point he managed a Yamaha dealership. Then he took over one of his father’s businesses, a public relations firm that represented the FMLN, of which his father was a big supporter.

I can’t find a ton of info about Bukele’s life around this time, but in 2011, at the age of 30, he decided to run for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, an ARENA-dominated suburb of San Salvador. Bukele ran on leftist policies under the FMLN but purposefully downplayed his association with the party; the FMLN’s name and logo were left off most campaign material, and Bukele began using cyan everywhere instead of the FLMN’s standard red coloring. Bukele narrowly won, presumably due to a combination of his energy/charisma and because ARENA was getting hammered nationally after having just lost the presidency for the first time in 2009.

From the New Yorker article:

“Bukele won by less than two per cent, and governed as if he were still campaigning. He erected a large stone sign with a white “N” engraved in a circle at the entrance to Nuevo Cuscatlán. He also opened a twenty-four-hour medical clinic, a library, and a community center. Each month, seniors received a free basket of food. Bukele vowed to donate his entire salary to a new program funding grants for students to take classes in English and computer science. The town’s debt ballooned, but his popularity soon eclipsed that of the Party elders.”

Later investigations found he had ignored a bunch of permit bullshit and maybe gave out inflated contracts to friends. Given his future, it seems likely that Bukele hastily burned a whole lot of current and future taxpayer dollars on spurious, flashy amenities (some of which were probably useful, others of which were probably useless) to gain national attention to climb the political ranks. Though if I were to keep bringing up the annoying Caesarian parallels, I’d point out that much of Julius Caesar’s early career also consisted of recklessly going into extreme debt to buy popularity.

Regardless, Bukele was beloved by the people of Nuevo Cuscatlán for mortgaging their future. So in 2015, with the eager support of the FMLN, Bukele ran for Mayor of San Salvador. Trying to go from the mayor of a town of ~8,000 inhabitants to the mayor of the capital city of 2 million (metro area) is a hell of a leap, especially for a 34 year old.

Once again, Bukele ran under the FMLN but did his best to distance himself from the party’s apparatus and legacy. His campaign lieutenants were a bunch of friends and family members instead of party officials. All of his campaign paraphernalia had his trademark cyan, “N,” and slogan, “nuevas ideas.” He became an even better candidate than before – polished, fun, energetic. He really found his stride in digital media, which was partially motivated by an aversion to mainstream journalists whom he (rightly or wrongly) considered to be establishment shills. In videos posted on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., Bukele presented himself as a young, dynamic force challenging the ossified political establishment that had led El Salvador astray through corruption and general incompetence. Soon enough, Bukele had huge viewership numbers and was dominating the polls, but like any good social media addict, Bukele behaved like he had ADHD:

“In public, Nayib was polished and poised, but in private meetings he tended to be distracted and jittery. He checked his phone constantly, drank four Red Bulls a day, kept odd hours, and struggled to focus on individual tasks. A former associate told me, ‘If an idea occurs to him, and he thinks it’s brilliant, he does it. Then, afterward, if it’s illegal? Oops!’”

In another article, one of his former lawyers calls him:

“an immature and impulsive man, addicted to his phone and social media. He couldn’t go 30 minutes without checking Twitter to see what people were saying about him. ‘He was always very scattered. It’s hard for him to focus and get organized…’”

Bukele and the FMLN won the election with just over 50% of the vote, unseating the incumbent National Coalition Party that had held San Salvador’s mayoral office for the last six years.

Now in his second and far more powerful office, Bukele basically did the same thing again. He used city funds to build a big market, a big library, refurbish the historic downtown, and widen a bunch of streets. A lot of these new buildings and sidewalks were conspicuously painted cyan and big “N”’s appeared on walls, in parks, and on murals. The mayor also spent a lot of time meeting with foreign officials from the United States and Taiwan, and made a high profile trip to Jerusalem where he told the world that his wife’s grandfather was Jewish.

In the future, Bukele would make a name for himself internationally through phenomenally successful tough-on-crime policies. But as mayor of San Salvador, his opening anti-crime policy salvo was… trying to negotiate a truce. El Faro, the intrepid media publication that would go on to become a serious thorn in Bukele’s side, published prison records indicating that he had sent emissaries to meet with leaders of B-18 to negotiate a reduction in the gang’s presence in key locations in the city. Bukele did, and always has denied negotiating with any criminals, and responded to El Faro’s articles by making some angry speeches and beefing up the street presence of the police.

The sour relations between the FMLN and Mayor Bukele only got worse as time went on. Bukele was technically in the FMLN, but he had a habit of openly insulting them for being sluggish, corrupt dinosaurs tethered to civil/Cold War politics. In turn, the FMLN leadership increasingly felt like it was playing with fire; it had managed to leverage this arrogant, young hot shot to take the mayoral office of San Salvador, but it wasn’t clear they could control him, especially since the office was often a stepping-stone to the presidency. Many considered Bukele more trouble than he was worth.

In May 2017, the tensions erupted at an FMLN event. Lots of attendees describe what happened differently, but Bukele allegedly accused party members of conspiring against him, and then may or may not have thrown an apple at a lawyer. Afterward, the FMLN’s leadership convened a meeting in which they narrowly voted to expel Bukele from the party (after he refused to attend a disciplinary hearing). Many of the defenders of Bukele within the party’s leadership were not actually favorably inclined toward the man, but feared that losing him would tear apart the FMLN.

Which is precisely what happened; the expulsion only sling-shotted Bukele toward his destiny. The FMLN got hammered in the 2018 mid-term elections, and when Bukele announced he was running for president in the 2019 elections, he immediately stole a huge chunk of the FMLN’s base. This support held even as he went through a bureaucratic rigmarole where it seemed like he might run with the FMLN again, but then he started his own party, but then that party was dissolved by election officials, and so Bukele ended up joining a minor right-of-center party which opportunistically slapped his name on their banners. Regardless, Bukele ignored this party and largely ran under his newly crafted, technically non-existent, cyan-colored Nuevas Ideas party anyway.

The actual policy platform of Bukele’s presidential campaign was fairly light. He proposed building some big infrastructure projects (but not how to pay for them) and fighting the gangs (with no clear strategy). But mostly, he ran as an honest, truth-telling outsider who would fight the culture and practice of corruption that had rotted El Salvador since the civil war. And without the encumbrance of FMLN membership, Bukele could openly declare war on the political establishment, particularly the two political parties that had dominated Salvadoran politics for almost 20 years.

These quotes are from a 2023 speech, but they represent his message to the Salvadoran people well:

“For decades, we tried everything that others said was best for us. They made us fight a civil war for a cause foreign to our reality [referring to the Cold War]…. They made us sign false peace agreements, which had nothing of peace, and which only served to allow the two sides in the war to share the spoils.

We tried every formula they gave us, and nothing worked. Then, protected by foreign powers, we handed the country over to the Right. And then, also protected by external agents, we gave power to the Left. This is how they kept us during 30 post-war years, during which there were more deaths than in the civil war, and more poverty and more violence. Nobody did anything to fundamentally change either the system or the institutions, much less the laws.”

Bukele’s campaign tactics matched the rhetoric. He barely left San Salvador, he boycotted the debates, and he refused to talk to most establishment shills journalists. Instead, he leaned on an expertly crafted social media campaign that either showed him making speeches to fanatically loyal crowds in San Salvador, or calmly explaining El Salvador’s problems from the comfort of his own living room.

The result – Bukele massacred the establishment with 54% in the first round to ARENA’s 32% and the FMLN’s 14%. Bukele also won every single department (ie. province) across the country. With more than 50% of the popular vote, there wasn’t even a second voting round.

In 2012, Bukele had no political experience aside from doing PR work for the FMLN. That year, he was elected mayor of a town of 8,000. In 2015, he was elected mayor of the capital city. In 2019, Bukele became the youngest president (age 37) of El Salvador in its history and the first to win from outside the two major parties since the civil war.

I find this all astonishing. Does stuff like this happen normally in small, poor countries? Was Bukele an unusual Obama-esque wunderkind? Did Bukele’s family pull some strings?

Despite reading everything I can find about Bukele, I still don’t have a grasp on how he was able to get so popular so quickly. As far as I can tell, Bukele is simply an excellent campaigner, and his anti-establishment messaging hit the Salvadoran people at exactly the right time, and Bukele got lucky. The establishment had humiliated itself with El Salvador’s low GDP growth, dire tourism levels, thoroughly corrupt leadership, and rampant crime, the last of which had reduced the state to bribing thuggish criminals to stop murdering its citizens. Bukele arrived in the right place at the right time with the right message.

Consolidation

Nayib Bukele came into the presidency of El Salvador on an enormous wave of enthusiasm. He had a clear mandate from the people to effect radical change throughout the Salvadoran state. It wasn’t quite clear what that change would be aside from rooting out corruption, but people were optimistic that the country would finally turn around.

But there was one big problem for Bukele. While his fortuitous political party hopping had helped win him the presidency, it had also left him without an actual elected political base of support. The last legislative elections were in 2018, resulting in ARENA holding 42% of seats and the FMLN holding 25%. While some of these elected individuals had been swayed to Bukele’s side (either idealistically or cynically), most were entrenched members of precisely the political establishment Bukele had been railing against for the last year. Likewise, the Salvadoran Supreme Court consisted of judges elected by the current and past legislative assemblies. In other words, Bukele had complete control of one branch of government, but faced strong hostility from the other two.

Fortunately for Bukele, he was uniquely situated to deal with this problem. His campaigns, policies, platforms, and personality had all emphasized his placement outside the traditional party system, so the loyalty of his followers was oriented directly toward him rather than any party or organization. Shortly after the election, all the cyan and “N”s came to fruition as Bukele brought Nuevas Ideas to life as a functional, recognized political party in El Salvador. It wasn’t a party of the right or left, but a party of Bukele, and the hundreds of politicians and millions of Salvadorans who flooded into its ranks were loyal to the individual.

But even with all the popular support in the world, Bukele still had to wait until the 2021 legislative elections to expand his power. Until then, he had to work with one measly branch of government to not only reshape El Salvador, but to prove his value to voters before the elections. He needed a big win, and he needed it soon.

Bukele set his sights on the gangs. If he could deliver a lower crime and rate to the Salvadoran people within a year, it would surely catapult Nuevos Ideas to total power.

Bukele unveiled the Territorial Control Plan (TCP). It was to be the most ambitious, comprehensive, expensive assault on gangs in Central America’s history. Like the Mano Duras, the TCP was a bundle of policies and laws designed to crush the gangs, but while the Mano Duras were swift strikes intended to arrest as many gang members as possible, the TCP was a methodical, multi-stage operation aiming to strangle the gangs over many years. With an estimated total cost of $572 million, Bukele promised that the TCP would end the Salvadoran gangs once and for all.

Phase One of the TCP was initiated mere days after Bukele announced it to the public at midnight of June 20, 2019 – 12 of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities, representing most of the metropolitan areas of the country, would receive an influx of 2,500 police officers and 3,000 soldiers (with another 1,000 deployed a month later) to be indefinitely stationed in key locations to suppress gang activity, particularly extortions. Additionally, all 28 of El Salvador’s prisons were put under a state of emergency, meaning all prisoners were confined to their cells, visitations were cancelled, and cell service was blocked. Combined, the operation was intended to hinder gang financing, cut off the leadership, and reduce the murder rate.

The operation initially received largely positive reviews. 5,000 arrests were made within the first two months. Crime decreased in key zones and the national crime rate seemed to decline, but arguably best of all, Bukele’s efforts to fight crime were highly visible. Putting a bunch of assault rifle-wielding soldiers in the town square is not exactly a subtle way to fight systematic extortion, but it works, and the Salvadoran people could see it in action. From AS/COA:

“An August 2019 Prensa Gráfica poll found that in just the first couple months of the plan’s rollout, the percent of Salvadorans who felt unsafe in the places they frequent the most dropped from 78 percent to 57 percent, while approval for the national police force increased 11 points year-on-year. El Salvador experienced a 33 percent drop in homicides from 2018 to 2019, according to Insight Crime data.”

Eventually, critics emerged. They pointed out that the operation was expensive, the murder rate didn’t seem to be declining any faster than before, and the TCP did nothing to address the fundamental causes of El Salvador’s gang problem. Stationing troops in markets was another band-aid solution to extortion that would merely push the gangs to launch new operations elsewhere.

Bukele countered that this was just Phase One. The TCP had seven planned stages – preparation, opportunity, modernization, incursion, extraction, integration, and… the seventh phase still doesn’t have a name as of writing this.

With Phase One declared a success, Phase Two was announced in July. If critics wanted lefty policies to address the root causes of criminality, that’s exactly what they would get – the government would build a whole new set of healthcare facilities, sports centers, and schools (with generous scholarship funds) to get Salvadoran children off the streets and away from the gangs. The price tag was estimated at $158 million, a considerable sum for humble El Salvador. But through some wrangling, the Salvadoran government got a $91 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, which is financed by Central American governments with a splattering of foreign support, including from Spain, Taiwan, and South Korea.

Try as I might, I can’t find any good info on whether any of this stuff from Phase Two was ever built or if it’s functional. So, moving on…

In August 2019, Bukele announced Phase Three of the TCP. The police and military, upon whom Bukele was increasingly relying, needed upgrades. They needed modern weapons, bulletproof vests, night vision, a helicopter, drones, and everything else a well-equipped fighting force needed to combat a quasi-insurgency. But this stuff isn’t cheap. Through more wrangling, Bukele was able to get the Central American Bank for Economic Integration to agree to a $109 million loan, with a $5.3 million kicker from South Korea.

Suddenly, Bukele’s grand plans came to a halt. The Salvadoran legislature, which was still controlled by ARENA, the FMLN, and a bunch of smaller parties, voted against approval for the loan. Like in the United States, the president of El Salvador is the commander-in-chief and can order the military to do almost anything, but the legislature holds the purse strings. If Bukele couldn’t coax the legislative assembly to vote for more financing, the TCP would be dead in the water.

Why did the assembly vote against approving the loan? That depends on who you ask. Anti-Bukele forces say that Bukele was recklessly spending with an already far too indebted country (debt as a % of GDP would increase from 71% in 2019 to 88% in 2020). Others had qualms about the transparency of Bukele’s spending. Others had concerns that this arrogant, charismatic, wildly popular new president had malevolent aspirations, and it probably wasn’t a good idea to give his military and police better weapons. Meanwhile, pro-Bukele forces (including more than one person I spoke to in El Salvador) claimed that the establishment was simply lashing out at a reformer. Bukele had taken the presidency from them, so now they were impeding, filibustering, and financially strangling his regime as a cynical strategy to stop his plans from coming to fruition.

For months, Bukele tried in vain to negotiate with the other two parties. But with no headway made, Bukele opted for what was easily the most daring and potentially disastrous maneuver of his career up to that point.

On February 6, 2020, Bukele invoked his powers to call an emergency session of the assembly, ostensibly to persuade the legislature to his side. Less than half of the assembly responded to the call, while the rest dismissed it as political grandstanding. The next day, Bukele publicly asked his supporters to protest the assembly with a reference to a constitutional article that protects the popular right of “insurrection.”  At some point, Bukele reportedly made contact with El Salvador’s military leaders and received certain assurances, though the extent of these guarantees is unknown.

On February 9, a few thousand Bukele supporters gathered around the legislative assembly building in the heart of San Salvador. Bukele arrived outside, told his followers to wait a moment, and then walked inside the assembly with 40 soldiers who sternly stood around the chamber. Bukele took the presiding seat at the front of the assembly, said, “It’s clear who’s in control of the situation and we’re going to put the decision in the hands of God,” and then prayed for a moment. When he was finished, Bukele briefly asked the assembly to vote to approve his loan and left the chamber to give a speech to his supporters while the soldiers stayed behind looking menacing. Bukele announced to his supporters that he was giving the “scoundrels” one week to approve the loan.

Over the following weeks, Bukele was accused of running a self-coup by many people within and outside of El Salvador. Protests erupted on university campuses calling for Bukele’s removal. Legislators who had been in the assembly that night said things like “So they’re going to make us vote with a rifle to the head? … This isn’t the way a democracy works,” and “No Salvadoran can be in favor of this; El Salvador is a country where democracy has cost blood.” To which Bukele technically accurately responded, “If I was a dictator, I would have taken control of everything,” and (paraphrasing) “if I wanted to remove the legislators, I would have.”

The whole thing was very weird. I think Bukele tried to pull off the putschist form of “because of the implication” (or better yet, the Caesarian version). He didn’t actually threaten to hurt or arrest or even fire anyone. The soldiers didn’t actually point their guns. But it’s hard to ignore the implication of marching loyal soldiers into a democratic chamber, praying to god, demanding they change a law, and then issuing an ultimatum.

To give Bukele his due, I think there is credence to the notion that El Salvador was in dire straits, and Bukele’s TCP was extremely popular, and the legislative resistance to it was based more on cynical politicking than fair-minded disagreement.

Or perhaps the best argument in Bukele’s favor is that his self-coup maneuver ultimately didn’t work. The legislature called Bukele’s buff and refused to approve the TCP loan. Bukele continued to huff and puff and make a big show of everything, but ultimately, he lost the political standoff.

In retrospect, the significance of February 9 was not the TCP loan, or even the resiliency of the establishment. Rather, it was Bukele’s sizeable breach of democratic norms and the positive response from the general Salvadoran population. Sure, Bukele was hounded by the international press, and denounced by politicians as a wannabe dictator, and protested by leftist students, but most Salvadorans continued to love him. Actually, many Salvadorans loved him more than ever. They saw February 9 as an indicator that Bukele was serious about reform. He was willing to do whatever it took to break the establishment and get the Salvadoran people what they needed. Perhaps there are circumstances where effective governance is more important than democratic procedure, especially when such procedures are exploited by bad faith actors.

It’s possible that the backlash from February 9 could have hurt Bukele more, but then COVID-19 suddenly arrived in El Salvador. Political fights over the TCP were quickly put on hold. On March 21, Bukele declared a “state of exception,” a temporary enhancement of executive powers to respond to emergencies. His regime then laid down harsh COVID restrictions, even for the region, including mandates to detain individuals for quarantine violations. Within a few months, over ten thousand individuals would be sent to “containment centers” that the New Yorker describes as “de-facto jails.”

I take any evaluations of COVID policies using available statics with a massive grain of salt due to the million uncontrolled factors, bad incentives of recording statistics, and sheer randomness of COVID’s impact. But for what it’s worth, the stats suggest that El Salvador did better against COVID than the rest of Central America, besides Nicaragua with its extremely suspiciously amazing figures:

Country	Cases per 1 million pops	Deaths per 1 million pops
El Salvador	30,816	646
Guatemala	69,285	1,091
Honduras	46,432	1,092
Costa Rica	239,058	1,819
Panama	238,307	1,962
Nicaragua	2,728	33

Whether due to the TCP or COVID-19, the murder rate was trending down faster than ever in early 2020. But then from April 24-27, there were 77 murders across the country, many of which occurred in prisons. Bukele responded by declaring a “maximum emergency in every detention facility holding gang members,” including locking gang members in their cells for 24 hours and placing gang leaders in solitary confinement indefinitely. Prisons were also ordered to avoid putting gang members of the same gangs in cells together, which, along with many other restrictions, were intended to reduce communication and coordination within gang structures.

As expected, Bukele’s critics denounced all this as unconstitutional and inhumane, particularly given how COVID would tear through the close quarters of prisons. Pictures like this began showing up in the international media:

The COVID restrictions and prison crackdown followed the same trend as the February 9 quasi-coup. Bukele was constantly attacked by Salvadoran politicians, Salvadoran leftists, and the international media for alleged constitutional violations. For instance, Bukele undoubtedly had the authority to launch the prison crackdown, but despite an on-paper legal limit of 15 days, he extended the crackdown indefinitely. Or better yet, during the crackdowns, Bukele “authorized” lethal self-defense against gang members, and even said “the government will see to the legal defense of those who may be unjustly charged, for defending the lives of honorable people,” both of which probably constitute blatant excesses by the executive branch over the legislative branch’s lawmaking powers.

And yet, Bukele’s popularity only grew. His critics accused him of not having real plans, of making all his policies up as he went along; many of his decrees were suddenly announced on Twitter or over late night orders to the police and military, without even the attempt to verify their legality. Bukele’s critics responded: so what? Why should Bukele wait for permission from legislators and judges who hate him? By violating these norms and defying the establishment, Bukele only further proved that he possessed the dynamism and determination to fix El Salvador.

In September 2020, Bukele faced his greatest public relations challenge yet, worse even than the February 9 self-coup.

El Faro, the Salvadoran media outlet that had uncovered Bukele’s negotiations with B-18 when he was mayor, discovered that Bukele was still negotiating with the gangs as president, this time with both B-18 and MS-13. Prison records seemingly confirmed that Bukele emissaries (including the head of the TCP’s Stage Two) had been talking to the gang leaders since shortly after his election all the way back in mid-2019. According to El Faro, Bukele promised the gang leaders better conditions in the prisons and social/monetary assistance through Stage Two of the TCP in exchange for keeping the murder rate down and support for Nuevas Ideas in the next election. If this was true, it would not only be extremely illegal, but also cast the roughly 60%ish decline in the murder rate since Bukele took office in an entirely new light.

Bukele denied everything. He accused El Faro of being a partisan rag spreading fake news, and a week later, the government opened a money laundering investigation into the outlet. Slightly more credibly, Bukele and his supporters argued that the notion of Bukele agreeing to give the gangs better conditions was absurd in light of the TCP and the prison lockdowns. Hadn’t they seen the pictures?

El Faro’s report was almost certainly accurate, or at least the American government seems to believe so. Over a year later, the US Department of the Treasury slapped economic sanctions on some high level Bukele lieutenants for technically financing gang activity.

I consider this revelation to be another fascinating data point in evaluating Bukele. You can take it as evidence that Bukele is either maximally cynical or pragmatic. You can take it as evidence that Bukele just does whatever random shit pops into his head even when it’s at cross purposes, or that he has the capacity to carefully navigate complex policy schemes and still come out ahead.

What can’t be denied is that the negotiation revelations indicate Bukele’s tremendous skill as a politician. The gang negotiations annihilated the credibility of the FMLN six years earlier, but Bukele was too wily to be caught in the same trap. Through clever rhetoric, denials, condemnations, and charisma, he rode out the PR storm.

The proof of Bukele’s popularity arrived in February 2021 with the legislative assembly elections. Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (officially headed by his cousin) took over 2/3rds of the seats, while ARENA and the FMLN were reduced to 20% combined. After yet another landslide victory for Bukele, he had nearly complete control of two branches of government.

And the third branch wouldn’t escape his grasp for long. Throughout the implementation of the TCP, the COVID restrictions, and the prison lockdowns, the Salvadoran Supreme Court had been another thorn in Bukele’s side with periodic declarations that his executive decrees were unconstitutional. Bukele’s response was typically just to ignore the court and keep doing what he was already doing. But it clearly hurt his reputation, especially internationally as more and more think pieces were being written by Western media outlets about El Salvador’s new aspiring dictator.

On May 1, the first day of the new legislature, Bukele dropped the hammer. In the United States, the President appoints the justices of the Supreme Court, but in El Salvador, they’re elected by the legislative assembly. Under Bukele’s direction, his legislative coalition voted to fire the five members of the Supreme Court’s constitutional court, as well as the attorney general, all of whom were replaced by Bukele loyalists. Bukele Tweeted: “And the people of El Salvador, through their representatives, said: DISMISSED!”

Two years after his election to the presidency, Bukele assumed de facto control over all three branches of government. It was four months later that Bukele updated his Twitter bio to “The Coolest Dictator in the World,” which he would later defend as an ironic joke directed at his critics. To be fair, he currently self-describes on Twitter as, “Philosopher King.”

Bitcoin Detour

I can’t find info on when Bukele first got into Bitcoin, but he seems to have been knocking around crypto circles since at least the start of his presidency in 2019.

Based on his interview with Tucker Carlson, Bukele is articulate in old school Austrian economics with a layer of modern populist anti-international sentiment. Bukele denounced GDP as a valid way to measure economic growth, but admitted he cares about it anyway to “play along with” the international community. He is especially concerned with inflation, believes the “concept of savings [has been] destroyed,” and resents the Federal Reserve for inflating the US dollar (which El Salvador also uses). He generally seems to view much of the international financial community with something between suspicion and hostility, but maintains a healthy respect for commerce and capitalism as forces for good.

Both in the interview and elsewhere, Bukele has presented Bitcoin as an antidote to the above ailments. As a currency with an algorithmically fixed and finite supply, Bitcoin is theoretically immune to many of the pitfalls of fiat currency, including political manipulation, arbitrary management by bureaucrats, and long-term inflation. Criticisms of Bukele’s embrace of Bitcoin fall neatly into place with almost all the other criticisms of him – a combination of legitimate concerns that he is recklessly lurching a political system and economy for his own self-aggrandizement, with illegitimate concerns based on a bias against a guy who thumbs his nose at liberal internationalist conventions.

As Bukele said in the interview, no one cared about El Salvador before him, but now the international community can’t stop harping on about El Salvador. And Bitcoin.

In June 2021, Bukele recorded a message for the annual Bitcoin Conference in Miami in which he announced that he was putting forth a bill in the legislative assembly to make Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. His framing: “In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy, and in the medium and long term we hope that this small decision can help us push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction.”

That all sounds a little Adam Neumann-ish, but his more practical justifications were to make El Salvador a Central American haven for crypto entrepreneurs and to lower the costs of remittances from Salvadoran immigrants in the US back to El Salvador (valued at $6 billion in 2020). Plus, like most inhabitants of impoverished countries, many Salvadorans don’t have bank accounts or any real connection to professional financial systems, so hopefully Bitcoin and the financial infrastructure around it could fill that gap. As expected, the legislative assembly quickly approved the bill, and in September, El Salvador became the first country on earth to make Bitcoin legal tender.

Even Bukele realized that simply declaring Bitcoin usable in stores and for tax payments wouldn’t cause mass adoption. Despite his Austrian inclinations, he figured the state would need to help jump-start this new Bitcoin-fueled Salvadoran economy. First, he asked the World Bank for help, and it told him to fuck off. Instead, the regime mostly got help from crypto enthusiasts, such as Athena Bitcoin, a “comprehensive financial platform that facilitates the use of digital currency and electronic banking to power economies in need of access and inclusion,” which donated funds to help set up a network of Bitcoin ATMs. Strike CEO Jack Mallers was also a key figure in Bukele’s Bitcoin adoption.

My sense is that most Salvadorans found this whole thing baffling. Not many had heard of Bitcoin, and far fewer could accurately describe what it was, let alone how it was going to function as a parallel currency and financial system. But Bukele somewhat brought them around through his innate popularity and by giving everyone in the country $30 worth of Bitcoin in the new government-backed Chivo Bitcoin wallet app. Hopefully, this would get the Bitcoin flowing in El Salvador’s economy.

To use another It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia analogy, this went a little like the gang’s Paddy’s Dollars scheme. Salvadorans eagerly got their 0.0000001 BTC or whatever and then immediately spent it anywhere it was accepted (which was not at every store despite the legal mandate), and then the vast majority of Salvadorans never purchased or received another BTC again. A few entrepreneurial types absorbed a lot of Bitcoin and held it, but most people just saw the endeavor as a weird government hand-out that annoyingly required them to wait in line at Bitcoin ATMs that have been gathering dust ever since.

This is how it was explained to me by a Salvadoran who lived through the event and spent all of his BTC on beer. For more concrete data, the New Yorker:

“a recent survey [presumed from mid-2022] by the Chamber of Commerce found that eighty-six per cent of the country’s commercial businesses have never conducted a bitcoin transaction.”

From Bitstamp.net:

“However, a year after the adoption of Bitcoin, economic surveys found that the cryptocurrency was not widely used. Only an estimated 20% of businesses accepted payment in bitcoin and less than a quarter of Salvadorians had made a purchase with the currency. According to the Central Reserve Bank, bitcoin was only used in 1.9% of remittance payments between September 2021 and April 2022. In a university survey, 71% of respondents said the Bitcoin Law did nothing to improve their finances.”

From Reuters:

“Some 88% of Salvadorans did not use [BTC] in 2023, according to a survey by the University of Central America’s public opinion institute. Just 1% of remittances were sent in bitcoin.”

So, Bitcoin as a legal tender has been a bust for Bukele. But other aspects of Bukele’s Bitcoin affection have been more successful.

Bukele is often derogatorily referred to as a “crypto bro” or a “tech bro” with a “startup” mentality of “move fast and break things.” In that spirit, his regime has made a series of BTC purchases seemingly as pure financial speculation. The first buy of 400 BTC was made in September 2021, the day before Bitcoin officially became legal tender. Unfortunately, within 48 hours, the price of BTC fell from about $52,000 to about $43,000, likely due to speculators buying on the news (that making BTC legal tender will increase BTC buys and price) and selling on the event.

Bukele’s financial fortunes only worsened from there as he happened to buy BTC at the height of a cycle, and prices continued falling and flatlining for about two years. Bukele responded by doubling down again and again until the government-owned (as of writing this) 2,845 BTC at an estimated total cost of $121 million.

Critics breathlessly followed the disaster with periodic news articles celebrating the latest loses of the Salvadoran government’s fiscal reserves. Bukele was derided as a moron suckered into the never-ending global scam that is cryptocurrency. In early 2022, as the BTC cycle neared its bottom, El Salvador’s sovereign debt bonds took a dive. In negotiations, the International Monetary Fund demanded that Bukele revoke Bitcoin’s legal tender status. Bukele refused and managed to muddle through the crisis by scraping together $560 million to buy distressed national debt bonds off the international market as a show of confidence.

Whether by determination or Wall Street Bets-style autism, the Salvadoran government’s Bitcoin investments officially entered the black on December 5, 2023 when the BTC price passed about $42,000. As of writing editing this in late February 2024 March 2024, the BTC portfolio stands at a $26 million or 21% $78 million or 64% profit. It’s not clear yet whether Bukele will hodl indefinitely or make some sales on behalf of the Salvadoran taxpayer, but Bukele continues to reiterate that 1 BTC = 1 BTC.

So Bukele may have the last laugh on Bitcoin speculation, but I’m less optimistic about the prospects of Bitcoin City. Again, Bukele is often criticized for seemingly coming up with big policy decisions on the fly, and both announcing and trying to implement them without really thinking them through. Bitcoin City feels exactly like that – a manic dream born from the dopamine rush of BTC’s all-time price highs in 2021 combined with the utopic prospects of special economic cities rising throughout the world, including Prospera in neighboring Honduras.

Announced in November 2021, Bitcoin City is a planned revamping of the seaside town of La Union based around a massive Bitcoin mining operation powered by geothermal energy from a nearby volcano. While details have been scarce since the announcement, the construction of Bitcoin city is supposed to be financed by a $1 billion bond, half of which will go directly toward construction, and half of which will be used to buy more BTC. The final city will also “have no income tax, forever. No income tax, zero property tax, no procurement tax, zero city tax, and zero CO2 emissions … The only taxes that they will have in Bitcoin City is VAT, half will be used to pay the municipality’s bonds and the rest for the public infrastructure and maintenance of the city.”

That sounds cool but extremely unlikely to ever come to fruition in a crazy but far less insane way than Saudia Arabia’s Neom. Given that there have been almost no updates on Bitcoin City in the last year, I’m guessing this one is a whiff for Bukele that he’s hoping the world forgets.

The Crackdown

In February 2021, President Nayib Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party gained a super majority in the legislative assembly. In May, the assembly took office and immediately removed obstructionist Supreme Court judges who had opposed Bukele for years. Two years after taking office, Bukele had control over all three branches of the Salvadoran government.

Finally, Bukele could really get to work. Back in February 2020, Bukele had marched soldiers into the assembly in an unsuccessful bid to force the chamber to approve a $109 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration to modernize El Salvador’s police and military equipment. In June 2021, the new assembly approved the loan without a hitch. Phase Three of the Territorial Control Plan could begin.

In July, Bukele announced Phase Four. Previously, the TCP had ordered the police and military to focus on protecting common areas from gangs, like town squares and marketplaces. Phase Four ordered El Salvador’s forces to expand their presence into prime gang real estate, mostly in the sprawling slums and suburbs surrounding the major cities where the gangs had long-held de facto political control.

I can’t find much info about Phase Four’s success or lack thereof, but from 2019 to the end of 2021, the TCP’s overall success was… debatable. Here’s the homicide rate per 100,000 citizens:

And here is El Salvador compared to its neighbors:

In 2021, the murder rate was indeed at the lowest point in El Salvador’s modern history at 18 per 100,000. But the murder rate had been in a sharp decline ever since it peaked in 2015 at 107 with the collapse of the gang truce, and El Salvador’s neighbors had also been on the downward trend. Bukele had taken power in 2019 when the rate was already at its all time low of 38. So it’s unclear whether Bukele’s TCP should be credited for further pushing El Salvador’s murder rate to new lows, or if Bukele and the TCP had simply ridden the trendline.

Regardless, Bukele trumpeted the murder stats anywhere and everywhere he could. By the end of 2021, he could say that his regime had brought El Salvador’s crime rate down by 66%. And the people agreed that El Salvador really was safer. Most of the major urban centers had largely been cleansed of psychotic tattooed thugs. The omnipresent police and military figures were seen as righteous warriors protecting the good people of El Salvador at their wise leader’s behest.

Bukele’s critics, who were an increasingly marginal factor in Salvadoran politics and society, maintained that Bukele hadn’t actually solved the crime problem. In addition to pointing out the inconclusive stats, they argued that all the TCP had done was park thousands of guys with assault rifles on city streets. Sure, that suppressed active crime, but it did nothing to break the strength of the gangs, let alone to fight the alleged root causes like poverty, inequality, and a lack of education. They claimed that the TCP’s Phase Two was a meaningless fig leaf, that the TCP’s raids into hostile territory had been weaker than the previous regime’s raids, and that an unknown percentage of the crime drop might have been due to Bukele negotiating with the gangs rather than fighting them. If so, then the gangs were as strong as ever and may have been biding their time to strike back against the government.

This is the explanation I’ve heard both from news stories and a local Salvadoran for the events of March 26-27, 2022. MS-13 and B-18 seemingly went on an arbitrary killing spree, resulting in at least 87 murders in 72 hours, the highest rate in El Salvador’s post-civil war history. Critics contend it was a purposeful act of terrorism by the gangs to flex their muscles against the Bukele regime, possibly after the collapse of a clandestine truce that Bukele had been secretly negotiating throughout his reign.

Bukele’s response would be the defining action of his presidency thus far. The legislative assembly immediately declared a “state of exception” to expand the president’s executive powers and loosen constitutional restrictions for 30 days. Bukele then met with top police and military officials and told them to use the full forces at their disposal to arrest the gangs by any means necessary. Habeus corpus was off the table. Individual officers/soldiers could make arrests at-will without justification. They didn’t need to worry about evidence, future trials, or complaints. Assurances were given by Bukele that he would back virtually all law enforcement conduct, no matter how severe. It was a sort of “kill them all; let god sort them out” decree.

Over the following two weeks, tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers stormed the streets of El Salvador in a “blitzkrieg.” I actually can’t find good info on their numbers, but InsightCrime described it as “ferocious” and an “overwhelming show of force.” The government agents basically arrested anyone they thought might be remotely connected to gang activity. From the Insight Crime report:

“A report in El Faro, which analyzed 1,251 pages of official arrest records from the Attorney General’s Office from the first weeks of the state of emergency, found that authorities frequently cited things like “suspicious appearance,” (apariencia sospechosa), “nervousness” (nerviosa), “anonymous accusations” (denuncias anónimas), and “having tattoos” (tener tatuajes) as sufficient reason to detain suspects.”

Once the initial surge subsided, the police and military presence remained at elevated levels throughout the country, even compared to Phase Four of the TCP, to continue rooting out suspected gang members in hiding. In November 2022, Bukele folded the crackdown into the TCP with Phase Five, a strategic maneuver wherein large military operations would target major gang holdouts. As late as December 2022, Salvadoran agents were still fighting gangs in the streets, such as in the Siege of Soyapango, which was the largest military operation in Salvadoran history.

In 2021, El Salvador had a prison population of around 40,000. Within two months of the commencement of the crackdown, an astounding 33,000 individuals had been arrested. By September 2022, the crackdown brought in 77,000 new prisoners, for a total of 105,000 prisoners, or about 1.7% of the country’s population. This makes El Salvador the most imprisoned country on earth, beating out Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan, and doubling the US’s numbers.

Prison population per 100,000 citizens:

The result – over that same time frame, El Salvador’s official murder rate has fallen from 18.17 in 2021 to 2.4 in 2023. Thus completing El Salvador’s transformation from having one of the highest murder rates on earth for almost 25 years to having a murder rate on par with Canada. A police intelligence report estimated that almost two-thirds of all gang members and affiliates had been arrested, and the remaining third is either deep in hiding or has fled the country.

In February 2023, El Faro, the longtime media nemesis of Bukele, issued a report stating:

“…El Faro visited 14 communities who for years lived under gangs’ ironclad control in the west, center, and east of the country; traversed the old criminal borderlines in the Center District of San Salvador; spoke to a veteran gang leader on the run and no longer in El Salvador; interviewed business people of different levels who for years were extorted by these groups; and conversed with police officers, religious leaders, NGOs, and political parties. The conclusion is that the gangs do not exist in this moment as El Salvador knew them for decades.”

The nature, intentions, legality, justice, and success of Bukele’s 2022 crackdown are still being intensely debated, so take everything in this section as my amateurish attempt to interpret data and reports that are still ongoing.

I strongly get the sense that Bukele absolutely did not think the crackdown would be this successful, because:

First, it was heavily improvised. The plans seemed to have been drawn up in a matter of days, maybe even hours.

Second, the crackdown had nothing directly to do with the Territorial Control Plan. Since his election in 2019, Bukele had been touting the TCP as the final solution to El Salvador’s gang problem. Then he suddenly put all that aside and threw all of his resources at the gangs in the most direct way possible, and achieved a measure of success that dramatically outpaced his carefully-crafted, $500+ million, seven-step crime reduction plan.

Third, in concept, the crackdown really wasn’t that dissimilar from the original Mano Dura back in 2003.

Fourth, as I’ll elaborate on later, there were a bunch of factors outside Bukele’s control (and likely his knowledge) that made the operation unexpectedly successful. In other words, luck was on his side.

And fifth, if Bukele knew that destroying the gangs was this easy, he would have done it already.

Regardless, the crackdown was overwhelmingly, insanely, impossibly successful, and everyone knew it. Bukele’s approval ratings before the crackdown were among the highest in the world, but afterward they were borderline Orwellian with most polls putting him near 90% throughout much of 2023. His international critics grew louder than ever but so did his international supporters with presidents and presidential candidates throughout Latin America openly praising his policies and promising to ape them.

So why was the crackdown so successful? Why did it go so much better than the Mano Dura crackdown of 2003 or all of the other similar crackdowns attempted throughout the last two decades in a dozen other Latin American countries?

I’ll briefly summarize the main arguments I’ve read from analysts, primarily from Insight Crime’s report, and then add a few of my own additions and caveats:

First, Bukele’s 2022 crackdown was more intense than any other. He used lots of soldiers and police officers (or at least that’s my sense, I can’t get good figures), deployed the men extremely rapidly, and gave nearly carte blanche to the men to arrest at their discretion. Past crackdowns were never this hardcore.

Second, Bukele’s crackdown was extremely fast, being deployed within days of its conception. This intensity and speed seems to have taken the gangs by surprise and then kept them off balance so they couldn’t coordinate an organized response (either to fight or flee) as they had more successfully done against smaller crackdowns waged by the previous Funes and Cerén regimes.

Third, the El Salvador branches of MS-13 and B-18 were in a state of relative weakness when the crackdown struck. B-18 had already split in two a few years prior over a leadership dispute, and MS-13 was close to doing the same. Neither group was in an optimal state to respond to the government’s well-executed strike. (It’s not clear how well Bukele understood any of this.)

Fourth, and arguably most importantly, with control of all three branches of government and public approval ratings easily exceeding 75%, Bukele had unprecedented political and public support for the crackdown. This enabled him to take extreme measures without facing significant backlash. In contrast, while the Mano Dura crackdown of 2003 showed somewhat similar success initially, nearly all of its gains were lost within a year as the Supreme Court struck down many of its laws and the legislative assembly withdrew support. Likewise, Bukele had to rely on an enormous amount of public support for the Salvadoran people to tolerate tens of thousands of soldiers streaming into their neighborhoods to arrest locals on sight. Most significantly, Bukele has extended the “state of exception” from the legally mandated 30 day period into an indefinite quasi-martial law, and it is still in effect as of writing this in late February 2024.

Those are the reasons I have seen listed. Here are a few additional hypotheses of my own:

First, the Territorial Control Plan may have primed El Salvador’s law enforcement and military capabilities for an extremely successful crackdown. I have yet to see a good analysis of this, but it seems logical. The TCP embedded thousands of government agents into Salvador neighborhoods (first relatively peaceful ones, then the worst ones) for almost two years, and then upgraded their equipment. When the 2022 crackdown was launched, Salvadoran law enforcement likely had an intimate knowledge of the neighborhoods they were raiding, who were the criminal elements, where they were hiding, etc. The crackdown wasn’t actually a part of the TCP, but the TCP may deserve credit for its success.

Second, similarly, I wonder if the success of the crackdown can be partially attributed to the Alliance for Prosperity, the $750 million aid package from the United States to Central America to reduce the flow of immigration in-part by improving law enforcement capabilities. The program coincided with a steep decline in crime during the Cerén regime, which may have just been regression to the mean, but I think there is decent evidence that US funding improved Salvadoran law enforcement’s competency.

Third, Bukele got really lucky. The crackdown was a good idea, but he launched the crackdown with little preparation at exactly the right time when the gangs were weak and the police/military were well positioned, and the whole thing went way better than he could have expected.

Now for the complications:

In 2020, El Salvador had an official prison capacity of 27,000, which was increased to 32,000 the following year after the construction of a new prison under the TCP. You might notice that this is still a lot less than the 77,000 prisoners rounded up in the crackdown or the 105,000 prisoners the government held by the end of 2023.

The Salvadoran government’s response to this conundrum has been impressive. In July 2022, just four months after the crackdown launched, the government began building the Terrorism Confinement Center (TCC) and completed it by January 2023. The TCC is the largest prison on earth, with an official capacity of 40,000. It is built over 56 acres in an isolated 410 acre forest. Each of its 512 “cells” can hold 80 prisoners, all of whom share access to two sinks and two toilets. Insight Crime speculates that the TCC’s real capacity is “closer to 20,000.” The Salvadoran government may be stretching the truth for PR purposes when they inevitably push the facility past its intended capacity.

As late as July 2023, the TCC was only holding 12,500 prisoners as most of the facility was still under construction. But even at its alleged maximum capacity, it only brings El Salvador up to a total prison capacity of 72,000, a considerable shortfall from 105,000 prisoners. So where are all these prisoners now? As far as I can tell, they’re stuffed anywhere and everywhere the government can put them: into already hugely overcrowded jails, in makeshift containment facilities, maybe in old COVID facilities.

Recall – historically, prison has perversely been a source of strength for MS-13 and B-18. American prisons originally gave them the criminal capital to professionalize, and it was in Salvadoran prisons that the two organizations’ leaderships formed tighter hierarchies, built better organizational structures, and terrorized the country for a solid 20 years.

Bukele already took measures to combat this problem during the early phases of the TCP with periodic prison lockdowns, but the 2022 crackdown put this approach into overdrive. The TCC and other facilities now operate on a mandate to break the gangs by any means necessary. This means almost no privacy, extremely limited amenities, and generally hellish conditions. From Insight Crime: “prison authorities maintain near-complete control behind bars and routinely subject prisoners to beatings and psychological torment. To restrict their ability to communicate with other inmates and the outside world, prisoners are often confined to their cells around the clock.”

By design, the crackdown had a spray-and-pray approach to arrests; most of those targeted were gang members or affiliates, but some portions were innocent bystanders caught up in the operation. These unfortunate individuals should be released eventually both for their own sakes and to relieve the prison numbers, but eventually might take a while. I haven’t seen any great figures for this, but the Salvadoran court system seems to be moving through the 77,000 new arrests at a glacial pace. Nor can the fairness of these trials be assured, especially with one source saying that it’s not uncommon for the courts to try over 100 defendants at a time.

The vast majority of those convicted will stay in prison for decades. In April 2022, at the launch of the crackdown, Bukele pushed news laws through the legislature to toughen sentencing guidelines, including raising the mandatory minimum sentence for gang membership from 3-5 years to 20-30 years. The minimum age for sentencing of any sort was lowered to 12, and even making gang signs could warrant a 15 year sentence. Anyone who “promotes, helps, facilitates or favors the creation or presence” of gangs could face 15 years.

Another complication on which I have seen surprisingly little discussion is cost. If you Google, “Bukele crackdown 2022 cost,” you’ll find dozens of articles about the “human cost” or “civil rights costs,” which I’ll get to soon, but almost nothing on the financial costs. Deploying tens of thousands of police officers and soldiers to raid and then occupy most of the country + build the biggest prison on earth to help hold 77,000 prisoners sounds really expensive for an impoverished Central American state.

While Bukele is most criticized for authoritarianism, some more wonkish opponents have gone after him for reckless spending in pursuit of the TCP. Here is El Salvador’s debt-to-GDP:

The big jump from 2019 to 2020 was for TCP spending after Bukele got in office and economic contraction due to COVID (probably around 8%). The debt-to-GDP ratio then fell in 2021 because it was a big rebound economic growth year (over 10%), though I’m not sure how the ratio continued to fall in 2022 when the GDP growth rate was only about 2.5% and Bukele launched the crackdown. Regardless, the credit situation was so bad at the start of the year that Fitch downgraded El Salvador’s government debt rating from B- to CCC.

Bukele’s response was to pre-pay a big Euro debt bond at $800 million in January 2023. How did he manage to pull that off while financing the TCP and the 2020 crackdowns? How did the government of El Salvador have $800+ million lying around? How will Bukele continue to finance the crackdown, the TCP, and the de facto military occupation they constitute for years to come? I have no idea.

Bukele’s crackdown has received an enormous amount of praise from Salvadorans and some international sources. But after reading hundreds of news articles, it’s safe to say that the consensus of the Western media is somewhere between skepticism and condemnation. The source of this opposition is the notion that the crackdown may have worked in the sense that it crushed the gangs and lowered the crime rate, but that these benefits came at the expense of civil rights, the Salvadoran constitution, the democratic structure of the nation, and the lives and freedom of thousands of innocent Salvadorans.

In evaluating these claims, I think it’s important to split them into two pieces. First, there is the claim that Bukele’s crackdown systematically hindered Salvadoran civil rights and undermined democracy. Second, there is the claim that Bukele’s agents committed abuses outside their official mandate, either with or without permission from the Salvadoran government. I’ll tackle the latter issue first:

From my readings, I’ve been consistently surprised at the competence of Salvadoran law enforcement, particularly its military. I guess I assumed that El Salvador had a typically corrupt and useless Central American military, but it really seems to have its shit together. Both the police and military have received periodic money dumps and training from the US since the end of the civil war, especially with the Alliance for Prosperity in the late 2010s. In 2016, some of this money went toward forming an elite special forces branch of the military specifically for fighting the gangs. By all accounts, the police and military carried out the execution of Bukele’s 2022 crackdown with high speed and efficiency, including some fairly complex maneuvers, such as the Siege of Soyapango, in which 8,500 soldiers and 1,500 police officers surrounded and then broke one of the last gang strongholds in December 2022. It was the largest Salvadoran military operation in history and resulted in over 1,300 arrests.

Which is to say that, for the size of the 2022 crackdown operation, it seems like there were relatively few abuses committed by Salvadoran forces outside their mandate. Stories of abuses can certainly be found, and even Bukele has admitted that of course the Salvadoran police have made mistakes just like any large force would in the same position, but relatively few. I think the best evidence of this is the continued widespread support for Bukele in El Salvador and the endless anecdotal praise for the government forces I’ve read in stories and heard myself in El Salvador. Even the residents of Soyapango were cheering on the government while their city was being squeezed.

However, there are more reports of abuse in the prisons. As of April 2023, there were 153 documented deaths (and probably more in reality) in the prison system; none of the victims had been convicted of crimes and all were thrown in “mass graves.” Given how awful prison conditions are, it’s easy to imagine that these could be accidental or the result of arbitrary acts by individual government agents.

While I have a generally high opinion of Salvadoran law enforcement and think their arbitrary abuse rate was low, there is a giant caveat I want to put on this analysis. Salvadoran law enforcement has a documented history of extrajudicial killings with permission from higher-ups. In his report, Wheeler spoke to an ex-cop who had carried out sanctioned hits on troublesome gang members. This seemed to be a fairly common occurrence, especially during the Cerén administration when increasingly well-armed officers were fighting professionalized street gangs. This makes me wonder if the modern Salvadoran forces are so competent that they’ve gotten better at covering up their worst abuses.

Even if the police and military were on their best behavior, there’s no doubt that Bukele’s crackdown violated civil rights. It did so by design. Bukele openly suspended numerous constitutional rights and legal restrictions, and gave his agents carte blanche to get the job done. I don’t even think there’s an argument to be made here; it’s unavoidably true. The biggest Bukele supporter might cite some sort of legal loopholes, but I think that’s grasping at straws. The crackdown was a blatantly authoritarian measure.

And those authoritarian measures hurt a lot of innocent people, even in the official government documentation. Of the 77,000 arrests made during the raids, only an estimated 32,331 individuals were full-fledged gang members. Most of the arrests were of “collaborators,” a rather loose term that could refer to a wide range of activities. Many of these collaborators profited, aided, and abetted the gangs, and deserve their fate, but many others likely collaborated under the threat of coercion, or to pay off debts, or were in some other nebulous grey space that exists in gang-dominated impoverished Central American slums.

Many other “collaborators” were unambiguously innocent. Media stories are awash with reports from mothers and fathers whose children were arbitrarily swept up in the raids and have been locked away in hellish prisons for months or years now. Some of these kids just happened to be playing in the wrong place at the wrong time, others were targeted by personal vendettas. The justice system will hopefully exonerate them eventually, but until then, some unknown numbers of individuals have gone through horrors due to the purposefully loose arrest standards set by the state. As of February 2024, the government has released 7,000 individuals arrested since the crackdown.

Was it worth it all worth it? Well…

Evaluating Bukele

What do I, personally, think of Bukele?

I am (very) cautiously optimistic that he’s a genuinely good leader, albeit one who has gotten quite lucky and has serious long-term risks.

The best case against Bukele is not that his policies have failed. Even his critics nearly always acknowledge that the 2022 crackdown and (to a lesser extent) the TCP have dramatically decreased El Salvador’s crime rate. As far as anyone can tell, the oft-touted 2.4 homicides per 100,000 citizens statistic is probably real (some qualms here). If you were to do some sort of gruesome cost-benefit analysis comparing the gains of crime reduction against the abuses perpetrated against gang members and innocents caught up in the raids, I think most critics would still agree that Bukele’s law enforcement policies were a net-positive for El Salvador. For contrast, you can look at President Duterte’s far more brutal anti-gang crackdown in the Philippines which sanctioned executing drug dealers, but produced a far more meager crime reduction outcome.

Rather, the best case against Bukele is that he has created severe systemic political risk in El Salvador by converting the government from a democracy to a de facto dictatorship. Bukele has inarguably undermined El Salvador’s democratic institutions by:

• Implicitly threatening the legislative assembly with violence in February 2020
• Using his legislative power to replace the Supreme Court with loyalists in May 2021
• Reducing the number of assembly seats by 33% to gerrymander districts to increase his legislative base in June 2023; ditto for mayors by 83% (this is actually the opposite of what Caesar did, but for the same purpose)
• Allegedly systematically undermining opponents in the media, including launching a money laundering investigation into El Faro, removing access to government events for critical media outlets, and maintaining a force of pro-Bukele online trolls
• Repeatedly ignoring Supreme Court rulings
• Running for re-election immediately at the end of his first term despite constitutional prohibitions against doing so
• Maintaining the “state of exception” for years and counting rather than the legally mandated 30 days, and using this power to violate the civil rights of tens of thousands of Salvadorans, including some who were surely innocent
• Repeatedly violating the Salvadoran constitution in numerous other ways big and small

The whole point of democracy is to spread political decision-making and create approval-based feedback loops with the population so that good leaders are elected and bad leaders are deposed without resorting to violence. Dictatorships concentrate power to permit more state dynamism but at the expense of this dispersed risk. This makes dictatorships a higher risk-higher reward proposition. A good dictator can do more good without democratic constraints, but a bad dictator can do more bad.

Thus far, Bukele has produced higher rewards, though there is no guarantee he will continue to do so. In the future, he could come up with a bunch of really dumb ideas like Bitcoin City but larger in scale and drive El Salvador back into the ground. He could lean on the loyalists he has built up to suppress an emergent opposition. Perhaps he could even get loyal police, soldiers, and supporting mobs to use violence against protestors. Bukele’s opponents have warned about such tactics from the start of his reign, but thus far they have almost entirely remained as potentials; the fear is now that they almost certainly can manifest if Bukele so chooses. It all comes down to Bukele.

And that’s the other big criticism of Bukele that fits nicely within this one: he gives some people the ick. He’s certainly charismatic, but it’s hard not to get a salesman vibe from him. He’s too slick, too smooth, too unserious. He spends too much time shit posting on Twitter and raging at critics. He calls himself a CEO leader and clearly wants to be compared to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rather than elder statesmen. Maybe he really is a cerebral figure in private, but that’s not the impression given by most who know him. He comes off as dynamic, intelligent, highly intuitive, and decisive, but also arbitrary, capricious, reckless, self-involved, and unwilling to listen to dissent, and perhaps not even to friendly advice. This is exactly the type of personality which might reap great results in a position of power if he gets lucky, but his luck could run out at any time.

The worst-case scenario for Bukele is that his luck, the environmental factors, and his judgment all take a turn for the worse. An opposition arises in El Salvador, and Bukele uses his increasingly dictatorial powers to clamp down. His fanatical base could suppress any opposition, maybe even with misinformation campaigns, arrests, and mob violence, all while he continues to steer the country in the wrong direction. After another 5+ years of Bukele, maybe El Salvador will end up back where it started but even worse since its democratic institutions will be irrevocably broken and the nation will be condemned to malevolent dictators indefinitely.

I think the best argument for Bukele is to accept all of the above and conclude that it’s worth the risk.

I can see the case for the idea that maintaining democracy should not be the be-all-end-all goal of a government. Democracy is generally good, especially compared to alternative forms of government, but there are contexts in which democratic institutions can hinder the prosperity of a nation. Voters in a democracy can elect bad leaders, either due to bad judgment or manipulation. The democratic checks and balances between branches of government can be exploited by bad faith actors for cynical political gain. If such hindrances get to an extreme point, it can be better for a nation to (hopefully temporarily) embrace authoritarianism to remove these democratic institutions so a dynamic leader can enact systematic reforms (as was, IMO, the case for Ghana with Jerry Rawlings) and/or take more dynamic steps to deal with crises. Most countries, including El Salvador and the United States, have built-in mechanisms to suspend ordinary democratic checks and balances in times of crisis, like martial law or the state of exception, but even these measures may not provide the government with enough flexibility to make fundamental reforms.

This was arguably the state of El Salvador by the mid-2010s. For almost twenty years, it was one of the most dangerous countries on earth, resulting in the murder of tens of thousands of Salvadorans, the terrorizing of millions of Salvadorans, and the continued impoverishment of the nation. Solutions were proposed and repeatedly tried in a democratic context, but they always failed. The right tried to be strong on crime, the left tried a softer touch; both failed. Maybe they failed because the leaders of both parties were cynics just trying to maintain power, or maybe they failed because the democratic institutions allowed the opposition party to tie the ruling party’s hands, or maybe the policy proposals were simply flawed. Regardless, the system wasn’t working, and it begged the question, why maintain it?

So Bukele came into power and did away with the system. He broke much of the constitution and the democratic checks and balances on the three government branches, and unified everything under his personal control. Only then did the Salvadoran state have the capability to crush the gangs, which it did with astounding success and efficiency.

The average Salvadoran citizen is far more concerned with the safety of themselves, their children, their businesses, and their countrymen, than being able to vote for six different corrupt political parties in a corrupt democratic system. So the average Salvadoran citizen got exactly what they wanted from the government through Bukele.

And let’s not forget that Bukele was elected democratically, and then had his mandate renewed democratically in multiple legislative elections. But even with his undoubtedly undemocratic current stranglehold over the state, is his reign still not a democratic success in some sense? Though it’s not entirely convincing, this has been the argument of authoritarians all the way back to the time of Caesar (also see FHB and JJ Rawlings). The government should represent some abstracted will of the people. Democratic institutions should achieve this end, but often don’t due to corruption and cynical politicking. An authoritarian leader can actually represent this will better than the democratic institutions if he is honest and competent enough. Dictators generally aren’t honest and competent enough, but, judging by the results, Bukele has been thus far.

What about the personality question? Isn’t Bukele a snake oil salesman?

Yeah, Bukele probably is capricious and arrogant and ultimately self-serving. As are 95% of politicians, especially the highly successful ones. I take the negative accounts of his temperament as probably true, but don’t really care that much. It’s not ideal, but it is expected. If I were to put an optimistic spin on Bukele’s personality, I’d say that his Trump-ish desire to be liked and social media obsession could actually be a strong safeguard against indulging in authoritarian excesses like leveraging violence against political opponents because Bukele is so concerned about his public image, at least more so than your generic sunglasses-wearing African dictator.

Also, in an extreme rarity for El Salvador and the vast majority of the developing world, Bukele doesn’t appear to be corrupt. Some of his lieutenants are, but I haven’t seen any evidence of Bukele embezzling money or misappropriating funds beyond maybe some small-scale sloppy accounting back when he was a mayor. In my book, non-corruptibility for someone in his position buys a lot of leeway for self-aggrandizement and childishness.

I don’t know what is happening inside Bukele’s head and I’m not going to psychologize him from a distance, but if I had to summarize his response to most critics, I’d show two videos of his speeches. First, here is Bukele at a press conference responding to questions about the excesses and abuses of his crackdown:

Second, here is Bukele after winning re-election in 2024:

Key quote:

“We have started to defeat our biggest evil. We are on the cusp of winning the war against the gangs. Literally, it’s not an exaggeration, it’s not hyperbole, literally, we went from being the most dangerous country in the world, to being the most secure in all of the Western hemisphere. The safest country in the American continent.

And what did they tell us? ‘You’re violating human rights.’ Whose human rights? The rights of the honest people? No. Perhaps we have prioritized the rights of the honest people over the criminals’ rights.

That is all we have done. And that’s what you say is a human rights violation. I ask these organizations, I ask these governments of these foreign nations, I ask these journalists: why do you want them to kill us? Why do you want to see Salvadoran blood spilled? Why aren’t you happy to see that blood doesn’t run in our country as it did before? Why? Why should we die? Why should our children die? So that you can be happy that we are respecting your false ‘democracy’ which you don’t even respect in your own country?”

Some qualms aside, let’s take what Bukele said here seriously.

When El Salvador was the murder capital of the world and thousands of Salvadorans were macheted or gunned down in the streets every year, no one cared. It was written off as a minor shit hole country with intractable violence.

Then El Salvador took drastic action to fix the problem and did so successfully. The solution was undoubtedly imperfect, but it was equally undoubtedly successful. El Salvador is a far more peaceful and prosperous country today than it was… arguably ever.

And in return, the government of El Salvador has been castigated by many foreign observers. Their criticisms are that El Salvador’s government hasn’t followed the traditional policy recommendations of the West closely enough. Democracy has been undermined and civil rights have been violated.

I largely agree with Bukele’s response that that there are civil/national/criminal contexts that are so bad that democratic values and civil rights need to be curtailed to reach optimal outcomes. In this case, certain liberal and democratic processes were restricted for the sake of fighting a colossal crime problem. Bukele would add that the Western critics are hypocritical and condescending toward El Salvador because its government is bucking the dominant global governing consensus. I’d soften that defense by noting that there are plenty of contexts in which there is no easy decision to be made, especially for the leaders of impoverished, crime-ridden nations, and we should ultimately judge policies based on their results. And Bukele has delivered undeniable results.

So I think Bukele has, on-net, been extremely good for El Salvador thus far. Whether that evaluation maintains depends on Bukele’s future performance. By my highly speculative estimation, I think he is unlikely to resort to violence against his people or do anything extremely stupid on the policy front. Hopefully, he will last one more term and then bow-out from office at the top of his game for an ideologically similar and equally uncorrupt successor. But who knows?

To be clear, my assessment of Bukele here is not meant to reflect on any other leaders or contexts. I am not saying that authoritarianism is a great way to deal with all or many national problems. What I am saying is that this stuff is complicated. There is probably a theoretical tipping point in any democratic state when the numerous inherent pitfalls of democratic institutions become so powerful that the government ceases to function effectively and requires a reset that can only be achieved undemocratically. This is a risky proposition that can go wrong in a million ways, but it can also work out (ex. Jerry Rawlings, Ataturk, Caesar, arguably Napoleon, etc.). By my distant, low-confidence interval assessment, El Salvador was probably in such a state regarding its crime, and Bukele was the right man to take the necessary steps to deal with it.

(Re)Election

As of writing this in February 2024, the last 8-10 months have been something of a victory lap for President Bukele. He still faces harsh opposition abroad, but even his critics in the media have to keep repeating that El Salvador has experienced a remarkable turnaround and the Salvadoran people credit Bukele. He has also gotten much more foreign support recently, not just from other Latin Americans and dissident voices in the West, but at least some mainstream Western pundits seem to be warming to him as something like a necessary evil compared to the previous chaos of El Salvador. He is even becoming something of a darling of the moderate right; in February 2024, he spoke at CPAC.

Now all Bukele has to do is stick the landing. He may have solved the Salvadoran crime problem, but to continue to do so, he carries a massively overburdened prison system, huge financial costs, and chronic accusations of authoritarianism. If he can leave El Salvador in a stable state, he may prove himself as brilliant as his supporters claim. Alternatively, he may never leave El Salvador at all…

I haven’t actually read the constitution of El Salvador, but according to almost every source, it is very well established in the document that presidents are limited to a single five-year term until they wait ten years after the end of their first term. And yet, in late 2024, Bukele confirmed what so many of both his opponents and proponents assumed – he was running for immediate reelection. The groundwork for this was laid all the way back in 2021 when Bukele’s legislative assembly fired the entire constitutional Supreme Court and put in a bunch of Bukele loyalists who approved of a new law permitting consecutive reelections.

ARENA, the FMLN, the US government, all the big international NGOs, and virtually the entire Western media condemned Bukele. But of course, the Salvadoran people didn’t. Bukele handled both the criticisms and praise well. The former he dismissed as partisan hackery from establishment shills; the latter was buttressed by various legal displays, such as taking a brief leave of absence from the presidency and getting a “licencia” to run for reelection.

ARENA and the FMLN both put up candidates but everyone knew what would happen. Bukele got almost 85% of the vote at 52% turnout and Nuevas Ideas held 71% of the assembly, which was actually a slight loss of seats, but a gain in percentage due to the elimination of some seats in 2021. Aside from that little maneuver, the election was free and fair as far as anyone could tell. Bukele is still the most popular political leader on earth, and despite blatantly violating the constitution of El Salvador, his mandate to lead has been renewed by his constituents.

 

Travelling Through El Salvador

I’m not going to lie – aside from the fascinating current political events of El Salvador, I didn’t find the country interesting as a travel destination. It’s fine, but I would not put El Salvador at the top of my recommended travel destinations.

The countryside is nice enough. There are lots of mostly arid mountains that were brown when I was there in the dry season but get green in the wet season. But the cities are ugly. Lots of concrete, lots of filth, lots of cockroaches. San Salvador is particularly unappealing outside of its historic center. It has this confusing sprawl to it that seems designed to prohibit walkability. The main commercial zone is based around a highway. The nightlife hot spots seem randomly scattered.

Santa Ana, El Salvador’s second largest city, is uglier but more interesting. For reasons that were never fully explained to me, a significant chunk of the city center consists of ruins. But not historic ruins, like the Mayan structures dotted throughout Central America or the old Churches in Antigua. Rather, there are a ton of dilapidated buildings that look like they’ve been abandoned for a decade or two. Some are tightly bordered up, some clearly have squatters, one of the largest is a huge warehouse or former covered market located right in the middle of the commercial district. The old art school is supposed to be a highlight, but the guard at the gate said I needed permission from the Tourism Ministry to get in.

Bukele brings up Surf City in every interview and he claims El Salvador has some of the best surfing in the world. But I didn’t bother with the coast since I’m not a beach guy. Maybe it’s the nicest part of El Salvador.

Crackdown

On my first day in El Salvador, I arrived in La Palma, a small town of 20,000 inhabitants near the Honduran border. I walked around in the middle of the night and came to the city square. Even after 11PM,  there were about a dozen soldiers with assault rifles patrolling the area. They seemed relaxed and the kids playing soccer nearby paid them no mind.

The crackdown and ongoing Territorial Control Plan are very much still felt in El Salvador almost two years after Bukele’s law enforcement initiatives went into overdrive. There are military and police everywhere, particularly in San Salvador where roaming squads patrol the streets. The city centers can have a bit of an “occupied country” feel, though the armed presence was nowhere near what I saw in Ukraine.

The locals I talked to all had glowing praise for Bukele and the crackdown. I repeatedly heard that El Salvador was in the best state it had ever been in. I was constantly told that specific areas were perfectly safe for me to walk through. A friendly Uber driver with a limited grasp of English said that Bukele had saved the nation.

The locals I talked to also all spoke well of the police and military. When a nervous Canadian tourist kept pointing out the assault-rifle wielding squads to my tour guide, he said that they made him and everyone else feel safe. The tour he gave of the historic district of San Salvador would have been almost impossible before Bukele, or at least would have required a dramatically higher degree of caution.

This was the same tour guide who was previously extorted by MS-13 when he opened up a hostel. He struck me as politically conservative despite his bohemian lifestyle. In a lengthy conversation, he explained the rise and success of Bukele in a manner that largely aligns with my own researched understanding – he came into office as an ascendant anti-corruption candidate, he launched the TCP as an ambitious anti-crime plan and it worked a little, then he did the crackdown in 2022 and it worked fantastically well because the military/police are competent and there was no political or popular opposition to tie his hands, and now Bukele is universally beloved throughout the country.

When I pressed him on the innocents arrested by the crackdown, the guide acknowledged they existed but wrote them off as an unfortunate side effect of a great policy. He countered that the arrested gang members were terrorists and deserved no quarter. Their removal from society was an absolute boon to El Salvador.

Bitcoin

This guide also told me that he immediately spent his $30 Bitcoin gift from the government on beer and hasn’t possessed a single Satoshi since.

I saw maybe four or five Bitcoin ATMs in El Salvador, including two Athena Bitcoin machines. I didn’t see anyone using them.

I also saw maybe a dozen “Bitcoin accepted” signs on stores, certainly more than I see in the US. But again, it’s my sense that nobody uses them.

The guide, who I consider an articulate and strong supporter of Bukele, seemed to consider the president’s Bitcoin ambitions to be a weird, misguided, but ultimately trivial effort.

Chinese Library

In the dead center of the historic district of San Salvador, right next to the National Palace, lies the National Library of El Salvador. Opened in November 2023, it’s an impressive, imposing modernist structure, and it’s very strange.

The library was built by Chinese money. I knew this even before looking it up on Wikipedia because right next to the giant “Biblioteca National De El Salvador” sign is another big sign with Chinese writing, plus a Chinese flag outside, plus there are emergency fire hoses throughout the building with Chinese labels. The entire construction project cost $50 million; I don’t know how much of that tab was picked up by the Chinese taxpayer, but considering that a $109 million loan to give the police and military better equipment nearly resulted in a coup d’état, I’m guessing the Chinese covered most of it. Presumably this financing was part of whatever deal El Salvador made to revoke its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in 2018, right before Bukele took office. There’s also some big infrastructure money coming down the pipeline any day now. (Note – If any leaders of other impoverished countries are reading this, this is a good way to squeeze some yuan out of Xi Dada.)

Having no idea what to expect, I sat in a line for 20 minutes for a tour, but rather than being grouped with 20+ other people, I ended up in a private tour as the only English speaker. Then I was led around the library for 30 minutes by a very bored English-speaking employee. The library is very Disney-esque, not just because it has a dedicated Marvel section, but also a Harry Potter section, a LEGO section, a Star Wars section, Pokemon stuff, and a video game area. Alternatively, it felt like one of those extremely expensive donor-funded buildings that the guide would really really emphasize on an undergrad college campus tour, but which students never actually use. The building is just as beautiful on the inside as the outside, and it provides some of the best rooftop views in San Salvador

But there are precious few books in this so-called library. There are a dozen video game consoles, a VR area, lots of couches, and lots and lots and lots of empty space.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but I hate this stuff – blatantly obvious prestige projects in impoverished nations that waste economic and political capital. It’s pure symbolism over practicality. Whatever actual value it does provide to some San Salvadorans could have been produced at a tiny fraction of the cost in a less flashy, more compact, more utilitarian building. Instead, tens of millions of dollars that could have gone to infrastructure or continuing law enforcement operations built a monument designed more to impress tourists than improve El Salvador.

Israel

I saw an anomalously high number of Stars of David and Israeli flags in El Salvador, a country with about 100 Jews (give or take).

I have yet to find a good reason why there is so much Jewish iconography in El Salvador. I asked a tour guide in San Salvador and he said something about Israel giving aid to El Salvador, but I can’t find much evidence of that beyond some military training. There are some historical links, like El Salvador voting in the UN to recognize Israel back in 1947, but El Salvador also moved its embassy out of Jerusalem in 2016.

Churches

If you like whitish yellow Spanish colonial churches, El Salvador is the place for you:

Once you get bored of those, check out the Church of the Rosary in San Salvador, easily one of the coolest churches I’ve ever seen, and a great example of how constraints on art (having no money to build a traditional cathedral) can produce more interesting results:

 

Chicken Buses

“Chicken bus” is the informal name for the local omnipresent buses throughout Central America. Most are decommissioned school or public buses from the US, which should be expensive, but apparently there are regulations governing how long they can be used in most of the US, so there is a large supply of used buses and Central American companies can buy them for cheap. Usually the bus companies decorate the chicken buses, but sometimes they just look like school buses:

As with everywhere else in the developing world, there are also a bunch of cheap Chinese imports:

Too much thinking about China and my own sloppiness made me think the following was Chinese after a quick glance. It’s Korean. I guess South Korean buses get down to El Salvador too:

The buses are usually packed and uncomfortable but it’s hard to complain when 8 hour rides might cost $2 (if that). Whenever they stop, a group of extremely sweaty merchants flood the bus to hawk their wares:

The best and worst part of the chicken buses is that the drivers FUCKING BLAST THEIR MUSIC. If it’s good music, it’s awesome. If it’s terribly music, it’s hell.

Miscellaneous

• “El Salvador” translates to “The Savior,” AKA Jesus Christ.
• On my first day in El Salvador, while walking down a main street at night, I saw a gigantic pile of shit (maybe from a dog, maybe from a human) being eaten by an enormous cockroach.
• In 1969, there was a FIFA World Cup qualifier match between El Salvador and Honduras in Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital. Honduras won, there was a big fight between the fans, and the Salvadoran government accused the Honduran government of doing nothing to protect Salvadoran fans. Then, six days later, there was a follow-up match in San Salvador, El Salvador won, there was a big fight, and the Honduran government accused the Salvadoran government of doing nothing to protect Honduran fans. A few days later, the tie-breaker match was held in Mexico City, El Salvador won, and the Honduran and Salvadoran fans beat the shit out of each other for a third time. El Salvador cut off all diplomatic relations with Honduras and claimed that almost 12,000 Salvadorans had been pogromed out of Honduras. Two weeks later, El Salvador began a bombing campaign against key targets in Honduras using “passenger airplanes with explosives strapped to their sides as bombers.” For 100 hours, the two countries bombed the shit out of each other, killed 3,000 people, and then a ceasefire was mediated by the Organization of American States. Thus ending the Football War.
• Good rule of thumb for Central American geography – if you draw a line on a horizontal diagonal through the middle of Central America, the land to the right of the line (closer to the Caribbean) is mostly wet jungle, while the land to the left of the line (closer to the Pacific) is mostly arid.
• There is a lot of Bukele-themed paraphernalia sold at tourist spots, like Bukele shirts, Bukele clocks, Bukele bobbleheads, etc. I bought a Bukele coffee mug.
• Don Titi Bar: