According to the World Bank, in 2015, the Central American state of El Salvador had a homicide rate of 107 per 100,000 people, the highest in the world. These numbers reduced drastically under former president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, as the homicide rate in 2018 was calculated at 53 per every 100,000 people or a 50.47% decrease. However, violence still dominated the nation, with maras, or gangs, such as Mara Salvatrucha (otherwise known as MS-13) and Barrio 18 terrorizing innocent civilians and creating a corrupt, incapacitated state. 

As of November 2018, it was estimated that MS-13 occupied 94% of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities. Furthermore, according to the Migration Policy Institute, El Salvador’s National Civil Police (PNC) had a total number of 28,000 police officers, while Human Rights Watch estimated the number of active gang members in the country to be 86,000. This numerical discrepancy, coupled with widespread corruption, has made policing gangs almost impossible. For example, numerous Salvadoran politicians have been indicted on corruption charges, including former President Antonio Saca (2004-2009), who was sentenced to 10 years in prison after embezzling $300 million of public funds. 

These conditions created an unstable society that was unable to provide fundamental human rights to its citizens. Sandra Elizabeth Inglés, a San Salvador resident, told the New York Times that people couldn’t complain to the police because they were afraid of corruption and lacked trust in the system. According to Inglés, the gang members “became the authority in this system.” Personal accounts depict a gruesome reality of life under the control of the maras that parallels life in a warzone. In fact, El Salvador’s homicide rate in 2019 was higher than that of many war-torn countries, such as Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. Despite these numbers, the last formal armed engagement in El Salvador was the Salvadoran Civil War, which ended in 1992.

Under the maras’ authority, rights were completely stripped away from civilians. Rival gangs claimed territories in which all inhabitants were forced to become subservient to them. A harrowing image from NPR photojournalist Encarni Pinando depicts a dead banana seller splayed on the floor in a pool of blood. The maras killed him because his employer refused to pay the increase in extortion money demanded by the specific gang that operated in the area. Another account tells of a fifteen-year-old girl, Marcela, who was brutally murdered for selling tortillas on the wrong side of the street. 

The Salvadoran people lived in fear under the brutality of the maras, and it seemed to them as if the police and government were doing nothing to assist them. Many of their futures looked bleak under the authority of these gangs, and general dissolution with society and the government reached an all-time high. Upon leaving office in 2019, Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s approval rating had dropped below 20%.  

It was time for a change. The Salvadoran people felt oppressed and ignored by the government for long enough. Their answer came in the form of Nayib Bukele, a young and charismatic populist whose platform centered around stamping out government corruption and dismantling the maras. On March 27, 2022, Bukele declared a national state of emergency after 62 people died the previous day solely due to gang violence. 

Since then, Bukele has conducted hundreds of raids on suspected maras across the country, resulting in the imprisonment of an estimated 78,715 gang members. There is no doubt his initiatives have been highly successful in reducing crimes, including homicide; El Salvador’s murder rate has dropped to a staggeringly low 2.4 homicides per every 100,000 people. This makes El Salvador the second least murderous country in the entire Western hemisphere, only behind Canada. 

However, criticism of Bukele’s harsh crackdown on crime has been pouring in from the Global North and human rights NGOs alike. They question the judicial methods and prison conditions in El Salvador. Due to the high number of individuals arrested during mass raids, legal proceedings have often been swift and poorly conducted in attempts to expedite the process. Because of this, many individuals have been wrongfully imprisoned due to perceived gang affiliations. The Bukele administration has already recognized its mistake in hastily rushing through legal proceedings, and has since released over 7,000 incarcerated individuals due to lack of evidence. 

That being said, El Salvador now has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with an estimated 2% of its adult population behind bars, causing an immense overcrowding of Salvadoran prisons. In addition to overcrowding, these prisons also have significantly high mortality rates. Since the commencement of Bukele’s “War on Gangs” back in March 2022, a total of 241 people have died in the Salvadoran prison system. Human rights group Humanitarian Legal Relief further estimates that 94%, or around 224 of the deceased had no gang affiliation. It is a travesty that so many innocent people are dying in these brutal Salvadoran prisons. Nonetheless, this number is seemingly dwarfed by the decrease in homicides over the last years in the country. If the homicide rate were to have remained at 38 per every 100,000 people, the rate when Bukele took office, then roughly 4,000 more innocent Salvadoran citizens would have died due to gang violence. 

It is impossible to place an exact value on human life and weigh one scenario, resulting in loss of life with another. That being said, speaking empirically, much fewer innocent lives have been lost in El Salvador over the last two years. Nevertheless, prison conditions and the judicial process in El Salvador must be drastically altered. The current formula is not sustainable in the long run, as humanitarian intervention will become necessary, and the population may soon turn against Bukele for overstepping his presidential capacity. Moreover, Bukele must also end the State of Emergency, which has been extended 24 times since March 2022. At this point, an extension of the state of emergency is entirely unnecessary. The murder rate has already plummeted, and overall nationalism and approval among the populace are at an all-time high. What more would an extension of the state of emergency accomplish other than further consolidating power within the executive branch? Soon, the Salvadoran people may have to analyze these extensions as an ambitious dictatorial power grab.

Foreign observers have already pointed out dictatorial tendencies in Bukele’s policies, including his removal of the state’s attorney general and five Supreme Court judges in early 2021, replacing them with members of his party. This event sparked conversation within the Biden administration on how to assess the fragility of the situation. However, Bukele claimed his administration was “cleaning house” to rid the government of corrupt officials. Moreover, Bukele had recently petitioned Congress to allow him to run for a second presidential term. This act directly violates Article 152 of El Salvador’s 1983 constitution, which prohibits the president from serving more than one term.

The general populace is well aware of Bukele’s overstepping of power. In many cases, this would cause public uproar and widespread protests; nevertheless, protests against Bukele, if any, represent only a small contingent of the population. The fact of the matter is that a majority of the Salvadoran people love Nayib Bukele. His approval rating reached as high as 91% earlier this year, making him one of the most approved heads of state in the world. Despite Bukele’s seemingly harsh policies, he has delivered the Salvadoran people from a seemingly endless cycle of brutality into a society where the general population is free to live as they please. 

In an interview last November with Óscar Martínez, the editor-in-chief of prominent Latin American newspaper El Faro, the Salvadoran discussed why such a large swath of the population supported Nayib Bukele despite his overstepping of power. He argues it’s because “people didn’t live in a democracy, they never have; they lived in a criminal regime where gangs raped their children. So, now, the state of emergency is the lesser evil. There are people who will accept having their son arrested if it means gangs won’t be in their neighborhood.”

Let me say that Bukele is not the perfect solution in any way, shape, or form. However, I believe the ship that contained “the perfect solution” set sail decades ago, as soon as the U.S. became involved in El Salvador.

In a January 2018 meeting with White House staff, Donald Trump fought back against restoring protections for immigrants from countries who had temporary protected status, namely El Salvador. During the conversation, the former president is reported to have remarked, “Why are we having all of these people from shithole countries come here?” The irony is that these immigrants have been forced out of their countries by United States policies. Bukele and the Salvadoran people have become required to salvage a country that has been exploited time and time again by the United States and the Global North. 

Starting during the Kennedy administration, the U.S. began funding and training paramilitary groups in El Salvador who “murdered, tortured, and raped their political opponents.” These paramilitary groups began directing their violence towards innocent “workers, peasants, and students,” and by the late 1980s, they were murdering around 800 civilians a month. Austerity and poverty created a peasant-laborer class that suffered from heightened levels of food insecurity. In response, many of these peasants created the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerilla militant group, in an attempt to rise against the oppressive national military. This resulted in a tumultuous civil war that lasted from 1980 to 1992 and resulted in 75,000 civilian deaths. 

One of the worst atrocities carried out by the national military during the war was the El Mozote Massacre, during which over 1,000 innocent civilians were murdered. Many of those killed were children who had been brutally raped, tortured, and killed by the military. El Mozote remains the single largest massacre in Latin American history, and it’s important to note that its perpetrators were both trained and funded by the United States.

Despite the war formally coming to an end with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords on January 16, 1992, the violence was far from over. During the war, many Salvadorans immigrated to  Los Angeles and became segregated in Latino neighborhoods in the South-Central part of the city. Due to the nature of Los Angeles in the 1980s with the crack cocaine epidemic and the emergence of gang warfare, the Mara Salvatruchas were born. 

The U.S. government, in an attempt to subdue the maras, began deporting airplanes full of gang members back to El Salvador in the early 90s. However, the Salvadoran government was still oppressive and poverty remained widespread, allowing for a fertile ground on which a gang-controlled state could grow. 

In short, the Salvadoran people have been stuck in a constant cycle of oppression, mainly due to the conditions imposed on them by the United States. In 2021, a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, signed by 14 Democrat lawmakers, accused Bukele of the “de facto criminalization of civil society.” To state that he is criminalizing a “civil society” is to imply that there was even a “civil society” in the first place. Is a country ruled by gangs that maim, torture and murder citizens to the point they are afraid to walk across the street a “civil society”? If anything, Bukele created a “civil society” from a collapsed and incapacitated society that was forced into this situation by the United States. He has drastically reduced the homicide rate while maintaining unprecedentedly high levels of public support. 

Perhaps we need to stop looking at this situation from a Eurocentric, Global North lens and view it from the perspective of a Salvadoran citizen. Despite critics who argue otherwise, El Salvador is indeed a democracy. While the seemingly draconian laws being enforced by the Bukele administration seem so far from what we could consider to be a democracy, maybe we are evaluating the word’s definition incorrectly. The word “democracy” comes from the Greek words “demos,” meaning people, and “kratos” meaning power. In this sense, Bukele’s restoration of power in the form of societal freedom for the Salvadoran people makes the state a democracy. The Salvadoran people are elated by this newfound freedom they have under Bukele, so why should we impose our definition of democracy on them to deprive them of this right?

The fact of the matter is that Bukele has been forced into such an authoritarian form of government by the conditions placed on him by both Spanish colonialism and more contemporary U.S. involvement. If Bukele were not in office and a more lenient, corrupt official was, there is no doubt the homicide rate would be significantly higher than it currently is. 

That being said, Bukele’s system will eventually fail if he continues to trend towards becoming a true authoritarian figure. His violation of the Salvadoran constitution by running for a second term could also potentially become troubling. Past examples in South America have shown how dangerous it can be if power is consolidated within the hands of one person. 

My message for Nayib Bukele would be to finally bring an end to the State of Emergency, as any day now, it could be perceived by the Salvadoran people as an overstepping of authority. Moreover, his excessive interpretation of the Executive’s capabilities, although not yet detrimental to the country, is not feasible in the long run. 

While El Salvador’s current democracy under Bukele may look unconventional compared to that of the United States, at its core it functions to protect the Salvadoran people and their civil liberties. Overall, Bukele has helped give birth to a prosperous and hopeful nation out of a society of gang-controlled chaos.